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• JMaghreb 2012 Trip Report

  - by arungupta

  JMaghreb is the inaugural Java conference organized by Morocco JUG. It is the biggest Java conference in Maghreb (5 countries in North West Africa). Oracle was the exclusive platinum sponsor with several others. The registrations had to be closed at 1412 for the free conference and several folks were already on the waiting list. Rabat with 531 registrations and Casablanca with 426 were the top cities. Some statistics ... 850+ attendees over 2 days, 500+ every day 30 sessions were delivered by 18 speakers from 10 different countries 10 sessions in French and 20 in English 6 of the speakers spoke at JavaOne 2012 8 will be at Devoxx Attendees from 5 different countries and 57 cities in Morocco 40.9% qualified them as professional and rest as students Topics ranged from HTML5, Java EE 7, ADF, JavaFX, MySQL, JCP, Vaadin, Android, Community, JCP Java EE 6 hands-on lab was sold out within 7 minutes and JavaFX in 12 minutes I gave the keynote along with Simon Ritter which was basically a recap of the Strategy and Technical keynotes presented at JavaOne 2012. An informal survey during the keynote showed the following numbers: 25% using NetBeans, 90% on Eclipse, 3 on JDeveloper, 1 on IntelliJ About 10 subscribers to free online Java magazine. This digital magazine is a comprehensive source of information for everything Java - subscribe for free!! About 10-15% using Java SE 7. Download JDK 7 and get started today! Even JDK 8 builds have been available for a while now. My second talk explained the core concepts of WebSocket and how JSR 356 is providing a standard API to build WebSocket-driven applications in Java EE 7. TOTD #183 explains how you can easily get started with WebSocket in GlassFish 4. The complete slide deck is available: Next day started with a community keynote by Sonya Barry. Some of us live the life of JCP, JSR, EG, EC, RI, etc every day, but not every body is. To address that, Sonya prepared an excellent introductory presentation providing an explanation of these terms and how java.net infrastructure supports Java development. The registration for the lab showed there is a definite demand for these technologies in this part of the world. I delivered the Java EE 6 hands-on lab to a packed room of about 120 attendees. Most of the attendees were able to progress and follow the lab instructions. Some of the attendees did not have a laptop but were taking extensive notes on paper notepads. Several attendees were already using Java EE 6 in their projects and typically they are the ones asking deep dive questions. Also gave out three copies of my recently released Java EE 6 Pocket Guide and new GlassFish t-shirts. Definitely feels happy to coach ~120 more Java developers learn standards-based enterprise Java programming. I also participated in a JCP BoF along with Werner, Sonya, and Badr. Adotp-a-JSR, java.net infrastructure, how to file a JSR, what is an RI, and other similar topics were discussed in a candid manner. You can follow @JMaghrebConf or check out their facebook page. java.net published a timely conversation with Badr El Houari - the fearless leader of the Morocco JUG team. Did you know that Morocco JUG stood for JCP EC elections (ADD LINK) ? Even though they did not get elected but did fairly well. Now some sample tweets from #JMaghreb ... #JMaghreb is over. Impressive for a first edition! Thanks @badrelhouari and all the @MoroccoJUG team ! Since you @speakjava : System.out.println("Thank you so much dear Tech Evangelist ! The JavaFX was pretty amazing !!! "); #JMaghreb @YounesVendetta @arungupta @JMaghrebConf Right ! hope he will be back to morocco again and again .. :) @Alji_ @arungupta @JMaghrebConf That dude is a genius ;) Put it on your wall :p @arungupta rocking Java EE 6 at @JMaghrebConf #Java #JavaEE #JMaghreb http://t.co/isl0Iq5p @sonyabarry you are an awesome speaker ;-) #JMaghreb rich more than 550 attendees in day one. Expecting more tomorrow! ongratulations @badrelhouari the organisation was great! The talks were pretty interesting, and the turnout was surprising at #JMaghreb! #JMaghreb is truly awesome... The speakers are unbelievable ! #JavaFX... Just amazing #JMaghreb Charmed by the talk about #javaFX ( nodes architecture, MVC, Lazy loading, binding... ) gotta start using it intead of SWT. #JMaghreb JavaFX is killing JFreeChart. It supports Charts a lot of kind of them ... #JMaghreb The british man is back #JMaghreb I do like him!! #JMaghreb @arungupta rocking @JMaghrebConf. pic.twitter.com/CNohA3PE @arungupta Great talk about the future of Java EE (JEE 7 & JEE 8) Thank you. #JMaghreb JEE7 more mooore power , leeess less code !! #JMaghreb They are simplifying the existing API for Java Message Service 2.0 #JMaghreb good to know , the more the code is simplified the better ! The Glassdoor guy #arungupta is doing it RIGHT ! #JMaghreb Great presentation of The Future of the Java Platform: Java EE 7, Java SE 8 & Beyond #jMaghreb @arungupta is a great Guy apparently #JMaghreb On a personal front, the hotel (Soiftel Jardin des Roses) was pretty nice and the location was perfect. There was a 1.8 mile loop dirt trail right next to it so I managed to squeeze some runs before my upcoming marathon. Also enjoyed some great Moroccan cuisine - Couscous, Tajine, mint tea, and moroccan salad. Visit to Kasbah of the Udayas, Hassan II (one of the tallest mosque in the world), and eating in a restaurant in a kasbah are some of the exciting local experiences. Now some pictures from the event (and around the city) ... And the complete album: Many thanks to Badr, Faisal, and rest of the team for organizing a great conference. They are already thinking about how to improve the content, logisitics, and flow for the next year. I'm certainly looking forward to JMaghreb 2.0 :-)

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• How I do VCS

  - by Wes McClure

  After years of dabbling with different version control systems and techniques, I wanted to share some of what I like and dislike in a few blog posts.  To start this out, I want to talk about how I use VCS in a team environment.  These come in a series of tips or best practices that I try to follow.  Note: This list is subject to change in the future. Always use some form of version control for all aspects of software development. Development is an evolution.  Looking back at where we were is an invaluable asset in that process.  This includes data schemas and documentation. Reverting / reapplying changes is absolutely critical for efficient development. The tools I use: Code: Hg (preferred), SVN Database: TSqlMigrations Documents: Sometimes in code repository, also SharePoint with versioning Always tag a commit (changeset) with comments This is a quick way to describe to someone else (or your future self) what the changeset entails. Be brief but courteous. One or two sentences about the task, not the actual changes. Use precommit hooks or setup the central repository to reject changes without comments. Link changesets to documentation If your project management system integrates with version control, or has a way to externally reference stories, tasks etc then leave a reference in the commit.  This helps locate more information about the commit and/or related changesets. It’s best to have a precommit hook or system that requires this information, otherwise it’s easy to forget. Ability to work offline is required, including commits and history Yes this requires a DVCS locally but doesn’t require the central repository to be a DVCS.  I prefer to use either Git or Hg but if it isn’t possible to migrate the central repository, it’s still possible for a developer to push / pull changes to that repository from a local Hg or Git repository. Never lock resources (files) in a central repository… Rude! We have merge tools for a reason, merging sucked a long time ago, it doesn’t anymore… stop locking files! This is unproductive, rude and annoying to other team members. Always review everything in your commit. Never ever commit a set of files without reviewing the changes in each. Never add a file without asking yourself, deep down inside, does this belong? If you leave to make changes during a review, start the review over when you come back.  Never assume you didn’t touch a file, double check. This is another reason why you want to avoid large, infrequent commits. Requirements for tools Quickly show pending changes for the entire repository. Default action for a resource with pending changes is a diff. Pluggable diff & merge tool Produce a unified diff or a diff of all changes.  This is helpful to bulk review changes instead of opening each file. The central repository is not your own personal dump yard.  Breaking this rule is a sure fire way to get the F bomb dropped in front of your name, multiple times. If you turn on Visual Studio’s commit on closing studio option, I will personally break your fingers. By the way, the person(s) in charge of this feature should be fired and never be allowed near programming, ever again. Commit (integrate) to the central repository / branch frequently I try to do this before leaving each day, especially without a DVCS.  One never knows when they might need to work from remote the following day. Never commit commented out code If it isn’t needed anymore, delete it! If you aren’t sure if it might be useful in the future, delete it! This is why we have history. If you don’t know why it’s commented out, figure it out and then either uncomment it or delete it. Don’t commit build artifacts, user preferences and temporary files. Build artifacts do not belong in VCS, everything in them is present in the code. (ie: bin\*, obj\*, *.dll, *.exe) User preferences are your settings, stop overriding my preferences files! (ie: *.suo and *.user files) Most tools allow you to ignore certain files and Hg/Git allow you to version this as an ignore file.  Set this up as a first step when creating a new repository! Be polite when merging unresolved conflicts. Count to 10, cuss, grab a stress ball and realize it’s not a big deal.  Actually, it’s an opportunity to let you know that someone else is working in the same area and you might want to communicate with them. Following the other rules, especially committing frequently, will reduce the likelihood of this. Suck it up, we all have to deal with this unintended consequence at times.  Just be careful and GET FAMILIAR with your merge tool.  It’s really not as scary as you think.  I personally prefer KDiff3 as its merging capabilities rock. Don’t blindly merge and then blindly commit your changes, this is rude and unprofessional.  Make sure you understand why the conflict occurred and which parts of the code you want to keep.  Apply scrutiny when you commit a manual merge: review the diff! Make sure you test the changes (build and run automated tests) Become intimate with your version control system and the tools you use with it. Avoid trial and error as much as is possible, sit down and test the tool out, read some tutorials etc.  Create test repositories and walk through common scenarios. Find the most efficient way to do your work.  These tools will be used repetitively, so inefficiencies will add up. Sometimes this involves a mix of tools, both GUI and CLI. I like a combination of both Tortoise Hg and hg cli to get the job efficiently. Always tag releases Create a way to find a given release, whether this be in comments or an explicit tag / branch.  This should be readily discoverable. Create release branches to patch bugs and then merge the changes back to other development branch(es). If using feature branches, strive for periodic integrations. Feature branches often cause forked code that becomes irreconcilable.  Strive to re-integrate somewhat frequently with the branch this code will ultimately be merged into.  This will avoid merge conflicts in the future. Feature branches are best when they are mutually exclusive of active development in other branches. Use and abuse local commits , at least one per task in a story. This builds a trail of changes in your local repository that can be pushed to a central repository when the story is complete. Never commit a broken build or failing tests to the central repository. It’s ok for a local commit to break the build and/or tests.  In fact, I encourage this if it helps group the changes more logically.  This is one of the main reasons I got excited about DVCS, when I wanted more than one changeset for a set of pending changes but some files could be grouped into both changesets (like solution file / project file changes). If you have more than a dozen outstanding changed resources, there should probably be more than one commit involved. Exceptions when maintaining code bases that require shotgun surgery, in this case, it’s a design smell :) Don’t version sensitive information Especially usernames / passwords   There is one area I haven’t found a solution I like yet: versioning 3rd party libraries and/or code.  I really dislike keeping any assemblies in the repository, but seems to be a common practice for external libraries.  Please feel free to share your ideas about this below.    -Wes

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• DRY and SRP

  - by Timothy Klenke

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TimothyK/archive/2014/06/11/dry-and-srp.aspxKent Beck’s XP Simplicity Rules (aka Four Rules of Simple Design) are a prioritized list of rules that when applied to your code generally yield a great design.  As you’ll see from the above link the list has slightly evolved over time.  I find today they are usually listed as: All Tests Pass Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) Express Intent Minimalistic These are prioritized.  If your code doesn’t work (rule 1) then everything else is forfeit.  Go back to rule one and get the code working before worrying about anything else. Over the years the community have debated whether the priority of rules 2 and 3 should be reversed.  Some say a little duplication in the code is OK as long as it helps express intent.  I’ve debated it myself.  This recent post got me thinking about this again, hence this post.   I don’t think it is fair to compare “Expressing Intent” against “DRY”.  This is a comparison of apples to oranges.  “Expressing Intent” is a principal of code quality.  “Repeating Yourself” is a code smell.  A code smell is merely an indicator that there might be something wrong with the code.  It takes further investigation to determine if a violation of an underlying principal of code quality has actually occurred. For example “using nouns for method names”, “using verbs for property names”, or “using Booleans for parameters” are all code smells that indicate that code probably isn’t doing a good job at expressing intent.  They are usually very good indicators.  But what principle is the code smell of Duplication pointing to and how good of an indicator is it? Duplication in the code base is bad for a couple reasons.  If you need to make a change and that needs to be made in a number of locations it is difficult to know if you have caught all of them.  This can lead to bugs if/when one of those locations is overlooked.  By refactoring the code to remove all duplication there will be left with only one place to change, thereby eliminating this problem. With most projects the code becomes the single source of truth for a project.  If a production code base is inconsistent with a five year old requirements or design document the production code that people are currently living with is usually declared as the current reality (or truth).  Requirement or design documents at this age in a project life cycle are usually of little value. Although comparing production code to external documentation is usually straight forward, duplication within the code base muddles this declaration of truth.  When code is duplicated small discrepancies will creep in between the two copies over time.  The question then becomes which copy is correct?  As different factions debate how the software should work, trust in the software and the team behind it erodes. The code smell of Duplication points to a violation of the “Single Source of Truth” principle.  Let me define that as: A stakeholder’s requirement for a software change should never cause more than one class to change. Violation of the Single Source of Truth principle will always result in duplication in the code.  However, the inverse is not always true.  Duplication in the code does not necessarily indicate that there is a violation of the Single Source of Truth principle. To illustrate this, let’s look at a retail system where the system will (1) send a transaction to a bank and (2) print a receipt for the customer.  Although these are two separate features of the system, they are closely related.  The reason for printing the receipt is usually to provide an audit trail back to the bank transaction.  Both features use the same data:  amount charged, account number, transaction date, customer name, retail store name, and etcetera.  Because both features use much of the same data, there is likely to be a lot of duplication between them.  This duplication can be removed by making both features use the same data access layer. Then start coming the divergent requirements.  The receipt stakeholder wants a change so that the account number has the last few digits masked out to protect the customer’s privacy.  That can be solve with a small IF statement whilst still eliminating all duplication in the system.  Then the bank wants to take a picture of the customer as well as capture their signature and/or PIN number for enhanced security.  Then the receipt owner wants to pull data from a completely different system to report the customer’s loyalty program point total. After a while you realize that the two stakeholders have somewhat similar, but ultimately different responsibilities.  They have their own reasons for pulling the data access layer in different directions.  Then it dawns on you, the Single Responsibility Principle: There should never be more than one reason for a class to change. In this example we have two stakeholders giving two separate reasons for the data access class to change.  It is clear violation of the Single Responsibility Principle.  That’s a problem because it can often lead the project owner pitting the two stakeholders against each other in a vein attempt to get them to work out a mutual single source of truth.  But that doesn’t exist.  There are two completely valid truths that the developers need to support.  How is this to be supported and honour the Single Responsibility Principle?  The solution is to duplicate the data access layer and let each stakeholder control their own copy. The Single Source of Truth and Single Responsibility Principles are very closely related.  SST tells you when to remove duplication; SRP tells you when to introduce it.  They may seem to be fighting each other, but really they are not.  The key is to clearly identify the different responsibilities (or sources of truth) over a system.  Sometimes there is a single person with that responsibility, other times there are many.  This can be especially difficult if the same person has dual responsibilities.  They might not even realize they are wearing multiple hats. In my opinion Single Source of Truth should be listed as the second rule of simple design with Express Intent at number three.  Investigation of the DRY code smell should yield to the proper application SST, without violating SRP.  When necessary leave duplication in the system and let the class names express the different people that are responsible for controlling them.  Knowing all the people with responsibilities over a system is the higher priority because you’ll need to know this before you can express it.  Although it may be a code smell when there is duplication in the code, it does not necessarily mean that the coder has chosen to be expressive over DRY or that the code is bad.

