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• "FOR UPDATE" v/s "LOCK IN SHARE MODE" : Allow concurrent threads to read updated "state" value of locked row

  - by shadesco

  I have the following scenario: User X logs in to the application from location lc1: call it Ulc1 User X (has been hacked, or some friend of his knows his login credential, or he just logs in from a different browser on his machine,etc.. u got the point) logs in at the same time from location lc2: call it Ulc2 I am using a main servlet which : - gets a connection from database pooling - sets autocommit to false - executes a command that goes through app layers: if all successful, set autocommit to true in a "finally" statement, and closes connection. Else if an exception happens, rollback(). In my database (mysql/innoDb) i have a "history" table, with row columns: id(primary key) |username | date | topic | locked The column "locked" has by default value "false" and it serves as a flag that marks if a specific row is locked or not. Each row is specific to a user (as u can see from the username column) So back to the scenario: --Ulc1 sends the command to update his history from the db for date "D" and topic "T". --Ulc2 sends the same command to update history from the db for the same date "D" and same topic "T" at the exact same time. I want to implement an mysql/innoDB locking system that will enable whichever thread arriving to do the following check: Is column "locked" for this row true or not? if true, return a message to the user that " he is already updating the same data from another location" if not true (ie not locked) : flag it as locked and update then reset locked to false once finished. Which of these two mysql locking techniques, will actually allow the 2nd arriving thread from reading the "updated" value of the locked column to decide wt action to take?Should i use "FOR UPDATE" or "LOCK IN SHARE MODE"? This scenario explains what i want to accomplish: - Ulc1 thread arrives first: column "locked" is false, set it to true and continue updating process - Ulc2 thread arrives while Ulc1's transaction is still in process, and even though the row is locked through innoDb functionalities, it doesn't have to wait but in fact reads the "new" value of column locked which is "true", and so doesn't in fact have to wait till Ulc1 transaction commits to read the value of the "locked" column(anyway by that time the value of this column will already have been reset to false). I am not very experienced with the 2 types of locking mechanisms, what i understand so far is that LOCK IN SHARE MODE allow other transaction to read the locked row while FOR UPDATE doesn't even allow reading. But does this read gets on the updated value? or the 2nd arriving thread has to wait the first thread to commit to then read the value? Any recommendations about which locking mechanism to use for this scenario is appreciated. Also if there's a better way to "check" if the row has been locked (other than using a true/false column flag) please let me know about it. thank you SOLUTION (Jdbc pseudocode example based on @Darhazer's answer) Table : [ id(primary key) |username | date | topic | locked ] connection.setautocommit(false); //transaction-1 PreparedStatement ps1 = "Select locked from tableName for update where id="key" and locked=false); ps1.executeQuery(); //transaction 2 PreparedStatement ps2 = "Update tableName set locked=true where id="key"; ps2.executeUpdate(); connection.setautocommit(true);// here we allow other transactions threads to see the new value connection.setautocommit(false); //transaction 3 PreparedStatement ps3 = "Update tableName set aField="Sthg" where id="key" And date="D" and topic="T"; ps3.executeUpdate(); // reset locked to false PreparedStatement ps4 = "Update tableName set locked=false where id="key"; ps4.executeUpdate(); //commit connection.setautocommit(true);

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• Break in Class Module vs. Break on Unhandled Errors (VB6 Error Trapping, Options Setting in IDE)

  - by Erx_VB.NExT.Coder

  Basically, I'm trying to understand the difference between the "Break in Class Module" and "Break on Unhandled Errors" that appear in the Visual Basic 6.0 IDE under the following path: Tools --> Options --> General --> Error Trapping The three options appear to be: Break on All Errors Break in Class Module Break on Unhandled Errors Now, apparently, according to MSDN, the second option (Break in Class Module) really just means "Break on Unhandled Errors in Class Modules". Also, this option appears to be set by default (ie: I think its set to this out of the box). What I am trying to figure out is, if I have the second option selected, do I get the third option (Break on Unhandled Errors) for free? In that, does it come included by default for all scenarios outside of the Class Module spectrum? To advise, I don't have any Class Modules in my currently active project. I have .bas modules though. Also, is it possible that by Class Mdules they may be referring to normal .bas Modules as well? (this is my second sub-question). Basically, I just want the setting to ensure there won't be any surprises once the exe is released. I want as many errors to display as possible while I am developing, and non to be displayed when in release mode. Normally, I have two types of On Error Resume Next on my forms where there isn't explicit error handling, they are as follows: On Error Resume Next ' REQUIRED On Error Resume Next ' NOT REQUIRED The required ones are things like, checking to see if an array has any length, if a call to its UBound errors out, that means it has no length, if it returns a value 0 or more, then it does have length (and therefore, exists). These types of Error Statements need to remain active even while I am developing. However, the NOT REQUIRED ones shouldn't remain active while I am developing, so I have them all commented out to ensure that I catch all the errors that exist. Once I am ready to release the exe, I do a CTRL+H to find all occurrences of: 'On Error Resume Next ' NOT REQUIRED (You may have noticed they are commented out)... And replace them with: On Error Resume Next ' NOT REQUIRED ... The uncommented version, so that in release mode, if there are any leftover errors, they do not show to users. For more on the description by MSDN on the three options (which I've read twice and still don't find adequate) you can visit the following link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yUQZZK2n2IYJ:support.microsoft.com/kb/129876&hl=en&lr=lang_en%7Clang_tr&gl=au&tbs=lr:lang_1en%7Clang_1tr&prmd=imvns&strip=1 I’m also interested in hearing your thoughts if you feel like volunteering them (and this would be my tentative/totally optional third sub-question, that being, your thoughts on fall-back error handling techniques). Just to summarize, the first two questions were, do we get option 3 included in all non-class scenarios if we choose option 2? And, is it possible that when they use the term "Class Module" they may be referring to .bas Modules as well? (Since a .bad Module is really just a class module that is pre-instantiated in the background during start-up). Thank you.

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• Using LINQ Distinct: With an Example on ASP.NET MVC SelectListItem

  - by Joe Mayo

  One of the things that might be surprising in the LINQ Distinct standard query operator is that it doesn’t automatically work properly on custom classes. There are reasons for this, which I’ll explain shortly. The example I’ll use in this post focuses on pulling a unique list of names to load into a drop-down list. I’ll explain the sample application, show you typical first shot at Distinct, explain why it won’t work as you expect, and then demonstrate a solution to make Distinct work with any custom class. The technologies I’m using are  LINQ to Twitter, LINQ to Objects, Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET MVC 2, and Visual Studio 2010. The function of the example program is to show a list of people that I follow.  In Twitter API vernacular, these people are called “Friends”; though I’ve never met most of them in real life. This is part of the ubiquitous language of social networking, and Twitter in particular, so you’ll see my objects named accordingly. Where Distinct comes into play is because I want to have a drop-down list with the names of the friends appearing in the list. Some friends are quite verbose, which means I can’t just extract names from each tweet and populate the drop-down; otherwise, I would end up with many duplicate names. Therefore, Distinct is the appropriate operator to eliminate the extra entries from my friends who tend to be enthusiastic tweeters. The sample doesn’t do anything with the drop-down list and I leave that up to imagination for what it’s practical purpose could be; perhaps a filter for the list if I only want to see a certain person’s tweets or maybe a quick list that I plan to combine with a TextBox and Button to reply to a friend. When the program runs, you’ll need to authenticate with Twitter, because I’m using OAuth (DotNetOpenAuth), for authentication, and then you’ll see the drop-down list of names above the grid with the most recent tweets from friends. Here’s what the application looks like when it runs: As you can see, there is a drop-down list above the grid. The drop-down list is where most of the focus of this article will be. There is some description of the code before we talk about the Distinct operator, but we’ll get there soon. This is an ASP.NET MVC2 application, written with VS 2010. Here’s the View that produces this screen: <%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<TwitterFriendsViewModel>" %> <%@ Import Namespace="DistinctSelectList.Models" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server">     Home Page </asp:Content><asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server">     <fieldset>         <legend>Twitter Friends</legend>         <div>             <%= Html.DropDownListFor(                     twendVM => twendVM.FriendNames,                     Model.FriendNames,                     "<All Friends>") %>         </div>         <div>             <% Html.Telerik().Grid<TweetViewModel>(Model.Tweets)                    .Name("TwitterFriendsGrid")                    .Columns(cols =>                     {                         cols.Template(col =>                             { %>                                 <img src="<%= col.ImageUrl %>"                                      alt="<%= col.ScreenName %>" />                         <% });                         cols.Bound(col => col.ScreenName);                         cols.Bound(col => col.Tweet);                     })                    .Render(); %>         </div>     </fieldset> </asp:Content> As shown above, the Grid is from Telerik’s Extensions for ASP.NET MVC. The first column is a template that renders the user’s Avatar from a URL provided by the Twitter query. Both the Grid and DropDownListFor display properties that are collections from a TwitterFriendsViewModel class, shown below: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Web.Mvc; namespace DistinctSelectList.Models { /// /// For finding friend info on screen /// public class TwitterFriendsViewModel { /// /// Display names of friends in drop-down list /// public List FriendNames { get; set; } /// /// Display tweets in grid /// public List Tweets { get; set; } } } I created the TwitterFreindsViewModel. The two Lists are what the View consumes to populate the DropDownListFor and Grid. Notice that FriendNames is a List of SelectListItem, which is an MVC class. Another custom class I created is the TweetViewModel (the type of the Tweets List), shown below: namespace DistinctSelectList.Models { /// /// Info on friend tweets /// public class TweetViewModel { /// /// User's avatar /// public string ImageUrl { get; set; } /// /// User's Twitter name /// public string ScreenName { get; set; } /// /// Text containing user's tweet /// public string Tweet { get; set; } } } The initial Twitter query returns much more information than we need for our purposes and this a special class for displaying info in the View.  Now you know about the View and how it’s constructed. Let’s look at the controller next. The controller for this demo performs authentication, data retrieval, data manipulation, and view selection. I’ll skip the description of the authentication because it’s a normal part of using OAuth with LINQ to Twitter. Instead, we’ll drill down and focus on the Distinct operator. However, I’ll show you the entire controller, below,  so that you can see how it all fits together: using System.Linq; using System.Web.Mvc; using DistinctSelectList.Models; using LinqToTwitter; namespace DistinctSelectList.Controllers { [HandleError] public class HomeController : Controller { private MvcOAuthAuthorization auth; private TwitterContext twitterCtx; /// /// Display a list of friends current tweets /// /// public ActionResult Index() { auth = new MvcOAuthAuthorization(InMemoryTokenManager.Instance, InMemoryTokenManager.AccessToken); string accessToken = auth.CompleteAuthorize(); if (accessToken != null) { InMemoryTokenManager.AccessToken = accessToken; } if (auth.CachedCredentialsAvailable) { auth.SignOn(); } else { return auth.BeginAuthorize(); } twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth); var friendTweets = (from tweet in twitterCtx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Friends select new TweetViewModel { ImageUrl = tweet.User.ProfileImageUrl, ScreenName = tweet.User.Identifier.ScreenName, Tweet = tweet.Text }) .ToList(); var friendNames = (from tweet in friendTweets select new SelectListItem { Text = tweet.ScreenName, Value = tweet.ScreenName }) .Distinct() .ToList(); var twendsVM = new TwitterFriendsViewModel { Tweets = friendTweets, FriendNames = friendNames }; return View(twendsVM); } public ActionResult About() { return View(); } } } The important part of the listing above are the LINQ to Twitter queries for friendTweets and friendNames. Both of these results are used in the subsequent population of the twendsVM instance that is passed to the view. Let’s dissect these two statements for clarification and focus on what is happening with Distinct. The query for friendTweets gets a list of the 20 most recent tweets (as specified by the Twitter API for friend queries) and performs a projection into the custom TweetViewModel class, repeated below for your convenience: var friendTweets = (from tweet in twitterCtx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Friends select new TweetViewModel { ImageUrl = tweet.User.ProfileImageUrl, ScreenName = tweet.User.Identifier.ScreenName, Tweet = tweet.Text }) .ToList(); The LINQ to Twitter query above simplifies what we need to work with in the View and the reduces the amount of information we have to look at in subsequent queries. Given the friendTweets above, the next query performs another projection into an MVC SelectListItem, which is required for binding to the DropDownList.  This brings us to the focus of this blog post, writing a correct query that uses the Distinct operator. The query below uses LINQ to Objects, querying the friendTweets collection to get friendNames: var friendNames = (from tweet in friendTweets select new SelectListItem { Text = tweet.ScreenName, Value = tweet.ScreenName }) .Distinct() .ToList(); The above implementation of Distinct seems normal, but it is deceptively incorrect. After running the query above, by executing the application, you’ll notice that the drop-down list contains many duplicates.  This will send you back to the code scratching your head, but there’s a reason why this happens. To understand the problem, we must examine how Distinct works in LINQ to Objects. Distinct has two overloads: one without parameters, as shown above, and another that takes a parameter of type IEqualityComparer<T>.  In the case above, no parameters, Distinct will call EqualityComparer<T>.Default behind the scenes to make comparisons as it iterates through the list. You don’t have problems with the built-in types, such as string, int, DateTime, etc, because they all implement IEquatable<T>. However, many .NET Framework classes, such as SelectListItem, don’t implement IEquatable<T>. So, what happens is that EqualityComparer<T>.Default results in a call to Object.Equals, which performs reference equality on reference type objects.  You don’t have this problem with value types because the default implementation of Object.Equals is bitwise equality. However, most of your projections that use Distinct are on classes, just like the SelectListItem used in this demo application. So, the reason why Distinct didn’t produce the results we wanted was because we used a type that doesn’t define its own equality and Distinct used the default reference equality. This resulted in all objects being included in the results because they are all separate instances in memory with unique references. As you might have guessed, the solution to the problem is to use the second overload of Distinct that accepts an IEqualityComparer<T> instance. If you were projecting into your own custom type, you could make that type implement IEqualityComparer<T>, but SelectListItem belongs to the .NET Framework Class Library.  Therefore, the solution is to create a custom type to implement IEqualityComparer<T>, as in the SelectListItemComparer class, shown below: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Web.Mvc; namespace DistinctSelectList.Models { public class SelectListItemComparer : EqualityComparer { public override bool Equals(SelectListItem x, SelectListItem y) { return x.Value.Equals(y.Value); } public override int GetHashCode(SelectListItem obj) { return obj.Value.GetHashCode(); } } } The SelectListItemComparer class above doesn’t implement IEqualityComparer<SelectListItem>, but rather derives from EqualityComparer<SelectListItem>. Microsoft recommends this approach for consistency with the behavior of generic collection classes. However, if your custom type already derives from a base class, go ahead and implement IEqualityComparer<T>, which will still work. EqualityComparer is an abstract class, that implements IEqualityComparer<T> with Equals and GetHashCode abstract methods. For the purposes of this application, the SelectListItem.Value property is sufficient to determine if two items are equal.   Since SelectListItem.Value is type string, the code delegates equality to the string class. The code also delegates the GetHashCode operation to the string class.You might have other criteria in your own object and would need to define what it means for your object to be equal. Now that we have an IEqualityComparer<SelectListItem>, let’s fix the problem. The code below modifies the query where we want distinct values: var friendNames = (from tweet in friendTweets select new SelectListItem { Text = tweet.ScreenName, Value = tweet.ScreenName }) .Distinct(new SelectListItemComparer()) .ToList(); Notice how the code above passes a new instance of SelectListItemComparer as the parameter to the Distinct operator. Now, when you run the application, the drop-down list will behave as you expect, showing only a unique set of names. In addition to Distinct, other LINQ Standard Query Operators have overloads that accept IEqualityComparer<T>’s, You can use the same techniques as shown here, with SelectListItemComparer, with those other operators as well. Now you know how to resolve problems with getting Distinct to work properly and also have a way to fix problems with other operators that require equality comparisons. @JoeMayo

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• Visual Studio 2013 Static Code Analysis in depth: What? When and How?

  - by Hosam Kamel

  In this post I'll illustrate in details the following points What is static code analysis? When to use? Supported platforms Supported Visual Studio versions How to use Run Code Analysis Manually Run Code Analysis Automatically Run Code Analysis while check-in source code to TFS version control (TFSVC) Run Code Analysis as part of Team Build Understand the Code Analysis results & learn how to fix them Create your custom rule set Q & A References What is static Rule analysis? Static Code Analysis feature of Visual Studio performs static code analysis on code to help developers identify potential design, globalization, interoperability, performance, security, and a lot of other categories of potential problems according to Microsoft's rules that mainly targets best practices in writing code, and there is a large set of those rules included with Visual Studio grouped into different categorized targeting specific coding issues like security, design, Interoperability, globalizations and others. Static here means analyzing the source code without executing it and this type of analysis can be performed through automated tools (like Visual Studio 2013 Code Analysis Tool) or manually through Code Review which already supported in Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 (check Using Code Review to Improve Quality video on Channel9) There is also Dynamic analysis which performed on executing programs using software testing techniques such as Code Coverage for example. When to use? Running Code analysis tool at regular intervals during your development process can enhance the quality of your software, examines your code for a set of common defects and violations is always a good programming practice. Adding that Code analysis can also find defects in your code that are difficult to discover through testing allowing you to achieve first level quality gate for you application during development phase before you release it to the testing team. Supported platforms .NET Framework, native (C and C++) Database applications. Support Visual Studio versions All version of Visual Studio starting Visual Studio 2013 (except Visual Studio Test Professional) check Feature comparisons Create and modify a custom rule set required Visual Studio Premium or Ultimate. How to use? Code Analysis can be run manually at any time from within the Visual Studio IDE, or even setup to automatically run as part of a Team Build or check-in policy for Team Foundation Server. Run Code Analysis Manually To run code analysis manually on a project, on the Analyze menu, click Run Code Analysis on your project or simply right click on the project name on the Solution Explorer choose Run Code Analysis from the context menu Run Code Analysis Automatically To run code analysis each time that you build a project, you select Enable Code Analysis on Build on the project's Property Page Run Code Analysis while check-in source code to TFS version control (TFSVC) Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) provides a way for organizations to enforce practices that lead to better code and more efficient group development through Check-in policies which are rules that are set at the team project level and enforced on developer computers before code is allowed to be checked in. (This is available only if you're using Team Foundation Server) Require permissions on Team Foundation Server: you must have the Edit project-level information permission set to Allow typically your account must be part of Project Administrators, Project Collection Administrators, for more information about Team Foundation permissions check http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms252587(v=vs.120).aspx In Team Explorer, right-click the team project name, point to Team Project Settings, and then click Source Control. In the Source Control dialog box, select the Check-in Policy tab. Click Add to create a new check-in policy. Double-click the existing Code Analysis item in the Policy Type list to change the policy. Check or Uncheck the policy option based on the configurations you need to perform as illustrated below: Enforce check-in to only contain files that are part of current solution: code analysis can run only on files specified in solution and project configuration files. This policy guarantees that all code that is part of a solution is analyzed. Enforce C/C++ Code Analysis (/analyze): Requires that all C or C++ projects be built with the /analyze compiler option to run code analysis before they can be checked in. Enforce Code Analysis for Managed Code: Requires that all managed projects run code analysis and build before they can be checked in. Check Code analysis rule set reference on MSDN What is Rule Set? Rule Set is a group of code analysis rules like the example below where Microsoft.Design is the rule set name where "Do not declare static members on generic types" is the code analysis rule Once you configured the Analysis rule the policy will be enabled for all the team member in this project whenever a team member check-in any source code to the TFSVC the policy section will highlight the Code Analysis policy as below TFS is a very extensible platform so you can simply implement your own custom Code Analysis Check-in policy, check this link for more details http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd492668.aspx but you have to be aware also about compatibility between different TFS versions check http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb907157.aspx Run Code Analysis as part of Team Build With Team Foundation Build (TFBuild), you can create and manage build processes that automatically compile and test your applications, and perform other important functions. Code Analysis can be enabled in the Build Definition file by selecting the correct value for the build process parameter "Perform Code Analysis" Once configure, Kick-off your build definition to queue a new build, Code Analysis will run as part of build workflow and you will be able to see code analysis warning as part of build report Understand the Code Analysis results & learn how to fix them Now after you went through Code Analysis configurations and the different ways of running it, we will go through the Code Analysis result how to understand them and how to resolve them. Code Analysis window in Visual Studio will show all the analysis results based on the rule sets you configured in the project file properties, let's dig deep into what each result item contains: 1 Check ID The unique identifier for the rule. CheckId and Category are used for in-source suppression of a warning.       2 Title The title of warning message       3 Description A description of the problem or suggested fix 4 File Name File name and the line of code number which violate the code analysis rule set 5 Category The code analysis category for this error 6 Warning /Error Depend on how you configure it in the rule set the default is Warning level 7 Action Copy: copy the warning information to the clipboard Create Work Item: If you're connected to Team Foundation Server you can create a work item most probably you may create a Task or Bug and assign it for a developer to fix certain code analysis warning Suppress Message: There are times when you might decide not to fix a code analysis warning. You might decide that resolving the warning requires too much recoding in relation to the probability that the issue will arise in any real-world implementation of your code. Or you might believe that the analysis that is used in the warning is inappropriate for the particular context. You can suppress individual warnings so that they no longer appear in the Code Analysis window. Two options available: In Source inserts a SuppressMessage attribute in the source file above the method that generated the warning. This makes the suppression more discoverable. In Suppression File adds a SuppressMessage attribute to the GlobalSuppressions.cs file of the project. This can make the management of suppressions easier. Note that the SuppressMessage attribute added to GlobalSuppression.cs also targets the method that generated the warning. It does not suppress the warning globally.       Visual Studio makes it very easy to fix Code analysis warning, all you have to do is clicking on the Check Id hyperlink if you are not aware how to fix the warring and you'll be directed to MSDN online or local copy based on the configuration you did while installing Visual Studio and you will find all the information about the warring including how to fix it. Create a Custom Code Analysis Rule Set The Microsoft standard rule sets provide groups of rules that are organized by function and depth. For example, the Microsoft Basic Design Guidelines Rules and the Microsoft Extended Design Guidelines Rules contain rules that focus on usability and maintainability issues, with added emphasis on naming rules in the Extended rule set, you can create and modify a custom rule set to meet specific project needs associated with code analysis. To create a custom rule set, you open one or more standard rule sets in the rule set editor. Create and modify a custom rule set required Visual Studio Premium or Ultimate. You can check How to: Create a Custom Rule Set on MSDN for more details http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264974.aspx Q & A Visual Studio static code analysis vs. FxCop vs. StyleCpp http://www.excella.com/blog/stylecop-vs-fxcop-difference-between-code-analysis-tools/ Code Analysis for SharePoint Apps and SPDisposeCheck? This post lists some of the rule set you can run specifically for SharePoint applications and how to integrate SPDisposeCheck as well. Code Analysis for SQL Server Database Projects? This post illustrate how to run static code analysis on T-SQL through SSDT ReSharper 8 vs. Visual Studio 2013? This document lists some of the features that are provided by ReSharper 8 but are missing or not as fully implemented in Visual Studio 2013. References A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/2/69354-a-few-billion-lines-of-code-later/fulltext What is New in Code Analysis for Visual Studio 2013 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2013/07/03/what-is-new-in-code-analysis-for-visual-studio-2013.aspx Analyze the code quality of Windows Store apps using Visual Studio static code analysis http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh441471.aspx [Hands-on-lab] Using Code Analysis with Visual Studio 2012 to Improve Code Quality http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/9/2/A9253B14-5F23-4BC8-9C7E-F5199DB5F831/Using%20Code%20Analysis%20with%20Visual%20Studio%202012%20to%20Improve%20Code%20Quality.docx Originally posted at "Hosam Kamel| Developer & Platform Evangelist" http://blogs.msdn.com/hkamel

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 4, Imperative Data Parallelism: Aggregation