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• RiverTrail - JavaScript GPPGU Data Parallelism

  - by JoshReuben

  Where is WebCL ? The Khronos WebCL working group is working on a JavaScript binding to the OpenCL standard so that HTML 5 compliant browsers can host GPGPU web apps – e.g. for image processing or physics for WebGL games - http://www.khronos.org/webcl/ . While Nokia & Samsung have some protype WebCL APIs, Intel has one-upped them with a higher level of abstraction: RiverTrail. Intro to RiverTrail Intel Labs JavaScript RiverTrail provides GPU accelerated SIMD data-parallelism in web applications via a familiar JavaScript programming paradigm. It extends JavaScript with simple deterministic data-parallel constructs that are translated at runtime into a low-level hardware abstraction layer. With its high-level JS API, programmers do not have to learn a new language or explicitly manage threads, orchestrate shared data synchronization or scheduling. It has been proposed as a draft specification to ECMA a (known as ECMA strawman). RiverTrail runs in all popular browsers (except I.E. of course). To get started, download a prebuilt version https://github.com/downloads/RiverTrail/RiverTrail/rivertrail-0.17.xpi , install Intel's OpenCL SDK http://www.intel.com/go/opencl and try out the interactive River Trail shell http://rivertrail.github.com/interactive For a video overview, see  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jueg6zB5XaM . ParallelArray the ParallelArray type is the central component of this API & is a JS object that contains ordered collections of scalars – i.e. multidimensional uniform arrays. A shape property describes the dimensionality and size– e.g. a 2D RGBA image will have shape [height, width, 4]. ParallelArrays are immutable & fluent – they are manipulated by invoking methods on them which produce new ParallelArray objects. ParallelArray supports several constructors over arrays, functions & even the canvas. // Create an empty Parallel Array var pa = new ParallelArray(); // pa0 = <>   // Create a ParallelArray out of a nested JS array. // Note that the inner arrays are also ParallelArrays var pa = new ParallelArray([ [0,1], [2,3], [4,5] ]); // pa1 = <<0,1>, <2,3>, <4.5>>   // Create a two-dimensional ParallelArray with shape [3, 2] using the comprehension constructor var pa = new ParallelArray([3, 2], function(iv){return iv[0] * iv[1];}); // pa7 = <<0,0>, <0,1>, <0,2>>   // Create a ParallelArray from canvas.  This creates a PA with shape [w, h, 4], var pa = new ParallelArray(canvas); // pa8 = CanvasPixelArray   ParallelArray exposes fluent API functions that take an elemental JS function for data manipulation: map, combine, scan, filter, and scatter that return a new ParallelArray. Other functions are scalar - reduce  returns a scalar value & get returns the value located at a given index. The onus is on the developer to ensure that the elemental function does not defeat data parallelization optimization (avoid global var manipulation, recursion). For reduce & scan, order is not guaranteed - the onus is on the dev to provide an elemental function that is commutative and associative so that scan will be deterministic – E.g. Sum is associative, but Avg is not. map Applies a provided elemental function to each element of the source array and stores the result in the corresponding position in the result array. The map method is shape preserving & index free - can not inspect neighboring values. // Adding one to each element. var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var plusOne = source.map(function inc(v) {     return v+1; }); //<2,3,4,5,6> combine Combine is similar to map, except an index is provided. This allows elemental functions to access elements from the source array relative to the one at the current index position. While the map method operates on the outermost dimension only, combine, can choose how deep to traverse - it provides a depth argument to specify the number of dimensions it iterates over. The elemental function of combine accesses the source array & the current index within it - element is computed by calling the get method of the source ParallelArray object with index i as argument. It requires more code but is more expressive. var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var plusOne = source.combine(function inc(i) { return this.get(i)+1; }); reduce reduces the elements from an array to a single scalar result – e.g. Sum. // Calculate the sum of the elements var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var sum = source.reduce(function plus(a,b) { return a+b; }); scan Like reduce, but stores the intermediate results – return a ParallelArray whose ith elements is the results of using the elemental function to reduce the elements between 0 and I in the original ParallelArray. // do a partial sum var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var psum = source.scan(function plus(a,b) { return a+b; }); //<1, 3, 6, 10, 15> scatter a reordering function - specify for a certain source index where it should be stored in the result array. An optional conflict function can prevent an exception if two source values are assigned the same position of the result: var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var reorder = source.scatter([4,0,3,1,2]); // <2, 4, 5, 3, 1> // if there is a conflict use the max. use 33 as a default value. var reorder = source.scatter([4,0,3,4,2], 33, function max(a, b) {return a>b?a:b; }); //<2, 33, 5, 3, 4> filter // filter out values that are not even var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var even = source.filter(function even(iv) { return (this.get(iv) % 2) == 0; }); // <2,4> Flatten used to collapse the outer dimensions of an array into a single dimension. pa = new ParallelArray([ [1,2], [3,4] ]); // <<1,2>,<3,4>> pa.flatten(); // <1,2,3,4> Partition used to restore the original shape of the array. var pa = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4]); // <1,2,3,4> pa.partition(2); // <<1,2>,<3,4>> Get return value found at the indices or undefined if no such value exists. var pa = new ParallelArray([0,1,2,3,4], [10,11,12,13,14], [20,21,22,23,24]) pa.get([1,1]); // 11 pa.get([1]); // <10,11,12,13,14>

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• Introduction to Human Workflow 11g

  - by agiovannetti

  Human Workflow is a component of SOA Suite just like BPEL, Mediator, Business Rules, etc. The Human Workflow component allows you to incorporate human intervention in a business process. You can use Human Workflow to create a business process that requires a manager to approve purchase orders greater than $10,000; or a business process that handles article reviews in which a group of reviewers need to vote/approve an article before it gets published. Human Workflow can handle the task assignment and routing as well as the generation of notifications to the participants. There are three common patterns or usages of Human Workflow: 1) Approval Scenarios: manage documents and other transactional data through approval chains . For example: approve expense report, vacation approval, hiring approval, etc. 2) Reviews by multiple users or groups: group collaboration and review of documents or proposals. For example, processing a sales quote which is subject to review by multiple people. 3) Case Management: workflows around work management or case management. For example, processing a service request. This could be routed to various people who all need to modify the task. It may also incorporate ad hoc routing which is unknown at design time. SOA 11g Human Workflow includes the following features: Assignment and routing of tasks to the correct users or groups. Deadlines, escalations, notifications, and other features required for ensuring the timely performance of a task. Presentation of tasks to end users through a variety of mechanisms, including a Worklist application. Organization, filtering, prioritization and other features required for end users to productively perform their tasks. Reports, reassignments, load balancing and other features required by supervisors and business owners to manage the performance of tasks. Human Workflow Architecture The Human Workflow component is divided into 3 modules: the service interface, the task definition and the client interface module. The Service Interface handles the interaction with BPEL and other components. The Client Interface handles the presentation of task data through clients like the Worklist application, portals and notification channels. The task definition module is in charge of managing the lifecycle of a task. Who should get the task assigned? What should happen next with the task? When must the task be completed? Should the task be escalated?, etc Stages and Participants When you create a Human Task you need to specify how the task is assigned and routed. The first step is to define the stages and participants. A stage is just a logical group. A participant can be a user, a group of users or an application role. The participants indicate the type of assignment and routing that will be performed. Stages can be sequential or in parallel. You can combine them to create any usage you require. See diagram below: Assignment and Routing There are different ways a task can be assigned and routed: Single Approver: task is assigned to a single user, group or role. For example, a vacation request is assigned to a manager. If the manager approves or rejects the request, the employee is notified with the decision. If the task is assigned to a group then once one of managers acts on it, the task is completed. Parallel : task is assigned to a set of people that must work in parallel. This is commonly used for voting. For example, a task gets approved once 50% of the participants approve it. You can also set it up to be a unanimous vote. Serial : participants must work in sequence. The most common scenario for this is management chain escalation. FYI (For Your Information) : task is assigned to participants who can view it, add comments and attachments, but can not modify or complete the task. Task Actions The following is the list of actions that can be performed on a task: Claim : if a task is assigned to a group or multiple users, then the task must be claimed first to be able to act on it. Escalate : if the participant is not able to complete a task, he/she can escalate it. The task is reassigned to his/her manager (up one level in a hierarchy). Pushback : the task is sent back to the previous assignee. Reassign :if the participant is a manager, he/she can delegate a task to his/her reports. Release : if a task is assigned to a group or multiple users, it can be released if the user who claimed the task cannot complete the task. Any of the other assignees can claim and complete the task. Request Information and Submit Information : use when the participant needs to supply more information or to request more information from the task creator or any of the previous assignees. Suspend and Resume :if a task is not relevant, it can be suspended. A suspension is indefinite. It does not expire until Resume is used to resume working on the task. Withdraw : if the creator of a task does not want to continue with it, for example, he wants to cancel a vacation request, he can withdraw the task. The business process determines what happens next. Renew : if a task is about to expire, the participant can renew it. The task expiration date is extended one week. Notifications Human Workflow provides a mechanism for sending notifications to participants to alert them of changes on a task. Notifications can be sent via email, telephone voice message, instant messaging (IM) or short message service (SMS). Notifications can be sent when the task status changes to any of the following: Assigned/renewed/delegated/reassigned/escalated Completed Error Expired Request Info Resume Suspended Added/Updated comments and/or attachments Updated Outcome Withdraw Other Actions (e.g. acquiring a task) Here is an example of an email notification: Worklist Application Oracle BPM Worklist application is the default user interface included in SOA Suite. It allows users to access and act on tasks that have been assigned to them. For example, from the Worklist application, a loan agent can review loan applications or a manager can approve employee vacation requests. Through the Worklist Application users can: Perform authorized actions on tasks, acquire and check out shared tasks, define personal to-do tasks and define subtasks. Filter tasks view based on various criteria. Work with standard work queues, such as high priority tasks, tasks due soon and so on. Work queues allow users to create a custom view to group a subset of tasks in the worklist, for example, high priority tasks, tasks due in 24 hours, expense approval tasks and more. Define custom work queues. Gain proxy access to part of another user's tasks. Define custom vacation rules and delegation rules. Enable group owners to define task dispatching rules for shared tasks. Collect a complete workflow history and audit trail. Use digital signatures for tasks. Run reports like Unattended tasks, Tasks productivity, etc. Here is a screenshoot of what the Worklist Application looks like. On the right hand side you can see the tasks that have been assigned to the user and the task's detail. References Introduction to SOA Suite 11g Human Workflow Webcast Note 1452937.2 Human Workflow Information Center Using the Human Workflow Service Component 11.1.1.6 Human Workflow Samples Human Workflow APIs Java Docs

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• ANTS CLR and Memory Profiler In Depth Review (Part 2 of 2 &ndash; Memory Profiler)

  - by ToStringTheory

  One of the things that people might not know about me, is my obsession to make my code as efficient as possible. Many people might not realize how much of a task or undertaking that this might be, but it is surely a task as monumental as climbing Mount Everest, except this time it is a challenge for the mind… In trying to make code efficient, there are many different factors that play a part – size of project or solution, tiers, language used, experience and training of the programmer, technologies used, maintainability of the code – the list can go on for quite some time. I spend quite a bit of time when developing trying to determine what is the best way to implement a feature to accomplish the efficiency that I look to achieve. One program that I have recently come to learn about – Red Gate ANTS Performance (CLR) and Memory profiler gives me tools to accomplish that job more efficiently as well. In this review, I am going to cover some of the features of the ANTS memory profiler set by compiling some hideous example code to test against. Notice As a member of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program, one of the perks is the ability to review products, in exchange for a free license to the program. I have not let this affect my opinions of the product in any way, and Red Gate nor Geeks With Blogs has tried to influence my opinion regarding this product in any way. Introduction – Part 2 In my last post, I reviewed the feature packed Red Gate ANTS Performance Profiler.  Separate from the Red Gate Performance Profiler is the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler – a simple, easy to use utility for checking how your application is handling memory management…  A tool that I wish I had had many times in the past.  This post will be focusing on the ANTS Memory Profiler and its tool set. The memory profiler has a large assortment of features just like the Performance Profiler, with the new session looking nearly exactly alike: ANTS Memory Profiler Memory profiling is not something that I have to do very often…  In the past, the few cases I’ve had to find a memory leak in an application I have usually just had to trace the code of the operations being performed to look for oddities…  Sadly, I have come across more undisposed/non-using’ed IDisposable objects, usually from ADO.Net than I would like to ever see.  Support is not fun, however using ANTS Memory Profiler makes this task easier.  For this round of testing, I am going to use the same code from my previous example, using the WPF application. This time, I will choose the ‘Profile Memory’ option from the ANTS menu in Visual Studio, which launches the solution in its currently configured state/start-up project, and then launches the ANTS Memory Profiler to help.  It prepopulates all of the fields with the current project information, and all I have to do is select the ‘Start Profiling’ option. When the window comes up, it is actually quite barren, just giving ideas on how to work the profiler.  You start by getting to the point in your application that you want to profile, and then taking a ‘Memory Snapshot’.  This performs a full garbage collection, and snapshots the managed heap.  Using the same WPF app as before, I will go ahead and take a snapshot now. As you can see, ANTS is already giving me lots of information regarding the snapshot, however this is just a snapshot.  The whole point of the profiler is to perform an action, usually one where a memory problem is being noticed, and then take another snapshot and perform a diff between them to see what has changed.  I am going to go ahead and generate 5000 primes, and then take another snapshot: As you can see, ANTS is already giving me a lot of new information about this snapshot compared to the last.  Information such as difference in memory usage, fragmentation, class usage, etc…  If you take more snapshots, you can use the dropdown at the top to set your actual comparison snapshots. If you beneath the timeline, you will see a breadcrumb trail showing how best to approach profiling memory using ANTS.  When you first do the comparison, you start on the Summary screen.  You can either use the charts at the bottom, or switch to the class list screen to get to the next step.  Here is the class list screen: As you can see, it lists information about all of the instances between the snapshots, as well as at the bottom giving you a way to filter by telling ANTS what your problem is.  I am going to go ahead and select the Int16[] to look at the Instance Categorizer Using the instance categorizer, you can travel backwards to see where all of the instances are coming from.  It may be hard to see in this image, but hopefully the lightbox (click on it) will help: I can see that all of these instances are rooted to the application through the UI TextBlock control.  This image will probably be even harder to see, however using the ‘Instance Retention Graph’, you can trace an objects memory inheritance up the chain to see its roots as well.  This is a simple example, as this is simply a known element.  Usually you would be profiling an actual problem, and comparing those differences.  I know in the past, I have spotted a problem where a new context was created per page load, and it was rooted into the application through an event.  As the application began to grow, performance and reliability problems started to emerge.  A tool like this would have been a great way to identify the problem quickly. Overview Overall, I think that the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler is a great utility for debugging those pesky leaks.  3 Biggest Pros: Easy to use interface with lots of options for configuring profiling session Intuitive and helpful interface for drilling down from summary, to instance, to root graphs ANTS provides an API for controlling the profiler. Not many options, but still helpful. 2 Biggest Cons: Inability to automatically snapshot the memory by interval Lack of complete integration with Visual Studio via an extension panel Ratings Ease of Use (9/10) – I really do believe that they have brought simplicity to the once difficult task of memory profiling.  I especially liked how it stepped you further into the drilldown by directing you towards the best options. Effectiveness (10/10) – I believe that the profiler does EXACTLY what it purports to do.  Features (7/10) – A really great set of features all around in the application, however, I would like to see some ability for automatically triggering snapshots based on intervals or framework level items such as events. Customer Service (10/10) – My entire experience with Red Gate personnel has been nothing but good.  their people are friendly, helpful, and happy! UI / UX (9/10) – The interface is very easy to get around, and all of the options are easy to find.  With a little bit of poking around, you’ll be optimizing Hello World in no time flat! Overall (9/10) – Overall, I am happy with the Memory Profiler and its features, as well as with the service I received when working with the Red Gate personnel.  Thank you for reading up to here, or skipping ahead – I told you it would be shorter!  Please, if you do try the product, drop me a message and let me know what you think!  I would love to hear any opinions you may have on the product. Code Feel free to download the code I used above – download via DropBox

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• ?11.2RAC??????????????

  - by JaneZhang(???)