  - by Reed

  In the article on simple data parallelism, I described how to perform an operation on an entire collection of elements in parallel.  Often, this is not adequate, as the parallel operation is going to be performing some form of aggregation. Simple examples of this might include taking the sum of the results of processing a function on each element in the collection, or finding the minimum of the collection given some criteria.  This can be done using the techniques described in simple data parallelism, however, special care needs to be taken into account to synchronize the shared data appropriately.  The Task Parallel Library has tools to assist in this synchronization. The main issue with aggregation when parallelizing a routine is that you need to handle synchronization of data.  Since multiple threads will need to write to a shared portion of data.  Suppose, for example, that we wanted to parallelize a simple loop that looked for the minimum value within a dataset: double min = double.MaxValue; foreach(var item in collection) { double value = item.PerformComputation(); min = System.Math.Min(min, value); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This seems like a good candidate for parallelization, but there is a problem here.  If we just wrap this into a call to Parallel.ForEach, we’ll introduce a critical race condition, and get the wrong answer.  Let’s look at what happens here: // Buggy code! Do not use! double min = double.MaxValue; Parallel.ForEach(collection, item => { double value = item.PerformComputation(); min = System.Math.Min(min, value); }); This code has a fatal flaw: min will be checked, then set, by multiple threads simultaneously.  Two threads may perform the check at the same time, and set the wrong value for min.  Say we get a value of 1 in thread 1, and a value of 2 in thread 2, and these two elements are the first two to run.  If both hit the min check line at the same time, both will determine that min should change, to 1 and 2 respectively.  If element 1 happens to set the variable first, then element 2 sets the min variable, we’ll detect a min value of 2 instead of 1.  This can lead to wrong answers. Unfortunately, fixing this, with the Parallel.ForEach call we’re using, would require adding locking.  We would need to rewrite this like: // Safe, but slow double min = double.MaxValue; // Make a "lock" object object syncObject = new object(); Parallel.ForEach(collection, item => { double value = item.PerformComputation(); lock(syncObject) min = System.Math.Min(min, value); }); This will potentially add a huge amount of overhead to our calculation.  Since we can potentially block while waiting on the lock for every single iteration, we will most likely slow this down to where it is actually quite a bit slower than our serial implementation.  The problem is the lock statement – any time you use lock(object), you’re almost assuring reduced performance in a parallel situation.  This leads to two observations I’ll make: When parallelizing a routine, try to avoid locks. That being said: Always add any and all required synchronization to avoid race conditions. These two observations tend to be opposing forces – we often need to synchronize our algorithms, but we also want to avoid the synchronization when possible.  Looking at our routine, there is no way to directly avoid this lock, since each element is potentially being run on a separate thread, and this lock is necessary in order for our routine to function correctly every time. However, this isn’t the only way to design this routine to implement this algorithm.  Realize that, although our collection may have thousands or even millions of elements, we have a limited number of Processing Elements (PE).  Processing Element is the standard term for a hardware element which can process and execute instructions.  This typically is a core in your processor, but many modern systems have multiple hardware execution threads per core.  The Task Parallel Library will not execute the work for each item in the collection as a separate work item. Instead, when Parallel.ForEach executes, it will partition the collection into larger “chunks” which get processed on different threads via the ThreadPool.  This helps reduce the threading overhead, and help the overall speed.  In general, the Parallel class will only use one thread per PE in the system. Given the fact that there are typically fewer threads than work items, we can rethink our algorithm design.  We can parallelize our algorithm more effectively by approaching it differently.  Because the basic aggregation we are doing here (Min) is communitive, we do not need to perform this in a given order.  We knew this to be true already – otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to parallelize this routine in the first place.  With this in mind, we can treat each thread’s work independently, allowing each thread to serially process many elements with no locking, then, after all the threads are complete, “merge” together the results. This can be accomplished via a different set of overloads in the Parallel class: Parallel.ForEach<TSource,TLocal>.  The idea behind these overloads is to allow each thread to begin by initializing some local state (TLocal).  The thread will then process an entire set of items in the source collection, providing that state to the delegate which processes an individual item.  Finally, at the end, a separate delegate is run which allows you to handle merging that local state into your final results. To rewriting our routine using Parallel.ForEach<TSource,TLocal>, we need to provide three delegates instead of one.  The most basic version of this function is declared as: public static ParallelLoopResult ForEach<TSource, TLocal>( IEnumerable<TSource> source, Func<TLocal> localInit, Func<TSource, ParallelLoopState, TLocal, TLocal> body, Action<TLocal> localFinally ) The first delegate (the localInit argument) is defined as Func<TLocal>.  This delegate initializes our local state.  It should return some object we can use to track the results of a single thread’s operations. The second delegate (the body argument) is where our main processing occurs, although now, instead of being an Action<T>, we actually provide a Func<TSource, ParallelLoopState, TLocal, TLocal> delegate.  This delegate will receive three arguments: our original element from the collection (TSource), a ParallelLoopState which we can use for early termination, and the instance of our local state we created (TLocal).  It should do whatever processing you wish to occur per element, then return the value of the local state after processing is completed. The third delegate (the localFinally argument) is defined as Action<TLocal>.  This delegate is passed our local state after it’s been processed by all of the elements this thread will handle.  This is where you can merge your final results together.  This may require synchronization, but now, instead of synchronizing once per element (potentially millions of times), you’ll only have to synchronize once per thread, which is an ideal situation. Now that I’ve explained how this works, lets look at the code: // Safe, and fast! double min = double.MaxValue; // Make a "lock" object object syncObject = new object(); Parallel.ForEach( collection, // First, we provide a local state initialization delegate. () => double.MaxValue, // Next, we supply the body, which takes the original item, loop state, // and local state, and returns a new local state (item, loopState, localState) => { double value = item.PerformComputation(); return System.Math.Min(localState, value); }, // Finally, we provide an Action<TLocal>, to "merge" results together localState => { // This requires locking, but it's only once per used thread lock(syncObj) min = System.Math.Min(min, localState); } ); Although this is a bit more complicated than the previous version, it is now both thread-safe, and has minimal locking.  This same approach can be used by Parallel.For, although now, it’s Parallel.For<TLocal>.  When working with Parallel.For<TLocal>, you use the same triplet of delegates, with the same purpose and results. Also, many times, you can completely avoid locking by using a method of the Interlocked class to perform the final aggregation in an atomic operation.  The MSDN example demonstrating this same technique using Parallel.For uses the Interlocked class instead of a lock, since they are doing a sum operation on a long variable, which is possible via Interlocked.Add. By taking advantage of local state, we can use the Parallel class methods to parallelize algorithms such as aggregation, which, at first, may seem like poor candidates for parallelization.  Doing so requires careful consideration, and often requires a slight redesign of the algorithm, but the performance gains can be significant if handled in a way to avoid excessive synchronization.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 27, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 27, 2010New ProjectsASP.NET MVC ScriptBehind: Dynamic, developer & designer friendly script inclusion, compression and optimization for ASP.NET MVCCSLib.Net: CSLib.Net (Common Solutions Library) is yet another library with commonly used utilities, helpers, extensions and etc.DNN Module - Google Analytic Dashboard: Here is a Google Analytic Dashboard DNN Module which contain following sub modules. * Visitors Overview * World Map Overlay * Traf...dotUML: dotUML is a toolkit that enables developers to create and visualize UML diagrams like sequence, use case or component diagrams. EventRegistration: Event Registration ProgramGameStore League Manager: GameStore League Manager makes it easier for gaming store managers to run local leagues for card games, board games and any game where there is a h...GibberIM: GibberIM (Gibberish IM) is yet another Jabber instant messanger implementation.HTTP Compression Library for Heavy Load Web Server: Deflater is a HTTP Compression Library, supporting Deflate (RFC 1950, RFC 1951) and GZip (RFC 1952). It is designed to encode and compress HTML con...HydroLiDAR: This is a research project intended to explore algorithms and techniques for extracting Hydrographic features (rivers, watersheds, ponds, pits, etc...Lan Party Manager: Lan Party ManagerMAPS SQL Analysis Project: This solution demonstrates how to build a Business Intelligence solution on top of the MAPS databaseMMDB Parallax ALM: An open source Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) system, being built by Mike Mooney of MMDB Solutions, as a learning/teaching exercise. MyColorSprite: This Silverlight app is a color selection tool especially great for creating gredient color brushes for the xaml code. It allows a user create/pic...PDF Form Bubble Up: Bubble Up takes PDF Forms stored in SharePoint document libraries and "bubbles up" the data in the PDF Form to the library. This means the data tha...PostBack Blog Engine: A modified Oxite open-source blog engine on top of the DB4O object database engine.Project Otto: A Silverlight Isometric Rendering Engine and Demo GameQFrac: Fraktalų generatorius parašytas naudojant Qt karkasą.RapidIoC: RapidIoC provides lightning fast IoC capabilities including Dependency Injection & AOP. The modular framework will allow for constructor, property,...Shatranj: A WPF / Silverlight based frontend to Huo Chess. This project was conceived as a way to learn key WPF / Silverlight concepts. At the release, it...WHS SkyDrive Backup Add In: This project allows for Windows Home Server to backup selected folders to your free 25GB Live SkyDrive. Simply dump the Home Server Add In, into y...Workflow Type Browser for WF4: This Workflow Type Browser displays type information for all arguments and variables in a WF4 workflow. It is designed for use in a rehosted desig...ZoomBarPlus: Windows Mobile Service designed for the HTC Touch Pro 2. Adds additional functionality to the zoom bar at the bottom of the screen. You can map key...New ReleasesBCryptTool: BCryptTool v0.2: The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 (SP1) is needed to run this program.Braintree Client Library: Braintree-1.1.1: Braintree-1.1.1CC.Utilities: CC.Utilities 1.0.10.226: Minor bug fixes. A few new functions in the Interop namespace. DoubleBufferedGraphics now exposes the underlying memory Image through the Mem...CC.Votd: CC.Votd 1.0.10.227: This release includes several bug fixes and enchancements. The most notable enhancement is the RssItemCache which will allow the screensaver to f...DNN Module - Google Analytic Dashboard: DNN Module - Google Analytic Dashboard: Here is a Google Analytic Dashboard DNN Module which contain following sub modules. * Visitors Overview * World Map Overlay * Traffic ...Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.008: Fixed Message Box to appear in front as expected. Added ColorWheel.getRandomColor() Including Recipes and Concept slides as part of releaseFolderSize: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.5.0: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.5.0 A simple utility intended to be used to scan harddrives for the folders that take most place and display this to the user...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts 3.0.4 beta Released: Hi, Today we are releasing the much awaited Zooming feature. In this version of Zooming you will be able to zoom/scale the PlotArea of the chart. ...GameStore League Manager: League Manager 1.0: Rough and ready first version. You will need to have SQL Server Express 2005 or 2008 installed on your machine to use this software. Unzip to a l...Google Maps API 3 Visual Studio Intellisense: google-maps-3-vs-1-0-vsdoc: google-maps-3-vs-1-0 provides Visual Studio intellisense in-line api documentation and code completion for Google Maps API V3. Updated 02/25/10 A...HaoRan_WebCam: HaoRan.WebCam.Web beta2: 在年前发布的那一版基于silverlight4(beta)版的摄像头应用之后。经过最近一段时间的完善。目前已推出了beta2版，在修改了原有程序bug的基础上，做了如下变化： 1.将图片载入修改成为按原图宽高比进行缩放，所以以前沿X,Y轴变化就变成了一个缩放条同比例变化了。 ...IQToolkit Contrib: IQToolkitContrib.zip (v1.0.17.1): Update to DataServiceClientRepository - added ExecuteNonEntity to deal with calling Wcf Data Service methods for Dto classes (opposed to Entity cla...kdar: KDAR 0.0.15: KDAR - Kernel Debugger Anti Rootkit - new module cheks added - bugs fixedLogJoint - Log Viewer: logjoint 1.5: - Added support for more formats - Timeline improvement - Unicode logs and encodings supportMyColorSprite: MyColorSprite: MyColorSprite This Silverlight app is a color selection tool especially great for creating gredient color brushes for the xaml code. It allows a ...OAuthLib: OAuthLib (1.6.0.1): Difference between 1.6.0.0 is just version number.Picasa Downloader: PicasaDownloader Setup (41085): Changelog: Fixed workitem 10296 (Saving at resolutions above 1600px), Added experimental support for a modifier of the image download url (inse...Prolog.NET: Prolog.NET 1.0 Beta 1.1: Installer includes: primary Prolog.NET assembly Prolog.NET Workbench PrologTest console application all required dependencies Beta 1.1 in...QFrac: QFrac 1.0: Pirmoji stabili QFrac versija.SharepointApplicationFramework: SAF QuickPoll: Release Notes: This web part is written in VS2010 beta2 and uses Microsoft Chart Controls. Packaged into a single WSP. This wsp creates a quick po...Star System Simulator: Star System Simulator 2.2: An minor update to Version 2.1. Changes in this release: User interface enhancements/fixes with toolbar and icons. Features in this release: Mod...ToDoListReminder: Version 1.0.1.0: Bugs fixed: 10316, 10317 Handler for "Window Closing" event was added Error handling for XML parsing was addedVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30226.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWindows Remote Assistance For Skype: Beta 1.0.1: Major changes: 1) Now using Skype4COM to interact with Skype 2) InvitationXML is compressed 3) Showing warning on first run to Allow Access to SkypeWorkflow Type Browser for WF4: Release 1.0: There has been much surprise and disappointment expressed by the WF4 developer community since Microsoft made it clear that Intellisense woould not...Most Popular ProjectsData Dictionary CreatorOutlook 2007 Messaging API (MAPI) Code SamplesCommon Data Parameters ModuleTeam System - Work Item Spell Checker (All Languages)Tyrannt Online (Client/Server RPG)Ray Tracer StarterMeeting DemoNick BerardiScreenslayerRawrMost Active ProjectsDinnerNow.netRawrBlogEngine.NETMapWindow GISSLARToolkit - Silverlight Augmented Reality ToolkitInfoServiceSharpMap - Geospatial Application Framework for the CLRCommon Context Adapterspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• Transactional Messaging in the Windows Azure Service Bus

  - by Alan Smith

  Introduction I’m currently working on broadening the content in the Windows Azure Service Bus Developer Guide. One of the features I have been looking at over the past week is the support for transactional messaging. When using the direct programming model and the WCF interface some, but not all, messaging operations can participate in transactions. This allows developers to improve the reliability of messaging systems. There are some limitations in the transactional model, transactions can only include one top level messaging entity (such as a queue or topic, subscriptions are no top level entities), and transactions cannot include other systems, such as databases. As the transaction model is currently not well documented I have had to figure out how things work through experimentation, with some help from the development team to confirm any questions I had. Hopefully I’ve got the content mostly correct, I will update the content in the e-book if I find any errors or improvements that can be made (any feedback would be very welcome). I’ve not had a chance to look into the code for transactions and asynchronous operations, maybe that would make a nice challenge lab for my Windows Azure Service Bus course. Transactional Messaging Messaging entities in the Windows Azure Service Bus provide support for participation in transactions. This allows developers to perform several messaging operations within a transactional scope, and ensure that all the actions are committed or, if there is a failure, none of the actions are committed. There are a number of scenarios where the use of transactions can increase the reliability of messaging systems. Using TransactionScope In .NET the TransactionScope class can be used to perform a series of actions in a transaction. The using declaration is typically used de define the scope of the transaction. Any transactional operations that are contained within the scope can be committed by calling the Complete method. If the Complete method is not called, any transactional methods in the scope will not commit.   // Create a transactional scope. using (TransactionScope scope = new TransactionScope()) {     // Do something.       // Do something else.       // Commit the transaction.     scope.Complete(); }     In order for methods to participate in the transaction, they must provide support for transactional operations. Database and message queue operations typically provide support for transactions. Transactions in Brokered Messaging Transaction support in Service Bus Brokered Messaging allows message operations to be performed within a transactional scope; however there are some limitations around what operations can be performed within the transaction. In the current release, only one top level messaging entity, such as a queue or topic can participate in a transaction, and the transaction cannot include any other transaction resource managers, making transactions spanning a messaging entity and a database not possible. When sending messages, the send operations can participate in a transaction allowing multiple messages to be sent within a transactional scope. This allows for “all or nothing” delivery of a series of messages to a single queue or topic. When receiving messages, messages that are received in the peek-lock receive mode can be completed, deadlettered or deferred within a transactional scope. In the current release the Abandon method will not participate in a transaction. The same restrictions of only one top level messaging entity applies here, so the Complete method can be called transitionally on messages received from the same queue, or messages received from one or more subscriptions in the same topic. Sending Multiple Messages in a Transaction A transactional scope can be used to send multiple messages to a queue or topic. This will ensure that all the messages will be enqueued or, if the transaction fails to commit, no messages will be enqueued.     An example of the code used to send 10 messages to a queue as a single transaction from a console application is shown below.   QueueClient queueClient = messagingFactory.CreateQueueClient(Queue1);   Console.Write("Sending");   // Create a transaction scope. using (TransactionScope scope = new TransactionScope()) {     for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)     {         // Send a message         BrokeredMessage msg = new BrokeredMessage("Message: " + i);         queueClient.Send(msg);         Console.Write(".");     }     Console.WriteLine("Done!");     Console.WriteLine();       // Should we commit the transaction?     Console.WriteLine("Commit send 10 messages? (yes or no)");     string reply = Console.ReadLine();     if (reply.ToLower().Equals("yes"))     {         // Commit the transaction.         scope.Complete();     } } Console.WriteLine(); messagingFactory.Close();     The transaction scope is used to wrap the sending of 10 messages. Once the messages have been sent the user has the option to either commit the transaction or abandon the transaction. If the user enters “yes”, the Complete method is called on the scope, which will commit the transaction and result in the messages being enqueued. If the user enters anything other than “yes”, the transaction will not commit, and the messages will not be enqueued. Receiving Multiple Messages in a Transaction The receiving of multiple messages is another scenario where the use of transactions can improve reliability. When receiving a group of messages that are related together, maybe in the same message session, it is possible to receive the messages in the peek-lock receive mode, and then complete, defer, or deadletter the messages in one transaction. (In the current version of Service Bus, abandon is not transactional.)   The following code shows how this can be achieved. using (TransactionScope scope = new TransactionScope()) {       while (true)     {         // Receive a message.         BrokeredMessage msg = q1Client.Receive(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1));         if (msg != null)         {             // Wrote message body and complete message.             string text = msg.GetBody<string>();             Console.WriteLine("Received: " + text);             msg.Complete();         }         else         {             break;         }     }     Console.WriteLine();       // Should we commit?     Console.WriteLine("Commit receive? (yes or no)");     string reply = Console.ReadLine();     if (reply.ToLower().Equals("yes"))     {         // Commit the transaction.         scope.Complete();     }     Console.WriteLine(); }     Note that if there are a large number of messages to be received, there will be a chance that the transaction may time out before it can be committed. It is possible to specify a longer timeout when the transaction is created, but It may be better to receive and commit smaller amounts of messages within the transaction. It is also possible to complete, defer, or deadletter messages received from more than one subscription, as long as all the subscriptions are contained in the same topic. As subscriptions are not top level messaging entities this scenarios will work. The following code shows how this can be achieved. try {     using (TransactionScope scope = new TransactionScope())     {         // Receive one message from each subscription.         BrokeredMessage msg1 = subscriptionClient1.Receive();         BrokeredMessage msg2 = subscriptionClient2.Receive();           // Complete the message receives.         msg1.Complete();         msg2.Complete();           Console.WriteLine("Msg1: " + msg1.GetBody<string>());         Console.WriteLine("Msg2: " + msg2.GetBody<string>());           // Commit the transaction.         scope.Complete();     } } catch (Exception ex) {     Console.WriteLine(ex.Message); }     Unsupported Scenarios The restriction of only one top level messaging entity being able to participate in a transaction makes some useful scenarios unsupported. As the Windows Azure Service Bus is under continuous development and new releases are expected to be frequent it is possible that this restriction may not be present in future releases. The first is the scenario where messages are to be routed to two different systems. The following code attempts to do this.   try {     // Create a transaction scope.     using (TransactionScope scope = new TransactionScope())     {         BrokeredMessage msg1 = new BrokeredMessage("Message1");         BrokeredMessage msg2 = new BrokeredMessage("Message2");           // Send a message to Queue1         Console.WriteLine("Sending Message1");         queue1Client.Send(msg1);           // Send a message to Queue2         Console.WriteLine("Sending Message2");         queue2Client.Send(msg2);           // Commit the transaction.         Console.WriteLine("Committing transaction...");         scope.Complete();     } } catch (Exception ex) {     Console.WriteLine(ex.Message); }     The results of running the code are shown below. When attempting to send a message to the second queue the following exception is thrown: No active Transaction was found for ID '35ad2495-ee8a-4956-bbad-eb4fedf4a96e:1'. The Transaction may have timed out or attempted to span multiple top-level entities such as Queue or Topic. The server Transaction timeout is: 00:01:00..TrackingId:947b8c4b-7754-4044-b91b-4a959c3f9192_3_3,TimeStamp:3/29/2012 7:47:32 AM.   Another scenario where transactional support could be useful is when forwarding messages from one queue to another queue. This would also involve more than one top level messaging entity, and is therefore not supported.   Another scenario that developers may wish to implement is performing transactions across messaging entities and other transactional systems, such as an on-premise database. In the current release this is not supported.   Workarounds for Unsupported Scenarios There are some techniques that developers can use to work around the one top level entity limitation of transactions. When sending two messages to two systems, topics and subscriptions can be used. If the same message is to be sent to two destinations then the subscriptions would have the default subscriptions, and the client would only send one message. If two different messages are to be sent, then filters on the subscriptions can route the messages to the appropriate destination. The client can then send the two messages to the topic in the same transaction.   In scenarios where a message needs to be received and then forwarded to another system within the same transaction topics and subscriptions can also be used. A message can be received from a subscription, and then sent to a topic within the same transaction. As a topic is a top level messaging entity, and a subscription is not, this scenario will work.

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• Day 2 - Game Design Documentation

  - by dapostolov

  So yesterday I didn't cut any code for my game but I was able to do a tiny bit of research on the XNA Game Development Technology and the communities out there and do you know what? I feel I'm a bit closer to my goal. The bad news is today I didn't cut code either. However, not all is lost because I wanted to get my ideas on paper and today I just did that.  Today, I began to jot down notes about the game and how I felt the visual elements would interact with each other. Unlike my workplace, my personal level of documentation is nothing more than a task list or a mind map of my ideas; it helps me streamline my solutions quiet effectively and circumvent the long process of articulating each thought to the n-th degree. I truly dislike documentation (because I have an extremely hard time articulating my thought and solutions); however, because I tend to do a really good job with documentation I tend to get stuck writing the buggers. But as a generalist remark: 'No Developer likes documentation.' For now let's stick with my basic notes and call this post a living document. Here are my notes, fresh, from after watching the new first episode of Merlin second season! Actually, a quick recommendation to anyone who is reading this (if anyone is): I truly recommend you envelope yourself in the medium or task you're trying to tackle. Be one with moment and feel it! For instance: Are you writing a fantasy script / game? What would the music of the genre sound like? For me the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack by Basil Poledouris is frackin awesome. There are many other good CD's out there, which I listen to (some who even use medival instruments, but Conan I keep returning to. It's a creative trigger for me. Ask yourself what would the imagery look like? Time to surf google for artist renditions of fantasy! What would the game feel like? Start playing some of your favorite games that inspire you, be wary though, have some self control and don't let it absorb your time. Anyhow, onto the documentation... Screens, Scenes, and Sprites. Oh My! (groan...) The first thing that came to mind were the screens, I thought the following would suffice: Menu Screen Character Customisation Screen Loading Screen? Battle Ground The Menu Screen Ok. So, the thought here is when the game loads a huge title is displayed: Wizard Wars. The player is prompted with 3 menu items: 1 Player Game, 2 Player Game, and Exit. Since I'm targetting the PC platform, as a non-networked game to start, I picture myself running my mouse over each menu option and the visual element of the menu item changes, along with a sound to indicate that I am over a curent menu item. And as I move my mouse away, it changes back, and possibly an exit mouse sound. Maybe on the screen somewhere is a brazier alit with a magical tome open right beside it, OR, maybe the tome is the menu! I hear the menu music as mellow, not obtrusive or piercing. On a menu item select, a confirmation sound bellows to indicate the players selection. The Esc key will always return me to the previous screens or desktop. The menu screen must feel...dark, like a really important ritual is about to happen and thus the music should build up. 1 Player Game - > Customize Character(s) 2 Player Game - > Customize Character(s) Exit - > Back to Windows Notes: So the first thing I pick up here are a couple things: First and foremost, my artistic abilities suck crap, so I may have to hire an artist (now that i've said that, lets get techy) graphical objects will be positioned within a scene on each screen / window. Menu items will be represented grapically, possibly animated, and have sound / animation effects triggered by user input or a time line. I have an animated scene involving a brazier or fire on a stick IF I was to move this game to the xbox, I'd have to track which menu item is currently selected (unless I do a mouse pointer type thing.) WindowObject has a scene A Scene has many GameObjects GameObject has a position graphic or animation MenuObject is a GameObject which has a mouse in, mouse out, and click event which either does something graphically (animation), does something with sound, or moves to another screen.  Character Customisation Screen With either the 1 or 2 player option selected, both selections will come to this screen; a wizard requires a name, powers, and vestements of course! Player one will configure his character first and then player two. I considered a split screen for PC but to have two people fighting over a keyboard would probably suck. For XBox, a split screen could work; maybe when I get into the networking portion (phase 2 blog?) of this game I will remove the 2 player option for PC and provide only multiplayer and I will leave 2 player for xbox...hmm... Anyhow...I picture the creation process as follows: Name: (textbox / keyboard entry) - for xbox, this would have to be different. Robe Color: (color box, or something) Stats: Speed, Oomph, and Health. (as sliders) 1 as minimum and 10 as maximum. Ok, Back, and Cancel buttons / options. Each stat has a benefit which are listed below. The idea is the player decides if he wants his wizard to run fast, be a tank and ... hit with a purse.Regardless, the player will have a pool of 12 points to use. Ideally, A balanced wizard will have 5 in each attribute. Spells? The only spell of choice is a ball of fire which comes without question. The music and screen should still feel like a ritual. The Character Speed Basically, how fast your character moves and casts. Oomph (Best Monster Truck Voice): PURE POWAH!!! The damage output of your fireball. Health How much damage you can take. Notes: I realise the game dynamics may sound uninteresting at the moment; but I think after a couple releases, we could have some other grand ideas such as: saved profiles, gold to upgrade arsenal of spells, talents, etc...but for now...a vanilla fireball thrower mage will suffice for this experiment. OK. So... a MenuObject  may need to be loosely coupled to allow future items such as networking? may be a button? a CharacterObject has a name speed oomph health and a funky robe color. cap on the three stats (1-10) an arsenal of 1 spell (possibly could expand this) The Loading Screen As is. The Battleground Screen For now, I'm keeping the screen as max resolution for the PC. The screen isn't going to move or even be a split screen. I'm not aiming high here because I want to see what level of change is involved when new features / concepts are added to game content. I'm interested to find out if we could apply techniques such as MVC or MVVM to this type of development or is it too tightly coupled? This reminds me when when my best friend and I were brainstorming our game idea (this is going back a while...1994, 6?) and he cringed at the thought of bringing business technology into games, especially when I suggested a database to store character information and COM / DCOM as the medium, but it seems I wasn't far off (reflecting); just like his implementation of a xml "config file" for dynamic direct-x menus back before .net in 1999...anyhow...i digress... The Battle One screen, two characters lobing balls of fire at each other...It doesn't get better than that. Every so often a scroll appears...and the fireballs bounce off walls, or the wizard has rapid fire, or even scrolls of healing! The scroll options are endless. Two bars at the top, each the color of the wizard (with their name beside the bar) indicate how much health they have. Possibly the appearance of the scrolls means the battle is taking too long? I'm thinking 1 player controls: up, down, left, right and space to fire the button. Or even possibly, mouse click and shift - mouse button to fire a spell in the direction they are facing. Two player controls: a, s, d, f and space AND arrows (up, down, left, right) and Del key or Crtl. The game ends when a player has 0 health and a dialog box appears asking for a rematch / reconfigure / exit. Health goes down when a fireball (friendly or not), connects with a wizard. When a wizard connects with a scroll, a countdown clock / icon appears near the health bar and the wizard begins to glow. For the most part, a wizard can have only scroll 1 effect on him at a time. Notes: Ok, there's alot to cover here. a CharacterObject is a GameObject it travels at a set velocity it travels in a direction it has sounds (walking, running, casting, impact, dying, laughing, whistling, other?) it has animations (walking, running, casting, impact, dying, laughing, idle, other?) it has a lifespan (determined by health) it is alive or dead it has a position a ScrollObject is a GameObject it carries a transferance of points "damage" (or healing, bad scroll effect?) (determinde by caster) it carries a transferance of "other" it is stationary it has a sound on impact it has a stationary animation it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it has a fade animation? it has a lifespan (determined by game) it is alive or dead it has a position a WallObject is a GameObject it has a sound on fireball impact? it is a still image / stationary it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it is dead it has a position A FireBall is a GameObject it carries a transferance of poinst "damage" (or healing, bad scroll effect?) (determinde by caster) it travels at a set velocity it travels in a direction it has a sound it has a travel animation it has an impact animation / or transfers an impact animation it has a fade animation? it has a lifespan (determined by caster) it is alive or dead it has a position As I look at this, I can see some common attributes in each object that I can carry up to the GameObject. I think I'm going to end the documentation here, it's taken me a bit of time to type this all out, tomorrow. I'll load up my IDE and my paint studio to get some good old fashioned cowboy hacking going!   D.

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• E-Business Suite Technology Sessions at OAUG Collaborate 12

  - by Max Arderius

  Members of our E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group will be at the OAUG Collaborate 12 conference at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada on April 22 to 26, 2012.  Please drop by any of our sessions to hear the latest news and meet up with us. Speaker Sessions Session 9675Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to 12.1 and BeyondAnne Carlson, Senior Director, Applications Technology Group, OracleSunday, April 22, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pmLocation: Jasmine B Attend this session to hear the latest Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 upgrade planning tips gleaned from customers who have already performed the upgrade. Youll get specific, cross-product advice on how to decide your project's scope, understand the factors that affect your project's duration, develop a robust testing strategy, leverage Oracle Support resources, and more. In a nutshell, this session tells you things you need to know before embarking upon your Release 12.1 upgrade project. Session 9401Minimizing Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance DowntimesElke Phelps, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleKevin Hudson, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, OracleSunday, April 22, 2:10 pm - 3:10 pmLocation: South Seas EThis session starts with an architecture review of Oracle E-Business Suite fundamentals and then moves to a practical view of the different tools and approaches for downtimes. Topics include patching shortcuts, merging patches, distributing worker processes across multiple servers, running ADPatch in no-interactive mode, staged APPL_TOPs, shared file systems, deferring system-wide database tasks, avoiding resource bottlenecks etc... This session also describes the online patching capabilities coming in Release 12.2. Session 9368Oracle E-Business Suite Technology: Latest Features and RoadmapLisa Parekh, Vice President, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Sunday, April 22, 4:30 pm - 5:30 pmLocation: South Seas EThis session provides an overview of Oracle E-Business Suite technology strategy, the capabilities and associated business benefits of recent releases, as well as a review of the product roadmap. As a cornerstone session for Oracle E-Business Suite technology, come hear about the latest usability enhancements, systems administration and configuration management tools, security-related updates, and tools and options for extending, customizing, and integrating the Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. Session 10709Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Strategy and General Manager UpdateCliff Godwin, Sr. VP, Application Development, OracleMonday, April 23, 2:30 pm - 3:30 pmLocation: Mandalay Bay DIn this session, hear from Oracle E-Business Suite General Manager Cliff Godwin as he delivers an update on the Oracle E-Business Suite product line. The session covers the value delivered by the current release of Oracle E-Business Suite applications, the momentum, and how Oracle E-Business Suite applications integrate into Oracle’s overall applications strategy. You will come away with an understanding of the value Oracle E-Business Suite applications deliver now and in the future. Session 9398How to Reduce TCO Using Oracle Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business SuiteAngelo Rosado, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleKenneth Baxter, Principal Product Strategy Manager, Management Pack Fusion Middleware Management, OracleTuesday, April 24, 8:00 am - 9:00 amLocation: Breakers GThis session covers the methods and tools you can use to gain insights into your end users, troubleshoot performance problems, define service-level objectives, and proactively monitor your end-to-end Oracle E-Business Suite environment to meet your availability and performance targets. Come hear how you can manage, diagnose, and monitor the Oracle E-Business Suite environment from a single console by using Oracle Enterprise Manager together with the Oracle Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite. Session 9370 Coexistence of Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Fusion Applications: Platform Perspective Nadia Bendjedou, Senior Director, Product Strategy, Oracle Tuesday, April 24, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm Location: South Seas E Join us at this session if you are wondering which tools to integrate your data, your processes and your User Interface. Or what tools to customize and extend your screens and reports (OAF, Forms, ADF, Oracle Reports, BI etc....), what tools to secure, protect and manage your Oracle E-Business Suite etc... Or simply if you are looking for a technical roadmap for your Oracle E-Business Suite infrastructure to CO-EXIST with the rest of your enterprise applications including Oracle Fusion Applications. Session 9375 Oracle E-Business Suite Directions: Deployment and System AdministrationMax Arderius, Manager, Applications Development Group, OracleTuesday, April 24, 4:30 pm - 5:30 pmLocation: Breakers GWhat's coming in the next major version of Oracle E-Business Suite 12? This session covers the latest technology stack, including the use of Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Database 11g Release 2. Topics include an architectural overview, installation and upgrade options, new configuration options, and new tools for hot-cloning and automated "lights out" cloning. Learn about how online patching will reduce your database patching downtimes to the time it takes to bounce your database server.Session 9369Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification Primer and RoadmapSteven Chan, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Wednesday, April 25, 8:15 am - 9:15 amLocation: South Seas FThis Oracle Development session summarizes the latest certifications and roadmap for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack, including database releases/options, Java, Oracle Forms, Oracle Containers for J2EE, desktop OS, browsers, JRE releases, Office/OpenOffice, development and Web authoring tools, user authentication and management, BI, security options, clouds, Oracle VM etc.... It also covers the most-commonly-asked questions about technology stack component support dates and upgrade implications. Session 9407The Latest Oracle E-Business Suite Release User Interface and Usability EnhancementsGustavo Jimenez, Sr. Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Wednesday, April 25, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pmLocation: South Seas GIn this session, developers will get a detailed look at new features designed to enhance usability, offer more capabilities for personalization and extensions, and support the development and use of dashboards and Web services. Topics include rich new UI capabilities such as new home page features, Navigator and Favorites pull-down menus, Oracle ADF task flows etc.... In addition, we will cover the personalization/extensibility enhancements, business layer extensions, Oracle ADF integration and much more. Session 9374Best Practices for Oracle E-Business Suite Performance Tuning and Upgrade OptimizationIsam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, OracleUdayan Parvate, Director, Release Engineering, Quality and Release Management, Oracle Thursday, April 26, 8:30 am - 9:30 amLocation: South Seas FThis presentation will offer tips and techniques on tuning all the layers of the Oracle E-Business Suite stack including the various tiers of the Oracle E-Business Suite environment. You will learn about tuning Oracle Forms, Concurrent Manager, Apache, and Oracle Discoverer. Track down memory leaks and other issues on the Java and Java Virtual Machine layers. The session also covers Oracle E-Business Suite product-level tuning, including Oracle Workflow, Oracle Order Management, Oracle Payroll, and other modules.Session 9412 Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Desktop Integration: Beyond Oracle Applications Desktop IntegratorGustavo Jimenez, Sr. Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleThursday, April 26, 8:30 am - 9:30 amLocation: Breakers GThis session describes the new expanded functionality in Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator, Oracle Report Manager, and dedicated integrators. You have more options for desktop integration now, not fewer. Topics include an overview of prepackaged solutions for integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with desktop applications such as Microsoft Excel, Word, and Projects. The session also discusses how you can use the Desktop Integration Framework feature to create your own integrators quickly and easily.Session 9533 Upgrading your Customizations to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1Sara Woodhull, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Thursday, April 26, 11:00 am - 12:00 pmLocation: South Seas FHave you personalized Forms or OA Framework screens? Have you used mod_plsql or Applications Express to tailor your Release 11i functionality? Have you extended or customized your Release 11i environment using other tools? This session will help you understand customization scenarios, use cases, tools, and technologies for ensuring that your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 environment fits your users' needs closely and that any future customizations will be easy to upgrade. Special Interest Groups (SIG) Session 10535OAUG Database SIG- Part IMichael Brown, Colibri Limited Company Sunday, April 22, 3:20 pm - 4:20 pmLocation: South Seas FThis is the annual meeting of the Database SIG at Collaborate. The call for candidates for the chair will be closed at the meeting. Plans include a speaker from Oracle and a presentation on applications performance. The details of the meeting will be posted on http://www.dbsig.com. Guest Presentation: Oracle E-Business Suite Database PerformanceIsam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Session 10720OAUG EBS Applications Technology SIG- Part ISrini Chaval, Cummins Monday, April 23, 2:30 pm - 3:30 pmLocation: South Seas F Guest Presentation:Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification RoadmapSteven Chan, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Session 10510OAUG EBS Applications Technology SIG- Part IISrini Chaval, CumminsMonday, April 23, 3:45 pm - 4:45 pmLocation: South Seas F Guest Presentation:Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 Online Patching Kevin Hudson, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Session 10522 OAUG Upgrade SIG- Part IISandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Wednesday, April 25, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pmLocation: South Seas FUpgrade SIG will host a business meeting followed by panel (Q&A) related to EBS Upgrade topics and Oracle presentation. Guest Presentation:Upgrading E-Business Suite Amrita Mehrok, Director, Financials Product Strategy, Oracle Nadia Bendjedou, Senior Director, Product Strategy, Oracle Session 10722OAUG Upgrade SIG- Part IISandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Wednesday, April 25, 4:15 pm - 5:15 pmLocation: South Seas FUpgrade SIG will host a business meeting followed by panel (Q&A) related to EBS Upgrade topics and Oracle presentation. Guest Presentation:Tuning the Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade Isam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Panels Session 9360Oracle E-Business Suite Cloning PanelSandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Guest Speaker: Max Arderius, Manager, Applications Technology Group, OracleWednesday, April 25, 9:30 am - 10:30 amLocation: South Seas FThis panel will discuss differences between available release 11i, R12 and R12.1 cloning methods. Advantages and disadvantages of each cloning method will be discussed in depth. This panel of experienced database administrators will lead a discussion focusing on the questions such as “which cloning method is best to use in your particular environment”. Attendees will gain practical knowledge, tips and tricks to assist with cloning of Oracle E-Business Suite release 11i, R12 and R12.1 environments. Session 10022Oracle Applications Tuning PanelMark Farnham, Rightsizing, Inc.Guest Speaker: Isam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, OracleThursday, April 26, 09:45 am - 10:45 amLocation: South Seas FThis applications performance panel session, sponsored by the OAUG Database SIG, provides a Q&A forum focused on helping you address your Oracle Applications (Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise and Siebel applications) performance- and scalability-related issues. The panel comprises several well-known Oracle Applications performance experts. Topic areas include Oracle Database; the network; and the applications tier, including patching and upgrade performance. For complete listing of all speaker sessions and other activities, please visit the OAUG Collaborate Web Site.

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• SQLAuthority Book Review – DBA Survivor: Become a Rock Star DBA

  - by pinaldave

  DBA Survivor: Become a Rock Star DBA – Thomas LaRock Link to Amazon Link to Flipkart First of all, I thank all my readers when I wrote that I could not get this book in any local book stores, because they offered me to send a copy of this good book. A very special mention goes to Sripada and Jayesh for they gave so much effort in finding my home address and sending me the hard copy. Before, I did not have the copy of the book, but now I have two of it already! It surprises me how my readers were able to find my home address, which I have not publicly shared. Quick Review: This is indeed a one easy-to-read and fun book. We all work day and night with technology yet we should not forget to show our love and care for our family at home. For our souls that starve for peace and guidance, this one book is the “it” book for all the technology enthusiasts. Though this book was specifically written for DBAs, the reach is not limited to DBAs only because the lessons incorporated in it actually applies to all. This is one of the most motivating technical books I have read. Detailed Review: Let us go over a few questions first: Who wants to be as famous as rockstars in the field of Database Administration? How can one learn what it takes to become a top notch software developer? If you are a beginner in your field, how will you go to next level? Your boss may be very kind or like Dilbert’s Boss, what will you do? How do you keep growing when Eco-system around you does not support you? You are almost at top but there is someone else at the TOP, what do you do and how do you avoid office politics? As a database developer what should be your basic responsibility? and many more… I was able to completely read book in one sitting and I loved it. Before I continue with my opinion, I want to echo the opinion of Kevin Kline who has written the Forward of the book. He has truly suggested that “You hold in your hands a collection of insights and wisdom on the topic of database administration gained through many years of hard-won experience, long nights of study, and direct mentorship under some of the industry’s most talented database professionals and information technology (IT) experts.” Today, IT field is getting bigger and better, while talking about terabytes of the database becomes “more” normal every single day. The gods and demigods of database professionals are taking care of these large scale databases and are carefully maintaining them. In this world, there are only a few beginnings on the first step. There are many experts in different technology fields who are asked to address the issues with databases. There is YOU and ME, who is just new to this work. So we ask ourselves WHERE to begin and HOW to begin. We adore and follow the religion of our rockstars, but oftentimes we really have no idea about their background and their struggles. Every rockstar has his success story which needs to be digested before learning his tricks and tips. This book starts with the same note and teaches the two most important lessons for anybody who wants to be a DBA Rockstar –  to focus on their single goal of learning and to excel the technology. The story starts with three simple guidelines – Get Prepared, Get Trained, Get Certified. Once a person learns the skills, and then, it would be about time that he needs to enrich or to improve those skills you have learned. I am sure that the right opportunity will come finding themselves and they will not have to go run behind it. However, the real challenge for any person is the first day or first week. A new employee, no matter how much experienced he is, sometimes has no clue about what should one do at new job. Chapter 2 and chapter 3 precisely talk about what one should do as soon as the new job begins. It is also written with keeping the fact in focus that each job can be very much different but there are few infrastructure setups and programming concepts are the same. Learning basics of database was really interesting. I like to focus on the roots of any technology. It is important to understand the structure of the database before suggesting what indexes needs to be created, the same way this book covers the most essential knowledge one must learn by most database developers. I think the title of the fourth chapter is my favorite sentence in this book. I can see that I will be saying this again and again in the future – “A Development Server Is a Production Server to a Developer“. I have worked in the software industry for almost 8 years now and I have seen so many developers sitting on their chairs and waiting for instructions from their lead about how to improve the code or what to do the next. When I talk to them, I suggest that the experiment with their server and try various techniques. I think they all should understand that for them, a development server is their production server and needs to pay proper attention to the code from the beginning. There should be NO any inappropriate code from the beginning. One has to fully focus and give their best, if they are not sure they should ask but should do something and stay active. Chapter 5 and 6 talks about two essential skills for any developer and database administration – what are the ethics of developers when they are working with production server and how to support software which is running on the production server. I have met many people who know the theory by heart but when put in front of keyboard they do not know where to start. The first thing they do opening the browser and searching online, instead of opening SQL Server Management Studio. This can very well happen to anybody who is experienced as well. Chapter 5 and 6 addresses that situation as well includes the handy scripts which can solve almost all the basic trouble shooting issues. “Where’s the Buffet?” By far, this is the best chapter in this book. If you have ever met me, you would know that I love food. I think after reading this chapter, I felt Thomas has written this just keeping me in mind. I think there will be many other people who feel the same way, too. Even my wife who read this chapter thought this was specifically written for me. I will not talk any more about this chapter as this is one must read chapter. And of course this is about real ‘FOOD‘. I am an SQL Server Trainer and Consultant and I totally agree with the point made in the chapter 8 of this book. Yes, it says here that what is necessary to train employees and people. Millions of dollars worth the labor is continuously done in the world which has faults and incorrect. Once something goes wrong, very expensive consultant comes in and fixes the problem. This whole cycle which can be stopped and improved if proper training is done. There is plenty of free trainings available as well, if one cannot afford paid training. “Connect. Learn. Share” – I think this is a great summary and bird’s eye view of this book. Networking is the key. Everything which is discussed in this book can be taken to next level if one properly uses this tips and continuously grow with it. Connecting with others, helping learn each other and building the good knowledge sharing environment should be the goal of everyone. Before I end the review I want to share a real experience. I have personally met one DBA who has worked in a single department in a company for so long that when he was put in a different department in his company due to closing that department, he could not adjust and quit the job despite the same people and company around him. Adjusting in the new environment gets much tougher as one person gets more and more experienced. This book precisely addresses the same issue along with their solutions. I just cannot stop comparing the book with my personal journey. I found so many things which are coincidently in the book is written as how we developer and DBA think. I must express special thanks to Thomas for taking time in his personal life and write this book for us. This book is indeed a book for everybody who wants to grow healthy in the tough and competitive environment. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Book Review, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• Exam 70-480 Study Material: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3