         ?????,???????????????,???dbca???????,???????????dbca,?????????11.2???????,???????,??dbca??????????????????,????????????????     ????11.2???????RACDB2???,?????RACDB1? ?????rac1,????rac2?     ?11.2?,?????grid?????GI,??oracle????????,????????oracle?????? 1. ??????????????????,?????,???????????:audit_file_dest, background_dump_dest, user_dump_dest ?core_dump_dest????audit_file_dest=/u01/app/oracle/admin/RACDB/adump,?????????,?????????:ORA-09925: Unable to create audit trail fileLinux-x86_64 Error: 2: No such file or directoryAdditional information: 99252. ????????????????????????????:SQL> alter system set instance_number=2 scope=spfile sid='RACDB2';SQL> alter system set thread=2 scope=spfile sid='RACDB2';SQL> alter system set undo_tablespace='UNDOTBS2' scope=spfile sid='RACDB2';SQL> alter system set local_listener='(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS_LIST=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=192.0.2.122)(PORT=1521))))' sid='RACDB2'; <=====192.0.2.122???2?VIP 3. ???????DB?$ORACLE_HOME/dbs/init<sid>.ora ?????DB?$ORACLE_HOME/dbs/init<sid>.ora,??????????????init<sid>.ora ????,????spfile???:=======================SPFILE='+DATA/racdb/spfileracdb.ora'??:[oracle@rac1 ~]$ scp $ORACLE_HOME/dbs/initRACDB1.ora rac2:$ORACLE_HOME/dbs/initRACDB2.ora <===????????24.  ??????/etc/oratab,????????????:RACDB2:/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1:N       5.  ???????????: DB?$ORACLE_HOME/dbs/ora<sid>.pwd ????DB?$ORACLE_HOME/dbs/ora<sid>.pwd,??????????????:[oracle@rac1 dbs]$ scp $ORACLE_HOME/dbs/orapwRACDB1 rac2:$ORACLE_HOME/dbs/orapwRACDB2 <==?????26.  ?????????????,????????UNDO TABLESPACE?(??????dbca?????,???????undo tablespace????,?????????)??:SQL>CREATE UNDO TABLESPACE "UNDOTBS2" DATAFILE '/dev/….' SIZE 4096M ;???????:SQL>CREATE UNDO TABLESPACE "UNDOTBS2" DATAFILE '+DATA' SIZE 4096M ;7.  ?????????????,????????redo thread?redo log:??:SQL> alter database add logfile thread 2      group 3 ('/dev/...', '/dev/...') size 1024M,     group 4 ('/dev/...','dev/...') size 1024M;???????:SQL> alter database add logfile thread 2     group 3 ('+DATA','+RECO') size 1024M,     group 4 ('+DATA','+RECO') size 1024M;SQL> alter database enable thread 2; <==????thread8.  ??????????,?????????????:[oracle@rac2 admin]$su - oracle[oracle@rac2 admin]$export ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1[oracle@rac2 admin]$export ORACLE_SID=RACDB2[oracle@rac2 admin]$ sqlplus / as sysdbaSQL> startup <==??????,???????2????????????9. ?????OCR???GI??,?????????????:$srvctl add instance -d <database name> -i <new instance name> -n <new node name>Example of srvctl add instance command:============================[oracle@rac2 ~]$ srvctl add instance -d racdb -i RACDB2 -n rac2  <==????????,????ps -ef|grep smon???[oracle@rac2 dbs]$ ps -ef|grep smonroot      3453     1  1 Jun12 ?        04:03:05 /u01/app/11.2.0/grid/bin/osysmond.bingrid      3727     1  0 Jun12 ?        00:00:19 asm_smon_+ASM2oracle    5343  4543  0 14:06 pts/1    00:00:00 grep smonoracle   28736     1  0 Jun25 ?        00:00:03 ora_smon_RACDB2 <========??????10. ???????:$su - grid[grid@rac2 ~]$ crsctl stat res -t...ora.racdb.db      1        ONLINE  ONLINE       rac1                     Open                      2        OFFLINE OFFLINE             rac2????,??????offline,????????????sqlplus??????sqlplus??????,???srvctl??:[grid@rac2 ~]$ su  - oraclePassword: [oracle@rac2 ~]$ sqlplus / as sysdbaSQL> shutdown immediate;Database closed.Database dismounted.ORACLE instance shut down.SQL> exit[oracle@rac2 ~]$ srvctl start instance -d racdb -i RACDB2[oracle@rac2 ~]$ su - gridPassword: [grid@rac2 ~]$ crsctl stat res -tora.racdb.db      1        ONLINE  ONLINE       rac1                     Open                      2        ONLINE  ONLINE       rac2                     Open                11. ?????????:[oracle@rac2 ~]$ crsctl stat res ora.racdb.db -pNAME=ora.racdb.dbTYPE=ora.database.typeACL=owner:oracle:rwx,pgrp:oinstall:rwx,other::r--ACTION_FAILURE_TEMPLATE=ACTION_SCRIPT=ACTIVE_PLACEMENT=1AGENT_FILENAME=%CRS_HOME%/bin/oraagent%CRS_EXE_SUFFIX%AUTO_START=restoreCARDINALITY=2CHECK_INTERVAL=1CHECK_TIMEOUT=30CLUSTER_DATABASE=trueDATABASE_TYPE=RACDB_UNIQUE_NAME=RACDBDEFAULT_TEMPLATE=PROPERTY(RESOURCE_CLASS=database) PROPERTY(DB_UNIQUE_NAME= CONCAT(PARSE(%NAME%, ., 2), %USR_ORA_DOMAIN%, .)) ELEMENT(INSTANCE_NAME= %GEN_USR_ORA_INST_NAME%) ELEMENT(DATABASE_TYPE= %DATABASE_TYPE%)DEGREE=1DESCRIPTION=Oracle Database resourceENABLED=1FAILOVER_DELAY=0FAILURE_INTERVAL=60FAILURE_THRESHOLD=1GEN_AUDIT_FILE_DEST=/u01/app/oracle/admin/RACDB/adumpGEN_START_OPTIONS=GEN_START_OPTIONS@SERVERNAME(rac1)=openGEN_START_OPTIONS@SERVERNAME(rac2)=openGEN_USR_ORA_INST_NAME=GEN_USR_ORA_INST_NAME@SERVERNAME(rac1)=RACDB1HOSTING_MEMBERS=INSTANCE_FAILOVER=0LOAD=1LOGGING_LEVEL=1MANAGEMENT_POLICY=AUTOMATICNLS_LANG=NOT_RESTARTING_TEMPLATE=OFFLINE_CHECK_INTERVAL=0ONLINE_RELOCATION_TIMEOUT=0ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1ORACLE_HOME_OLD=PLACEMENT=restrictedPROFILE_CHANGE_TEMPLATE=RESTART_ATTEMPTS=2ROLE=PRIMARYSCRIPT_TIMEOUT=60SERVER_POOLS=ora.RACDBSPFILE=+DATA/RACDB/spfileRACDB.oraSTART_DEPENDENCIES=hard(ora.DATA.dg,ora.RECO.dg) weak(type:ora.listener.type,global:type:ora.scan_listener.type,uniform:ora.ons,global:ora.gns) pullup(ora.DATA.dg,ora.RECO.dg)START_TIMEOUT=600STATE_CHANGE_TEMPLATE=STOP_DEPENDENCIES=hard(intermediate:ora.asm,shutdown:ora.DATA.dg,shutdown:ora.RECO.dg)STOP_TIMEOUT=600TYPE_VERSION=3.2UPTIME_THRESHOLD=1hUSR_ORA_DB_NAME=RACDBUSR_ORA_DOMAIN=USR_ORA_ENV=USR_ORA_FLAGS=USR_ORA_INST_NAME=USR_ORA_INST_NAME@SERVERNAME(rac1)=RACDB1USR_ORA_INST_NAME@SERVERNAME(rac2)=RACDB2USR_ORA_OPEN_MODE=openUSR_ORA_OPI=falseUSR_ORA_STOP_MODE=immediateVERSION=11.2.0.3.0???11.2,?OCR???database??,??????,???????????database???????database???????,??????,???????????????ASM????????????  ?:dbca ???????????:????????oracle????dbca:su - oracledbca?? RAC database?? Instance Management?? add an instance???active rac database??????? ??undo?redo??

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• Diagramming Software for a Developer/Designer

  - by Craig Walker

  For a long time I've been looking for a good diagramming/vector-based drawing program that meets my needs as a developer. I'd like to: Draw database diagrams Draw flow charts Draw object-modeling diagrams (UML being the standard) Draw other free-form diagrams (basically boxes & arrows with the occasional clipart) Draw mockups of user interfaces and web pages EDIT: I want good-looking electronic-format diagrams that I can show to 3rd parties, not just something for my own internal use. EDIT 2: I'm also looking for Windows software, although I'm toying with the idea of switching to Mac, so a really good Mac-only product might get me to switch. Basically I need a good vector graphic program (with decent grouping, connecting lines, and ideally auto-routing). I'd prefer a diagramming tool that can also be used for drawing (for the UI mockups) rather than a drawing tool that can also be used for diagrams. I've tried Visio on several occasions, and every time I've been disappointed. The interface always seems to get in my way at some point. It's pretty close to what I want, and the latest version (I got the trail from MS) seems to be better than previous ones in terms of usability, but I really don't want to plunk down that sort of cash for a mediocre product. I've tried Dia and Inkscape, and while initially promising and with the right price tag, I found both of them to be lacking in several ways (including some recurring bugs). I've toyed with getting Adobe Illustrator, but I've never used it before, and I have a feeling that it wouldn't handle the diagramming aspect very well, and I don't want to buy a copy just to find out it doesn't meet my needs. So far, the product that I've had the most success with is, sadly, OpenOffice Draw. It's free of course (which lowers my expectations and thus improves my view of it) and its usability is pretty good, but in the end I'd like something more suited to diagramming. I'm willing to spend real money (in the $500-$1K range) for a really good piece of software if it does everything I want it to. The front runner is of course Visio but I'm hoping for more. Does anybody have any recommendations? CONCLUSION: @dlamblin had the most informative post, but the part I gained the most from was his/her (and others) mention of OmniGraffle, not Gliffy. I gave Gliffy a try, and it seemed neet for occational use, but since it's a Flash app (note: not AJAX as dlamblin mentioned) it's still a bit of a pain to use (no keyboard shortcuts for copy/paste was pretty much a deal breaker for me). I also tried SmartDraw, but it had 3-strikes-you're-out against it: The trial period was only 7 days long. It used some nonstandard (and visually jarring) GUI widget toolkit for its UI. At the very least it makes me suspicious (how do I know it will actually work & support the standard Windows features?) It crashed on me early into my trial. OmniGraffle looks like exactly what I want... except that it's Mac-only (so I couldn't give it a try). However, it got good reviews from my Mac-owning coworker, and I hope to try it on a friend's Mac soon. If it's good enough then I might spring for a new MacBook.

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• java.rmi.UnmarshalException: unable to pull client classes by server

  - by andrews

  Hi, I have an RMI client/server set-up on two machines that works fine in a simple situation when the server doesn't require a client-side defned class. However, when I need to use a class defined on the client side I am unable to have the server unmarshall those classes. I suspect this is an issue with my java.rmi.server.codebase property that I pass in as argument to the client app. I followed Sun's RMI Tutorial trail and I think I have followed the steps exactly except that I don't specify a classpath argument when executing client and server because they execute in the directory right above the root package directory (however I tried that too with no effect). The exceptions I get when attempting to execute the different client-side combinations described in detail below are all the same: RmiServer exception: java.rmi.ServerException: RemoteException occurred in server thread; nested exception is: java.rmi.UnmarshalException: error unmarshalling arguments; nested exception is: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: test.MyTask at sun.rmi.server.UnicastServerRef.dispatch(UnicastServerRef.java:353) at sun.rmi.transport.Transport$1.run(Transport.java:177) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at sun.rmi.transport.Transport.serviceCall(Transport.java:173) at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPTransport.handleMessages(TCPTransport.java:553) at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPTransport$ConnectionHandler.run0(TCPTransport.java:808) at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPTransport$ConnectionHandler.run(TCPTransport.java:667) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1110) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:603) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:636) at sun.rmi.transport.StreamRemoteCall.exceptionReceivedFromServer(StreamRemoteCall.java:255) at sun.rmi.transport.StreamRemoteCall.executeCall(StreamRemoteCall.java:233) at sun.rmi.server.UnicastRef.invoke(UnicastRef.java:142) at java.rmi.server.RemoteObjectInvocationHandler.invokeRemoteMethod(RemoteObjectInvocationHandler.java:178) at java.rmi.server.RemoteObjectInvocationHandler.invoke(RemoteObjectInvocationHandler.java:132) at $Proxy0.execute(Unknown Source) at test.myClient.main(myClient.java:32) The details are: My client/server rmi is set up over a home network behind a router. The router is assigned to a static ip address I will call myhostname. Appropriate port-mapping is set-up in the router that points to the right machines. role, machine, os, ip-address: server, venice, linux ubuntu 9.10, 10.0.1.2 client, naples, mac os x leopard, 10.0.1.4 I startup the server side as follows inside /home/andrews/workspace/epsilon/bin: 1 starting registry on the default port 1099: venice% rmiregistry & 2 starting web-server on port 2001 pointing to code base for common interfaces: venice% java webserver/ClassFileServer 2001 /home/andrew/workspace/epsilon/bin 3 starting server app (main class in test/myServer) which registers the server object: venice% java -Djava.rmi.server.codebase="http://myhostname:2001/" -Djava.security.policy=server.policy -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=myhostname test/myServer & Now the client side inside /Users/andrews/Development/Java/workspace/epsilon/bin: 1 start a local web server that can server client-side classes to the server (not sure if this is needed, but I added I tried it, and still no success; I have added port-mapping to the router for 2001 to venice, for 2002 to naples) naples$ java webserver/ClassFileServer 2002 /Users/andrews/Development/Java/workspace/epsilon/bin/ Trying to run the client (note: I don't specify the -cp argument because client executes right above the root package directory): 1 try #1 using an http hostname naples$ java -Djava.rmi.server.codebase=http://10.0.1.4:2002/ -Djava.security.policy=client.policy test.myClient myhostname Note 1: the myhostname argument at the end is passed-in to the client so that it resolves to server's rmi hostname. Note 2: I tried using localhost:2002 instead of 10.0.1.4:2002 too. Note 3: I tried using myhostname:2002 since myhostname is assigned to the router and I have proper port-mapping set-up, this address should resolve to naples and not venice 2 try #2: naples$ java -Djava.rmi.server.codebase=file:/Users/andrews/Development/Java/workspace/epsilon/bin/ -Djava.security.policy=client.policy test.myClient myhostname Note 1: the code base url format is correct, I created a small program to convert current file directory path into a url and used that. using file:///Users... has same effect. Other notes: 1 my server and client policy files correctly specify the path, as I've tested this setup with good and bad paths, and getting a security exception for bad path 2 this setup works if I don't use client-side defined objects, the client connects correctly to the server and the server executes. 3 when I place the client-side class on the server in the server's classpath, all executes fine. All help is appreciated.

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• Log a user in to an ASP.net application using Windows Authentication without using Windows Authentic

  - by Rising Star

  I have an ASP.net application I'm developing authentication for. I am using an existing cookie-based log on system to log users in to the system. The application runs as an anonymous account and then checks the cookie when the user wants to do something restricted. This is working fine. However, there is one caveat: I've been told that for each page that connects to our SQL server, I need to make it so that the user connects using an Active Directory account. because the system I'm using is cookie based, the user isn't logged in to Active Directory. Therefore, I use impersonation to connect to the server as a specific account. However, the powers that be here don't like impersonation; they say that it clutters up the code. I agree, but I've found no way around this. It seems that the only way that a user can be logged in to an ASP.net application is by either connecting with Internet Explorer from a machine where the user is logged in with their Active Directory account or by typing an Active Directory username and password. Neither of these two are workable in my application. I think it would be nice if I could make it so that when a user logs in and receives the cookie (which actually comes from a separate log on application, by the way), there could be some code run which tells the application to perform all network operations as the user's Active Directory account, just as if they had typed an Active Directory username and password. It seems like this ought to be possible somehow, but the solution evades me. How can I make this work? Update To those who have responded so far, I apologize for the confusion I have caused. The responses I've received indicate that you've misunderstood the question, so please allow me to clarify. I have no control over the requirement that users must perform network operations (such as SQL queries) using Active Directory accounts. I've been told several times (online and in meat-space) that this is an unusual requirement and possibly bad practice. I also have no control over the requirement that users must log in using the existing cookie-based log on application. I understand that in an ideal MS ecosystem, I would simply dis-allow anonymous access in my IIS settings and users would log in using Windows Authentication. This is not the case. The current system is that as far as IIS is concerned, the user logs in anonymously (even though they supply credentials which result in the issuance of a cookie) and we must programmatically check the cookie to see if the user has access to any restricted resources. In times past, we have simply used a single SQL account to perform all queries. My direct supervisor (who has many years of experience with this sort of thing) wants to change this. He says that if each user has his own AD account to perform SQL queries, it gives us more of a trail to follow if someone tries to do something wrong. The closest thing I've managed to come up with is using WIF to give the user a claim to a specific Active Directory account, but I still have to use impersonation because even still, the ASP.net process presents anonymous credentials to the SQL server. It boils down to this: Can I log users in with Active Directory accounts in my ASP.net application without having the users manually enter their AD credentials? (Windows Authentication)

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• Drupal menu with submenus only shows submenu of current page. NOT a CSS problem

  - by jordanstephens

  This is not a CSS problem. The HTML isn't there. I need the menu, with submenus to exist in HTML on EACH page. Right now, the submenu only exists in HTML for the submenu related to the page being currently viewed. Here's an example of what it SHOULD be like. <ul id="menu"> <li>Page1 <ul class="sub"> <li>sub1.1</li> <li>sub1.2</li> <li>sub1.3</li> <li>sub1.4</li> </ul> </li> <li>Page2 <ul class="sub"> <li>sub2.1</li> <li>sub2.2</li> <li>sub2.3</li> <li>sub2.4</li> </ul> </li> <li>Page3 <ul class="sub"> <li>sub3.1</li> <li>sub3.2</li> <li>sub3.3</li> <li>sub3.4</li> </ul> </li> </ul> But here is what is actually happening (say I'm currently viewing Page2): <ul id="menu"> <li>Page1</li> <li>Page2 <ul class="sub"> <li>sub2.1</li> <li>sub2.2</li> <li>sub2.3</li> <li>sub2.4</li> </ul> </li> <li>Page3</li> </ul> Additionally, and maybe this doesn't have anything to do with it, but whichever list item <li> element is relative to the page i am currently on is given these classes expanded active-trail and any other <li> is given collapsed class. The classes aren't really so much of an issue, the problem is just that the content (html) isn't there. Does anyone have any idea what's going on here. I feel like I've been digging in the Drupal Admin menus forever now. I feel like it's got to have a PHP solution in the template file or something, but I don't know Drupal super well at this point. Thank you!