  - by Stacy Vicknair

  Here’s a list of sources of information for the different elements that comprise the 70-480 exam: General Resources http://www.w3schools.com (As pointed out in David Pallmann’s blog some of this content is unverified, but it is a decent source of information. For more about when it isn’t decent, see http://www.w3fools.com ) http://www.bloggedbychris.com/2012/09/19/microsoft-exam-70-480-study-guide/ (A guy who did a lot of what I did already, sadly I found this halfway through finishing my resources list. This list is expertly put together so I would recommend checking it out.) http://davidpallmann.blogspot.com/2012/08/microsoft-certification-exam-70-480.html http://pluralsight.com/training/Courses (Yes, this isn’t free, but if you look at the course listing there is an entire section on HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. You can always try the trial!)   Some of the links I put below will overlap with the other resources above, but I tried to find explanations that looked beneficial to me on links outside those already mentioned.   Test Breakdown Implement and Manipulate Document Structures and Objects (24%) Create the document structure. o This objective may include but is not limited to: structure the UI by using semantic markup, including for search engines and screen readers (Section, Article, Nav, Header, Footer, and Aside); create a layout container in HTML http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_new_elements.asp   Write code that interacts with UI controls. o This objective may include but is not limited to: programmatically add and modify HTML elements; implement media controls; implement HTML5 canvas and SVG graphics http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_canvas.asp http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_svg.asp   Apply styling to HTML elements programmatically. o This objective may include but is not limited to: change the location of an element; apply a transform; show and hide elements   Implement HTML5 APIs. o This objective may include but is not limited to: implement storage APIs, AppCache API, and Geolocation API http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_geolocation.asp http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_webstorage.asp http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_app_cache.asp   Establish the scope of objects and variables. o This objective may include but is not limited to: define the lifetime of variables; keep objects out of the global namespace; use the “this” keyword to reference an object that fired an event; scope variables locally and globally http://robertnyman.com/2008/10/09/explaining-javascript-scope-and-closures/ http://www.quirksmode.org/js/this.html   Create and implement objects and methods. o This objective may include but is not limited to: implement native objects; create custom objects and custom properties for native objects using prototypes and functions; inherit from an object; implement native methods and create custom methods http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/object.shtml http://www.crockford.com/javascript/inheritance.html http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1635116/javascript-class-method-vs-class-prototype-method http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/proto.shtml     Implement Program Flow (25%) Implement program flow. o This objective may include but is not limited to: iterate across collections and array items; manage program decisions by using switch statements, if/then, and operators; evaluate expressions http://www.javascriptkit.com/jsref/looping.shtml http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/varshort.shtml http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/switch.shtml   Raise and handle an event. o This objective may include but is not limited to: handle common events exposed by DOM (OnBlur, OnFocus, OnClick); declare and handle bubbled events; handle an event by using an anonymous function http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/DOM-Level-3-Events/html/DOM3-Events.html http://javascript.info/tutorial/bubbling-and-capturing   Implement exception handling. o This objective may include but is not limited to: set and respond to error codes; throw an exception; request for null checks; implement try-catch-finally blocks http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/trycatch.shtml   Implement a callback. o This objective may include but is not limited to: receive messages from the HTML5 WebSocket API; use jQuery to make an AJAX call; wire up an event; implement a callback by using anonymous functions; handle the “this” pointer http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-websockets-20110419/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/websockets/basics/ http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.ajax/   Create a web worker process. o This objective may include but is not limited to: start and stop a web worker; pass data to a web worker; configure timeouts and intervals on the web worker; register an event listener for the web worker; limitations of a web worker https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/Using_web_workers http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/workers/basics/   Access and Secure Data (26%) Validate user input by using HTML5 elements. o This objective may include but is not limited to: choose the appropriate controls based on requirements; implement HTML input types and content attributes (for example, required) to collect user input http://diveintohtml5.info/forms.html   Validate user input by using JavaScript. o This objective may include but is not limited to: evaluate a regular expression to validate the input format; validate that you are getting the right kind of data type by using built-in functions; prevent code injection http://www.regular-expressions.info/javascript.html http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/66ztdbe6(v=vs.94).aspx https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/typeof http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/06/safe-html-and-xss/ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/942011/how-to-prevent-javascript-injection-attacks-within-user-generated-html   Consume data. o This objective may include but is not limited to: consume JSON and XML data; retrieve data by using web services; load data or get data from other sources by using XMLHTTPRequest http://www.erichynds.com/jquery/working-with-xml-jquery-and-javascript/ http://www.webdevstuff.com/86/javascript-xmlhttprequest-object.html http://www.json.org/ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4935632/how-to-parse-json-in-javascript   Serialize, deserialize, and transmit data. o This objective may include but is not limited to: binary data; text data (JSON, XML); implement the jQuery serialize method; Form.Submit; parse data; send data by using XMLHTTPRequest; sanitize input by using URI/form encoding http://api.jquery.com/serialize/ http://www.javascript-coder.com/javascript-form/javascript-form-submit.phtml http://stackoverflow.com/questions/327685/is-there-a-way-to-read-binary-data-into-javascript https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/encodeURI     Use CSS3 in Applications (25%) Style HTML text properties. o This objective may include but is not limited to: apply styles to text appearance (color, bold, italics); apply styles to text font (WOFF and @font-face, size); apply styles to text alignment, spacing, and indentation; apply styles to text hyphenation; apply styles for a text drop shadow http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_text.asp http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_font.asp http://nicewebtype.com/notes/2009/10/30/how-to-use-css-font-face/ http://webdesign.about.com/od/beginningcss/p/aacss5text.htm http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/ http://www.css3.info/preview/box-shadow/   Style HTML box properties. o This objective may include but is not limited to: apply styles to alter appearance attributes (size, border and rounding border corners, outline, padding, margin); apply styles to alter graphic effects (transparency, opacity, background image, gradients, shadow, clipping); apply styles to establish and change an element’s position (static, relative, absolute, fixed) http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/10-css3-properties-you-need-to-be-familiar-with/ http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_image_transparency.asp http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_background-image.asp http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/graphics/cssgradientbackgroundmaker/default.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visufx.html http://www.barelyfitz.com/screencast/html-training/css/positioning/ http://davidwalsh.name/css-fixed-position   Create a flexible content layout. o This objective may include but is not limited to: implement a layout using a flexible box model; implement a layout using multi-column; implement a layout using position floating and exclusions; implement a layout using grid alignment; implement a layout using regions, grouping, and nesting http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/flexbox/quick/ http://www.css3.info/preview/multi-column-layout/ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh673558(v=vs.85).aspx http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-grid-layout/ http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-regions/   Create an animated and adaptive UI. o This objective may include but is not limited to: animate objects by applying CSS transitions; apply 3-D and 2-D transformations; adjust UI based on media queries (device adaptations for output formats, displays, and representations); hide or disable controls http://www.bloggedbychris.com/2012/09/19/microsoft-exam-70-480-study-guide/   Find elements by using CSS selectors and jQuery. o This objective may include but is not limited to: choose the correct selector to reference an element; define element, style, and attribute selectors; find elements by using pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes (for example, :before, :first-line, :first-letter, :target, :lang, :checked, :first-child) http://www.bloggedbychris.com/2012/09/19/microsoft-exam-70-480-study-guide/   Structure a CSS file by using CSS selectors. o This objective may include but is not limited to: reference elements correctly; implement inheritance; override inheritance by using !important; style an element based on pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes (for example, :before, :first-line, :first-letter, :target, :lang, :checked, :first-child) http://www.bloggedbychris.com/2012/09/19/microsoft-exam-70-480-study-guide/   Technorati Tags: 70-480,CSS3,HTML5,HTML,CSS,JavaScript,Certification

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• Cryptographic Validation Explained

  - by MarkPearl

  We have been using LogicNP’s CryptoLicensing for some of our software and I was battling to understand how exactly the whole process worked. I was sent the following document which really helped explain it – so if you ever use the same tool it is well worth a read. Licensing Basics LogicNP CryptoLicensing For .Net is the most advanced and state-of-the art licensing and copy protection system you can use for your software. LogicNP CryptoLicensing System uses the latest cryptographic technology to generate and validate licenses. The cryptographic algorithm used is the RSA algorithm which consists of a pair of keys called as the generation key and the validation key. Data encrypted using the generation key can only be decrypted using the corresponding validation key. How does cryptographic validation work? When a new license project is created, a unique validation-generation key pair is created for the project. When LogicNP CryptoLicensing For .Net generates licenses, it encrypts the license settings using the generation key. The validation key can be safely distributed with your software and is used during validation. During license validation, LogicNP CryptoLicensing For .Net attempts to decrypt the encrypted license code using the validation key. If the decryption is successful, this means that the data was encrypted using the generation key, since only the corresponding validation key can decrypt data encrypted with the generation key. This further means that not only is the license valid but that it was generated by you and only you since nobody else has access to the generation key. Generation Key This key is used by CryptoLicensing Generator to generate encrypted license codes. This key is stored in the license project file, so the license project file must be kept secure and confidential and must be accorded the same care as any other critical asset such as source code. Validation Key This key is used for validating generated license codes. It is the same key displayed in the 'Get Validation Key And Code' dialog (Ctrl+K) and is used by your software when validating license codes (using LogicNP.CryptoLicensing.dll). Unlike the generation key, it is not necessary to keep this key secure and confidential. Note that the generation key pair is stored in the project file created by LogicNP CryptoLicensing For .Net, so it is very important to backup this file and to keep it secure. Once the file is lost, it is not possible to retrieve the key pair. FAQ Do I use the same validation key to validate all license codes? Yes, the validation key (and generation key) for the project remains the same; you use the same key to validate all license codes generated using the project. You can retrieve the validation key using the "Project" menu --> "Get Validation Key & Code" menu item. Can license codes generated using generation key from one project be validated using validation key of another project? No! Q. Is every generated license code unique? A. Yes, every license code generated by CryptoLicensing is guaranteed to be unique, even if you generate thousands of codes at a time. Q. What makes CryptoLicensing so secure? A. CryptoLicensing uses the latest cryptographic technology to generate and validate licenses. The cryptographic algorithm used is the RSA asymmetric key algorithm which can use upto 3072-bit keys. Given current computing power, it takes years to break a 3072-bit key. Q. Is is possible for a hacker to develop a keygen for my software? A. Impossible. The cryptographic algorithm used by CryptoLicensing consists of a pair of keys called as the generation key and the validation key. Data encrypted with one key can only be decrypted by the other key and vice versa. Licenses are generated using the generation key and validated using the validation key. Without the generation key, it is impossible to generate valid licenses. Q. What is the difference between validation key and generation key? Generation Key This key is used by CryptoLicensing Generator to generate encrypted license codes. This key is stored in the license project file, so the license project file must be kept secure and confidential and must be accorded the same care as any other critical asset such as source code. Validation Key This key is used for validating generated license codes. It is the same key displayed in the 'Get Validation Key And Code' dialog (Ctrl+K) and is used by your software when validating license codes (using LogicNP.CryptoLicensing.dll). Unlike the generation key, it is not necessary to keep this key secure and confidential. Q. Do I have to include the license project file (.licproj) with my software? A. No!!! This goes against the very essence of the security of the asymmetric cryptographic scheme because the project file contains both the validation and generation key. With your software, you only need to include the validation key which will be used to validate licenses generated by CryptoLicensing using the generation key. The license project file should be treated as any other valuable and confidential asset such as your source code. Q. Does the license service need the license project file? A. Yes. The license project file is needed whenever new licenses are generated (via the UI, via the API or via the license service). As just one example, the license service generates new machine-locked licenses when activated licenses are presented to it for activation, therefore the license service needs the license project file. Q. Is it possible to embed my own data in the generated licenses? A. Yes. You can embed any amount of additional data in the licenses. This data will have the same amount of security as the license code itself and will be tamper-proof. The embedded user data can be retrieved from your software. Q. What additional steps can I take to ensure that my software does not get cracked? A. There are many methods and techniques which can make it extremely difficult for a hacker to crack your software. See Writing Effective License Checking Code And Designing Effective Licenses for more information. Q. Why is the license service not working? A. The most common cause is not setting the CryptoLicense.LicenseServiceURL property before trying to validate a license. Make sure that this property is set to the correct URL where your license service is hosted. The most common cause after this is that the license project file on the web server where your license service is hosted is not the latest. This happens if you make changes to the license project (for example, set the 'Enable With Serials' setting for a profile), but don't upload the updated project file to your web server. Q. Why are my serials not working? Serial codes require the user of a license service. See Using Serial Codes for more details. Also see the earlier question 'Why is the license service not working?' Q. Is the same validation key used to validate license codes generated from different profiles. A. Yes. Profiles are just pre specified license settings for quickly generating licenses having those settings. The actual license code is still generated using the license project's cryptographic generation key and thus, can be validated using the project's validation key. Q. Why are changes made to a profile not getting saved? A. Simply changing license settings via UI and saving the license project does not save those license settings to the active profile. You must first save the license settings to a profile using the Save/Save As command from the Profiles menu (see above). Q. Why is validation of activated licenses failing from CryptoLicensing Generator, but works from my software? A. Make sure that you have specified the URL of the license service using the Project Properties Dialog. Also see the earlier question 'Why is the license service not working?' Q. How can I extend the trial period of my customer? A. To extend the evaluation period of the customer, simply send him a new license code specifying the desired evaluation limits. Evaluation information such as the current used days, executions, etc are stored in garbled form in a registry location which is derived from the license code. Therefore, when a new license code is used, the old evaluation information will not be used and a new evaluation period will be started.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 07, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 07, 2010New ProjectsBibleBrowser: BibleBrowserBibleMaps: BibleMapsChristianLibrary: ChristianLibraryCLB Podcast Module: DotNetNuke Module used to allow DNN to host one or more podcasts within a portal.Coletivo InVitro: Nova versão do Site do ColetivoCustomer Care Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Customer Care Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.EasyTFS: A very lightweight, quick, web-based search application for Team Foundation Server. EasyTfs searches as you type, providing real-time search resul...FSCommunity: abcGeocache Downloader: GeocacheDownloader helps you download geocache information in an organised way, making easier to copy the information to your device. The applicati...Grabouille: Grabouille aims to be an incubation project for Microsoft best patterns & practices and also a container for last .Net technologies. The goal is, i...Klaverjas: Test application for testing different new technologies in .NET (WCF, DataServices, C# stuff, Entity...etc.)Livecity: Social network. Alpha 0.1MarxSupples: testMOSS 2007 - Excel Services: This helps you understand MOSS 2007 - Excel Services and how to use the same in .NETmy site: a personal web siteNazTek.Extension.Clr35: Contains a set of CLR 3.5 extensions and utility APInetDumbster: netDumbster is a .Net Fake SMTP Server clone of the popular Dumbster (http://quintanasoft.com/dumbster/) netDumbster is based on the API of nDumbs...Object-Oriented Optimization Toolbox (OOOT): A library (.dll) of various linear, nonlinear, and stochastic numerical optimization techniques. While some of these are older than 50 years, they ...OMap - Object to Object Mapper: OMap is a simple object to object mapper. It could be used for scenarios like mapping your data from domain objects into data transfer objects.PDF Renderer for BlackBerry.: Render and view PDF files on BlackBerry using a modified version of Sun's PDF Renderer.Pomodoro Tool: Pomodoro Tool is a timer for http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/ . It's a timer and task tracker with a text task editing interface.ReadingPlan: ReadingPlanRil#: .net library to use the public Readitlater.com public APISCSM Incident SLA Management: This project provides an extension to System Center Service Manager to provide more granular control over incident service level agreement (SLA) ma...SEAH - Sistema Especialista de Agravante de Hipertensão: O SEAH tem como propósito alertar o indivíduo em relação ao seu agravante de hipertensão arterial e a órgãos competentes, entidades de ensino, pesq...StudyGuide: StudyGuideTest Project (ignore): This is used to demonstrate CodePlex at meetings. Please ignore this project.YCC: YCC is an open source c compiler which compatible with ANSI standard.The project is currently an origin start.We will work it for finally useable a...New ReleasesAlbum photo de club - Club's Photos Album: App - version 0.5: Modifications : - Ajout des favoris - Ajout de l'update automatique /*/ - Add favorites - Add automatic updateBoxee Launcher: Boxee Launcher 1.0.1.5: Boxee Launcher finds the BOXEE executable using a registry key that BOXEE creates. The new version of BOXEE changed the location. Boxee Launcher ha...CBM-Command: 2010-05-06: Release Notes - 2010-05-06New Features Creating Directories Deleting Files and Directories Renaming Files and Directories Changes 40 columns i...Customer Care Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Customer Care Accelerator for Dynamics CRM R1: The Customer Care Accelerator (CCA) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM focuses on delivering contact center enabling functionality, such as the ability to ...D-AMPS: D-AMPS 0.9.2: Add .bat files for command-line running Bug fixed (core engine) Section 6, 8, 9 modifications Sources (Fortran) for core engineDynamicJson: Release 1.1.0.0: Add - foreach support Add - Dynamic Shortcut of IsDefined,Delete,Deserialize Fix - Deserialize Delete - LengthEasyTFS: EasyTfs 1.0 Beta 1: A very lightweight, quick, web-based search application for Team Foundation Server. EasyTfs searches as you type, providing real-time search resul...Event Scavenger: Add installer for Admin tool: Added installer for Admin tool. Removed exe's for admin and viewer from zip file - were replaced by the msi installers.Expression Blend Samples: PathListBoxUtils for Expression Blend 4 RC: Initial release of the PathListBoxUtils samples.HackingSilverlight Code Browser: HackingSilverlight Code Browser: Out with the old and in with the new... the HackingSilverlight Code Browser is a reference tool for code snippets so that I can not have to remembe...Hammock for REST: Hammock v1.0.3: v1.0.3 ChangesFixes for OAuth escaping and API usage Added FollowRedirects feature to RestClient/RestRequest v1.0.2 Changes.NET 4.0 and Client P...ImmlPad: ImmlPad Beta 1.1.1: Changes in this release: Added more intelligent right-click menu's to allow opening an IMML document with a specific Player version Fixed issue w...LinkedIn® for Windows Mobile: LinkedIn for Windows Mobile v0.8: Improved error message dumping + moved OAuth parameters from www.* to api.* In case of unexpected errors, check "Application Data\LinkedIn for Wind...Live-Exchange Calendar Sync: Installer: Alpha release of Live-Exchange Calendar SyncMAPILab Explorer for SharePoint: MAPILab Explorer for SharePoint ver 2.1.0: 1) Get settings form old versions 2) Rules added to display enumerable object items. 3) Bug fixed with remove persisted object How to install:Do...MapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi May 6, 2010: This release enables output .prj files to also show the ESRI names for the PRJCS, GEOCS, and the DATUM. It also fixes a bug that was preventing th...MOSS 2007 - Excel Services: Calculator using Excel Services: Simple calculator using Excel ServicesMvcMaps - Unified Bing/Google Mapping API for ASP.NET MVC: MvcMaps Preview 1 for ASP.NET 4.0 and VS'2010: There was a change in ASP.NET 4.0 that broke the release, so a small modification needed to be made to the reflection code. This release fixes that...NazTek.Extension.Clr35: NazTek.Extension.Clr35 Binary Cab: Binary cab fileNazTek.Extension.Clr35: NazTek.Extension.Clr35 Source Cab: Source codePDF Renderer for BlackBerry.: PDF Renderer 0.1 for BlackBerry: This library requires a BlackBerry Signing Key in order to compile for use on a BlackBerry device. Signing keys can be obtained at BlackBerry Code ...Pomodoro Tool: PomodoroTool Clickonce installer: PomodoroTool Clickonce installerPOS for .Net Handheld Products Service Object: POS for .Net Handheld Products Service Object 1002: New version (1.0.0.2) which should support 64 bit platforms (see ReadMe.txt included with source for details). Source code only.QuestTracker: QuestTracker 0.4: What's New in QuestTracker 0.4 - - You can now drag and drop the quests on the left pane to rearrange or move quests from one group to another. - D...RDA Collaboration Team Projects: Property Bag Cmdlet: This cmdlet allows to retrieve, insert and update property bag values at farm, web app, site and web scope. The same operations can be in code usi...Ril#: Rilsharp 1.0: The first version of the Ril# (Readitlater sharp) library.Scrum Sprint Monitor: v1.0.0.47911 (.NET 4-TFS 2010): What is new in this release? Migrated to .NET Framework 4 RTM; Compiled against TFS 2010 RTM Client DLLs; Smoother animations with easing funct...SCSM Incident SLA Management: SCSM Incident SLA Management Version 0.1: This is the first release of the SCSM SLA Management solution. It is an 'alpha' release and has only been tested by the developers on the project....StackOverflow Desktop Client in C# and WPF: StackOverflow Client 0.4: Shows a popup that displays all the new questions and allows you to navigate between them. Fixed a bug that showed incorrect views and answers in t...Transcriber: Transcriber V0.1: Pre-release, usable but very rough.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30506.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Studio CSLA Extension for ADO.NET Entity Framework: CslaExtension Beta1: Requirements Visual Studio 2010 CSLA 4.0. Beta 1 Installation Download VSIX file and double click to install. Open Visual Studio -> Tools -> Exte...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight Toolkitpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETDotNetNuke® Community EditionMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryAJAX Control FrameworkIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterRawrpatterns & practices: Azure Security GuidanceCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightBlogEngine.NETTweetSharpNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleTinyProject

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• Looking Back at MIX10

  - by WeigeltRo

  It’s the sad truth of my life that even though I’m fascinated by airplanes and flight in general since my childhood days, my body doesn’t like flying. Even the ridiculously short flights inside Germany are taking their toll on me each time. Now combine this with sitting in the cramped space of economy class for many hours on a transatlantic flight from Germany to Las Vegas and back, and factor in some heavy dose of jet lag (especially on my way eastwards), and you get an idea why after coming back home I had this question on my mind: Was it really worth it to attend MIX10? This of course is a question that will also be asked by my boss at Comma Soft (for other reasons, obviously), who decided to send me and my colleague Jens Schaller, to the MIX10 conference. (A note to my German readers: An dieser Stelle der Hinweis, dass Comma Soft noch Silverlight-Entwickler und/oder UI-Designer für den Standort Bonn sucht – aussagekräftige Bewerbungen bitte an [email protected]) Too keep things short: My answer is yes. Before I’ll go into detail, let me ask the heretical questions whether tech conferences in general still make sense. There was a time, where actually being at a tech conference gave you a head-start in regard to learning about new technologies. Nowadays this is no longer true, where every bit of information and every detail is immediately twittered, blogged and whatevered to death. In the case of MIX10 you even can download the video-taped sessions shortly after. So: Does visiting a conference still make sense? It depends on what you expect from a conference. It should be clear to everybody that you’ll neither get exclusive information, nor receive training in a small group. What a conference does offer that sitting in front of your computer does not can be summarized as follows: Focus Being away from work and home will help you to focus on the presented information. Of course there are always the poor guys who are haunted by their work (with mails and short text messages reporting the latest showstopper problem), but in general being out of your office makes a huge difference. Inspiration With the focus comes the emotional involvement. I find it much easier to absorb information if I feel that certain vibe when sitting in a session. This still means that I have put work into reviewing the information later, but it’s a better starting point. And all the impressions collected at a (good) conference combined lead to a higher motivation – be it by the buzz (“this is gonna be sooo cool!”) or by the fear to fall behind (“man, we’ll have work on this, or else…”). People At a conference it’s pretty easy to get into contact with other people during breakfast, lunch and other breaks. This is a good opportunity to get a feel for what other development teams are doing (on a very general level of course, nobody will tell you about their secret formula) and what they are thinking about specific technologies. So MIX10 did offer focus, inspiration and people, but that would have meant nothing without valuable content. When I (being a frontend developer with a strong interest in UI/UX) planned my visit to MIX10, I made the decision to focus on the "soft" topics of design, interaction and user experience. I figured that I would be bombarded with all the technical details about Silverlight 4 anyway in the weeks and months to come. Actually, I would have liked to catch a few technical sessions, but the agenda wasn’t exactly in favor of people interested in any kind of Silverlight and UI/UX/Design topics. That’s one of my few complaints about the conference – I would have liked one more day and/or more sessions per day. Overall, the quality of the workshops and sessions was pretty high. In fact, looking back at my collection of conferences I’ve visited in the past I’d say that MIX10 ranks somewhere near the top spot. Here’s an overview of the workshops/sessions I attended (I’ll leave out the keynotes): Day 0 (Workshops on Sunday) Design Fundamentals for Developers Robby Ingebretsen is the man! Great workshop in three parts with the perfect mix of examples, well-structured definition of terminology and the right dose of humor. Robby was part of the WPF team before founding his own company so he not only has a strong interest in design (and the skillz!) but also the technical background.   Design Tools and Techniques Originally announced to be held by Arturo Toledo, the Rosso brothers from ArcheType filled in for the first two parts, and Corrina Black had a pretty general part about the Windows Phone UI. The first two thirds were a mixed bag; the two guys definitely knew what they were talking about, and the demos were great, but the talk lacked the preparation and polish of a truly great presentation. Corrina was not allowed to go into too much detail before the keynote on Monday, but the session was still very interesting as it showed how much thought went into the Windows Phone UI (and there’s always a lot to learn when people talk about their thought process). Day 1 (Monday) Designing Rich Experiences for Data-Centric Applications I wonder whether there was ever a test-run for this session, but what Ken Azuma and Yoshihiro Saito delivered in the first 15 minutes of a 30-minutes-session made me walk out. A commercial for a product (just great: a video showing a SharePoint plug-in in an all-Japanese UI) combined with the most generic blah blah one could imagine. EPIC FAIL.   Great User Experiences: Seamlessly Blending Technology & Design I switched to this session from the one above but I guess I missed the interesting part – what I did catch was what looked like a “look at the cool stuff we did” without being helpful. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood after the other session.   The Art, Technology and Science of Reading This talk by Kevin Larson was very interesting, but was more a presentation of what Microsoft is doing in research (pretty impressive) and in the end lacked a bit the helpful advice one could have hoped for.   10 Ways to Attack a Design Problem and Come Out Winning Robby Ingebretsen again, and again a great mix of theory and practice. The clean and simple, yet effective, UI of the reader app resulted in a simultaneous “wow” of Jens and me. If you’d watch only one session video, this should be it. Microsoft has to bring Robby back next year! Day 2 (Tuesday) Touch in Public: Multi-touch Interaction Design for Kiosks & Architectural Experiences Very interesting session by Jason Brush, a great inspiration with many details to look out for in the examples. Exactly what I was hoping for – and then some!   Designing Bing: Heart and Science How hard can it be to design the UI for a search engine? An input field and a list of results, that should be it, right? Well, not so fast! The talk by Paul Ray showed the many iterations to finally get it right (up to the choice of a specific blue for the links). And yes, I want an eye-tracking device to play around with!   The Elephant in the Room When Nishant Kothary presented a long list of what his session was not about, I told to myself (not having the description text present) “Am I in the wrong talk? Should I leave?”. Boy, was I wrong. A great talk about human factors in the process of designing stuff.   An Hour with Bill Buxton Having seen Bill Buxton’s presentation in the keynote, I just had to see this man again – even though I didn’t know what to expect. Being more or less unplanned and intended to be more of a conversation, the session didn’t provide a wealth of immediately useful information. Nevertheless Bill Buxton was impressive with his huge knowledge of seemingly everything. But this could/should have been a session some when in the evening and not in parallel to at least two other interesting talks. Day 3 (Wednesday) Design the Ordinary, Like the Fixie This session by DL Byron and Kevin Tamura started really well and brought across the message to keep things simple. But towards the end the talk lost some of its steam. And, as a member of the audience pointed out, they kind of ignored their own advice when they used a fancy presentation software other then PowerPoint that sometimes got in the way of showing things.   Developing Natural User Interfaces Speaking of alternative presentation software, Joshua Blake definitely had the most remarkable alternative to PowerPoint, a self-written program called NaturalShow that was controlled using multi-touch on a touch screen. Not a PowerPoint-killer, but impressive nevertheless. The (excellent) talk itself was kind of eye-opening in regard to what “multi-touch support” on various platforms (WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone) actually means.   Treat your Content Right The talk by Tiffani Jones Brown wasn’t even on my planned schedule, but somehow I ended up in that session – and it was great. And even for people who don’t necessarily have to write content for websites, some points made by Tiffani are valid in many places, notably wherever you put texts with more than a single word into your UI. Creating Effective Info Viz in Microsoft Silverlight The last session of MIX10 I attended was kind of disappointing. At first things were very promising, with Matthias Shapiro giving a brief but well-structured introduction to info graphics and interactive visualizations. Then the live-coding began and while the result was interesting, too much time was spend on wrestling to get the code working. Ending earlier than planned, the talk was a bit light on actual content, but at least it included a nice list of resources. Conclusion It could be felt all across MIX10, UIs will take a huge leap forward; in fact, there are enough examples that have already. People who both have the technical know-how and at least a basic understanding of design (“literacy” as Bill Buxton called it) are in high demand. The concept of the MIX conference and initiatives like design.toolbox shows that Microsoft understands very well that frontend developers have to acquire new knowledge besides knowing how to hack code and putting buttons on a form. There are extremely exciting times before us, with lots of opportunity for those who are eager to develop their skills, that is for sure.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 09, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 09, 2010New Projects(SocketCoder) Free Silverlight Voice/Video Conferencing Modules: The Goal of this project is to provide complete Open Source Voice/Video Chatting Client/Server Modules Using Silverlight techniques, this project i...AJAX Control Framework: Do PageMethods and the UpdatePanel make you feel dirty? Think making AJAX enabled custom ASP.NET controls should WAY easier than it is? Wish ASP.NE...Bluetooth Radar: WPF 4.0 Application working with The final release of 32feet.net (v2.2) to Discover Bluetooth devices, send files and more cool stuff for Bluetooth...Bomberman: Bomberman c++ Project Code Library: This is just a personal storage place for a utility library containing extension methods, new classes, and/or improvements to existing classes.DianPing.com MogileFS Client: MogileFS Client for .Net 2.0Dirty City Hearts Website: Dirty City Hearts WebsiteDocGen - SharePoint 2010 Bulk Document Loader: DocGen is a SharePoint 2010 multithreaded console application for bulk loading sample documents into SharePoint. This program generates Microsoft ...dou24: WebSite for DOUExplora: Explora es un navegador de archivos que no pretende ser un sustituto del explorador de Windows, sino un experimento de codificación que compartir c...HobbyBrew Mobile: This project is basic beer brewing software for Windows Mobile able to read HobbyBrew xml files. Developed in C# and Windows FormsjLight: Interop between Silverlight and the javascript based on jQuery. The syntax used in Silverlight is as close as posible to the jQuery syntax.johandekoning.nl samples: Sample code project which are discussed on johandekoning.nl / johandekoning.com. Most examples are / will be developed with C#Kanban: this is a agile paroject managementMETAR.NET Decoder: Project libraries used to decode airport METAR weather information into adequate data types, change them and back, create resulting METAR informati...Micro Framework: MFDeploy with Set/Get mote SKU ID: This is a modification to the Micro Framework's MFDeploy utility that lets the user set and get the mote's ID (aka SKU). It can be done via the GUI...MobySharp: MobySharp is a implementation of the Mobypicture.com API written in C#NGilead: NGilead permits you to use your NHibernate POCO (and especially the partially loaded ones) outside the .NET Virtual Machine (to Silverlight for exa...OpenIdPortableArea: OpenIdPortableArea is an MvcContrib powered Portable Area that encapsulates logic for implementing OpenId encapsulation (using DotNetOpenAuth).OrderToList Extension for IEnumerable: An extension method for IEnumerable<T> that will sort the IEnumerable based on a list of keys. Suppose you have a list of IDs {10, 5, 12} and wa...project3140.org: Code repository for project3140.org.Prometheus Backup Solution: The Prometheus Backup Solution is a free and small Backup Utility for personal use and for small businesses.Roids: an asteroids clone for Silverlight and XNA: An example of a simple game cross-compiling for both Silverlight and XNA using SilverSprite.SemanticAnalyzer: 3rd phase of Compiler Design ProjectSSRS SDK for PHP: SQL Server Reporting Service SDK for PHPWorking Memory Workout: Working Memory Workout is a working memory training game based on the N-back, a task researchers say may improve fluid intelligence. It greatly ex...Wouters Code Samples: This Project will host some of my sample projects I created. I'm a professional SharePoint/BizTalk developer so most of the provided samples will ...New Releases(SocketCoder) Free Silverlight Voice/Video Conferencing Modules: Silverlight Voice Video Chat Modules: Client/Server Silverlight Voice Video Chat ModulesAccessibilityChecker: Accessibility Checker V0.2: Accessibility Checker V0.2 - Direct url´s input functionality added - XHTML, WAI validation modules, easy to extend. (W3C and Achecker modules incl...AStar.net: AStar.net 1.1 downloads: AStar.net 1.1 Version detailsGreatly improved path finding speed and memory usage from version 1.0. Avalaible downloads:AStar.net 1.1 dll - Runtim...AutoPoco: AutoPoco 0.2: This release will bring some non-generic alternatives to configuration + some more automatic configuration options such as assembly scanningBluetooth Radar: Version 1: Basic version only with the ability to discover Bluetooth devices around you.Convert-Media PowerShell Module for Expression Encoder: Release 1.0.0.2: This is a build that incorporates the latest change sets including perform publish. No other changesDevTreks -social budgeting that improves lives and livelihoods: Social Budgeting Web Software, DevTreks alpha 3e: Alpha 3e is a general debug. It also upgrades the software's family budgeting capabilities, including the addition of a new 'Food Nutrition Input'...dV2t Enterprise Library: dV2tEntLib 1.0.0.3: dV2tEntLib 1.0.0.3EnhSim: Release v1.9.8.3: Release v1.9.8.3 Change Armour Penetration calcs to apply the "Rouncer fix" (current version displays debug info to assist users in testing that th...HouseFly controls: HouseFly controls alpha 0.9: HouseFly controls 0.9 alpha binaries (Includes HouseFly.Classes and HouseFly.Controls).Jitbit WYSWYG BBCode Editor: Release: ReleaseMicro Framework: MFDeploy with Set/Get mote SKU ID: MFDeploy with get, set mote ID: The Micro Framework 4.0 MFDeploy, modified to let the user get & set the mote IDMobySharp: MobySharp 1.0: Initial ReleaseOpenIdPortableArea: OpenIdPortableArea: OpenIdPortableArea.Release: DotNetOpenAuth.dll DotNetOpenAuth.xml MvcContrib.dll MvcContrib.xml OpenIdPortableArea.dll OpenIdPortableAre...OrderToList Extension for IEnumerable: Release 0.9b: I'm calling this 0.9 because I came up with it yesterday and there's little real word use so there's probably something that needs fixing or improv...Prometheus Backup Solution: Prometheus BETA: Actual BETA Release. Restore Functions are not available...Reusable Library: V1.0.6: A collection of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developer.Reusable Library Demo: V1.0.4: A demonstration of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developerSharePoint Labs: SPLab4005A-FRA-Level100: SPLab4005A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you the 5th best practice you should apply when writing code with the SharePoint API. Lab La...SharePoint Labs: SPLab6001A-FRA-Level200: SPLab6001A-FRA-Level200 This SharePoint Lab will teach you how to create a generic Feature Receiver within Visual Studio. Creating a Feature Receiv...SharePoint LogViewer: SharePoint LogViewer 2.0: Supports live Farm monitoring. Many bug fixes.Simple Savant: Simple Savant v0.5: Added support for custom constraint/validation logic (See Versioning and Consistency) Added support for reliable cross-domain writes (See Version...SQL Server Extended Properties Quick Editor: Release 1.6.1: Whats new in 1.6.1: Add an edit form to support long text editing. double click to open editor. Add an ORM extended properties initializer to creat...SSRS SDK for PHP: SSRS SDK for PHP: Current release includes the SSRSReport library to connect to SQL Server Reporting Services and a sample application to show the basic steps needed...Table Storage Backup & Restore for Windows Azure: Table Storage Backup 1.0.3751: Bug fix: Crash when creating a table if the existing table had not finished deleting. Bug fix: Incorrect batch URI if the storage account ended in ...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30408.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Studio DSite: Audio Player (Visual C++ 2008): An audio player that can play wav files.Working Memory Workout: Working Memory Workout 1.0: Working Memory Workout is a working memory trainer based on the N-back memory task.Wouters Code Samples: XMLReceiveCBR: This is a Custom Pipeline component. It will help you create a Content Based Routing solution in combination of a WCF Requst/Response service. Gene...Xen: Graphics API for XNA: Xen 1.8: Version 1.8 (XNA 3.1) This update fixes a number of bugs in several areas of the API and introduces a large new Tutorial. [Added] L2 Spherical Ha...Most Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesFacebook Developer ToolkitMost Active ProjectsnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.Shweet: SharePoint 2010 Team Messaging built with PexRawrAutoPocopatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleFacebook Developer ToolkitFarseer Physics EngineNcqrs Framework - The CQRS framework for .NET

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• Professional Scrum Developer (.NET) Training in London

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  On the 26th - 30th July in Microsoft’s offices in London Adam Cogan from SSW will be presenting the first Professional Scrum Developer course in the UK. I will be teaching this course along side Adam and it is a fantastic experience. You are split into teams and go head-to-head to deliver units of potentially shippable work in four two hour sprints. The Professional Scrum Developer course is the only course endorsed by both Microsoft and Ken Schwaber and they have worked together very effectively in brining this course to fruition. This course is the brain child of Richard Hundhausen, a Microsoft Regional Director, and both Adam and I attending the Trainer Prep in Sydney when he was there earlier this year. He is a fantastic trainer and no matter where you do this course you can be safe in the knowledge that he has trained and vetted all of the teachers. A tools version of Ken if you will Find a course and register Download this syllabus Download the Scrum Guide What is the Professional Scrum Developer course all about? Professional Scrum Developer course is a unique and intensive five-day experience for software developers. The course guides teams on how to turn product requirements into potentially shippable increments of software using the Scrum framework, Visual Studio 2010, and modern software engineering practices. Attendees will work in self-organizing, self-managing teams using a common instance of Team Foundation Server 2010. Who should attend this course? This course is suitable for any member of a software development team – architect, programmer, database developer, tester, etc. Entire teams are encouraged to attend and experience the course together, but individuals are welcome too. Attendees will self-organize to form cross-functional Scrum teams. These teams require an aggregate of skills specific to the selected case study. Please see the last page of this document for specific details. Product Owners, ScrumMasters, and other stakeholders are welcome too, but keep in mind that everyone who attends will be expected to commit to work and pull their weight on a Scrum team. What should you know by the end of the course? Scrum will be experienced through a combination of lecture, demonstration, discussion, and hands-on exercises. Attendees will learn how to do Scrum correctly while being coached and critiqued by the instructor, in the following topic areas: Form effective teams Explore and understand legacy “Brownfield” architecture Define quality attributes, acceptance criteria, and “done” Create automated builds How to handle software hotfixes Verify that bugs are identified and eliminated Plan releases and sprints Estimate product backlog items Create and manage a sprint backlog Hold an effective sprint review Improve your process by using retrospectives Use emergent architecture to avoid technical debt Use Test Driven Development as a design tool Setup and leverage continuous integration Use Test Impact Analysis to decrease testing times Manage SQL Server development in an Agile way Use .NET and T-SQL refactoring effectively Build, deploy, and test SQL Server databases Create and manage test plans and cases Create, run, record, and play back manual tests Setup a branching strategy and branch code Write more maintainable code Identify and eliminate people and process dysfunctions Inspect and improve your team’s software development process What does the week look like? This course is a mix of lecture, demonstration, group discussion, simulation, and hands-on software development. The bulk of the course will be spent working as a team on a case study application delivering increments of new functionality in mini-sprints. Here is the week at a glance: Monday morning and most of the day Friday will be spent with the computers powered off, so you can focus on sharpening your game of Scrum and avoiding the common pitfalls when implementing it. The Sprints Timeboxing is a critical concept in Scrum as well as in this course. We expect each team and student to understand and obey all of the timeboxes. The timebox duration will always be clearly displayed during each activity. Expect the instructor to enforce it. Each of the ½ day sprints will roughly follow this schedule: Component Description Minutes Instruction Presentation and demonstration of new and relevant tools & practices 60 Sprint planning meeting Product owner presents backlog; each team commits to delivering functionality 10 Sprint planning meeting Each team determines how to build the functionality 10 The Sprint The team self-organizes and self-manages to complete their tasks 120 Sprint Review meeting Each team will present their increment of functionality to the other teams = 30 Sprint Retrospective A group retrospective meeting will be held to inspect and adapt 10 Each team is expected to self-organize and manage their own work during the sprint. Pairing is highly encouraged. The instructor/product owner will be available if there are questions or impediments, but will be hands-off by default. You should be prepared to communicate and work with your team members in order to achieve your sprint goal. If you have development-related questions or get stuck, your partner or team should be your first level of support. Module 1: INTRODUCTION This module provides a chance for the attendees to get to know the instructors as well as each other. The Professional Scrum Developer program, as well as the day by day agenda, will be explained. Finally, the Scrum team will be selected and assembled so that the forming, storming, norming, and performing can begin. Trainer and student introductions Professional Scrum Developer program Agenda Logistics Team formation Retrospective Module 2: SCRUMDAMENTALS This module provides a level-setting understanding of the Scrum framework including the roles, timeboxes, and artifacts. The team will then experience Scrum firsthand by simulating a multi-day sprint of product development, including planning, review, and retrospective meetings. Scrum overview Scrum roles Scrum timeboxes (ceremonies) Scrum artifacts Simulation Retrospective It’s required that you read Ken Schwaber’s Scrum Guide in preparation for this module and course. MODULE 3: IMPLEMENTING SCRUM IN VISUAL STUDIO 2010 This module demonstrates how to implement Scrum in Visual Studio 2010 using a Scrum process template*. The team will learn the mapping between the Scrum concepts and how they are implemented in the tool. After connecting to the shared Team Foundation Server, the team members will then return to the simulation – this time using Visual Studio to manage their product development. Mapping Scrum to Visual Studio 2010 User Story work items Task work items Bug work items Demonstration Simulation Retrospective Module 4: THE CASE STUDY In this module the team is introduced to their problem domain for the week. A kickoff meeting by the Product Owner (the instructor) will set the stage for the why and what that will take during the upcoming sprints. The team will then define the quality attributes of the project and their definition of “done.” The legacy application code will be downloaded, built, and explored, so that any bugs can be discovered and reported. Introduction to the case study Download the source code, build, and explore the application Define the quality attributes for the project Define “done” How to file effective bugs in Visual Studio 2010 Retrospective Module 5: HOTFIX This module drops the team directly into a Brownfield (legacy) experience by forcing them to analyze the existing application’s architecture and code in order to locate and fix the Product Owner’s high-priority bug(s). The team will learn best practices around finding, testing, fixing, validating, and closing a bug. How to use Architecture Explorer to visualize and explore Create a unit test to validate the existence of a bug Find and fix the bug Validate and close the bug Retrospective Module 6: PLANNING This short module introduces the team to release and sprint planning within Visual Studio 2010. The team will define and capture their goals as well as other important planning information. Release vs. Sprint planning Release planning and the Product Backlog Product Backlog prioritization Acceptance criteria and tests Sprint planning and the Sprint Backlog Creating and linking Sprint tasks Retrospective At this point the team will have the knowledge of Scrum, Visual Studio 2010, and the case study application to begin developing increments of potentially shippable functionality that meet their definition of done. Module 7: EMERGENT ARCHITECTURE This module introduces the architectural practices and tools a team can use to develop a valid design on which to develop new functionality. The teams will learn how Scrum supports good architecture and design practices. After the discussion, the teams will be presented with the product owner’s prioritized backlog so that they may select and commit to the functionality they can deliver in this sprint. Architecture and Scrum Emergent architecture Principles, patterns, and practices Visual Studio 2010 modeling tools UML and layer diagrams SPRINT 1 Retrospective Module 8: TEST DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT This module introduces Test Driven Development as a design tool and how to implement it using Visual Studio 2010. To maximize productivity and quality, a Scrum team should setup Continuous Integration to regularly build every team member’s code changes and run regression tests. Refactoring will also be defined and demonstrated in combination with Visual Studio’s Test Impact Analysis to efficiently re-run just those tests which were impacted by refactoring. Continuous integration Team Foundation Build Test Driven Development (TDD) Refactoring Test Impact Analysis SPRINT 2 Retrospective Module 9: AGILE DATABASE DEVELOPMENT This module lets the SQL Server database developers in on a little secret – they can be agile too. By using the database projects in Visual Studio 2010, the database developers can join the rest of the team. The students will see how to apply Agile database techniques within Visual Studio to support the SQL Server 2005/2008/2008R2 development lifecycle. Agile database development Visual Studio database projects Importing schema and scripts Building and deploying Generating data Unit testing SPRINT 3 Retrospective Module 10: SHIP IT Teams need to know that just because they like the functionality doesn’t mean the Product Owner will. This module revisits acceptance criteria as it pertains to acceptance testing. By refining acceptance criteria into manual test steps, team members can execute the tests, recording the results and reporting bugs in a number of ways. Manual tests will be defined and executed using the Microsoft Test Manager tool. As the Sprint completes and an increment of functionality is delivered, the team will also learn why and when they should create a branch of the codeline. Acceptance criteria Testing in Visual Studio 2010 Microsoft Test Manager Writing and running manual tests Branching SPRINT 4 Retrospective Module 11: OVERCOMING DYSFUNCTION This module introduces the many types of people, process, and tool dysfunctions that teams face in the real world. Many dysfunctions and scenarios will be identified, along with ideas and discussion for how a team might mitigate them. This module will enable you and your team to move toward independence and improve your game of Scrum when you depart class. Scrum-butts and flaccid Scrum Best practices working as a team Team challenges ScrumMaster challenges Product Owner challenges Stakeholder challenges Course Retrospective What will be expected of you and you team? This is a unique course in that it’s technically-focused, team-based, and employs timeboxes. It demands that the members of the teams self-organize and self-manage their own work to collaboratively develop increments of software. All attendees must commit to: Pay attention to all lectures and demonstrations Participate in team and group discussions Work collaboratively with other team members Obey the timebox for each activity Commit to work and do your best to deliver All teams should have these skills: Understanding of Scrum Familiarity with Visual Studio 201 C#, .NET 4.0 & ASP.NET 4.0 experience*  SQL Server 2008 development experience Software testing experience * Check with the instructor ahead of time for the exact technologies Self-organising teams Another unique attribute of this course is that it’s a technical training class being delivered to teams of developers, not pairs, and not individuals. Ideally, your actual software development team will attend the training to ensure that all necessary skills are covered. However, if you wish to attend an open enrolment course alone or with just a couple of colleagues, realize that you may be placed on a team with other attendees. The instructor will do his or her best to ensure that each team is cross-functional to tackle the case study, but there are no guarantees. You may be required to try a new role, learn a new skill, or pair with somebody unfamiliar to you. This is just good Scrum! Who should NOT take this course? Because of the nature of this course, as explained above, certain types of people should probably not attend this course: Students requiring command and control style instruction – there are no prescriptive/step-by-step (think traditional Microsoft Learning) labs in this course Students who are unwilling to work within a timebox Students who are unwilling to work collaboratively on a team Students who don’t have any skill in any of the software development disciplines Students who are unable to commit fully to their team – not only will this diminish the student’s learning experience, but it will also impact their team’s learning experience Find a course and register Download this syllabus Download the Scrum Guide Technorati Tags: Scrum,SSW,Pro Scrum Dev