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• C - Error with read() of a file, storage in an array, and printing output properly

  - by ns1

  I am new to C, so I am not exactly sure where my error is. However, I do know that the great portion of the issue lies either in how I am storing the doubles in the d_buffer (double) array or the way I am printing it. Specifically, my output keeps printing extremely large numbers (with around 10-12 digits before the decimal point and a trail of zeros after it. Additionally, this is an adaptation of an older program to allow for double inputs, so I only really added the two if statements (in the "read" for loop and the "printf" for loop) and the d_buffer declaration. I would appreciate any input whatsoever as I have spent several hours on this error. #include <stdio.h> #include <fcntl.h> #include <sys/types.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <string.h> struct DataDescription { char fieldname[30]; char fieldtype; int fieldsize; }; /* ----------------------------------------------- eof(fd): returns 1 if file `fd' is out of data ----------------------------------------------- */ int eof(int fd) { char c; if ( read(fd, &c, 1) != 1 ) return(1); else { lseek(fd, -1, SEEK_CUR); return(0); } } void main() { FILE *fp; /* Used to access meta data */ int fd; /* Used to access user data */ /* ---------------------------------------------------------------- Variables to hold the description of the data - max 10 fields ---------------------------------------------------------------- */ struct DataDescription DataDes[10]; /* Holds data descriptions for upto 10 fields */ int n_fields; /* Actual # fields */ /* ------------------------------------------------------ Variables to hold the data - max 10 fields.... ------------------------------------------------------ */ char c_buffer[10][100]; /* For character data */ int i_buffer[10]; /* For integer data */ double d_buffer[10]; int i, j; int found; printf("Program for searching a mini database:\n"); /* ============================= Read in meta information ============================= */ fp = fopen("db-description", "r"); n_fields = 0; while ( fscanf(fp, "%s %c %d", DataDes[n_fields].fieldname, &DataDes[n_fields].fieldtype, &DataDes[n_fields].fieldsize) > 0 ) n_fields++; /* --- Prints meta information --- */ printf("\nThe database consists of these fields:\n"); for (i = 0; i < n_fields; i++) printf("Index %d: Fieldname `%s',\ttype = %c,\tsize = %d\n", i, DataDes[i].fieldname, DataDes[i].fieldtype, DataDes[i].fieldsize); printf("\n\n"); /* --- Open database file --- */ fd = open("db-data", O_RDONLY); /* --- Print content of the database file --- */ printf("\nThe database content is:\n"); while ( ! eof(fd) ) { /* ------------------ Read next record ------------------ */ for (j = 0; j < n_fields; j++) { if ( DataDes[j].fieldtype == 'I' ) read(fd, &i_buffer[j], DataDes[j].fieldsize); if ( DataDes[j].fieldtype == 'F' ) read(fd, &d_buffer[j], DataDes[j].fieldsize); if ( DataDes[j].fieldtype == 'C' ) read(fd, &c_buffer[j], DataDes[j].fieldsize); } double d; /* ------------------ Print it... ------------------ */ for (j = 0; j < n_fields; j++) { if ( DataDes[j].fieldtype == 'I' ) printf("%d ", i_buffer[j]); if ( DataDes[j].fieldtype == 'F' ) d = d_buffer[j]; printf("%lf ", d); if ( DataDes[j].fieldtype == 'C' ) printf("%s ", c_buffer[j]); } printf("\n"); } printf("\n"); printf("\n"); } Post edits output: 16777216 0.000000 107245694331284094976.000000 107245694331284094976.000000 Pi 33554432 107245694331284094976.000000 2954938175610156848888276006519501238173891974277081114627768841840801736306392481516295906896346039950625609765296207682724801406770458881439696544971142710292689518104183685723154223544599940711614138798312668264956190761622328617992192.000000 2954938175610156848888276006519501238173891974277081114627768841840801736306392481516295906896346039950625609765296207682724801406770458881439696544971142710292689518104183685723154223544599940711614138798312668264956190761622328617992192.000000 Secret Key 50331648 2954938175610156848888276006519501238173891974277081114627768841840801736306392481516295906896346039950625609765296207682724801406770458881439696544971142710292689518104183685723154223544599940711614138798312668264956190761622328617992192.000000 -0.000000 -0.000000 The number E Expected Output: 3 rows of data ending with the number "e = 2.18281828" To reproduce the problem, the following two files need to be in the same directory as the lookup-data.c file: - db-data - db-description

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• How about a new platform for your next API&hellip; a CMS?

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman/archive/2014/05/22/how-about-a-new-platform-for-your-next-apihellip-a.aspxSay what? I’m seeing a type of API emerge which serves static or long-lived resources, which are mostly read-only and have a controlled process to update the data that gets served. Think of something like an app configuration API, where you want a central location for changeable settings. You could use this server side to store database connection strings and keep all your instances in sync, or it could be used client side to push changes out to all users (and potentially driving A/B or MVT testing). That’s a good candidate for a RESTful API which makes proper use of HTTP expiration and validation caching to minimise traffic, but really you want a front end UI where you can edit the current config that the API returns and publish your changes. Sound like a Content Mangement System would be a good fit? I’ve been looking at that and it’s a great fit for this scenario. You get a lot of what you need out of the box, the amount of custom code you need to write is minimal, and you get a whole lot of extra stuff from using CMS which is very useful, but probably not something you’d build if you had to put together a quick UI over your API content (like a publish workflow, fine-grained security and an audit trail). You typically use a CMS for HTML resources, but it’s simple to expose JSON instead – or to do content negotiation to support both, so you can open a resource in a browser and see a nice visual representation, or request it with: Accept=application/json and get the same content rendered as JSON for the app to use. Enter Umbraco Umbraco is an open source .NET CMS that’s been around for a while. It has very good adoption, a lively community and a good release cycle. It’s easy to use, has all the functionality you need for a CMS-driven API, and it’s scalable (although you won’t necessarily put much scale on the CMS layer). In the rest of this post, I’ll build out a simple app config API using Umbraco. We’ll define the structure of the configuration resource by creating a new Document Type and setting custom properties; then we’ll build a very simple Razor template to return configuration documents as JSON; then create a resource and see how it looks. And we’ll look at how you could build this into a wider solution. If you want to try this for yourself, it’s ultra easy – there’s an Umbraco image in the Azure Website gallery, so all you need to to is create a new Website, select Umbraco from the image and complete the installation. It will create a SQL Azure website to store all the content, as well as a Website instance for editing and accessing content. They’re standard Azure resources, so you can scale them as you need. The default install creates a starter site for some HTML content, which you can use to learn your way around (or just delete). 1. Create Configuration Document Type In Umbraco you manage content by creating and modifying documents, and every document has a known type, defining what properties it holds. We’ll create a new Document Type to describe some basic config settings. In the Settings section from the left navigation (spanner icon), expand Document Types and Master, hit the ellipsis and select to create a new Document Type: This will base your new type off the Master type, which gives you some existing properties that we’ll use – like the Page Title which will be the resource URL. In the Generic Properties tab for the new Document Type, you set the properties you’ll be able to edit and return for the resource: Here I’ve added a text string where I’ll set a default cache lifespan, an image which I can use for a banner display, and a date which could show the user when the next release is due. This is the sort of thing that sits nicely in an app config API. It’s likely to change during the life of the product, but not very often, so it’s good to have a centralised place where you can make and publish changes easily and safely. It also enables A/B and MVT testing, as you can change the response each client gets based on your set logic, and their apps will behave differently without needing a release. 2. Define the response template Now we’ve defined the structure of the resource (as a document), in Umbraco we can define a C# Razor template to say how that resource gets rendered to the client. If you only want to provide JSON, it’s easy to render the content of the document by building each property in the response (Umbraco uses dynamic objects so you can specify document properties as object properties), or you can support content negotiation with very little effort. Here’s a template to render the document as HTML or JSON depending on the Accept header, using JSON.NET for the API rendering: @inherits Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoTemplatePage @using Newtonsoft.Json @{ Layout = null; } @if(UmbracoContext.HttpContext.Request.Headers["accept"] != null &amp;&amp; UmbracoContext.HttpContext.Request.Headers["accept"] == "application/json") { Response.ContentType = "application/json"; @Html.Raw(JsonConvert.SerializeObject(new { cacheLifespan = CurrentPage.cacheLifespan, bannerImageUrl = CurrentPage.bannerImage, nextReleaseDate = CurrentPage.nextReleaseDate })) } else { <h1>App configuration</h1> <p>Cache lifespan: <b>@CurrentPage.cacheLifespan</b></p> <p>Banner Image: </p> <img src="@CurrentPage.bannerImage"> <p>Next Release Date: <b>@CurrentPage.nextReleaseDate</b></p> } That’s a rough-and ready example of what you can do. You could make it completely generic and just render all the document’s properties as JSON, but having a specific template for each resource gives you control over what gets sent out. And the templates are evaluated at run-time, so if you need to change the output – or extend it, say to add caching response headers – you just edit the template and save, and the next client request gets rendered from the new template. No code to build and ship. 3. Create the content With your document type created, in  the Content pane you can create a new instance of that document, where Umbraco gives you a nice UI to input values for the properties we set up on the Document Type: Here I’ve set the cache lifespan to an xs:duration value, uploaded an image for the banner and specified a release date. Each property gets the appropriate input control – text box, file upload and date picker. At the top of the page is the name of the resource – myapp in this example. That specifies the URL for the resource, so if I had a DNS entry pointing to my Umbraco instance, I could access the config with a URL like http://static.x.y.z.com/config/myapp. The setup is all done now, so when we publish this resource it’ll be available to access.  4. Access the resource Now if you open  that URL in the browser, you’ll see the HTML version rendered: - complete with the  image and formatted date. Umbraco lets you save changes and preview them before publishing, so the HTML view could be a good way of showing editors their changes in a usable view, before they confirm them. If you browse the same URL from a REST client, specifying the Accept=application/json request header, you get this response:   That’s the exact same resource, with a managed UI to publish it, being accessed as HTML or JSON with a tiny amount of effort. 5. The wider landscape If you have fairy stable content to expose as an API, I think  this approach is really worth considering. Umbraco scales very nicely, but in a typical solution you probably wouldn’t need it to. When you have additional requirements, like logging API access requests - but doing it out-of-band so clients aren’t impacted, you can put a very thin API layer on top of Umbraco, and cache the CMS responses in your API layer:   Here the API does a passthrough to CMS, so the CMS still controls the content, but it caches the response. If the response is cached for 1 minute, then Umbraco only needs to handle 1 request per minute (multiplied by the number of API instances), so if you need to support 1000s of request per second, you’re scaling a thin, simple API layer rather than having to scale the more complex CMS infrastructure (including the database). This diagram also shows an approach to logging, by asynchronously publishing a message to a queue (Redis in this case), which can be picked up later and persisted by a different process. Does it work? Beautifully. Using Azure, I spiked the solution above (including the Redis logging framework which I’ll blog about later) in half a day. That included setting up different roles in Umbraco to demonstrate a managed workflow for publishing changes, and a couple of document types representing different resources. Is it maintainable? We have three moving parts, which are all managed resources in Azure –  an Azure Website for Umbraco which may need a couple of instances for HA (or may not, depending on how long the content can be cached), a message queue (Redis is in preview in Azure, but you can easily use Service Bus Queues if performance is less of a concern), and the Web Role for the API. Two of the components are off-the-shelf, from open source projects, and the only custom code is the API which is very simple. Does it scale? Pretty nicely. With a single Umbraco instance running as an Azure Website, and with 4x instances for my API layer (Standard sized Web Roles), I got just under 4,000 requests per second served reliably, with a Worker Role in the background saving the access logs. So we had a nice UI to publish app config changes, with a friendly Web preview and a publishing workflow, capable of supporting 14 million requests in an hour, with less than a day’s effort. Worth considering if you’re publishing long-lived resources through your API.

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• MVC Automatic Menu

  - by Nuri Halperin

  An ex-colleague of mine used to call his SQL script generator "Super-Scriptmatic 2000". It impressed our then boss little, but was fun to say and use. We called every batch job and script "something 2000" from that day on. I'm tempted to call this one Menu-Matic 2000, except it's waaaay past 2000. Oh well. The problem: I'm developing a bunch of stuff in MVC. There's no PM to generate mounds of requirements and there's no Ux Architect to create wireframe. During development, things change. Specifically, actions get renamed, moved from controller x to y etc. Well, as the site grows, it becomes a major pain to keep a static menu up to date, because the links change. The HtmlHelper doesn't live up to it's name and provides little help. How do I keep this growing list of pesky little forgotten actions reigned in? The general plan is: Decorate every action you want as a menu item with a custom attribute Reflect out all menu items into a structure at load time Render the menu using as CSS  friendly <ul><li> HTML. The MvcMenuItemAttribute decorates an action, designating it to be included as a menu item: [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Method, AllowMultiple = true)] public class MvcMenuItemAttribute : Attribute {   public string MenuText { get; set; }   public int Order { get; set; }   public string ParentLink { get; set; }   internal string Controller { get; set; }   internal string Action { get; set; }     #region ctor   public MvcMenuItemAttribute(string menuText) : this(menuText, 0) { } public MvcMenuItemAttribute(string menuText, int order) { MenuText = menuText; Order = order; }       internal string Link { get { return string.Format("/{0}/{1}", Controller, this.Action); } }   internal MvcMenuItemAttribute ParentItem { get; set; } #endregion } The MenuText allows overriding the text displayed on the menu. The Order allows the items to be ordered. The ParentLink allows you to make this item a child of another menu item. An example action could then be decorated thusly: [MvcMenuItem("Tracks", Order = 20, ParentLink = "/Session/Index")] . All pretty straightforward methinks. The challenge with menu hierarchy becomes fairly apparent when you try to render a menu and highlight the "current" item or render a breadcrumb control. Both encounter an  ambiguity if you allow a data source to have more than one menu item with the same URL link. The issue is that there is no great way to tell which link a person click. Using referring URL will fail if a user bookmarked the page. Using some extra query string to disambiguate duplicate URLs essentially changes the links, and also ads a chance of collision with other query parameters. Besides, that smells. The stock ASP.Net sitemap provider simply disallows duplicate URLS. I decided not to, and simply pick the first one encountered as the "current". Although it doesn't solve the issue completely – one might say they wanted the second of the 2 links to be "current"- it allows one to include a link twice (home->deals and products->deals etc), and the logic of deciding "current" is easy enough to explain to the customer. Now that we got that out of the way, let's build the menu data structure: public static List<MvcMenuItemAttribute> ListMenuItems(Assembly assembly) { var result = new List<MvcMenuItemAttribute>(); foreach (var type in assembly.GetTypes()) { if (!type.IsSubclassOf(typeof(Controller))) { continue; } foreach (var method in type.GetMethods()) { var items = method.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(MvcMenuItemAttribute), false) as MvcMenuItemAttribute[]; if (items == null) { continue; } foreach (var item in items) { if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(item.Controller)) { item.Controller = type.Name.Substring(0, type.Name.Length - "Controller".Length); } if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(item.Action)) { item.Action = method.Name; } result.Add(item); } } } return result.OrderBy(i => i.Order).ToList(); } Using reflection, the ListMenuItems method takes an assembly (you will hand it your MVC web assembly) and generates a list of menu items. It digs up all the types, and for each one that is an MVC Controller, digs up the methods. Methods decorated with the MvcMenuItemAttribute get plucked and added to the output list. Again, pretty simple. To make the structure hierarchical, a LINQ expression matches up all the items to their parent: public static void RegisterMenuItems(List<MvcMenuItemAttribute> items) { _MenuItems = items; _MenuItems.ForEach(i => i.ParentItem = items.FirstOrDefault(p => String.Equals(p.Link, i.ParentLink, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))); } The _MenuItems is simply an internal list to keep things around for later rendering. Finally, to package the menu building for easy consumption: public static void RegisterMenuItems(Type mvcApplicationType) { RegisterMenuItems(ListMenuItems(Assembly.GetAssembly(mvcApplicationType))); } To bring this puppy home, a call in Global.asax.cs Application_Start() registers the menu. Notice the ugliness of reflection is tucked away from the innocent developer. All they have to do is call the RegisterMenuItems() and pass in the type of the application. When you use the new project template, global.asax declares a class public class MvcApplication : HttpApplication and that is why the Register call passes in that type. protected void Application_Start() { AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas(); RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);   MvcMenu.RegisterMenuItems(typeof(MvcApplication)); }   What else is left to do? Oh, right, render! public static void ShowMenu(this TextWriter output) { var writer = new HtmlTextWriter(output);   renderHierarchy(writer, _MenuItems, null); }   public static void ShowBreadCrumb(this TextWriter output, Uri currentUri) { var writer = new HtmlTextWriter(output); string currentLink = "/" + currentUri.GetComponents(UriComponents.Path, UriFormat.Unescaped);   var menuItem = _MenuItems.FirstOrDefault(m => m.Link.Equals(currentLink, StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase)); if (menuItem != null) { renderBreadCrumb(writer, _MenuItems, menuItem); } }   private static void renderBreadCrumb(HtmlTextWriter writer, List<MvcMenuItemAttribute> menuItems, MvcMenuItemAttribute current) { if (current == null) { return; } var parent = current.ParentItem; renderBreadCrumb(writer, menuItems, parent); writer.Write(current.MenuText); writer.Write(" / ");   }     static void renderHierarchy(HtmlTextWriter writer, List<MvcMenuItemAttribute> hierarchy, MvcMenuItemAttribute root) { if (!hierarchy.Any(i => i.ParentItem == root)) return;   writer.RenderBeginTag(HtmlTextWriterTag.Ul); foreach (var current in hierarchy.Where(element => element.ParentItem == root).OrderBy(i => i.Order)) { if (ItemFilter == null || ItemFilter(current)) {   writer.RenderBeginTag(HtmlTextWriterTag.Li); writer.AddAttribute(HtmlTextWriterAttribute.Href, current.Link); writer.AddAttribute(HtmlTextWriterAttribute.Alt, current.MenuText); writer.RenderBeginTag(HtmlTextWriterTag.A); writer.WriteEncodedText(current.MenuText); writer.RenderEndTag(); // link renderHierarchy(writer, hierarchy, current); writer.RenderEndTag(); // li } } writer.RenderEndTag(); // ul } The ShowMenu method renders the menu out to the provided TextWriter. In previous posts I've discussed my partiality to using well debugged, time test HtmlTextWriter to render HTML rather than writing out angled brackets by hand. In addition, writing out using the actual writer on the actual stream rather than generating string and byte intermediaries (yes, StringBuilder being no exception) disturbs me. To carry out the rendering of an hierarchical menu, the recursive renderHierarchy() is used. You may notice that an ItemFilter is called before rendering each item. I figured that at some point one might want to exclude certain items from the menu based on security role or context or something. That delegate is the hook for such future feature. To carry out rendering of a breadcrumb recursion is used again, this time simply to unwind the parent hierarchy from the leaf node, then rendering on the return from the recursion rather than as we go along deeper. I guess I was stuck in LISP that day.. recursion is fun though.   Now all that is left is some usage! Open your Site.Master or wherever you'd like to place a menu or breadcrumb, and plant one of these calls: <% MvcMenu.ShowBreadCrumb(this.Writer, Request.Url); %> to show a breadcrumb trail (notice lack of "=" after <% and the semicolon). <% MvcMenu.ShowMenu(Writer); %> to show the menu.   As mentioned before, the HTML output is nested <UL> <LI> tags, which should make it easy to style using abundant CSS to produce anything from static horizontal or vertical to dynamic drop-downs.   This has been quite a fun little implementation and I was pleased that the code size remained low. The main crux was figuring out how to pass parent information from the attribute to the hierarchy builder because attributes have restricted parameter types. Once I settled on that implementation, the rest falls into place quite easily.