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, November 11, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, November 11, 2012Popular ReleasesZXMAK2: Version 2.7.2.0: show extended rzx error info fix reset lag for PROFI ULA 5.xx fix reset behavior fix PROFI ULA timings (thanks to solegstar) fix #FF port for PROFI ULA add ATM710 memory module add new predefined machine configs: ATM Turbo 2, PROFI 3.XX???????: Monitor 2012-11-11: This is the first releaseVidCoder: 1.4.5 Beta: Removed the old Advanced user interface and moved x264 preset/profile/tune there instead. The functionality is still available through editing the options string. Added ability to specify the H.264 level. Added ability to choose VidCoder's interface language. If you are interested in translating, we can get VidCoder in your language! Updated WPF text rendering to use the better Display mode. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5045. Removed logic that forced the .m4v extension in certain ...ImageGlass: Version 1.5: http://i1214.photobucket.com/albums/cc483/phapsuxeko/ImageGlass/1.png v1.5.4401.3015 Thumbnail bar: Increase loading speed Thumbnail image with ratio Support personal customization: mouse up, mouse down, mouse hover, selected item... Scroll to show all items Image viewer Zoom by scroll, or selected rectangle Speed up loading Zoom to cursor point New background design and customization and others... v1.5.4430.483 Thumbnail bar: Auto move scroll bar to selected image Show / Hi...Building Windows 8 Apps with C# and XAML: Full Source Chapters 1 - 10 for Windows 8 Fix 002: This is the full source from all chapters of the book, compiled and tested on Windows 8 RTM. Includes: A fix for the Netflix example from Chapter 6 that was missing a service reference A fix for the ImageHelper issue (images were not being saved) - this was due to the buffer being inadequate and required streaming the writeable bitmap to a buffer first before encoding and savingmyCollections: Version 2.3.2.0: New in this version : Added TheGamesDB.net API for Games and NDS Added Support for Windows Media Center Added Support for myMovies Added Support for XBMC Added Support for Dune HD Added Support for Mede8er Added Support for WD HDTV Added Fast search options Added order by Artist/Album for music You can now create covers and background for games You can now update your ID3 tag with the info of myCollections Fixed several provider Performance improvement New Splash ...Draw: Draw 1.0: Drawing PadPlayer Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 (v1.0): IMPORTANT: List of breaking changes from preview 7 Ability to move control panel or individual elements outside media player. more info... New Entertainment app theme for out of the box support for Windows 8 Entertainment app guidelines. more info... VSIX reference names shortened. Allows seeing plugin name from "Add Reference" dialog without resizing. FreeWheel SmartXML now supports new "Standard" event callback type. Other minor misc fixes and improvements ADDITIONAL DOWNLOADSSmo...WebSearch.Net: WebSearch.Net 3.1: WebSearch.Net is an open-source research platform that provides uniform data source access, data modeling, feature calculation, data mining, etc. It facilitates the experiments of web search researchers due to its high flexibility and extensibility. The platform can be used or extended by any language compatible for .Net 2 framework, from C# (recommended), VB.Net to C++ and Java. Thanks to the large coverage of knowledge in web search research, it is necessary to model the techniques and main...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.10.0: NugetNuGet BlogRead the release blog post for 4.10.0. Whats newMVC support New request pipeline Many, many bugfixes (see the issue tracker for a complete list) Read the documentation for the MVC bits. Breaking changesWe have done all we can not to break backwards compatibility, but we had to do some minor breaking changes: Removed graphicHeadlineFormat config setting from umbracoSettings.config (an old relic from the 3.x days) U4-690 DynamicNode ChildrenAsList was fixed, altering it'...SQL Server Partitioned Table Framework: Partitioned Table Framework Release 1.0: SQL Server 2012 ReleaseSharePoint Manager 2013: SharePoint Manager 2013 Release ver 1.0.12.1106: SharePoint Manager 2013 Release (ver: 1.0.12.1106) is now ready for SharePoint 2013. The new version has an expanded view of the SharePoint object model and has been tested on SharePoint 2013 RTM. As a bonus, the new version is also available for SharePoint 2010 as a separate download.D3D9Client: D3D9Client R7: New release for Orbiter 2010-P1 - Added horizon/sun angle for night-lights into the configuration file (default 10deg) - Some runway lights related bugs are fixed - Added more configuration options for runway lightsFiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 1.2: Verzija 1.2. je, prije svega, odgovor na novu verziju Tehnicke specifikacije (v1.1.) koja je objavljena prije nekoliko dana. Pored novosti vezanih uz (sitne) izmjene u spomenutoj novoj verziji Tehnicke dokumentacije, projekt smo prošili sa nekim dodatnim feature-ima od kojih je vecina proizašla iz vaših prijedloga - hvala :) Novosti u v1.2. su: - Neusuglašenost zahtjeva (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.com/workitem/645) - Sample projekt - iznosi se množe sa 100 (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.c...MFCMAPI: October 2012 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1036 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeDictationTool: DictationCool-WPF: • Open a media file to start a new dication. • Open a dct file to continue a dictation. • Compare your dictation with original text if exists. • Save your dictation to dct file, and restore it to continue later. • Save the compared result to html file.MCEBuddy 2.x: MCEBuddy 2.3.7: Changelog for 2.3.7 (32bit and 64bit) 1. Improved performance of MP4 Fast and M4V Fast Profiles (no deinterlacing, removed --decomb) 2. Improved priority handling 3. Added support for Pausing and Resume conversions 4. Added support for fallback to source directory if network destination directory is unavailable 5. MCEBuddy now installs ShowAnalyzer during installation 6. Added support for long description atom in iTunesDyanamic Reports (RDLC) - SharePoint 2010 Visual WebPart: Initial Release: This is a Initial Release.HTML Renderer: HTML Renderer 1.0.0.0 (3): Major performance improvement (http://theartofdev.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/how-i-optimized-html-renderer-and-fell-in-love-with-vs-profiler/) Minor fixes raised in issue tracker and discussions.Window Manager: Window Manager 1.0: First releaseNew Projectsarteytex: este es una prueba blockworld: An implementation of a goal stack planner.Customer Note: customer note is windows store applicationDraw: ?????????????：??????、CAD??、????。Football Management: Football Management System is web management system for football (soccer) leagues, teams and players. Hijri Converter API: This project is aimed to create a simple RESTful API using VB and ASP.NET to do Hijri-to-Gregorian and Gregorian-to-Hijri conversion.httpclient?????????: httpclient?????????（1）??????????（2）?????????（3）??2012-11-06??，???????。 Imagine Cup 2013: Develop project to Imagine Cup 2013MyAppReji: MyAppN2F Request: The N2F Request object is used to handle interactions between N2F and the global $_REQUEST variable, sanitizing any results which are returned.Orchard Metro Theme: Orchard Metro Theme is a clean and flexible multi-zone theme.Poker Clock And Goodies: poker w8ProjectASPReviewer: Review website for notebooks, tablets and smartphones.Prototype: Its about making an proto type for the final project.Prototype - 7COM0207: 7COM0207 web scripting module, Assignment 2QuickToAD: QuickToAD is a foundational development project for the purpose of jump-starting data-driven application projects.Release Manager: Release Manager is a project to design and develop Windows based Release Management Software.ResW File Code Generator: A Visual Studio 2012 Custom Tool for generating a strongly typed helper class for accessing localized resources from a .ResW file.SEO Tools: This is a website containing some commonly used SEO tools. I have only added a blog ping utility at this time but there is more to come. Thales communicator: A C# library that helps communicate with Thales HSMTrivial: A trivia framework: Trivial is a C# framework that helps you creating custom trivia-like applications.

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• Clustering Basics and Challenges

  - by Karoly Vegh

  For upcoming posts it seemed to be a good idea to dedicate some time for cluster basic concepts and theory. This post misses a lot of details that would explode the articlesize, should you have questions, do not hesitate to ask them in the comments.  The goal here is to get some concepts straight. I can't promise to give you an overall complete definitions of cluster, cluster agent, quorum, voting, fencing, split brain condition, so the following is more of an explanation. Here we go. -------- Cluster, HA, failover, switchover, scalability -------- An attempted definition of a Cluster: A cluster is a set (2+) server nodes dedicated to keep application services alive, communicating through the cluster software/framework with eachother, test and probe health status of servernodes/services and with quorum based decisions and with switchover/failover techniques keep the application services running on them available. That is, should a node that runs a service unexpectedly lose functionality/connection, the other ones would take over the and run the services, so that availability is guaranteed. To provide availability while strictly sticking to a consistent clusterconfiguration is the main goal of a cluster.  At this point we have to add that this defines a HA-cluster, a High-Availability cluster, where the clusternodes are planned to run the services in an active-standby, or failover fashion. An example could be a single instance database. Some applications can be run in a distributed or scalable fashion. In the latter case instances of the application run actively on separate clusternodes serving servicerequests simultaneously. An example for this version could be a webserver that forwards connection requests to many backend servers in a round-robin way. Or a database running in active-active RAC setup.  -------- Cluster arhitecture, interconnect, topologies -------- Now, what is a cluster made of? Servers, right. These servers (the clusternodes) need to communicate. This of course happens over the network, usually over dedicated network interfaces interconnecting all the clusternodes. These connection are called interconnects.How many clusternodes are in a cluster? There are different cluster topologies. The most simple one is a clustered pair topology, involving only two clusternodes:  There are several more topologies, clicking the image above will take you to the relevant documentation. Also, to answer the question Solaris Cluster allows you to run up to 16 servers in a cluster. Where shall these clusternodes be placed? A very important question. The right answer is: It depends on what you plan to achieve with the cluster. Do you plan to avoid only a server outage? Then you can place them right next to eachother in the datacenter. Do you need to avoid DataCenter outage? In that case of course you should place them at least in different fire zones. Or in two geographically distant DataCenters to avoid disasters like floods, large-scale fires or power outages. We call this a stretched- or campus cluster, the clusternodes being several kilometers away from eachother. To cover really large distances, you probably need to move to a GeoCluster, which is a different kind of animal.  What is a geocluster? A Geographic Cluster in Solaris Cluster terms is actually a metacluster between two, separate (locally-HA) clusters.  -------- Cluster resource types, agents, resources, resource groups -------- So how does the cluster manage my applications? The cluster needs to start, stop and probe your applications. If you application runs, the cluster needs to check regularly if the application state is healthy, does it respond over the network, does it have all the processes running, etc. This is called probing. If the cluster deems the application is in a faulty state, then it can try to restart it locally or decide to switch (stop on node A, start on node B) the service. Starting, stopping and probing are the three actions that a cluster agent does. There are many different kinds of agents included in Solaris Cluster, but you can build your own too. Examples are an agent that manages (mounts, moves) ZFS filesystems, or the Oracle DB HA agent that cares about the database, or an agent that moves a floating IP address between nodes. There are lots of other agents included for Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, Oracle DB, Oracle Weblogic, Zones, LDoms, NFS, DNS, etc.We also need to clarify the difference between a cluster resource and the cluster resource group.A cluster resource is something that is managed by a cluster agent. Cluster resource types are included in Solaris cluster (see above, e.g. HAStoragePlus, HA-Oracle, LogicalHost). You can group cluster resources into cluster resourcegroups, and switch these groups together from one node to another. To stick to the example above, to move an Oracle DB service from one node to another, you have to switch the group between nodes, and the agents of the cluster resources in the group will do the following:  On node A Shut down the DB Unconfigure the LogicalHost IP the DB Listener listens on unmount the filesystem   Then, on node B: mount the FS configure the IP  startup the DB -------- Voting, Quorum, Split Brain Condition, Fencing, Amnesia -------- How do the clusternodes agree upon their action? How do they decide which node runs what services? Another important question. Running a cluster is a strictly democratic thing.Every node has votes, and you need the majority of votes to have the deciding power. Now, this is usually no problem, clusternodes think very much all alike. Still, every action needs to be governed upon in a productive system, and has to be agreed upon. Agreeing is easy as long as the clusternodes all behave and talk to eachother over the interconnect. But if the interconnect is gone/down, this all gets tricky and confusing. Clusternodes think like this: "My job is to run these services. The other node does not answer my interconnect communication, it must be down. I'd better take control and run the services!". The problem is, as I have already mentioned, clusternodes very much think alike. If the interconnect is gone, they all assume the other node is down, and they all want to mount the data backend, enable the IP and run the database. Double IPs, double mounts, double DB instances - now that is trouble. Also, in a 2-node cluster they both have only 50% of the votes, that is, they themselves alone are not allowed to run a cluster.  This is where you need a quorum device. According to Wikipedia, the "requirement for a quorum is protection against totally unrepresentative action in the name of the body by an unduly small number of persons.". They need additional votes to run the cluster. For this requirement a 2-node cluster needs a quorum device or a quorum server. If the interconnect is gone, (this is what we call a split brain condition) both nodes start to race and try to reserve the quorum device to themselves. They do this, because the quorum device bears an additional vote, that could ensure majority (50% +1). The one that manages to lock the quorum device (e.g. if it's an FC LUN, it SCSI reserves it) wins the right to build/run a cluster, the other one - realizing he was late - panics/reboots to ensure the cluster config stays consistent.  Losing the interconnect isn't only endangering the availability of services, but it also endangers the cluster configuration consistence. Just imagine node A being down and during that the cluster configuration changes. Now node B goes down, and node A comes up. It isn't uptodate about the cluster configuration's changes so it will refuse to start a cluster, since that would lead to cluster amnesia, that is the cluster had some changes, but now runs with an older cluster configuration repository state, that is it's like it forgot about the changes.  Also, to ensure application data consistence, the clusternode that wins the race makes sure that a server that isn't part of or can't currently join the cluster can access the devices. This procedure is called fencing. This usually happens to storage LUNs via SCSI reservation.  Now, another important question: Where do I place the quorum disk?  Imagine having two sites, two separate datacenters, one in the north of the city and the other one in the south part of it. You run a stretched cluster in the clustered pair topology. Where do you place the quorum disk/server? If you put it into the north DC, and that gets hit by a meteor, you lose one clusternode, which isn't a problem, but you also lose your quorum, and the south clusternode can't keep the cluster running lacking the votes. This problem can't be solved with two sites and a campus cluster. You will need a third site to either place the quorum server to, or a third clusternode. Otherwise, lacking majority, if you lose the site that had your quorum, you lose the cluster. Okay, we covered the very basics. We haven't talked about virtualization support, CCR, ClusterFilesystems, DID devices, affinities, storage-replication, management tools, upgrade procedures - should those be interesting for you, let me know in the comments, along with any other questions. Given enough demand I'd be glad to write a followup post too. Now I really want to move on to the second part in the series: ClusterInstallation.  Oh, as for additional source of information, I recommend the documentation: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23623_01/index.html, and the OTN Oracle Solaris Cluster site: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris-cluster/index.html

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• Refactor This (Ugly Code)!

  - by Alois Kraus

  Ayende has put on his blog some ugly code to refactor. First and foremost it is nearly impossible to reason about other peoples code without knowing the driving forces behind the current code. It is certainly possible to make it much cleaner when potential sources of errors cannot happen in the first place due to good design. I can see what the intention of the code is but I do not know about every brittle detail if I am allowed to reorder things here and there to simplify things. So I decided to make it much simpler by identifying the different responsibilities of the methods and encapsulate it in different classes. The code we need to refactor seems to deal with a handler after a message has been sent to a message queue. The handler does complete the current transaction if there is any and does handle any errors happening there. If during the the completion of the transaction errors occur the transaction is at least disposed. We can enter the handler already in a faulty state where we try to deliver the complete event in any case and signal a failure event and try to resend the message again to the queue if it was not inside a transaction. All is decorated with many try/catch blocks, duplicated code and some state variables to route the program flow. It is hard to understand and difficult to reason about. In other words: This code is a mess and could be written by me if I was under pressure. Here comes to code we want to refactor:         private void HandleMessageCompletion(                                      Message message,                                      TransactionScope tx,                                      OpenedQueue messageQueue,                                      Exception exception,                                      Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> messageCompleted,                                      Action<CurrentMessageInformation> beforeTransactionCommit)         {             var txDisposed = false;             if (exception == null)             {                 try                 {                     if (tx != null)                     {                         if (beforeTransactionCommit != null)                             beforeTransactionCommit(currentMessageInformation);                         tx.Complete();                         tx.Dispose();                         txDisposed = true;                     }                     try                     {                         if (messageCompleted != null)                             messageCompleted(currentMessageInformation, exception);                     }                     catch (Exception e)                     {                         Trace.TraceError("An error occured when raising the MessageCompleted event, the error will NOT affect the message processing"+ e);                     }                     return;                 }                 catch (Exception e)                 {                     Trace.TraceWarning("Failed to complete transaction, moving to error mode"+ e);                     exception = e;                 }             }             try             {                 if (txDisposed == false && tx != null)                 {                     Trace.TraceWarning("Disposing transaction in error mode");                     tx.Dispose();                 }             }             catch (Exception e)             {                 Trace.TraceWarning("Failed to dispose of transaction in error mode."+ e);             }             if (message == null)                 return;                 try             {                 if (messageCompleted != null)                     messageCompleted(currentMessageInformation, exception);             }             catch (Exception e)             {                 Trace.TraceError("An error occured when raising the MessageCompleted event, the error will NOT affect the message processing"+ e);             }               try             {                 var copy = MessageProcessingFailure;                 if (copy != null)                     copy(currentMessageInformation, exception);             }             catch (Exception moduleException)             {                 Trace.TraceError("Module failed to process message failure: " + exception.Message+                                              moduleException);             }               if (messageQueue.IsTransactional == false)// put the item back in the queue             {                 messageQueue.Send(message);             }         }     You can see quite some processing and handling going on there. Yes this looks like real world code one did put together to make things work and he does not trust his callbacks. I guess these are event handlers which are optional and the delegates were extracted from an event to call them back later when necessary.  Lets see what the author of this code did intend:          private void HandleMessageCompletion(             TransactionHandler transactionHandler,             MessageCompletionHandler handler,             CurrentMessageInformation messageInfo,             ErrorCollector errors             )         {               // commit current pending transaction             transactionHandler.CallHandlerAndCommit(messageInfo, errors);               // We have an error for a null message do not send completion event             if (messageInfo.CurrentMessage == null)                 return;               // Send completion event in any case regardless of errors             handler.OnMessageCompleted(messageInfo, errors);               // put message back if queue is not transactional             transactionHandler.ResendMessageOnError(messageInfo.CurrentMessage, errors);         }   I did not bother to write the intention here again since the code should be pretty self explaining by now. I have used comments to explain the still nontrivial procedure step by step revealing the real intention about all this complex program flow. The original complexity of the problem domain does not go away but by applying the techniques of SRP (Single Responsibility Principle) and some functional style but we can abstract the necessary complexity away in useful abstractions which make it much easier to reason about it. Since most of the method seems to deal with errors I thought it was a good idea to encapsulate the error state of our current message in an ErrorCollector object which stores all exceptions in a list along with a description what the error all was about in the exception itself. We can log it later or not depending on the log level or whatever. It is really just a simple list that encapsulates the current error state.          class ErrorCollector          {              List<Exception> _Errors = new List<Exception>();                public void Add(Exception ex, string description)              {                  ex.Data["Description"] = description;                  _Errors.Add(ex);              }                public Exception Last              {                  get                  {                      return _Errors.LastOrDefault();                  }              }                public bool HasError              {                  get                  {                      return _Errors.Count > 0;                  }              }          }   Since the error state is global we have two choices to store a reference in the other helper objects (TransactionHandler and MessageCompletionHandler)or pass it to the method calls when necessary. I did chose the latter one because a second argument does not hurt and makes it easier to reason about the overall state while the helper objects remain stateless and immutable which makes the helper objects much easier to understand and as a bonus thread safe as well. This does not mean that the stored member variables are stateless or thread safe as well but at least our helper classes are it. Most of the complexity is located the transaction handling I consider as a separate responsibility that I delegate to the TransactionHandler which does nothing if there is no transaction or Call the Before Commit Handler Commit Transaction Dispose Transaction if commit did throw In fact it has a second responsibility to resend the message if the transaction did fail. I did see a good fit there since it deals with transaction failures.          class TransactionHandler          {              TransactionScope _Tx;              Action<CurrentMessageInformation> _BeforeCommit;              OpenedQueue _MessageQueue;                public TransactionHandler(TransactionScope tx, Action<CurrentMessageInformation> beforeCommit, OpenedQueue messageQueue)              {                  _Tx = tx;                  _BeforeCommit = beforeCommit;                  _MessageQueue = messageQueue;              }                public void CallHandlerAndCommit(CurrentMessageInformation currentMessageInfo, ErrorCollector errors)              {                  if (_Tx != null && !errors.HasError)                  {                      try                      {                          if (_BeforeCommit != null)                          {                              _BeforeCommit(currentMessageInfo);                          }                            _Tx.Complete();                          _Tx.Dispose();                      }                      catch (Exception ex)                      {                          errors.Add(ex, "Failed to complete transaction, moving to error mode");                          Trace.TraceWarning("Disposing transaction in error mode");                          try                          {                              _Tx.Dispose();                          }                          catch (Exception ex2)                          {                              errors.Add(ex2, "Failed to dispose of transaction in error mode.");                          }                      }                  }              }                public void ResendMessageOnError(Message message, ErrorCollector errors)              {                  if (errors.HasError && !_MessageQueue.IsTransactional)                  {                      _MessageQueue.Send(message);                  }              }          } If we need to change the handling in the future we have a much easier time to reason about our application flow than before. After we did complete our transaction and called our callback we can call the completion handler which is the main purpose of the HandleMessageCompletion method after all. The responsiblity o the MessageCompletionHandler is to call the completion callback and the failure callback when some error has occurred.            class MessageCompletionHandler          {              Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> _MessageCompletedHandler;              Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> _MessageProcessingFailure;                public MessageCompletionHandler(Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> messageCompletedHandler,                                              Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> messageProcessingFailure)              {                  _MessageCompletedHandler = messageCompletedHandler;                  _MessageProcessingFailure = messageProcessingFailure;              }                  public void OnMessageCompleted(CurrentMessageInformation currentMessageInfo, ErrorCollector errors)              {                  try                  {                      if (_MessageCompletedHandler != null)                      {                          _MessageCompletedHandler(currentMessageInfo, errors.Last);                      }                  }                  catch (Exception ex)                  {                      errors.Add(ex, "An error occured when raising the MessageCompleted event, the error will NOT affect the message processing");                  }                    if (errors.HasError)                  {                      SignalFailedMessage(currentMessageInfo, errors);                  }              }                void SignalFailedMessage(CurrentMessageInformation currentMessageInfo, ErrorCollector errors)              {                  try                  {                      if (_MessageProcessingFailure != null)                          _MessageProcessingFailure(currentMessageInfo, errors.Last);                  }                  catch (Exception moduleException)                  {                      errors.Add(moduleException, "Module failed to process message failure");                  }              }            }   If for some reason I did screw up the logic and we need to call the completion handler from our Transaction handler we can simple add to the CallHandlerAndCommit method a third argument to the MessageCompletionHandler and we are fine again. If the logic becomes even more complex and we need to ensure that the completed event is triggered only once we have now one place the completion handler to capture the state. During this refactoring I simple put things together that belong together and came up with useful abstractions. If you look at the original argument list of the HandleMessageCompletion method I have put many things together:   Original Arguments New Arguments Encapsulate Message message CurrentMessageInformation messageInfo         Message message TransactionScope tx Action<CurrentMessageInformation> beforeTransactionCommit OpenedQueue messageQueue TransactionHandler transactionHandler        TransactionScope tx        OpenedQueue messageQueue        Action<CurrentMessageInformation> beforeTransactionCommit Exception exception,             ErrorCollector errors Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> messageCompleted MessageCompletionHandler handler          Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> messageCompleted          Action<CurrentMessageInformation, Exception> messageProcessingFailure The reason is simple: Put the things that have relationships together and you will find nearly automatically useful abstractions. I hope this makes sense to you. If you see a way to make it even more simple you can show Ayende your improved version as well.

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• Does HTML 5 &ldquo;Rich vs. Reach&rdquo; a False Choice?