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• Craftsmanship is ALL that Matters

  - by Wayne Molina

  Today, I'm going to talk about a touchy subject: the notion of working in a company that doesn't use the prescribed "best practices" in its software development endeavours.  Over the years I have, using a variety of pseudonyms, asked this question on popular programming forums.  Although I always add in some minor variation of the story to avoid suspicion that it's the same person posting, the crux of the tale remains the same: A Programmer’s Tale A junior software developer has just started a new job at an average company, creating average line-of-business applications for internal use (the most typical scenario programmers find themselves in).  This hypothetical newbie has spent a lot of time reading up on the "theory" of software development, devouring books, blogs and screencasts from well-known and respected software developers in the community in order to broaden his knowledge and "do what the pros do".  He begins his new job, eager to apply what he's learned on a real-world project only to discover that his new teammates doesn't use any of those concepts and techniques.  They hack their way through development, or in a best-case scenario use some homebrew, thrown-together semblance of a framework for their applications that follows not one of the best practices suggested by the “elite” in the software community - things like TDD (TDD as a "best practice" is the only subjective part of this post, but it's included here due to a very large following of respected developers who consider it one), the SOLID principles, well-known and venerable tools, even version control in a worst case and truly nightmarish scenario.  Our protagonist is frustrated that he isn't doing things the "proper" way - a way he's spent personal time digesting and learning about and, more importantly, a way that some of the top developers in the industry advocate - and turns to a forum to ask the advice of his peers. Invariably the answer I, in the guise of the concerned newbie, will receive is that A) I don't know anything and should just shut my mouth and sling code the bad way like everybody else on the team, and B) These "best practices" are fade or a joke, and the only thing that matters is shipping software to your customers. I am here today to say that anyone who says this, or anything like it, is not only full of crap but indicative of exactly the type of “developer” that has helped to give our industry a bad name.  Here is why: One Who Knows Nothing, Understands Nothing On one hand, you have the cognoscenti of the .NET development world.  Guys like James Avery, Jeremy Miller, Ayende Rahien and Rob Conery; all well-respected and noted programmers that are pretty much our version of celebrities.  These guys write blogs, books, and post videos outlining the "correct" way of writing software to make sure it not only works but is maintainable and extensible and a joy to work with.  They tout the virtues of the SOLID principles, or of using TDD/BDD, or using a mature ORM like NHibernate, Subsonic or even Entity Framework. On the other hand, you have Joe Everyman, Lead Software Developer at Initrode Corporation - in our hypothetical story Joe is the junior developer's new boss.  Joe's been with Initrode for 10 years, starting as the company’s very first programmer and over the years building up a little fiefdom of his own until at the present he’s in charge of all Initrode’s software development.  Joe writes code the same way he always has, without bothering to learn much, if anything.  He looked at NHibernate once and found it was "too hard", so he uses a primitive implementation of the TableDataGateway pattern as a wrapper around SqlClient.SqlConnection and SqlClient.SqlCommand instead of an actual ORM (or, in a better case scenario, has created his own ORM); the thought of using LINQ or Entity Framework or really anything other than his own hastily homebrew solution has never occurred to him.  He doesn't understand TDD and considers “testing” to be using the .NET debugger to step through code, or simply loading up an app and entering some values to see if it works.  He doesn't really understand SOLID, and he doesn't care to.  He's worked as a programmer for years, and that's all that counts.  Right?  WRONG. Who would you rather trust?  Someone with years of experience and who writes books, creates well-known software and is akin to a celebrity, or someone with no credibility outside their own minute environment who throws around their clout and company seniority as the "proof" of their ability?  Joe Everyman may have years of experience at Initrode as a programmer, and says to do things "his way" but someone like Jeremy Miller or Ayende Rahien have years of experience at companies just like Initrode, THEY know ten times more than Joe Everyman knows or could ever hope to know, and THEY say to do things "this way". Here's another way of thinking about it: If you wanted to get into politics and needed advice on the best way to do it, would you rather listen to the mayor of Hicktown, USA or Barack Obama?  One is a small-time nobody while the other is very well-known and, as such, would probably have much more accurate and beneficial advice. NOTE: The selection of Barack Obama as an example in no way, shape, or form suggests a political affiliation or political bent to this post or blog, and no political innuendo should be mistakenly read from it; the intent was merely to compare a small-time persona with a well-known persona in a non-software field.  Feel free to replace the name "Barack Obama" with any well-known Congressman, Senator or US President of your choice. DIY Considered Harmful I will say right now that the homebrew development environment is the WORST one for an aspiring programmer, because it relies on nothing outside it's own little box - no useful skill outside of the small pond.  If you are forced to use some half-baked, homebrew ORM created by your Director of Software, you are not learning anything valuable you can take with you in the future; now, if you plan to stay at Initrode for 10 years like Joe Everyman, this is fine and dandy.  However if, like most of us, you want to advance your career outside a very narrow space you will do more harm than good by sticking it out in an environment where you, to be frank, know better than everybody else because you are aware of alternative and, in almost most cases, better tools for the job.  A junior developer who understands why the SOLID principles are good to follow, or why TDD is beneficial, or who knows that it's better to use NHibernate/Subsonic/EF/LINQ/well-known ORM versus some in-house one knows better than a senior developer with 20 years experience who doesn't understand any of that, plain and simple.  Anyone who disagrees is either a liar, or someone who, just like Joe Everyman, Lead Developer, relies on seniority and tenure rather than adapting their knowledge as things evolve. In many cases, the Joe Everymans of the world act this way out of fear - they cannot possibly fathom that a “junior” could know more than them; after all, they’ve spent 10 or more years in the same company, doing the same job, cranking out the same shoddy software.  And here comes a newbie who hasn’t spent 10+ years doing the same things, with a fresh and often radical take on the craft, and Joe Everyman is afraid he might have to put some real effort into his career again instead of just pointing to his 10 years of service at Initrode as “proof” that he’s good, or that he might have to learn something new to improve; in most cases the problem is Joe Everyman, and by extension Initrode itself, has a mentality of just being “good enough”, and mediocrity is the rule of the day. A Thorn Bush is No Place for a Phoenix My advice is that if you work on a team where they don't use the best practices that some of the most famous developers in our field say is the "right" way to do things (and have legions of people who agree), and YOU are aware of these practices and can see why they work, then LEAVE the company.  Find a company where they DO care about quality, and craftsmanship, otherwise you will never be happy.  There is no point in "dumbing" yourself down to the level of your co-workers and slinging code without care to craftsmanship.  In 95% of these situations there will be no point in bringing it to the attention of Joe Everyman because he won't listen; he might even get upset that someone is trying to "upstage" him and fire the newbie, and replace someone with loads of untapped potential with a drone that will just nod affirmatively and grind out the tasks assigned without question. Find a company that has people smart enough to listen to the "best and brightest", and be happy.  Do not, I repeat, DO NOT waste away in a job working for ignorant people.  At the end of the day software development IS a craft, and a level of craftsmanship is REQUIRED for any serious professional.  When you have knowledgeable people with the credibility to back it up saying one thing, and small-time people who are, to put it bluntly, nobodies in the field saying and doing something totally different because they can't comprehend it, leave the nobodies to their own devices to fade into obscurity.  Work for a company that uses REAL software engineering techniques and really cares about craftsmanship.  The biggest issue affecting our career, and the reason software development has never been the respected, white-collar career it was meant to be, is because hacks and charlatans can pass themselves off as professional programmers without following a lick of good advice from programmers much better at the craft than they are.  These modern day snake-oil salesmen entrench themselves in companies by hoodwinking non-technical businesspeople and customers with their shoddy wares, end up in senior/lead/executive positions, and push their lack of knowledge on everybody unfortunate enough to work with/for/under them, crushing any dissent or voices of reason and change under their tyrannical heel and leaving behind a trail of dismayed and, often, unemployed junior developers who were made examples of to keep up the facade and avoid the shadow of doubt being cast upon them. To sum this up another way: If you surround yourself with learned people, you will learn.  Surround yourself with ignorant people who can't, as the saying goes, see the forest through the trees, and you'll learn nothing of any real value.  There is more to software development than just writing code, and the end goal should not be just "shipping software", it should be shipping software that is extensible, maintainable, and above all else software whose creation has broadened your knowledge in some capacity, even if a minor one.  An eager newbie who knows theory and thirsts for knowledge can easily be moulded and taught the advanced topics, but the same can't be said of someone who only cares about the finish line.  This industry needs more people espousing the benefits of software craftsmanship and proper software engineering techniques, and less Joe Everymans who are unwilling to adapt or foster new ways of thinking. Conclusion - I Cast “Protection from Fire” I am fairly certain this post will spark some controversy and might even invite the flames.  Please keep in mind these are opinions and nothing more.  A little healthy rant and subsequent flamewar can be good for the soul once in a while.  To paraphrase The Godfather: It helps to get rid of the bad blood.

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• Using the OAM Mobile & Social SDK to secure native mobile apps - Part 2 : OAM Mobile & Social Server configuration

  - by kanishkmahajan

  Objective  In the second part of this blog post I'll now cover configuration of OAM to secure our sample native apps developed using the iOS SDK. First, here are some key server side concepts: Application Profiles: An application profile is a logical representation of your application within OAM server. It could be a web (html/javascript) or native (iOS or Android) application. Applications may have different requirements for AuthN/AuthZ, and therefore each application that interacts with OAM Mobile & Social REST services must be uniquely defined. Service Providers: Service providers represent the back end services that are accessed by applications. With OAM Mobile & Social these services are in the areas of authentication, authorization and user profile access. A Service Provider then defines a type or class of service for authentication, authorization or user profiles. For example, the JWTAuthentication provider performs authentication and returns JWT (JSON Web Tokens) to the application. In contrast, the OAMAuthentication also provides authentication but uses OAM SSO tokens Service Profiles:  A Service Profile is a logical envelope that defines a service endpoint URL for a service provider for the OAM Mobile & Social Service. You can create multiple service profiles for a service provider to define token capabilities and service endpoints. Each service provider instance requires atleast one corresponding service profile.The  OAM Mobile & Social Service includes a pre-configured service profile for each pre-configured service provider. Service Domains: Service domains bind together application profiles and service profiles with an optional security handler. So now let's configure the OAM server. Additional details are in the OAM Documentation and this post simply provides an outline of configuration tasks required to configure OAM for securing native apps.  Configuration  Create The Application Profile Log on to the Oracle Access Management console and from System Configuration -> Mobile and Social -> Mobile Services, select "Create" under Application Profiles. You would do this  step twice - once for each of the native apps - AvitekInventory and AvitekScheduler. Enter the parameters for the new Application profile: Name:  The application name. In this example we use 'InventoryApp' for the AvitekInventory app and 'SchedulerApp' for the AvitekScheduler app. The application name configured here must match the application name in the settings for the deployed iOS application. BaseSecret: Enter a password here. This does not need to match any existing password. It is used as an encryption key between the client and the OAM server.  Mobile Configuration: Enable this checkbox for any mobile applications. This enables the SDK to collect and send Mobile specific attributes to the OAM server.  Webview: Controls the type of browser that the iOS application will use. The embedded browser (default) will render the browser within the application. External will use the system standalone browser. External can sometimes be preferable for debugging URLScheme: The URL scheme associated with the iOS apps that is also used as a custom URL scheme to register O/S handlers that will take control when OAM transfers control to device. For the AvitekInventory and the AvitekScheduler apps I used osa:// and client:// respectively. You set this scheme in Xcode while developing your iOS Apps under Info->URL Types.  Bundle Identifier : The fully qualified name of your iOS application. You typically set this when you create a new Xcode project or under General->Identity in Xcode. For the AvitekInventory and AvitekScheduler apps these were com.us.oracle.AvitekInventory and com.us.oracle.AvitekScheduler respectively.  Create The Service Domain Select create under Service domains. Create a name for your domain (AvitekDomain is what I've used). The name configured must match the service domain set in the iOS application settings. Under "Application Profile Selection" click the browse button. Choose the application profiles that you created in the previous step one by one. Set the InventoryApp as the SSO agent (with an automatic priority of 1) and the SchedulerApp as the SSO client. This associates these applications with this service domain and configures them in a 'circle of trust'.  Advance to the next page of the wizard to configure the services for this domain. For this example we will use the following services:  Authentication:   This will use the JWT (JSON Web Token) format authentication provider. The iOS application upon successful authentication will receive a signed JWT token from OAM Mobile & Social service. This token will be used in subsequent calls to OAM. Use 'MobileOAMAuthentication' here. Authorization:  The authorization provider. The SDK makes calls to this provider endpoint to obtain authorization decisions on resource requests. Use 'OAMAuthorization' here. User Profile Service:  This is the service that provides user profile services (attribute lookup, attribute modification). It can be any directory configured as a data source in OAM.  And that's it! We're done configuring our native apps. In the next section, let's look at some additional features that were mentioned in the earlier post that are automated by the SDK for the app developer i.e. these are areas that require no additional coding by the app developer when developing with the SDK as they only require server side configuration: Additional Configuration  Offline Authentication Select this option in the service domain configuration to allow users to log in and authenticate to the application locally. Clear the box to block users from authenticating locally. Strong Authentication By simply selecting the OAAMSecurityHandlerPlugin while configuring mobile related Service Domains, the OAM Mobile&Social service allows sophisticated device and client application registration logic as well as the advanced risk and fraud analysis logic found in OAAM to be applied to mobile authentication. Let's look at some scenarios where the OAAMSecurityHandlerPlugin gets used. First, when we configure OAM and OAAM to integrate together using the TAP scheme, then that integration kicks off by selecting the OAAMSecurityHandlerPlugin in the mobile service domain. This is how the mobile device is now prompted for KBA,OTP etc depending on the TAP scheme integration and the OAM users registered in the OAAM database. Second, when we configured the service domain, there were claim attributes there that are already pre-configured in OAM Mobile&Social service and we simply accepted the default values- these are the set of attributes that will be fetched from the device and passed to the server during registration/authentication as device profile attributes. When a mobile application requests a token through the Mobile Client SDK, the SDK logic will send the Device Profile attributes as a part of an HTTP request. This set of Device Profile attributes enhances security by creating an audit trail for devices that assists device identification. When the OAAM Security Plug-in is used, a particular combination of Device Profile attribute values is treated as a device finger print, known as the Digital Finger Print in the OAAM Administration Console. Each finger print is assigned a unique fingerprint number. Each OAAM session is associated with a finger print and the finger print makes it possible to log (and audit) the devices that are performing authentication and token acquisition. Finally, if the jail broken option is selected while configuring an application profile, the SDK detects a device is jail broken based on configured policy and if the OAAM handler is configured the plug-in can allow or block access to client device depending on the OAAM policy as well as detect blacklisted, lost or stolen devices and send a wipeout command that deletes all the mobile &social relevant data and blocks the device from future access. 1024x768 Social Logins Finally, let's complete this post by adding configuration to configure social logins for mobile applications. Although the Avitek sample apps do not demonstrate social logins this would be an ideal exercise for you based on the sample code provided in the earlier post. I'll cover the server side configuration here (with Facebook as an example) and you can retrofit the code to accommodate social logins by following the steps outlined in "Invoking Authentication Services" and add code in LoginViewController and maybe create a new delegate - AvitekRPDelegate based on the description in the previous post. So, here all you will need to do is configure an application profile for social login, configure a new service domain that uses the social login application profile, register the app on Facebook and finally configure the Facebook OAuth provider in OAM with those settings. Navigate to Mobile and Social, click on "Internet Identity Services" and create a new application profile. Here are the relevant parameters for the new application profile (-also we're not registering the social user in OAM with this configuration below, however that is a key feature as well): Name:  The application name. This must match the name of the of mobile application profile created for your application under Mobile Services. We used InventoryApp for this example. SharedSecret: Enter a password here. This does not need to match any existing password. It is used as an encryption key between the client and the OAM Mobile and Social service.  Mobile Application Return URL: After the Relying Party (social) login, the OAM Mobile & Social service will redirect to the iOS application using this URI. This is defined under Info->URL type and we used 'osa', so we define this here as 'osa://' Login Type: Choose to allow only internet identity authentication for this exercise. Authentication Service Endpoint : Make sure that /internetidentityauthentication is selected. Login to http://developers.facebook.com using your Facebook account and click on Apps and register the app as InventoryApp. Note that the consumer key and API secret gets generated automatically by the Facebook OAuth server. Navigate back to OAM and under Mobile and Social, click on "Internet Identity Services" and edit the Facebook OAuth Provider. Add the consumer key and API secret from the Facebook developers site to the Facebook OAuth Provider: Navigate to Mobile Services. Click on New to create a new service domain. In this example we call the domain "AvitekDomainRP". The type should be 'Mobile Application' and the application credential type 'User Token'. Add the application "InventoryApp" to the domain. Advance the next page of the wizard. Select the  default service profiles but ensure that the Authentication Service is set to 'InternetIdentityAuthentication'. Finish the creation of the service domain.