  - by andrewbrust

  The competition between the Web and proprietary rich platforms, including Windows, Mac OS, iPhone/iPad, Adobe’s Flash/AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight, is not new. But with the emergence of HTML 5 and imminent support for it in the next release of the major Web browsers, the battle is heating up. And with the announcements made Wednesday at Google's I/O conference, it's getting kicked up yet another notch. The impact of this platform battle on companies in the media and advertising world, and the developers who serve them, is significant. The most prominent question is whether video and rich media online will shift towards pure HTML and away from plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight. In fact, certain features in HTML 5 make it suitable for development for line of business applications as well, further threatening those plug-in technologies. So what's the deal? Is this real or hype? To answer that question, I've done my own research into HTML 5's features and talked to several media-focused, New York area developers to get their opinions. I present my findings to you in this post. Before bearing down into HTML 5 specifics and practitioners’ quotes, let's set the context. To understand what HTML 5 can do, take a look at this video of Sports Illustrated’s HTML 5 prototype. This should start to get you bought into the idea that HTML 5 could be a game-changer. Next, if you happen to have installed the beta version of Google's Chrome 5 browser, take a look at the page linked to below, and in that page, click on any of the game thumbnails to see what's possible, without a plug-in, in this brave new world. (Note, although the instructions for each game tell you to press the A key to start, press the Z key instead.). Here's the link: http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara As an adjunct to what's enabled by HTML 5, consider the various transforms that are part of CSS 3. If you're running Safari as your browser, the following link will showcase this live; if not, you'll see a bitmap that will give you an idea of what's possible: http://webkit.org/blog/386/3d-transforms Are you starting to get the picture (literally)? What has up until now required browser plug-ins and other patches to HTML, most typically Flash, will soon be renderable, natively, in all major browsers. Moreover, it's looking likely that developers will be able to deliver such content and experiences in these browsers using one base of markup and script code (using straight JavaScript and/or jQuery), without resorting to browser-specific code and workarounds. If you're skeptical of this, I wouldn't blame you, especially with respect to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. However, i can tell you with confidence that even Microsoft is dedicated to full-on HTML 5 support in version 9 of that browser, which is currently under development. So what’s new in HTML 5, specifically, that makes sites like this possible?  The specification documents go into deep detail, and there’s no sense in rehashing them here, but a summary is probably in order.   Here is a non-authoritative, but useful, list of the major new feature areas in HTML 5: 2D drawing capabilities and 3D transforms. 2D drawing instructions can be embedded statically into a Web page; application interactivity and animation can be achieved through script.  As mentioned above, 3D transforms are technically part of version 3 of the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) spec, rather than HTML 5, but they can nonetheless be thought of as part of the bundle.  They allow for rendering of 3D images and animations that, together with 2D drawing, make HTML-based games much more feasible than they are presently, as the links above demonstrate. Embedded audio and video. A media player can appear directly in a rendered Web page, using HTML markup and no plug-ins. Alternately, player controls can be hidden and the content can play automatically. Major enhancements to form-based input. This includes such things as specification of required fields, embedding of text “hints” into a control, limiting valid input on a field to dates, email addresses or a list of values.  There’s more to this, but the gist is that line-of-business applications, with complicated input and data validation, are supported directly Offline caching, local storage and client-side SQL database. These facilities allow Web applications to function more like native apps, even if no internet connection is available. User-defined data. Data (or metadata – data about data) can easily be embedded statically and/or retrieved and updated with Javascript code. This avoids having to embed that data in a separate file, or within script code. Taken together, these features position HTML to compete with, and perhaps overtake, Adobe’s Flash/AIR (and Microsoft’s Silverlight) as a viable Web platform for media, RIAs (rich internet applications – apps that function more like desktop software than Web sites) and interactive Web content, including games. What do players in the media world think about this?  From the embedded video above, we know what Sports Illustrated (and, therefore, Time Warner) think.  Hulu, the major Internet site for broadcast TV content, is on record as saying HTML5 video does not pass muster with them, at least not yet.  YouTube, on the other hand, already has an experimental HTML 5-based version of their site.  TechCrunch has reported that NetFlix is flirting with HTML 5 too, especially as it pertains to embedded browsers in TV-based devices.  And the New York Times’ Web site now embeds some video clips without resorting to Flash.  They have to – otherwise iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users couldn’t see them in the Mobile Safari browser. What do media-focused developers think about all this?  I talked to several to get their opinions. Michael Pinto is CEO and Founder of Very Memorable Design whose primary focus has been to help marketing directors get traction online.  The firm’s client roster includes the likes Time, Inc., Scholastic and PBS.  Pinto predicts that “More and more microsites that were done entirely in Flash will be done more and more using jQuery. I can also see slideshows and video now being done without Flash. However if you needed to create a game or highly interactive activity Flash would still be the way to go for the web.” A dissenting view comes from Jesse Erlbaum, CEO of The Erlbaum Group, LLC, which serves numerous clients in the magazine publishing sector.  When I asked Erlbaum whether he thought HTML 5 and jQuery/JavaScript would steal significant market share from Flash, he responded “Not at all!  In particular, not for media and advertising customers!  These sectors are not generally in the business of making highly functional applications, which is the one place where HTML5/jQuery/etc really shines.” Ironically, Pinto’s firm is a heavy user of Flash for its projects and Erlbaum’s develops atop the “LAMP” (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl) stack.  For whatever reason, each firm seems to see the other’s toolset as a more viable choice.  But both agree that the developer tool story around HTML 5 is deficient.  Pinto explains “What’s lost with [HTML 5 and Javascript] techniques is that there isn’t a single widely favored easy-to-use tool of choice for authoring. So with Flash you can get up and running right away and not worry about what is different from one browser to the next.“  Erlbaum agrees, saying: “HTML5/Javascript lacks a sophisticated integrated development environment (IDE) which is an essential part of Flash.  If what someone is trying to make is primarily animation, it's a waste of time…to do this in Javascript.  It can be done much more easily in Flash, and with greater cross-browser compatibility and consistency due to the ubiquity of Flash.” Adobe (maker of Flash since its 2005 acquisition of Macromedia) likely agrees.  And for better or worse, they’ve decided to address this shortcoming of HTML 5, even at risk of diminishing their Flash platfrom. Yesterday Adobe announced that their hugely popular Deamweaver Web design authoring tool would directly support HTML 5 and CSS 3 development.  In fact, the Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 HTML5 Pack is downloadable now from Adobe Labs. Maybe Adobe is bowing to pressure from ardent Web professionals like Scott Kellum, Lead Designer at Channel V Media,  a digital and offline branding firm, serving the media and marketing sectors, among others.  Kellum told me that HTML 5 “…will definitely move people away from Flash. It has many of the same functionalities with faster load times and better accessibility. HTML5 will help Flash as well: with the new caching methods you can now even run Flash apps offline.” Although all three Web developers I interviewed would agree that Flash is still required for more sophisticated applications, Kellum seems to have put his finger on why HTML 5 may nonetheless dominate.  In his view, much of the Web development out there has little need for high-end capabilities: “Most people want to add a little punch to a navigation bar or some video and now you can get the biggest bang for your buck with HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript.” I’ve already mentioned that Google’s ongoing I/O conference, at the Moscone West center in San Francisco, is driving the HTML 5 news cycle, big time.  And Google made many announcements of their own, including the open sourcing of their VP8 video codec, new enterprise-oriented capabilities for its App Engine cloud offering, and the creation of the Chrome Web Store, which the company says will make it easier to find and “install” Web applications, in a fashion similar to  the way users procure native apps on various mobile platforms. HTML 5 looks to be disruptive, especially to the media world.  And even if the technology ends up disappointing, the chatter around it alone is causing big changes in the technology world.  If the richness it promises delivers, then magazine publishers and non-text digital advertisers may indeed have a platform for creating compelling content that loads quickly, is standards-based and will render identically in (the newest versions of) all major Web browsers.  Can this development in the digital arena save the titans of the print world?  I can’t predict, but it’s going to be fun to watch, and the competitive innovation from all players in both industries will likely be immense.

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• Optimizing Solaris 11 SHA-1 on Intel Processors

  - by danx

  SHA-1 is a "hash" or "digest" operation that produces a 160 bit (20 byte) checksum value on arbitrary data, such as a file. It is intended to uniquely identify text and to verify it hasn't been modified. Max Locktyukhin and others at Intel have improved the performance of the SHA-1 digest algorithm using multiple techniques. This code has been incorporated into Solaris 11 and is available in the Solaris Crypto Framework via the libmd(3LIB), the industry-standard libpkcs11(3LIB) library, and Solaris kernel module sha1. The optimized code is used automatically on systems with a x86 CPU supporting SSSE3 (Intel Supplemental SSSE3). Intel microprocessor architectures that support SSSE3 include Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge microprocessor families. Further optimizations are available for microprocessors that support AVX (such as Sandy Bridge). Although SHA-1 is considered obsolete because of weaknesses found in the SHA-1 algorithm—NIST recommends using at least SHA-256, SHA-1 is still widely used and will be with us for awhile more. Collisions (the same SHA-1 result for two different inputs) can be found with moderate effort. SHA-1 is used heavily though in SSL/TLS, for example. And SHA-1 is stronger than the older MD5 digest algorithm, another digest option defined in SSL/TLS. Optimizations Review SHA-1 operates by reading an arbitrary amount of data. The data is read in 512 bit (64 byte) blocks (the last block is padded in a specific way to ensure it's a full 64 bytes). Each 64 byte block has 80 "rounds" of calculations (consisting of a mixture of "ROTATE-LEFT", "AND", and "XOR") applied to the block. Each round produces a 32-bit intermediate result, called W[i]. Here's what each round operates: The first 16 rounds, rounds 0 to 15, read the 512 bit block 32 bits at-a-time. These 32 bits is used as input to the round. The remaining rounds, rounds 16 to 79, use the results from the previous rounds as input. Specifically for round i it XORs the results of rounds i-3, i-8, i-14, and i-16 and rotates the result left 1 bit. The remaining calculations for the round is a series of AND, XOR, and ROTATE-LEFT operators on the 32-bit input and some constants. The 32-bit result is saved as W[i] for round i. The 32-bit result of the final round, W[79], is the SHA-1 checksum. Optimization: Vectorization The first 16 rounds can be vectorized (computed in parallel) because they don't depend on the output of a previous round. As for the remaining rounds, because of step 2 above, computing round i depends on the results of round i-3, W[i-3], one can vectorize 3 rounds at-a-time. Max Locktyukhin found through simple factoring, explained in detail in his article referenced below, that the dependencies of round i on the results of rounds i-3, i-8, i-14, and i-16 can be replaced instead with dependencies on the results of rounds i-6, i-16, i-28, and i-32. That is, instead of initializing intermediate result W[i] with: W[i] = (W[i-3] XOR W[i-8] XOR W[i-14] XOR W[i-16]) ROTATE-LEFT 1 Initialize W[i] as follows: W[i] = (W[i-6] XOR W[i-16] XOR W[i-28] XOR W[i-32]) ROTATE-LEFT 2 That means that 6 rounds could be vectorized at once, with no additional calculations, instead of just 3! This optimization is independent of Intel or any other microprocessor architecture, although the microprocessor has to support vectorization to use it, and exploits one of the weaknesses of SHA-1. Optimization: SSSE3 Intel SSSE3 makes use of 16 %xmm registers, each 128 bits wide. The 4 32-bit inputs to a round, W[i-6], W[i-16], W[i-28], W[i-32], all fit in one %xmm register. The following code snippet, from Max Locktyukhin's article, converted to ATT assembly syntax, computes 4 rounds in parallel with just a dozen or so SSSE3 instructions: movdqa W_minus_04, W_TMP pxor W_minus_28, W // W equals W[i-32:i-29] before XOR // W = W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] palignr $8, W_minus_08, W_TMP // W_TMP = W[i-6:i-3], combined from // W[i-4:i-1] and W[i-8:i-5] vectors pxor W_minus_16, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25]) ^ W[i-16:i-13] pxor W_TMP, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] ^ W[i-16:i-13]) ^ W[i-6:i-3]) movdqa W, W_TMP // 4 dwords in W are rotated left by 2 psrld $30, W // rotate left by 2 W = (W >> 30) | (W << 2) pslld $2, W_TMP por W, W_TMP movdqa W_TMP, W // four new W values W[i:i+3] are now calculated paddd (K_XMM), W_TMP // adding 4 current round's values of K movdqa W_TMP, (WK(i)) // storing for downstream GPR instructions to read A window of the 32 previous results, W[i-1] to W[i-32] is saved in memory on the stack. This is best illustrated with a chart. Without vectorization, computing the rounds is like this (each "R" represents 1 round of SHA-1 computation): RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR With vectorization, 4 rounds can be computed in parallel: RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR Optimization: AVX The new "Sandy Bridge" microprocessor architecture, which supports AVX, allows another interesting optimization. SSSE3 instructions have two operands, a input and an output. AVX allows three operands, two inputs and an output. In many cases two SSSE3 instructions can be combined into one AVX instruction. The difference is best illustrated with an example. Consider these two instructions from the snippet above: pxor W_minus_16, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25]) ^ W[i-16:i-13] pxor W_TMP, W // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] ^ W[i-16:i-13]) ^ W[i-6:i-3]) With AVX they can be combined in one instruction: vpxor W_minus_16, W, W_TMP // W = (W[i-32:i-29] ^ W[i-28:i-25] ^ W[i-16:i-13]) ^ W[i-6:i-3]) This optimization is also in Solaris, although Sandy Bridge-based systems aren't widely available yet. As an exercise for the reader, AVX also has 256-bit media registers, %ymm0 - %ymm15 (a superset of 128-bit %xmm0 - %xmm15). Can %ymm registers be used to parallelize the code even more? Optimization: Solaris-specific In addition to using the Intel code described above, I performed other minor optimizations to the Solaris SHA-1 code: Increased the digest(1) and mac(1) command's buffer size from 4K to 64K, as previously done for decrypt(1) and encrypt(1). This size is well suited for ZFS file systems, but helps for other file systems as well. Optimized encode functions, which byte swap the input and output data, to copy/byte-swap 4 or 8 bytes at-a-time instead of 1 byte-at-a-time. Enhanced the Solaris mdb(1) and kmdb(1) debuggers to display all 16 %xmm and %ymm registers (mdb "$x" command). Previously they only displayed the first 8 that are available in 32-bit mode. Can't optimize if you can't debug :-). Changed the SHA-1 code to allow processing in "chunks" greater than 2 Gigabytes (64-bits) Performance I measured performance on a Sun Ultra 27 (which has a Nehalem-class Xeon 5500 Intel W3570 microprocessor @3.2GHz). Turbo mode is disabled for consistent performance measurement. Graphs are better than words and numbers, so here they are: The first graph shows the Solaris digest(1) command before and after the optimizations discussed here, contained in libmd(3LIB). I ran the digest command on a half GByte file in swapfs (/tmp) and execution time decreased from 1.35 seconds to 0.98 seconds. The second graph shows the the results of an internal microbenchmark that uses the Solaris libpkcs11(3LIB) library. The operations are on a 128 byte buffer with 10,000 iterations. The results show operations increased from 320,000 to 416,000 operations per second. Finally the third graph shows the results of an internal kernel microbenchmark that uses the Solaris /kernel/crypto/amd64/sha1 module. The operations are on a 64Kbyte buffer with 100 iterations. third graph shows the results of an internal kernel microbenchmark that uses the Solaris /kernel/crypto/amd64/sha1 module. The operations are on a 64Kbyte buffer with 100 iterations. The results show for 1 kernel thread, operations increased from 410 to 600 MBytes/second. For 8 kernel threads, operations increase from 1540 to 1940 MBytes/second. Availability This code is in Solaris 11 FCS. It is available in the 64-bit libmd(3LIB) library for 64-bit programs and is in the Solaris kernel. You must be running hardware that supports Intel's SSSE3 instructions (for example, Intel Nehalem, Westmere, or Sandy Bridge microprocessor architectures). The easiest way to determine if SSSE3 is available is with the isainfo(1) command. For example, nehalem $ isainfo -v $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu 32-bit i386 applications sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov sep cx8 tsc fpu If the output also shows "avx", the Solaris executes the even-more optimized 3-operand AVX instructions for SHA-1 mentioned above: sandybridge $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications avx xsave pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu 32-bit i386 applications avx xsave pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov sep cx8 tsc fpu No special configuration or setup is needed to take advantage of this code. Solaris libraries and kernel automatically determine if it's running on SSSE3 or AVX-capable machines and execute the correctly-tuned code for that microprocessor. Summary The Solaris 11 Crypto Framework, via the sha1 kernel module and libmd(3LIB) and libpkcs11(3LIB) libraries, incorporated a useful SHA-1 optimization from Intel for SSSE3-capable microprocessors. As with other Solaris optimizations, they come automatically "under the hood" with the current Solaris release. References "Improving the Performance of the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-1)" by Max Locktyukhin (Intel, March 2010). The source for these SHA-1 optimizations used in Solaris "SHA-1", Wikipedia Good overview of SHA-1 FIPS 180-1 SHA-1 standard (FIPS, 1995) NIST Comments on Cryptanalytic Attacks on SHA-1 (2005, revised 2006)

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• Solaris X86 64-bit Assembly Programming

  - by danx

  Solaris X86 64-bit Assembly Programming This is a simple example on writing, compiling, and debugging Solaris 64-bit x86 assembly language with a C program. This is also referred to as "AMD64" assembly. The term "AMD64" is used in an inclusive sense to refer to all X86 64-bit processors, whether AMD Opteron family or Intel 64 processor family. Both run Solaris x86. I'm keeping this example simple mainly to illustrate how everything comes together—compiler, assembler, linker, and debugger when using assembly language. The example I'm using here is a C program that calls an assembly language program passing a C string. The assembly language program takes the C string and calls printf() with it to print the string. AMD64 Register Usage But first let's review the use of AMD64 registers. AMD64 has several 64-bit registers, some special purpose (such as the stack pointer) and others general purpose. By convention, Solaris follows the AMD64 ABI in register usage, which is the same used by Linux, but different from Microsoft Windows in usage (such as which registers are used to pass parameters). This blog will only discuss conventions for Linux and Solaris. The following chart shows how AMD64 registers are used. The first six parameters to a function are passed through registers. If there's more than six parameters, parameter 7 and above are pushed on the stack before calling the function. The stack is also used to save temporary "stack" variables for use by a function. 64-bit Register Usage %rip Instruction Pointer points to the current instruction %rsp Stack Pointer %rbp Frame Pointer (saved stack pointer pointing to parameters on stack) %rdi Function Parameter 1 %rsi Function Parameter 2 %rdx Function Parameter 3 %rcx Function Parameter 4 %r8 Function Parameter 5 %r9 Function Parameter 6 %rax Function return value %r10, %r11 Temporary registers (need not be saved before used) %rbx, %r12, %r13, %r14, %r15 Temporary registers, but must be saved before use and restored before returning from the current function (usually with the push and pop instructions). 32-, 16-, and 8-bit registers To access the lower 32-, 16-, or 8-bits of a 64-bit register use the following: 64-bit register Least significant 32-bits Least significant 16-bits Least significant 8-bits %rax%eax%ax%al %rbx%ebx%bx%bl %rcx%ecx%cx%cl %rdx%edx%dx%dl %rsi%esi%si%sil %rdi%edi%di%axl %rbp%ebp%bp%bp %rsp%esp%sp%spl %r9%r9d%r9w%r9b %r10%r10d%r10w%r10b %r11%r11d%r11w%r11b %r12%r12d%r12w%r12b %r13%r13d%r13w%r13b %r14%r14d%r14w%r14b %r15%r15d%r15w%r15b %r16%r16d%r16w%r16b There's other registers present, such as the 64-bit %mm registers, 128-bit %xmm registers, 256-bit %ymm registers, and 512-bit %zmm registers. Except for %mm registers, these registers may not present on older AMD64 processors. Assembly Source The following is the source for a C program, helloas1.c, that calls an assembly function, hello_asm(). $ cat helloas1.c extern void hello_asm(char *s); int main(void) { hello_asm("Hello, World!"); } The assembly function called above, hello_asm(), is defined below. $ cat helloas2.s /* * helloas2.s * To build: * cc -m64 -o helloas2-cpp.s -D_ASM -E helloas2.s * cc -m64 -c -o helloas2.o helloas2-cpp.s */ #if defined(lint) || defined(__lint) /* ARGSUSED */ void hello_asm(char *s) { } #else /* lint */ #include <sys/asm_linkage.h> .extern printf ENTRY_NP(hello_asm) // Setup printf parameters on stack mov %rdi, %rsi // P2 (%rsi) is string variable lea .printf_string, %rdi // P1 (%rdi) is printf format string call printf ret SET_SIZE(hello_asm) // Read-only data .text .align 16 .type .printf_string, @object .printf_string: .ascii "The string is: %s.\n\0" #endif /* lint || __lint */ In the assembly source above, the C skeleton code under "#if defined(lint)" is optionally used for lint to check the interfaces with your C program--very useful to catch nasty interface bugs. The "asm_linkage.h" file includes some handy macros useful for assembly, such as ENTRY_NP(), used to define a program entry point, and SET_SIZE(), used to set the function size in the symbol table. The function hello_asm calls C function printf() by passing two parameters, Parameter 1 (P1) is a printf format string, and P2 is a string variable. The function begins by moving %rdi, which contains Parameter 1 (P1) passed hello_asm, to printf()'s P2, %rsi. Then it sets printf's P1, the format string, by loading the address the address of the format string in %rdi, P1. Finally it calls printf. After returning from printf, the hello_asm function returns itself. Larger, more complex assembly functions usually do more setup than the example above. If a function is returning a value, it would set %rax to the return value. Also, it's typical for a function to save the %rbp and %rsp registers of the calling function and to restore these registers before returning. %rsp contains the stack pointer and %rbp contains the frame pointer. Here is the typical function setup and return sequence for a function: ENTRY_NP(sample_assembly_function) push %rbp // save frame pointer on stack mov %rsp, %rbp // save stack pointer in frame pointer xor %rax, %r4ax // set function return value to 0. mov %rbp, %rsp // restore stack pointer pop %rbp // restore frame pointer ret // return to calling function SET_SIZE(sample_assembly_function) Compiling and Running Assembly Use the Solaris cc command to compile both C and assembly source, and to pre-process assembly source. You can also use GNU gcc instead of cc to compile, if you prefer. The "-m64" option tells the compiler to compile in 64-bit address mode (instead of 32-bit). $ cc -m64 -o helloas2-cpp.s -D_ASM -E helloas2.s $ cc -m64 -c -o helloas2.o helloas2-cpp.s $ cc -m64 -c helloas1.c $ cc -m64 -o hello-asm helloas1.o helloas2.o $ file hello-asm helloas1.o helloas2.o hello-asm: ELF 64-bit LSB executable AMD64 Version 1 [SSE FXSR FPU], dynamically linked, not stripped helloas1.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable AMD64 Version 1 helloas2.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable AMD64 Version 1 $ hello-asm The string is: Hello, World!. Debugging Assembly with MDB MDB is the Solaris system debugger. It can also be used to debug user programs, including assembly and C. The following example runs the above program, hello-asm, under control of the debugger. In the example below I load the program, set a breakpoint at the assembly function hello_asm, display the registers and the first parameter, step through the assembly function, and continue execution. $ mdb hello-asm # Start the debugger > hello_asm:b # Set a breakpoint > ::run # Run the program under the debugger mdb: stop at hello_asm mdb: target stopped at: hello_asm: movq %rdi,%rsi > $C # display function stack ffff80ffbffff6e0 hello_asm() ffff80ffbffff6f0 0x400adc() > $r # display registers %rax = 0x0000000000000000 %r8 = 0x0000000000000000 %rbx = 0xffff80ffbf7f8e70 %r9 = 0x0000000000000000 %rcx = 0x0000000000000000 %r10 = 0x0000000000000000 %rdx = 0xffff80ffbffff718 %r11 = 0xffff80ffbf537db8 %rsi = 0xffff80ffbffff708 %r12 = 0x0000000000000000 %rdi = 0x0000000000400cf8 %r13 = 0x0000000000000000 %r14 = 0x0000000000000000 %r15 = 0x0000000000000000 %cs = 0x0053 %fs = 0x0000 %gs = 0x0000 %ds = 0x0000 %es = 0x0000 %ss = 0x004b %rip = 0x0000000000400c70 hello_asm %rbp = 0xffff80ffbffff6e0 %rsp = 0xffff80ffbffff6c8 %rflags = 0x00000282 id=0 vip=0 vif=0 ac=0 vm=0 rf=0 nt=0 iopl=0x0 status=<of,df,IF,tf,SF,zf,af,pf,cf> %gsbase = 0x0000000000000000 %fsbase = 0xffff80ffbf782a40 %trapno = 0x3 %err = 0x0 > ::dis # disassemble the current instructions hello_asm: movq %rdi,%rsi hello_asm+3: leaq 0x400c90,%rdi hello_asm+0xb: call -0x220 <PLT:printf> hello_asm+0x10: ret 0x400c81: nop 0x400c85: nop 0x400c88: nop 0x400c8c: nop 0x400c90: pushq %rsp 0x400c91: pushq $0x74732065 0x400c96: jb +0x69 <0x400d01> > 0x0000000000400cf8/S # %rdi contains Parameter 1 0x400cf8: Hello, World! > [ # Step and execute 1 instruction mdb: target stopped at: hello_asm+3: leaq 0x400c90,%rdi > [ mdb: target stopped at: hello_asm+0xb: call -0x220 <PLT:printf> > [ The string is: Hello, World!. mdb: target stopped at: hello_asm+0x10: ret > [ mdb: target stopped at: main+0x19: movl $0x0,-0x4(%rbp) > :c # continue program execution mdb: target has terminated > $q # quit the MDB debugger $ In the example above, at the start of function hello_asm(), I display the stack contents with "$C", display the registers contents with "$r", then disassemble the current function with "::dis". The first function parameter, which is a C string, is passed by reference with the string address in %rdi (see the register usage chart above). The address is 0x400cf8, so I print the value of the string with the "/S" MDB command: "0x0000000000400cf8/S". I can also print the contents at an address in several other formats. Here's a few popular formats. For more, see the mdb(1) man page for details. address/S C string address/C ASCII character (1 byte) address/E unsigned decimal (8 bytes) address/U unsigned decimal (4 bytes) address/D signed decimal (4 bytes) address/J hexadecimal (8 bytes) address/X hexadecimal (4 bytes) address/B hexadecimal (1 bytes) address/K pointer in hexadecimal (4 or 8 bytes) address/I disassembled instruction Finally, I step through each machine instruction with the "[" command, which steps over functions. If I wanted to enter a function, I would use the "]" command. Then I continue program execution with ":c", which continues until the program terminates. MDB Basic Cheat Sheet Here's a brief cheat sheet of some of the more common MDB commands useful for assembly debugging. There's an entire set of macros and more powerful commands, especially some for debugging the Solaris kernel, but that's beyond the scope of this example. $C Display function stack with pointers $c Display function stack $e Display external function names $v Display non-zero variables and registers $r Display registers ::fpregs Display floating point (or "media" registers). Includes %st, %xmm, and %ymm registers. ::status Display program status ::run Run the program (followed by optional command line parameters) $q Quit the debugger address:b Set a breakpoint address:d Delete a breakpoint $b Display breakpoints :c Continue program execution after a breakpoint [ Step 1 instruction, but step over function calls ] Step 1 instruction address::dis Disassemble instructions at an address ::events Display events Further Information "Assembly Language Techniques for Oracle Solaris on x86 Platforms" by Paul Lowik (2004). Good tutorial on Solaris x86 optimization with assembly. The Solaris Operating System on x86 Platforms An excellent, detailed tutorial on X86 architecture, with Solaris specifics. By an ex-Sun employee, Frank Hofmann (2005). "AMD64 ABI Features", Solaris 64-bit Developer's Guide contains rules on data types and register usage for Intel 64/AMD64-class processors. (available at docs.oracle.com) Solaris X86 Assembly Language Reference Manual (available at docs.oracle.com) SPARC Assembly Language Reference Manual (available at docs.oracle.com) System V Application Binary Interface (2003) defines the AMD64 ABI for UNIX-class operating systems, including Solaris, Linux, and BSD. Google for it—the original website is gone. cc(1), gcc(1), and mdb(1) man pages.