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• Automatically create bug resolution task using the TFS 2010 API

  - by Bob Hardister

  My customer requires bug resolution to be approved and tracked.  To minimize the overhead for developers I implemented a TFS 2010 server-side plug-in to automatically create a child resolution task for the bug when the “CCB” field is set to approved. The CCB field is a custom field.  I also added the story points field to the bug WIT for sizing purposes. Redundant tasks will not be created unless the bug title is changed or the prior task is closed. The program writes an audit trail to a log file visible in the TFS Admin Console Log view. Here’s the code. BugAutoTask.cs /* SPECIFICATION * When the CCB field on the bug is set to approved, create a child task where the task: * name = Resolve bug [ID] - [Title of bug] * assigned to = same as assigned to field on the bug * same area path * same iteration path * activity = Bug Resolution * original estimate = bug points * * The source code is used to build a dll (Ows.TeamFoundation.BugAutoTaskCreation.PlugIns.dll), * which needs to be copied to * C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Services\bin\Plugins * on ALL TFS application-tier servers. * * Author: Bob Hardister. */ using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.IO; using System.Xml; using System.Text; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Linq; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Server; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Server; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client; using System.Collections; namespace BugAutoTaskCreation { public class BugAutoTask : ISubscriber { public EventNotificationStatus ProcessEvent(TeamFoundationRequestContext requestContext, NotificationType notificationType, object notificationEventArgs, out int statusCode, out string statusMessage, out ExceptionPropertyCollection properties) { statusCode = 0; properties = null; statusMessage = String.Empty; // Error message for for tracing last code executed and optional fields string lastStep = "No field values found or set "; try { if ((notificationType == NotificationType.Notification) && (notificationEventArgs.GetType() == typeof(WorkItemChangedEvent))) { WorkItemChangedEvent workItemChange = (WorkItemChangedEvent)notificationEventArgs; // see ConnectToTFS() method below to select which TFS instance/collection // to connect to TfsTeamProjectCollection tfs = ConnectToTFS(); WorkItemStore wiStore = tfs.GetService<WorkItemStore>(); lastStep = lastStep + ": connection to TFS successful "; // Get the work item that was just changed by the user. WorkItem witem = wiStore.GetWorkItem(workItemChange.CoreFields.IntegerFields[0].NewValue); lastStep = lastStep + ": retrieved changed work item, ID:" + witem.Id + " "; // Filter for Bug work items only if (witem.Type.Name == "Bug") { // DEBUG lastStep = lastStep + ": changed work item is a bug "; // Filter for CCB (i.e. Baseline Status) field set to approved only bool BaselineStatusChange = false; if (workItemChange.ChangedFields != null) { ProcessBugRevision(ref lastStep, workItemChange, wiStore, ref witem, ref BaselineStatusChange); } } } } catch (Exception e) { Trace.WriteLine(e.Message); Logger log = new Logger(); log.WriteLineToLog(MsgLevel.Error, "Application error: " + lastStep + " - " + e.Message + " - " + e.InnerException); } statusCode = 1; statusMessage = "Bug Auto Task Evaluation Completed"; properties = null; return EventNotificationStatus.ActionApproved; } // PRIVATE METHODS private static void ProcessBugRevision(ref string lastStep, WorkItemChangedEvent workItemChange, WorkItemStore wiStore, ref WorkItem witem, ref bool BaselineStatusChange) { foreach (StringField field in workItemChange.ChangedFields.StringFields) { // DEBUG lastStep = lastStep + ": last changed field is - " + field.Name + " "; if (field.Name == "Baseline Status") { lastStep = lastStep + ": retrieved bug baseline status field value, bug ID:" + witem.Id + " "; BaselineStatusChange = (field.NewValue != field.OldValue); if ((BaselineStatusChange) && (field.NewValue == "Approved")) { // Instanciate logger Logger log = new Logger(); // *** Create resolution task for this bug *** // ******************************************* // Get the team project and selected field values of the bug work item Project teamProject = witem.Project; int bugID = witem.Id; string bugTitle = witem.Fields["System.Title"].Value.ToString(); string bugAssignedTo = witem.Fields["System.AssignedTo"].Value.ToString(); string bugAreaPath = witem.Fields["System.AreaPath"].Value.ToString(); string bugIterationPath = witem.Fields["System.IterationPath"].Value.ToString(); string bugChangedBy = witem.Fields["System.ChangedBy"].OriginalValue.ToString(); string bugTeamProject = witem.Project.Name; lastStep = lastStep + ": all mandatory bug field values found "; // Optional fields Field bugPoints = witem.Fields["Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.StoryPoints"]; if (bugPoints.Value != null) { lastStep = lastStep + ": all mandatory and optional bug field values found "; } // Initialize child resolution task title string childTaskTitle = "Resolve bug " + bugID + " - " + bugTitle; // At this point I can check if a resolution task (of the same name) // for the bug already exist // If so, do not create a new resolution task bool createResolutionTask = true; WorkItem parentBug = wiStore.GetWorkItem(bugID); WorkItemLinkCollection links = parentBug.WorkItemLinks; foreach (WorkItemLink wil in links) { if (wil.LinkTypeEnd.Name == "Child") { WorkItem childTask = wiStore.GetWorkItem(wil.TargetId); if ((childTask.Title == childTaskTitle) && (childTask.State != "Closed")) { createResolutionTask = false; log.WriteLineToLog(MsgLevel.Info, "Team project " + bugTeamProject + ": " + bugChangedBy + " - set the CCB field to \"Approved\" for bug, ID: " + bugID + ". Task not created as open one of the same name already exist, ID:" + childTask.Id); } } } if (createResolutionTask) { // Define the work item type of the new work item WorkItemTypeCollection workItemTypes = wiStore.Projects[teamProject.Name].WorkItemTypes; WorkItemType wiType = workItemTypes["Task"]; // Setup the new task and assign field values witem = new WorkItem(wiType); witem.Fields["System.Title"].Value = "Resolve bug " + bugID + " - " + bugTitle; witem.Fields["System.AssignedTo"].Value = bugAssignedTo; witem.Fields["System.AreaPath"].Value = bugAreaPath; witem.Fields["System.IterationPath"].Value = bugIterationPath; witem.Fields["Microsoft.VSTS.Common.Activity"].Value = "Bug Resolution"; lastStep = lastStep + ": all mandatory task field values set "; // Optional fields if (bugPoints.Value != null) { witem.Fields["Microsoft.VSTS.Scheduling.OriginalEstimate"].Value = bugPoints.Value; lastStep = lastStep + ": all mandatory and optional task field values set "; } // Check for validation errors before saving the new task and linking it to the bug ArrayList validationErrors = witem.Validate(); if (validationErrors.Count == 0) { witem.Save(); // Link the new task (child) to the bug (parent) var linkType = wiStore.WorkItemLinkTypes[CoreLinkTypeReferenceNames.Hierarchy]; // Fetch the work items to be linked var parentWorkItem = wiStore.GetWorkItem(bugID); int taskID = witem.Id; var childWorkItem = wiStore.GetWorkItem(taskID); // Add a new link to the parent relating the child and save it parentWorkItem.Links.Add(new WorkItemLink(linkType.ForwardEnd, childWorkItem.Id)); parentWorkItem.Save(); log.WriteLineToLog(MsgLevel.Info, "Team project " + bugTeamProject + ": " + bugChangedBy + " - set the CCB field to \"Approved\" for bug, ID:" + bugID + ", which automatically created child resolution task, ID:" + taskID); } else { log.WriteLineToLog(MsgLevel.Error, "Error in creating bug resolution child task for bug ID:" + bugID); foreach (Field taskField in validationErrors) { log.WriteLineToLog(MsgLevel.Error, " - Validation Error in task field: " + taskField.ReferenceName); } } } } } } } private TfsTeamProjectCollection ConnectToTFS() { // Connect to TFS string tfsUri = string.Empty; // Production TFS instance production collection tfsUri = @"xxxx"; // Production TFS instance admin collection //tfsUri = @"xxxxx"; // Local TFS testing instance default collection //tfsUri = @"xxxxx"; TfsTeamProjectCollection tfs = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(new System.Uri(tfsUri)); tfs.EnsureAuthenticated(); return tfs; } // HELPERS public string Name { get { return "Bug Auto Task Creation Event Handler"; } } public SubscriberPriority Priority { get { return SubscriberPriority.Normal; } } public enum MsgLevel { Info, Warning, Error }; public Type[] SubscribedTypes() { return new Type[1] { typeof(WorkItemChangedEvent) }; } } } Logger.cs using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.IO; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Windows.Forms; namespace BugAutoTaskCreation { class Logger { // fields private string _ApplicationDirectory = @"C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Team Foundation\Server Configuration\Logs"; private string _LogFileName = @"\CFG_ACCT_AT_OWS_BugAutoTaskCreation.log"; private string _LogFile; private string _LogTimestamp = DateTime.Now.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss"); private string _MsgLevelText = string.Empty; // default constructor public Logger() { // check for a prior log file FileInfo logFile = new FileInfo(_ApplicationDirectory + _LogFileName); if (!logFile.Exists) { CreateNewLogFile(ref logFile); } } // properties public string ApplicationDirectory { get { return _ApplicationDirectory; } set { _ApplicationDirectory = value; } } public string LogFile { get { _LogFile = _ApplicationDirectory + _LogFileName; return _LogFile; } set { _LogFile = value; } } // PUBLIC METHODS public void WriteLineToLog(BugAutoTask.MsgLevel msgLevel, string logRecord) { try { // set msgLevel text if (msgLevel == BugAutoTask.MsgLevel.Info) { _MsgLevelText = "[Info @" + MsgTimeStamp() + "] "; } else if (msgLevel == BugAutoTask.MsgLevel.Warning) { _MsgLevelText = "[Warning @" + MsgTimeStamp() + "] "; } else if (msgLevel == BugAutoTask.MsgLevel.Error) { _MsgLevelText = "[Error @" + MsgTimeStamp() + "] "; } else { _MsgLevelText = "[Error: unsupported message level @" + MsgTimeStamp() + "] "; } // write a line to the log file StreamWriter logFile = new StreamWriter(_ApplicationDirectory + _LogFileName, true); logFile.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + logRecord); logFile.Close(); } catch (Exception) { throw; } } // PRIVATE METHODS private void CreateNewLogFile(ref FileInfo logFile) { try { string logFilePath = logFile.FullName; // write the log file header _MsgLevelText = "[Info @" + MsgTimeStamp() + "] "; string cpu = string.Empty; if (Environment.Is64BitOperatingSystem) { cpu = " (x64)"; } StreamWriter newLog = new StreamWriter(logFilePath, false); newLog.Flush(); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "===================================================================="); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Team Foundation Server Administration Log"); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Version : " + "1.0.0 Author: Bob Hardister"); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "DateTime : " + _LogTimestamp); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Type : " + "OWS Custom TFS API Plug-in"); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Activity : " + "Bug Auto Task Creation for CCB Approved Bugs"); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Area : " + "Build Explorer"); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Assembly : " + "Ows.TeamFoundation.BugAutoTaskCreation.PlugIns.dll"); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Location : " + @"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Services\bin\Plugins"); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "User : " + Environment.UserDomainName + @"\" + Environment.UserName); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "Machine : " + Environment.MachineName); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "System : " + Environment.OSVersion + cpu); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText + "===================================================================="); newLog.WriteLine(_MsgLevelText); newLog.Close(); } catch (Exception) { throw; } } private string MsgTimeStamp() { string msgTimestamp = string.Empty; return msgTimestamp = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss:fff"); } } }

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• How Mature is Your Database Change Management Process?

  - by Ben Rees

  .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database Delivery Patterns & Practices Further Reading Organization and team processes How do you get your database schema changes live, on to your production system? As your team of developers and DBAs are working on the changes to the database to support your business-critical applications, how do these updates wend their way through from dev environments, possibly to QA, hopefully through pre-production and eventually to production in a controlled, reliable and repeatable way? In this article, I describe a model we use to try and understand the different stages that customers go through as their database change management processes mature, from the very basic and manual, through to advanced continuous delivery practices. I also provide a simple chart that will help you determine “How mature is our database change management process?” This process of managing changes to the database – which all of us who have worked in application/database development have had to deal with in one form or another – is sometimes known as Database Change Management (even if we’ve never used the term ourselves). And it’s a difficult process, often painfully so. Some developers take the approach of “I’ve no idea how my changes get live – I just write the stored procedures and add columns to the tables. It’s someone else’s problem to get this stuff live. I think we’ve got a DBA somewhere who deals with it – I don’t know, I’ve never met him/her”. I know I used to work that way. I worked that way because I assumed that making the updates to production was a trivial task – how hard can it be? Pause the application for half an hour in the middle of the night, copy over the changes to the app and the database, and switch it back on again? Voila! But somehow it never seemed that easy. And it certainly was never that easy for database changes. Why? Because you can’t just overwrite the old database with the new version. Databases have a state – more specifically 4Tb of critical data built up over the last 12 years of running your business, and if your quick hotfix happened to accidentally delete that 4Tb of data, then you’re “Looking for a new role” pretty quickly after the failed release. There are a lot of other reasons why a managed database change management process is important for organisations, besides job security, not least: Frequency of releases. Many business managers are feeling the pressure to get functionality out to their users sooner, quicker and more reliably. The new book (which I highly recommend) Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Barry O’Reilly and Joanne Molesky provides a great discussion on how many enterprises are having to move towards a leaner, more frequent release cycle to maintain their competitive advantage. It’s no longer acceptable to release once per year, leaving your customers waiting all year for changes they desperately need (and expect) Auditing and compliance. SOX, HIPAA and other compliance frameworks have demanded that companies implement proper processes for managing changes to their databases, whether managing schema changes, making sure that the data itself is being looked after correctly or other mechanisms that provide an audit trail of changes. We’ve found, at Red Gate that we have a very wide range of customers using every possible form of database change management imaginable. Everything from “Nothing – I just fix the schema on production from my laptop when things go wrong, and write it down in my notebook” to “A full Continuous Delivery process – any change made by a dev gets checked in and recorded, fully tested (including performance tests) before a (tested) release is made available to our Release Management system, ready for live deployment!”. And everything in between of course. Because of the vast number of customers using so many different approaches we found ourselves struggling to keep on top of what everyone was doing – struggling to identify patterns in customers’ behavior. This is useful for us, because we want to try and fit the products we have to different needs – different products are relevant to different customers and we waste everyone’s time (most notably, our customers’) if we’re suggesting products that aren’t appropriate for them. If someone visited a sports store, looking to embark on a new fitness program, and the store assistant suggested the latest $10,000 multi-gym, complete with multiple weights mechanisms, dumb-bells, pull-up bars and so on, then he’s likely to lose that customer. All he needed was a pair of running shoes! To solve this issue – in an attempt to simplify how we understand our customers and our offerings – we built a model. This is a an attempt at trying to classify our customers in to some sort of model or “Customer Maturity Framework” as we rather grandly term it, which somehow simplifies our understanding of what our customers are doing. The great statistician, George Box (amongst other things, the “Box” in the Box-Jenkins time series model) gave us the famous quote: “Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful” We’ve taken this quote to heart – we know it’s a gross over-simplification of the real world of how users work with complex legacy and new database developments. Almost nobody precisely fits in to one of our categories. But we hope it’s useful and interesting. There are actually a number of similar models that exist for more general application delivery. We’ve found these from ThoughtWorks/Forrester, from InfoQ and others, and initially we tried just taking these models and replacing the word “application” for “database”. However, we hit a problem. From talking to our customers we know that users are far less further down the road of mature database change management than they are for application development. As a simple example, no application developer, who wants to keep his/her job would develop an application for an organisation without source controlling that code. Sure, he/she might not be using an advanced Gitflow branching methodology but they’ll certainly be making sure their code gets managed in a repo somewhere with all the benefits of history, auditing and so on. But this certainly isn’t the case (yet) for the database – a very large segment of the people we speak to have no source control set up for their databases whatsoever, even at the most basic level (for example, keeping change scripts in a source control system somewhere). By the way, if this is you, Red Gate has a great whitepaper here, on the barriers people face getting a source control process implemented at their organisations. This difference in maturity is the same as you move in to areas such as continuous integration (common amongst app developers, relatively rare for database developers) and automated release management (growing amongst app developers, very rare for the database). So, when we created the model we started from scratch and biased the levels of maturity towards what we actually see amongst our customers. But, what are these stages? And what level are you? The table below describes our definitions for four levels of maturity – Baseline, Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. As I say, this is a model – you won’t fit any of these categories perfectly, but hopefully one will ring true more than others. We’ve also created a PDF with a flow chart to help you find which of these groups most closely matches your team:  Download the Database Delivery Maturity Framework PDF here   Level D1 – Baseline Work directly on live databases Sometimes work directly in production Generate manual scripts for releases. Sometimes use a product like SQL Compare or similar to do this Any tests that we might have are run manually Level D2 – Beginner Have some ad-hoc DB version control such as manually adding upgrade scripts to a version control system Attempt is made to keep production in sync with development environments There is some documentation and planning of manual deployments Some basic automated DB testing in process Level D3 – Intermediate The database is fully version-controlled with a product like Red Gate SQL Source Control or SSDT Database environments are managed Production environment schema is reproducible from the source control system There are some automated tests Have looked at using migration scripts for difficult database refactoring cases Level D4 – Advanced Using continuous integration for database changes Build, testing and deployment of DB changes carried out through a proper database release process Fully automated tests Production system is monitored for fast feedback to developers   Does this model reflect your team at all? Where are you on this journey? We’d be very interested in knowing how you get on. We’re doing a lot of work at the moment, at Red Gate, trying to help people progress through these stages. For example, if you’re currently not source controlling your database, then this is a natural next step. If you are already source controlling your database, what about the next stage – continuous integration and automated release management? To help understand these issues, there’s a summary of the Red Gate Database Delivery learning program on our site, alongside a Patterns and Practices library here on Simple-Talk and a Training Academy section on our documentation site to help you get up and running with the tools you need to progress. All feedback is welcome and it would be great to hear where you find yourself on this journey! This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

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• Showing an Action on a TopComponent Node

  - by Geertjan

  Let's say you want to extend the tools in NetBeans IDE, specifically for TopComponents. When the user right-clicks in the Projects window (or Files window or Favorites window) on a Java class that extends TopComponent, a menu item should be available for branding the TopComponent. What "branding" entails is, at this stage, a secondary question. The primary question, from an implementation point of view, is "how do I create an action that is only shown when the user right-clicks on a TopComponent?" Here's the solution, in NetBeans IDE 7.2 (the "lazy" attribute, here set to false, is new in 7.2): import com.sun.source.tree.ClassTree; import com.sun.source.util.TreePathScanner; import java.awt.event.ActionEvent; import java.io.IOException; import javax.lang.model.element.Element; import javax.lang.model.element.TypeElement; import javax.swing.AbstractAction; import javax.swing.Action; import javax.swing.JOptionPane; import org.netbeans.api.java.source.CompilationController; import org.netbeans.api.java.source.CompilationInfo; import org.netbeans.api.java.source.JavaSource; import org.netbeans.api.java.source.JavaSource.Phase; import org.netbeans.api.java.source.Task; import org.openide.awt.ActionID; import org.openide.awt.ActionReference; import org.openide.awt.ActionReferences; import org.openide.awt.ActionRegistration; import org.openide.awt.DynamicMenuContent; import org.openide.loaders.DataObject; import org.openide.util.ContextAwareAction; import org.openide.util.Exceptions; import org.openide.util.Lookup; import org.openide.util.NbBundle.Messages; import org.openide.util.Utilities; @ActionID(     category = "Tools", id = "org.tc.customizer.BrandTopComponentAction") @ActionRegistration(     displayName = "#CTL_BrandTopComponentAction",     lazy = false) @ActionReferences({     @ActionReference(path = "Loaders/text/x-java/Actions", position = 150) }) @Messages("CTL_BrandTopComponentAction=Brand") public final class BrandTopComponentAction extends AbstractAction implements ContextAwareAction {     private final DataObject dobj;     public BrandTopComponentAction() {         this(Utilities.actionsGlobalContext());     }     public BrandTopComponentAction(Lookup context) {         super(Bundle.CTL_BrandTopComponentAction());         this.dobj = context.lookup(DataObject.class);         //Enable the menu item only if we're dealing with a TopComponent         JavaSource javaSource = JavaSource.forFileObject(dobj.getPrimaryFile());         try {             javaSource.runUserActionTask(new ScanForTopComponentTask(this), true);         } catch (IOException ex) {             Exceptions.printStackTrace(ex);         }         //Hide the menu item if it isn't enabled:         putValue(DynamicMenuContent.HIDE_WHEN_DISABLED, true);     }     @Override     public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ev) {         JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Hurray, I am a TopComponent!");         //Now add your code for showing a dialog,         //where the dialog will display UI for branding the TopComponent somehow         //and retrieve those branding values         //and then change the TopComponent class accordingly.     }     @Override     public Action createContextAwareInstance(Lookup actionContext) {         return new BrandTopComponentAction(actionContext);     }     private static class ScanForTopComponentTask implements Task<CompilationController> {         private final BrandTopComponentAction action;         private ScanForTopComponentTask(BrandTopComponentAction action) {             this.action = action;         }         @Override         public void run(CompilationController compilationController) throws Exception {             compilationController.toPhase(Phase.ELEMENTS_RESOLVED);             new MemberVisitor(compilationController, action).scan(                     compilationController.getCompilationUnit(), null);         }     }     private static class MemberVisitor extends TreePathScanner<Void, Void> {         private CompilationInfo info;         private final AbstractAction action;         public MemberVisitor(CompilationInfo info, AbstractAction action) {             this.info = info;             this.action = action;         }         @Override         public Void visitClass(ClassTree t, Void v) {             Element el = info.getTrees().getElement(getCurrentPath());             if (el != null) {                 TypeElement te = (TypeElement) el;                 if (te.getSuperclass().toString().equals("org.openide.windows.TopComponent")){                     action.setEnabled(true);                 } else {                     action.setEnabled(false);                 }             }             return null;         }     } } The code above is the result of combining various tutorials found on the NetBeans Platform Learning Trail.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 11, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 11, 2011Popular ReleasesSnoop, the WPF Spy Utility: Snoop 2.6.1: This release is a bug fixing release. Most importantly, issues have been seen around WPF 4.0 applications not always showing up in the app chooser. Hopefully, they are fixed now. I thought this issue warranted a minor release since more and more people are going WPF 4.0 and I don't want anyone to have any problems. Dan Hanan also contributes again with several usability features. Thanks Dan! Happy Snooping! p.s. By request, I am also attaching a .zip file ... so that people can install it ...RIBA - Rich Internet Business Application for Silverlight: Preview of MVVM Framework Source + Tutorials: This is a first public release of the MVVM Framework which is part of the final RIBA application. The complete RIBA example LOB application has yet to be published. Further Documentation on the MVVM part can be found on the Blog, http://www.SilverlightBlog.Net and in the downloadable source ( mvvm/doc/ ). Please post all issues and suggestions in the issue tracker.SharePoint Learning Kit: 1.5: SharePoint Learning Kit 1.5 has the following new functionality: *Support for SharePoint 2010 *E-Learning Actions can be localised *Two New Document Library Edit Options *Automatically add the Assignment List Web Part to the Web Part Gallery *Various Bug Fixes for the Drop Box There are 2 downloads for this release SLK-1.5-2010.zip for SharePoint 2010 SLK-1.5-2007.zip for SharePoint 2007 (WSS3 & MOSS 2007)Facebook C# SDK: 5.0.3 (BETA): This is fourth BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. For more information about this release see the following blog posts: Facebook C# SDK - Writing your first Facebook Application Facebook C# SDK v5 Beta Internals Facebook C# SDK V5.0.0 (BETA) Released We have spend time trying ...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Excel Template, version 1.0.1.161: The NodeXL Excel template displays a network graph using edge and vertex lists stored in an Excel 2007 or Excel 2010 workbook. What's NewThis release adds a new Twitter List network importer, makes some minor feature improvements, and fixes a few bugs. See the Complete NodeXL Release History for details. Installation StepsFollow these steps to install and use the template: Download the Zip file. Unzip it into any folder. Use WinZip or a similar program, or just right-click the Zip file...WatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.09.03: Whats NewAdded New Skin TagTastic http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/TagCloud-TagTastic-Skin.jpg Added New Skin RoundedButton http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/TagCloud-RoundedButton-Skin.jpg changes Tag Count fixed on Tag Source Referrals Fixed Tag Count when multiple Tag Sources are usedExtremeML: ExtremeML v1.0 Beta 3: VS solution source code updated for compatibility with VS2010 (accommodates VS2010 breaking changes in T4 template support).Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.1: This release adds a few more performance and graphical enhancements to 1.0. Switching desktops is now about as fast as you can blink. Desktop switching optimizations New welcome wizard for Vista/7 Fixed a few minor bugs Added a few more options to the options dialog (including ability to disable the taskbar switching)WCF Data Services Toolkit: WCF Data Services Toolkit: The source code and binary releases of the WCF Data Services Toolkit. For simplicity, the source code download doesn't include any of the MSTest files. If you want those, you can pull the code down via MercurialyoutubeFisher: youtubeFisher 3.0 [beta]: What's new: Video capturing improved Supports YouTube's new layout (january 2011) Internal refactoringNearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v5.0: Version 5.0 of the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing the following improvements: .NET 4.0 as target framework using ASP.NET MVC 3. All views migrated to Razor for cleaner markup. Alternate template (Layout file) for mobile devices 4 Bug Fixes since Version 4.1 Visit the project Roadmap for more details. Webdeploy package sha1 checksum: 28785b7248052465ea0738a7775e8e8744d84c27fuv: 1.0 release, codename Chopper Joe: features: search/replace :o to open file :s to save file :q to quitASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager html generation optimized new features for the lookup (add additional search data ) live demo went aeroEnhSim: EnhSim 2.3.6 BETA: 2.3.6 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.06 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 Changes since 2.3.0 ...TestApi - a library of Test APIs: TestApi v0.6: TestApi v0.6 comes with the following changes: TestApi code development has been moved to Codeplex: Moved TestApi soluton to VS 2010; Moved all source code to Codeplex. All development work is done there now. Fault Injection API: Integrated the unmanaged FaultInjectionEngine.dll COM component in the build; Cleaned up FaultInjectionEngine.dll to build at warning level 4; Implemented “FaultScope” which allows for in-process fault injection; Added automation scripts & sample program; ...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.5: AutoChat now allows up to 6 items. Items with nr. 7-0 will be removed! News page url's are now opened in the default browser Added a context menu to the system tray icon (thanks to Alex Banagos) AutoChat now allows configuring the Chat Keys and the Modifier Key The recent files list now supports compact and full mode Fix: Swapped mouse buttons are now properly detected Fix: Sometimes the Play button was pressed while still greyed out Champion: Karma Note: You can also run the u...mojoPortal: 2.3.6.2: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2362-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Rawr: Rawr 4.0.19 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...IronRuby: 1.1.2: IronRuby 1.1.2 is a servicing release that keeps on improving compatibility with Ruby 1.9.2 and includes IronRuby integration to Visual Studio 2010. We decided to drop 1.8.6 compatibility mode in all post-1.0 releases. We recommend using IronRuby 1.0 if you need 1.8.6 compatibility. In this release we fixed several major issues: - problems that blocked Gem installation in certain cases - regex syntax: the parser was replaced with a new one that is much more compatible with Ruby 1.9.2 - cras...MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 (4): There was a small issue with the previous release that caused errors when installing the templates in VS10 Express. This release corrects the error. Only use this if you encountered issues when installing the previous release. No changes in the binaries.New ProjectsAlchemySearch: A middleware application that allows the searching of Open Text's Alchemy application from a command line or from a calling application. C# .NET 4alltuan: all tuan infoasp.net mvc 2.0 ??????: asp.net mvc 2.0 ??????Basic Text File Generator: This is an investigatory development that creates text files from a windows forms app.bisolu_luc: nothing yetCriteria Pack for EPiServer CMS: This is a collection of useful criteria for extending the personalization mechanism, Visitor Groups, in EPiServer CMS 6 R2 (or later).CTRNN.NET: CTRNN.NET is a C# implementation of Continuous Time Recurrent Neural Networks.DXperience Toolkit: Complimentary controls and libraries from DevExpress.Excel Library for Small Basic: This library extend Small Basic to allows you to read or write contents of a cell in the Excel file from Small Basic program. ???????? Small Basic ????、Small Basic ??? Excel ???????????????????。HealthVault Eventing Sample: A sample application demonstrating the new HealthVault Eventing feature.Hitcents Blog - Example Code: Contains various source code examples from articles at http://www.hitcents.com/blog. Brought to you by Hitcents.INI Modifier: A proprietary application to amend users ini files for JBAe automatically from a central control file.issueIT.net - ”I just found the last bug”: issueIT is the best open source web-based issue tracker for .NET. It’s easy to customize to suit your organization. This project is not finished yet - it is only at a very early stage Leage of Legends Masteries Tool: -Small, portable and fast tool to help you set your masteries. -No Install. -Masteries saved in the same folder: "lolMasterSet.dat" (text file) How to use: - Run and then go to masteries tab in League of Legends luncher. You should see the overlay. Memory View controls: Memory View controls are a pair of controls for real time and static viewing and editing of a memory space. MemoryHexEditor is a hex editor that supports viewing and editing memory, and MemoryHeatMap is a time-based graphical view that shows how memory is read and written to.Moq Contrib: Community contributions to Moq.Operating System Basic: Sistema operacional desenvolvido em QuickBasic, durante minha adolecência.PAiRS - A WPF Memory Card Game: PAiRS is an implementation of a card matching game in which you are given an even number of cards face down in a grid, and you try to flip over 2 cards at a time to create a match until all cards are matched. PAiRS is built using C#, .Net 3.5+ and WPF.RIBA - Rich Internet Business Application for Silverlight: RIBA is an example LOB application with many features to show how to build distributed and secure Line of Business applications based on Silverlight 4. You can find the official blog on www.silverlightblog.netSearcher: Searcher is a Windows Phone project which allows you to quickly search using multiple search engines. SharePoint Term Store Powershell Utilities: An assortment of PowerShell script-based utilities to perform actions on the SharePoint Managed Metadata Term Store. PowerShell script-based utilities have been chosen rather than cmdlets as they are more suitable for environments that have strict installation policies.SmartHotelFoundation: Smart Hotel FoundationSumer Filemanager: This project ensured fully ajax based file management.The Open Source PMU: The Open Source PMU Project provides resources that enable you to build your own SynchroPhasor sensor for use with the openPDC project, research, development, or electric grid observation.Trail Blazer: Movie Trailer Fetcher - Downloads trailers for movies in a collection and saves them in movie folder. It is being developed as a companion to Meta Data Fetchers for the Media Browser project. It is being developed as a standalone C# app but a frontend in MCML is being considered.University Project Tracker: University Project TrackerVideo Backup Fusion: The complete and simply to use backup solution for video portalsWPF ShellFactory: WPF ShellFactory is an easy-to-use application framework for WPF, using a system derived from M-V-VM for its views. It supports multiple modules, either statically or dynamically loaded (i.e. plugins). It also contains mechanisms for application-wide services.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 14, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 14, 2011Popular ReleasesProDinner - ASP.NET MVC EF4 Code First DDD jQuery Sample App: first release: ProDinner is an ASP.NET MVC sample application, it uses DDD, EF4 Code First for Data Access, jQuery and MvcProjectAwesome for Web UI, it has Multi-language User Interface Features: CRUD and search operations for entities Multi-Language User Interface upload and crop Images (make thumbnail) for meals pagination using "more results" button very rich and responsive UI (using Mvc Project Awesome) Multiple UI themes (using jQuery UI themes)Personal Activity Monitor - increas your productivity by eliminating timewasters: Personal Activity Monitor v0.1.2: removed PreEmptive monitoring attributes - maybe will be back in the future added scrollbars to the list of apps :)BEPUphysics: BEPUphysics v0.15.0: BEPUphysics v0.15.0!LiveChat Starter Kit: LCSK v1.1: This release contains couple of new features and bug fixes including: Features: Send chat transcript via email Operator can now invite visitor to chat (pro-active chat request) Bug Fixes: Operator management (Save and Delete) bug fixes Operator Console chat small fixesIronRuby: 1.1.3: IronRuby 1.1.3 is a servicing release that keeps on improving compatibility with Ruby 1.9.2 and includes IronRuby integration to Visual Studio 2010. We decided to drop 1.8.6 compatibility mode in all post-1.0 releases. We recommend using IronRuby 1.0 if you need 1.8.6 compatibility. The main purpose of this release is to sync with IronPython 2.7 release, i.e. to keep the Dynamic Language Runtime that both these languages build on top shareable. This release also fixes a few bugs: 5763 Use...SQL Server PowerShell Extensions: 2.3.2.1 Production: Release 2.3.2.1 implements SQLPSX as PowersShell version 2.0 modules. SQLPSX consists of 13 modules with 163 advanced functions, 2 cmdlets and 7 scripts for working with ADO.NET, SMO, Agent, RMO, SSIS, SQL script files, PBM, Performance Counters, SQLProfiler, Oracle and MySQL and using Powershell ISE as a SQL and Oracle query tool. In addition optional backend databases and SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 reports are provided with SQLServer and PBM modules. See readme file for details.Image.Viewer: 2011.2: Whats new for Image.Viewer 2011.2: New open from file New about dialog Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsIronPython: 2.7: On behalf of the IronPython team, I'm very pleased to announce the release of IronPython 2.7. This release contains all of the language features of Python 2.7, as well as several previously missing modules and numerous bug fixes. IronPython 2.7 also includes built-in Visual Studio support through IronPython Tools for Visual Studio. IronPython 2.7 requires .NET 4.0 or Silverlight 4. To download IronPython 2.7, visit http://ironpython.codeplex.com/releases/view/54498. Any bugs should be report...XML Explorer: XML Explorer 4.0.2: Changes in 4.0: This release is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile. Changed XSD validation to use the schema specified by the XML documents. Added a VS style Error List, double-clicking an error takes you to the offending node. XPathNavigator schema validation finally gives SourceObject (was fixed in .NET 4). Added Namespaces window and better support for XPath expressions in documents with a default namespace. Added ExpandAll and CollapseAll toolbar buttons (in a...Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 1.0.0.0: Stable Release 51 Degrees.mobi Foundation has been in beta for some time now and has been used on thousands of websites worldwide. We’re now highly confident in the product and have designated this release as stable. We recommend all users update to this version. New Capabilities MappingsTo improve compatibility with other libraries some new .NET capabilities are now populated with wurfl data: “maximumRenderedPageSize” populated with “max_deck_size” “rendersBreaksAfterWmlAnchor” populated ...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7.3: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager added interactive search for the lookupWPF Inspector: WPF Inspector 0.9.7: New Features in Version 0.9.7 - Support for .NET 3.5 and 4.0 - Multi-inspection of the same process - Property-Filtering for multiple keywords e.g. "Height Width" - Smart Element Selection - Select Controls by clicking CTRL, - Select Template-Parts by clicking CTRL+SHIFT - Possibility to hide the element adorner (over the context menu on the visual tree) - Many bugfixes??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2011-03-10: http://download.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1codechs&DownloadId=216140 ??，????。??????????All-In-One Code Framework ???，??20?Sample！！????，?????。http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ASP.NET ??： CSASPNETBingMaps VBASPNETRemoteUploadAndDownload CS/VBASPNETSerializeJsonString CSASPNETIPtoLocation CSASPNETExcelLikeGridView ....... Winform??： FTPDownload FTPUpload MultiThreadedWebDownloader...Rawr: Rawr 4.1.0: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a Release of the WPF version, most of the general issues have been resolved. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Tracker. Whe...PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.1.2 for IIS 7: This is a localization release of PHP Manager for IIS 7. It contains all the functionality available in 56962 plus a few bug fixes (see change list for more details). Most importantly this release is translated into five languages: German - the translation is provided by Christian Graefe Dutch - the translation is provided by Harrie Verveer Turkish - the translation is provided by Yusuf Oztürk Japanese - the translation is provided by Kenichi Wakasa Russian - the translation is provid...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Beta ChangesAdded user streams support Serialization is not attempted for Twitter 5xx errors Fixes based on feedback Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.2.0: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: http://json.codeplex.comOffice Web.UI: Version 2.4: After having lost all modifications done for 2.3. I finally did it again... Have a look at http://www.officewebui.com/change-log Also, the documentation continues to grow... http://www.officewebui.com/category/kb ThanksmyCollections: Version 1.3: New in version 1.3 : Added Editor management for Books Added Amazon API for Books Us, Fr, De Added Amazon Us, Fr, De for Movies Added The MovieDB for Fr and De Added Author for Books Added Editor and Platform for Games Added Amazon Us, De for Games Added Studio for XXX Added Background for XXX Bug fixing with Softonic API Bug fixing with IMDB UI improvement Removed GraceNote Added Amazon Us,Fr, De for Series Added TVDB Fr and De for Series Added Tracks for Musi...patterns & practices : Composite Services: Composite Services Guidance - CTP2: Overview The Composite Services guidance (codename Reykjavik) provides best practices and capabilities for applying industry-known SOA design patterns when building robust, connected, service-oriented composite enterprise applications. These capabilities are implemented as a set of reusable components for analytic tracing, service virtualization, metadata centralization and versioning, and policy centralization as well as exception management, included in this release. Changes in this CTP ...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 1.0 Beta 1: Beta 1You can't install IronPython Tools for Visual Studio side-by-side with Python Tools for Visual Studio. A race condition sometimes causes local MPI debugging to miss breakpoints. When MPI jobs on a cluster fail they don’t get cleaned up correctly, which can cause debugging to stall because the associated MPI job is stuck in the queue. The "Threads" view has a race condition which can cause it not to display properly at times. VS2010 shortcuts that are pinned to the taskbar are so...New ProjectsASPRazorWebGrid: ASPRazorWebGrid can be used as an alternative for the built-in WebGrid in ASP.NET MVC3 using Razor. Features: - Server-side sorting and paging - Choice between url grid sort/paging parameters or page postback - Clean pager layoutBert Automation Framework: Bert Automation Framework. Bert can be leveraged to create automated tests for Windows or Web based applications. Framework is developed in C# using Visual Studio 2010, Microsofts AutomationUI and/or WATIN and be used to create automated tests. CasinoBot - A C# IRC gambling bot: CasinoBot is an IRC bot which allows you to play eight games. You can play single- and multiplayer games like hangman or slot. Includes a currency system, multi-channel support and a huge wordlist. The bot is written in C# using the SmartIRC4Net library.Cheque Management: This is a Cheque management project that help people to manage their cheque.CityLife: CityLife is a silverlight gameEmpty Razor Generator: A stripped down single file generator powered by Razor. Similiar to other generators available with the exception that is an absolute minimal implmentation. It's easy to tweak and very flexible. Driven in part because I would love to see it on WPF/WP7/Silverlight.ExtendedWorkFlow: Umbraco Extended WorkFlow to add extra functionality to create workflow process maps that can execute assemblies via commands and that have set stages. All stages, action and commands are logged within the umbraco audit trail. States and Action are also locked to user or role.Fluent CodeDOM: A library which allows you to work with CodeDOM in a way that is similar to the way you write your code. The library allows you to write your generated code much faster and make it more readable. Also, the usage of this library is very intuitive.FT: wftGoogle Map control for ASP.NET MVC: The control wraps Google maps API simplifying the use of Google maps in ASP.NET MVC applications. Based on Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC this control shows how easy is to extend the Telerik framawork by building your own controls for ASP.NET MVC.GooNews - A WP7 Application: A Windows Phone 7 application. iTimeTrack IssueTracker: The iTimeTrack IssueTracker project is a (the AGPL open-source) subset of of the iTimeTrack time and issue tracker app that you can customize for your organizations use.jcompare: jcomparejuwenxue: submit some free bookKinect Finger Paint: Kinect Finger Paint is a Kinect application build on the OpenNI framework. It is meant as a tutorial and playground for experimenting with the Kinect interface.MTA_XNA_11_B: hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hh hProgrammingPractice: VC++ Programming PracticeSimple Backlog for Visual Studio: An enhanced task list for VS 2010, designed to make it easier to manage a backlog of features. Written in C# and WPF. Released under the Apache 2.0 licence.Text Reader: Text reader allows you to enter a text and it will read it up for you using TTS in windows. It's developed in C#.TrainTraX: TrainTraX is a system for training and certifying users with simple multiple choice question tests.Windows Charting: A windows charting application that uses microsoft charting controls for visual studio 2008WPFReveil: WPFReveil is a digital clock control on WPF. This project is composed two elements. WPFReveil.App is the application. WPFReveil contains the control clock.