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• MSCC: Purpose and benefits of Version Control Systems (VCS)

  Unfortunately, there was no monthly meetup during May. Which means that it was even more important and interesting to go forward with a great topic for this month. Earlier this year I already spoke to Nayar Joolfoo about doing a presentation on version control systems (VCS), and he gladly agreed since then. It was just about finding the right date for the action. Furthermore, it was also a great coincidence that Avinash Meetoo announced on social media networks that Knowledge 7 is about to have a new training on "Effective git" - which correlates to a book title Avinash is currently working on - all the best with your approach on this and reach out to our MSCC craftsmen for recessions. Once again a big Thank you to Orange Ebene Accelerator on providing the venue for us, and the MSCC members involved on securing the time slot for our event. Unfortunately, it's kind of tough to get an early confirmation for our meetups these days. I'll keep you posted on that one as there are some interesting and exciting options coming up soon. Okay, let's talk about the meeting and version control systems again. As usual, I'm going to put my first impression of the meetup: "Absolutely great topic, questions and discussions on version control systems, like git or VSO. I was also highly pleased by the number of first timers and female IT geeks. Hopefully, we will be able to keep this trend for future get-togethers." And I really have to emphasise the amount of fresh blood coming to our gathering. Also, during the initial phase it was surprising to see that exactly those first-timers, most of them students at various campuses here on the island, had absolutely no idea about version control systems. More about further down... Reactions of other attendees If I counted correctly, we had a total of 17 attendees this month, and I'd like to give you feedback from some of them: "Inspiring. Helped me understand more about GIT." -- Sean on event comments "Joined the meetup today with literally no idea what is a version control system. I have several reasons why I should be starting to use VCS as from NOW in my projects. Thanks Nayar, Jochen and other participants :)" -- Yudish on event comments "Was present today and I'm very satisfied.I was not aware if there was a such tool like git available. Thanks to those who contributed for this meetup.It was great. Learned a lot from this meetup!!" -- Leonardo on event comments "Seriously, I can see how it’s going to ease my task and help me save time. Gone are the issues with files backups.  And since I’ll be doing my dissertation this year, using Git would help me a lot for my backups and I’m grateful to Nayar for the great explanation." -- Swan-Iyah on MSCC meetup : Version Controls Hopefully, I'll be able to get some other sources - personal blogs preferred - on our meeting. Geeks, thank you so much for those encouraging comments. It's really great to experience that we, all members of the MSCC, are doing the right thing to get more IT information out, and to help each other to improve and evolve in our professional careers. Our agenda of the day Honestly, we had a bumpy start... First, I was battling a little bit with the movable room divider in order to maximize the space. I mean, we had 24 RSVPs and usually there might additional people coming along. Then, for what ever reason, we were facing power outages - actually twice in short periods. Not too good for the projector after all, but hey it went smooth for the rest of the time being. And last but not least... our first speaker Nayar got stuck somewhere on the road. ;-) Anyway, not a real show-stopper and we used the time until Nayar's arrival to introduce ourselves a little bit. It is always important for me to get to know the "newbies" a little bit, and as a result we had lots of students of university - first year, second year and recent graduates - among them. Surprisingly, none of them was ever in contact with version control systems at all. I mean, this is a shocking discovery! Similar to the ability of touch-typing I'd say that being able to use (and master) any kind of version control system is compulsory in any job in the IT industry. Seriously, I'm wondering what is being taught during the classes on the campus. All of them have to work on semester assessments or final projects, even in small teams of 2-4 people. That's the perfect occasion to get started with VCS. Already in this phase, we had great input from more experienced VCS users, like Sean, Avinash and myself. git - a modern approach to VCS - Nayar What a tour! Nayar gave us the full round of git from start to finish, even touching some more advanced techniques. First, he started to explain about the importance of version control systems as an essential tool for software developers, even working alone on a project, and the ability to have a kind of "time machine" that allows you to inspect and revert to a previous version of source code at any time. Then he showed how easy it is to install git on an Ubuntu based system but also mentioned that git is literally available for any operating system, like Windows, Mac OS X and of course other Linux distributions. Next, he showed us how to set the initial configuration values of user name and email address which simplifies the daily usage of the git client while working with your repositories. Then he initialised and added a new repository for some local development of a blogging software. All commands were done using the command line interface (CLI) so that they can be repeated on any system as reference. The syntax and the procedure is always the same, and Nayar clearly mentioned this to the attendees. Now, having a git repository in place it was about time to work on some "important" changes on the blogging software - just for the sake of demonstrating the ease of use and power of git. One interesting question came very early: "How many commands do we have to learn? It looks quite difficult at the moment" - Well, rest assured that during daily development circles you will need less than 10 git commands on a regular base: git add, commit, push, pull, checkout, and merge And Nayar demo'd all of them. Much to the delight of everyone he also showed gitk which is the git repository browser. It's an UI tool to display changes in a repository or a selected set of commits. This includes visualizing the commit graph, showing information related to each commit, and the files in the trees of each revision. Using gitk to display and browse information of a local git repository And last but not least, we took advantage of the internet connectivity and reached out to various online portals offering git hosting for free. Nayar showed us how to push the local repository into a remote system on github. Showing the web-based git browser and history handling, and then also explained and demo'd on how to connect to existing online repositories in order to get access to either your own source code or other people's open source projects. Next to github, we also spoke about bitbucket and gitlab as potential online platforms for your projects. Have a look at the conditions and details about their free service packages and what you can get additionally as a paying customer. Usually, you already get a lot of services for up to five users for free but there might be other important aspects that might have an impact on your decision. Anyways, moving git-based repositories between systems is a piece of cake, and changing online platforms is possible at any stage of your development. Visual Studio Online (VSO) - Jochen Well, Nayar literally covered all elements of working with git during his session, including the use of external online platforms. So, what would be the advantage of talking about Visual Studio Online (VSO)? First of all, VSO is "just another" online platform for hosting and managing git repositories on remote systems, equivalent to github, bitbucket, or any other web site. At the moment (of writing), Microsoft also provides a free package of up to five users / developers on a git repository but there is more in that package. Of course, it is related to software development on the Windows systems and the bonds are tightened towards the use of Visual Studio but out of experience you are absolutely not restricted to that. Connecting a Linux or Mac OS X machine with a git client or an integrated development environment (IDE) like Eclipse or Xcode works as smooth as expected. So, why should one opt in for VSO? Well, one of the main aspects that I would like to mention here is that VSO integrates the Application Life Cycle Methodology (ALM) of Microsoft in their platform. Meaning that you get agile project management with Backlogs, Sprints, Burn-down charts as well as the ability to track tasks, bug reports and work items next to collaborative team chats. It's the whole package of agile development you'll get. And, something I mentioned briefly during the begin of our meeting, VSO gives you the possibility of an automated continuous integrated (CI) process which builds and can run tests of your source code after each commit of changes. Having a proper CI strategy is also part of the Clean Code Developer practices - on Level Green actually -, and not only simplifies your life as a software developer but also reduces the sources of potential errors. Seamless integration and automated deployment between Microsoft Azure Web Sites and git repository But my favourite feature is the seamless continuous deployment to Microsoft Azure. Especially, while working on web projects it's absolutely astounishing that as soon as you commit your chances it just takes a couple of seconds until your modifications are deployed and available on your Azure-hosted web sites. Upcoming Events and networking Due to the adjusted times, everybody was kind of hungry and we didn't follow up on networking or upcoming events - very unfortunate to my opinion and this will have an impact on future planning of our meetups. Because I rather would like to see more conversations during and at the end of our meetings than everyone just packing their laptops, bags and accessories and rush off to grab some food. I was hoping to get some information regarding this year's Code Challenge - supposedly to be organised during July? Maybe someone could leave a comment on that - but I couldn't get any updates. Well, I'll keep digging... In case that you would like to get more into git and how to use it effectively, please check out Knowledge 7's upcoming course on "Effective git". Thanks Avinash for your vital input into today's conversation and I'm looking forward to get a grip on your book title very soon. My resume of the day Do not work in IT without any kind of version control system! Seriously, without a VCS in place you're doing it wrong. It's like driving a car without seat belts attached or riding your bike without safety helmet. You don't do that! End of discussion. ;-) Nowadays, having access to free (as in cost) tools to install on your machine and numerous online platforms to host your source code for free for up to five users it's a no-brainer to get yourself familiar with VCS. Today's sessions gave a good overview on how to start using git and how to connect to various remote services like github or VSO.

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• [GEEK SCHOOL] Network Security 2: Preventing Disaster with User Account Control

  - by Ciprian Rusen

  In this second lesson in our How-To Geek School about securing the Windows devices in your network, we will talk about User Account Control (UAC). Users encounter this feature each time they need to install desktop applications in Windows, when some applications need administrator permissions in order to work and when they have to change different system settings and files. UAC was introduced in Windows Vista as part of Microsoft’s “Trustworthy Computing” initiative. Basically, UAC is meant to act as a wedge between you and installing applications or making system changes. When you attempt to do either of these actions, UAC will pop up and interrupt you. You may either have to confirm you know what you’re doing, or even enter an administrator password if you don’t have those rights. Some users find UAC annoying and choose to disable it but this very important security feature of Windows (and we strongly caution against doing that). That’s why in this lesson, we will carefully explain what UAC is and everything it does. As you will see, this feature has an important role in keeping Windows safe from all kinds of security problems. In this lesson you will learn which activities may trigger a UAC prompt asking for permissions and how UAC can be set so that it strikes the best balance between usability and security. You will also learn what kind of information you can find in each UAC prompt. Last but not least, you will learn why you should never turn off this feature of Windows. By the time we’re done today, we think you will have a newly found appreciation for UAC, and will be able to find a happy medium between turning it off completely and letting it annoy you to distraction. What is UAC and How Does it Work? UAC or User Account Control is a security feature that helps prevent unauthorized system changes to your Windows computer or device. These changes can be made by users, applications, and sadly, malware (which is the biggest reason why UAC exists in the first place). When an important system change is initiated, Windows displays a UAC prompt asking for your permission to make the change. If you don’t give your approval, the change is not made. In Windows, you will encounter UAC prompts mostly when working with desktop applications that require administrative permissions. For example, in order to install an application, the installer (generally a setup.exe file) asks Windows for administrative permissions. UAC initiates an elevation prompt like the one shown earlier asking you whether it is okay to elevate permissions or not. If you say “Yes”, the installer starts as administrator and it is able to make the necessary system changes in order to install the application correctly. When the installer is closed, its administrator privileges are gone. If you run it again, the UAC prompt is shown again because your previous approval is not remembered. If you say “No”, the installer is not allowed to run and no system changes are made. If a system change is initiated from a user account that is not an administrator, e.g. the Guest account, the UAC prompt will also ask for the administrator password in order to give the necessary permissions. Without this password, the change won’t be made. Which Activities Trigger a UAC Prompt? There are many types of activities that may trigger a UAC prompt: Running a desktop application as an administrator Making changes to settings and files in the Windows and Program Files folders Installing or removing drivers and desktop applications Installing ActiveX controls Changing settings to Windows features like the Windows Firewall, UAC, Windows Update, Windows Defender, and others Adding, modifying, or removing user accounts Configuring Parental Controls in Windows 7 or Family Safety in Windows 8.x Running the Task Scheduler Restoring backed-up system files Viewing or changing the folders and files of another user account Changing the system date and time You will encounter UAC prompts during some or all of these activities, depending on how UAC is set on your Windows device. If this security feature is turned off, any user account or desktop application can make any of these changes without a prompt asking for permissions. In this scenario, the different forms of malware existing on the Internet will also have a higher chance of infecting and taking control of your system. In Windows 8.x operating systems you will never see a UAC prompt when working with apps from the Windows Store. That’s because these apps, by design, are not allowed to modify any system settings or files. You will encounter UAC prompts only when working with desktop programs. What You Can Learn from a UAC Prompt? When you see a UAC prompt on the screen, take time to read the information displayed so that you get a better understanding of what is going on. Each prompt first tells you the name of the program that wants to make system changes to your device, then you can see the verified publisher of that program. Dodgy software tends not to display this information and instead of a real company name, you will see an entry that says “Unknown”. If you have downloaded that program from a less than trustworthy source, then it might be better to select “No” in the UAC prompt. The prompt also shares the origin of the file that’s trying to make these changes. In most cases the file origin is “Hard drive on this computer”. You can learn more by pressing “Show details”. You will see an additional entry named “Program location” where you can see the physical location on your hard drive, for the file that’s trying to perform system changes. Make your choice based on the trust you have in the program you are trying to run and its publisher. If a less-known file from a suspicious location is requesting a UAC prompt, then you should seriously consider pressing “No”. What’s Different About Each UAC Level? Windows 7 and Windows 8.x have four UAC levels: Always notify – when this level is used, you are notified before desktop applications make changes that require administrator permissions or before you or another user account changes Windows settings like the ones mentioned earlier. When the UAC prompt is shown, the desktop is dimmed and you must choose “Yes” or “No” before you can do anything else. This is the most secure and also the most annoying way to set UAC because it triggers the most UAC prompts. Notify me only when programs/apps try to make changes to my computer (default) – Windows uses this as the default for UAC. When this level is used, you are notified before desktop applications make changes that require administrator permissions. If you are making system changes, UAC doesn’t show any prompts and it automatically gives you the necessary permissions for making the changes you desire. When a UAC prompt is shown, the desktop is dimmed and you must choose “Yes” or “No” before you can do anything else. This level is slightly less secure than the previous one because malicious programs can be created for simulating the keystrokes or mouse moves of a user and change system settings for you. If you have a good security solution in place, this scenario should never occur. Notify me only when programs/apps try to make changes to my computer (do not dim my desktop) – this level is different from the previous in in the fact that, when the UAC prompt is shown, the desktop is not dimmed. This decreases the security of your system because different kinds of desktop applications (including malware) might be able to interfere with the UAC prompt and approve changes that you might not want to be performed. Never notify – this level is the equivalent of turning off UAC. When using it, you have no protection against unauthorized system changes. Any desktop application and any user account can make system changes without your permission. How to Configure UAC If you would like to change the UAC level used by Windows, open the Control Panel, then go to “System and Security” and select “Action Center”. On the column on the left you will see an entry that says “Change User Account Control settings”. The “User Account Control Settings” window is now opened. Change the position of the UAC slider to the level you want applied then press “OK”. Depending on how UAC was initially set, you may receive a UAC prompt requiring you to confirm this change. Why You Should Never Turn Off UAC If you want to keep the security of your system at decent levels, you should never turn off UAC. When you disable it, everything and everyone can make system changes without your consent. This makes it easier for all kinds of malware to infect and take control of your system. It doesn’t matter whether you have a security suite or antivirus installed or third-party antivirus, basic common-sense measures like having UAC turned on make a big difference in keeping your devices safe from harm. We have noticed that some users disable UAC prior to setting up their Windows devices and installing third-party software on them. They keep it disabled while installing all the software they will use and enable it when done installing everything, so that they don’t have to deal with so many UAC prompts. Unfortunately this causes problems with some desktop applications. They may fail to work after you enable UAC. This happens because, when UAC is disabled, the virtualization techniques UAC uses for your applications are inactive. This means that certain user settings and files are installed in a different place and when you turn on UAC, applications stop working because they should be placed elsewhere. Therefore, whatever you do, do not turn off UAC completely! Coming up next … In the next lesson you will learn about Windows Defender, what this tool can do in Windows 7 and Windows 8.x, what’s different about it in these operating systems and how it can be used to increase the security of your system.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 11, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 11, 2010New ProjectsASP.NET MVC Extensions: ASP.NET MVC Extensions is developed on top of ASP.NET MVC extensibility point, which allows your IoC Container to rule everywhere.Best practices in .NET: NMA is a collection of knowledges that I learned from my co-worker and Internet. It's built on Domain Driven Design theories. I used Struture Map,...BioRider: Project participant of the 1st National Award for InteroperabilityBSoft: that's the project for bsoftClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML makes it easier for developers to create OpenXML files for Excel 2007. It provides a nice object oriented way to manipulate the files (si...Dragon Master: A tool for all D&D masters that need to create Dragon NPCsFacturator - Create invoices easy and fast: Windows forms application for creating invoices based on a Word template. Including a simple workflow for send, payed and finished invoices and a q...FreeEPG: An Australian EPG using the Freeview online guide. All Freeview regions are supported and data can be exported in either XMLTV or Microsoft Media ...GreedyRSS: Convert everything to RSS FeedHByte: In honor of the heisenberg uncertainty principle. This is an implementation of a type who has byte semantics, but who's value and location can not...JSON RPC 2.0 - Javascript/.NET Implementation: JSON RPC 2.0 - Javascript/.NET Implementation - NOT READY YETMjollnir - Supplemental Library for BCL: Mjollnir is Supplements Library for BCL. Mjollnir is Compatible with .NET Framework 4 (or maybe later).Money Spinner: MoneySpinnerMSPY 2010 Open Extended Dictionary Building Tool: A tool to create Open Extend Dictionary for Microsoft Pinyin IME 2010, it is develped in C#Sharepoint Data Store: This is a small library that lets SharePoint developers store and manage custom application information in SharePoint.SharePointSlim: We are going to use it in conjunction with the PowerSlim projectSSTA: A Tool to Compare SQL Database Schema Versionstbeasy: tbeasyNew Releases8085 Microprocessor simulator: 8085 Instruction Set Simulator with source code: 8085 Instruction set simulator with windows installer plus complete source code and examplesAutoArchive: Site Template...: Slightly off topic, but take a looK!BioRider: Uptiva Dreams IT Entry: ==================================== National Interoperability Award ==================================== TEAM: Uptiva Dreams IT PROJECT: BioRide...C# Developer Utility Library: ScrimpNet.Core Library May 2010: Initial upload of project library. Contains only source files. Recommend adding extracted files to your project as a project reference.Coot: Beta 1: To install the screen saver: Extract the contents of the zip file (all three files) to C:\Windows\System32 Go to screen saver properties, select ...Deploy Workflow Manager: Deploy Workflow Manager v1: Recommend you test on your development environment first before implementing into production. Criteria to run the workflow is assumed to be inclu...Expression Encoder 3 Visual Basic Samples: Encoder 3 VB Samples: Zip file contains the Encoder 3 samples written in Visual Basic.FreeEPG: Debug Release: Initial Release. Run the application from the command line for options. If you choose to run the client as a Windows Service, then you will need t...FSharpChess: Alpha Release 0.197: This is just the latest version of the binaries. Note that there are two excecutables: FSharpChess includes a UI partially written in C# FSharpCh...GreedyRSS: GreedyRSS V2: V2与V1相比： 改进了插件架构 用数据库取代XML配置文件 用Web Services暴露了部分功能Headspring Labs: ASP.NET MVC 2 tips and tricks (code): Contains example app that demonstrates techniques in the Tips & Tricks powerpointHeadspring Labs: ASP.NET MVC tips and tricks PPT: Powerpoint file for the ASP.NET MVC tips and tricks talk.HouseFly controls: HouseFly controls beta 1.0.0.0: HouseFly controls release 1.0.0.0 betaiTuner - The iTunes Companion: iTuner 1.2.3782: This production release of iTuner 1.2 allows you to synchronize one or more iTunes playlists to a USB MP3 player. It also provides the ability to ...JSON RPC 2.0 - Javascript/.NET Implementation: v0.7: Protocol implemented. Most of the extra features implemented.MapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi May 10, 2010: This version fixes a reproject bug where false_easting from .prj files was not being correctly converted into meters when the projection was in feet.Mouse Zoom - Visual Studio Extension: MouseZoom 1.7: Version 1.7 fixes a bug that can cause the keys to stick when leaving focus (e.g. opening a VS dialog box).Mouse Zoom - Visual Studio Extension: MouseZoom 1.8: Override mouse wheel scroll functionality to always scroll 25% no matter what zoom level you are on (by default, scrolling with the mouse wheel bec...MSPY 2010 Open Extended Dictionary Building Tool: 20100511build: First release. 1. Installation After you download it to your local disk, create a new folder and unzip it to the new folder, that's it. 2. run ...MSPY 2010 Open Extended Dictionary Building Tool: 20100511build2: First release. 1. Installation After you download it to your local disk, create a new folder and unzip it to the new folder, that's it. 2. run ...Multiwfn: multiwfn1.3.2: multiwfn1.3.2NASA Space Shuttle TV Schedule Transfer to Outlook Calendar: NASA Space Shuttle TV Schedule Release v1.4.132.1: Warning!There is a problem with the latest version of the program and rev 0 of STS-132 mission schedule. I am looking into the problem when the yea...NASA Space Shuttle TV Schedule Transfer to Outlook Calendar: NASA Space Shuttle TV Schedule Release v1.4.132.2: This release fixes a problem with rev 0 of the STS-132 mission schedule in recognizing the year of launch. NASA changed the year of launch to a fo...Object/Relational Mapper & Code Generator in Net 2.0 for Relational & XML Schema: 2.8: Switched compliation options to always run in 32-bit mode, to ensure it can connect to MSAccess & MSExcel on 64-bit machines. Updated parameterised...Open NFSe: OpenNFSe-Salvador v1.0.0: Atualização do OpenNFSe-Salvador para o novo schema utilizado pela prefeitura de Salvador.OpenSLIM: OpenSLIM-v373b0-20100509-0: Here is the list of new additions and improvements that this new major release incorporates: Systems Decommissioning Management. Improvements on...Pcap.Net: Pcap.Net 0.6.0 (44468): Pcap.Net - May 2010 Release Pcap.Net is a .NET wrapper for WinPcap written in C++/CLI and C#. It Features almost all WinPcap features and includes ...PowerShell Community Extensions: 2.0 Production: PowerShell Community Extensions 2.0 Release NotesMay 10, 2010 The primary purpose of the Pscx 2.0 release is to convert from the previous approach...Scrum Sprint Monitor: v1.0.0.47921 (.NET 4-TFS 2010): What is new in this release? Minor version over 1.0.0.47911 introducing CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program). This is taking advantage of...Sharepoint Data Store: 1.0: First ReleaseSPVisualDev - SharePoint Developer Tool: Version 2.2.0: Visual Studio 2010 is now supported. Note that this is only intended to be used for MOSS 2007 / WSS 3.0 development and not for SP 2010. Package SP...SQL Server PowerShell Extensions: 2.2.1 Production: Release 2.2 re-implements SQLPSX as PowersShell version 2.0 modules. SQLPSX consists of 9 modules with 133 advanced functions, 2 cmdlets and 7 scri...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30510.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30510.1: Automatic drop of latest buildVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30510.2: Automatic drop of latest buildVolumeMaster: Volume Master 2.0 Beta: First release of VolumeMaster. So if you're running Windows Vista / 7 you can have a handy Volume OSD and control your volume with the following sh...WabbitStudio Z80 Software Tools: SPASM2 32-Bit: A test release for SPASM2.Web Camera Shooter: 1.0.0.1: Video capturing: Touchless SDK -> AForge.Video. Main window shown in taskbar and not top most. Native images generated for all assemblies. Sm...Most Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETPHPExcelMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMirror Testing SystemThe Information Literacy Education Learning Environment (ILE)RawrCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightwhiteBlogEngine.NETTweetSharpjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesIonics Isapi Rewrite Filter

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