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• How to safely reboot via First Boot script

  - by unixman

  With the cost and performance benefits of the SPARC T4 and SPARC T5 systems undeniably validated, the banking sector is actively moving to Solaris 11.  I was recently asked to help a banking customer of ours look at migrating some of their Solaris 10 logic over to Solaris 11.  While we've introduced a number of holistic improvements in Solaris 11, in terms of how we ease long-term software lifecycle management, it is important to appreciate that customers may not be able to move all of their Solaris 10 scripts and procedures at once; there are years of scripts that reflect fine-tuned requirements of proprietary banking software that gets layered on top of the operating system. One of these requirements is to go through a cycle of reboots, after the system is installed, in order to ensure appropriate software dependencies and various configuration files are in-place. While Solaris 10 introduced a facility that aids here, namely SMF, many of our customers simply haven't yet taken the time to take advantage of this - proceeding with logic that, while functional, without further analysis has an appearance of not being optimal in terms of taking advantage of all the niceties bundled in Solaris 11 at no extra cost. When looking at Solaris 11, we recognize that one of the vehicles that bridges the gap between getting the operating system image payload delivered, and the customized banking software installed, is a notion of a First Boot script.  I had a working example of this at one of the Oracle OpenWorld sessions a few years ago - we've since improved our documentation and have introduced sections where this is described in better detail.   If you're looking at this for the first time and you've not worked with IPS and SMF previously, you might get the sense that the tasks are daunting.   There is a set of technologies involved that are jointly engineered in order to make the process reliable, predictable and extensible. As you go down the path of writing your first boot script, you'll be faced with a need to wrap it into a SMF service and then packaged into a IPS package. The IPS package would then need to be placed onto your IPS repository, in order to subsequently be made available to all of your AI (Automated Install) clients (i.e. the systems that you're installing Solaris and your software onto).     With this blog post, I wanted to create a single place that outlines the entire process (simplistically), and provide a hint of how a good old "at" command may make the requirement of forcing an initial reboot handy. The syntax and references to commands here is based on running this on a version of Solaris 11 that has been updated since its initial release in 2011 (i.e. I am writing this on Solaris 11.1) Assuming you've built an AI server (see this How To article for an example), you might be asking yourself: "Ok, I've got some logic that I need executed AFTER Solaris is deployed and I need my own little script that would make that happen. How do I go about hooking that script into the Solaris 11 AI framework?"  You might start here, in Chapter 13 of the "Installing Oracle Solaris 11.1 Systems" guide, which talks about "Running a Custom Script During First Boot".  And as you do, you'll be confronted with command that might be unfamiliar to you if you're new to Solaris 11, like our dear new friend: svcbundle svcbundle is an aide to creating manifests and profiles.  It is awesome, but don't let its awesomeness overwhelm you. (See this How To article by my colleague Glynn Foster for a nice working example).  In order to get your script's logic integrated into the Solaris 11 deployment process, you need to wrap your (shell) script into 2 manifests -  a SMF service manifest and a IPS package manifest.  ....and if you're new to XML, well then -- buckle up We have some examples of small first boot scripts shown here, as templates to build upon. Necessary structure of the script, particularly in leveraging SMF interfaces, is key. I won't go into that here as that is covered nicely in the doc link above.    Let's say your script ends up looking like this (btw: if things appear to be cut-off in your browser, just select them, copy and paste into your editor and it'll be grabbed - the source gets captured eventhough the browser may not render it "correctly" - ah, computers). #!/bin/sh # Load SMF shell support definitions . /lib/svc/share/smf_include.sh # If nothing to do, exit with temporary disable completed=`svcprop -p config/completed site/first-boot-script-svc:default` [ "${completed}" = "true" ] && \ smf_method_exit $SMF_EXIT_TEMP_DISABLE completed "Configuration completed" # Obtain the active BE name from beadm: The active BE on reboot has an R in # the third column of 'beadm list' output. Its name is in column one. bename=`beadm list -Hd|nawk -F ';' '$3 ~ /R/ {print $1}'` beadm create ${bename}.orig echo "Original boot environment saved as ${bename}.orig" # ---- Place your one-time configuration tasks here ---- # For example, if you have to pull some files from your own pre-existing system: /usr/bin/wget -P /var/tmp/ $PULL_DOWN_ADDITIONAL_SCRIPTS_FROM_A_CORPORATE_SYSTEM /usr/bin/chmod 755 /var/tmp/$SCRIPTS_THAT_GOT_PULLED_DOWN_IN_STEP_ABOVE # Clearly the above 2 lines represent some logic that you'd have to customize to fit your needs. # # Perhaps additional things you may want to do here might be of use, like # (gasp!) configuring ssh server for root login and X11 forwarding (for testing), and the like... # # Oh and by the way, after we're done executing all of our proprietary scripts we need to reboot # the system in accordance with our operational software requirements to ensure all layered bits # get initialized properly and pull-in their own modules and components in the right sequence, # subsequently. # We need to set a "time bomb" reboot, that would take place upon completion of this script. # We already know that *this* script depends on multi-user-server SMF milestone, so it should be # safe for us to schedule a reboot for 5 minutes from now. The "at" job get scheduled in the queue # while our little script continues thru the rest of the logic. /usr/bin/at now + 5 minutes <<REBOOT /usr/bin/sync /usr/sbin/reboot REBOOT # ---- End of your customizations ---- # Record that this script's work is done svccfg -s site/first-boot-script-svc:default setprop config/completed = true svcadm refresh site/first-boot-script-svc:default smf_method_exit $SMF_EXIT_TEMP_DISABLE method_completed "Configuration completed"  ...and you're happy with it and are ready to move on. Where do you go and what do you do? The next step is creating the IPS package for your script. Since running the logic of your script constitutes a service, you need to create a service manifest. This is described here, in the middle of Chapter 13 of "Creating an IPS package for the script and service".  Assuming the name of your shell script is first-boot-script.sh, you could end up doing the following: $ cd some_working_directory_for_this_project$ mkdir -p proto/lib/svc/manifest/site$ mkdir -p proto/opt/site $ cp first-boot-script.sh proto/opt/site  Then you would create the service manifest  file like so: $ svcbundle -s service-name=site/first-boot-script-svc \ -s start-method=/opt/site/first-boot-script.sh \ -s instance-property=config:completed:boolean:false -o \ first-boot-script-svc-manifest.xml   ...as described here, and place it into the directory hierarchy above. But before you place it into the directory, make sure to inspect the manifest and adjust the appropriate service dependencies.  That is to say, you want to properly specify what milestone should be reached before your service runs.  There's a <dependency> section that looks like this, before you modify it: <dependency restart_on="none" type="service" name="multi_user_dependency" grouping="require_all"> <service_fmri value="svc:/milestone/multi-user"/>  </dependency>  So if you'd like to have your service run AFTER the multi-user-server milestone has been reached (i.e. later, as multi-user-server has more dependencies then multi-user and our intent to reboot the system may have significant ramifications if done prematurely), you would modify that section to read:  <dependency restart_on="none" type="service" name="multi_user_server_dependency" grouping="require_all"> <service_fmri value="svc:/milestone/multi-user-server"/>  </dependency> Save the file and validate it: $ svccfg validate first-boot-script-svc-manifest.xml Assuming there are no errors returned, copy the file over into the directory hierarchy: $ cp first-boot-script-svc-manifest.xml proto/lib/svc/manifest/site Now that we've created the service manifest (.xml), create the package manifest (.p5m) file named: first-boot-script.p5m.  Populate it as follows: set name=pkg.fmri value=first-boot-script-AT-1-DOT-0,5.11-0 set name=pkg.summary value="AI first-boot script" set name=pkg.description value="Script that runs at first boot after AI installation" set name=info.classification value=\ "org.opensolaris.category.2008:System/Administration and Configuration" file lib/svc/manifest/site/first-boot-script-svc-manifest.xml \ path=lib/svc/manifest/site/first-boot-script-svc-manifest.xml owner=root \ group=sys mode=0444 dir path=opt/site owner=root group=sys mode=0755 file opt/site/first-boot-script.sh path=opt/site/first-boot-script.sh \ owner=root group=sys mode=0555 Now we are going to publish this package into a IPS repository. If you don't have one yet, don't worry. You have 2 choices: You can either  publish this package into your mirror of the Oracle Solaris IPS repo or create your own customized repo.  The best practice is to create your own customized repo, leaving your mirror of the Oracle Solaris IPS repo untouched.  From this point, you have 2 choices as well - you can either create a repo that will be accessible by your clients via HTTP or via NFS.  Since HTTP is how the default Solaris repo is accessed, we'll go with HTTP for your own IPS repo.   This nice and comprehensive How To by Albert White describes how to create multiple internal IPS repos for Solaris 11. We'll zero in on the basic elements for our needs here: We'll create the IPS repo directory structure hanging off a separate ZFS file system, and we'll tie it into an instance of pkg.depotd. We do this because we want our IPS repo to be accessible to our AI clients through HTTP, and the pkg.depotd SMF service bundled in Solaris 11 can help us do this. We proceed as follows: # zfs create rpool/export/MyIPSrepo # pkgrepo create /export/MyIPSrepo # svccfg -s pkg/server add MyIPSrepo # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo addpg pkg application # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo setprop pkg/port=10081 # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo setprop pkg/inst_root=/export/MyIPSrepo # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo addpg general framework # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo addpropvalue general/complete astring: MyIPSrepo # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo addpropvalue general/enabled boolean: true # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo setprop pkg/readonly=true # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo setprop pkg/proxy_base = astring: http://your_internal_websrvr/MyIPSrepo # svccfg -s pkg/server:MyIPSrepo setprop pkg/threads = 200 # svcadm refresh application/pkg/server:MyIPSrepo # svcadm enable application/pkg/server:MyIPSrepo Now that the IPS repo is created, we need to publish our package into it: # pkgsend publish -d ./proto -s /export/MyIPSrepo first-boot-script.p5m If you find yourself making changes to your script, remember to up-rev the version in the .p5m file (which is your IPS package manifest), and re-publish the IPS package. Next, you need to go to your AI install server (which might be the same machine) and modify the AI manifest to include a reference to your newly created package.  We do that by listing an additional publisher, which would look like this (replacing the IP address and port with your own, from the "svccfg" commands up above): <publisher name="firstboot"> <origin name="http://192.168.1.222:10081"/> </publisher>  Further down, in the  <software_data action="install">  section add: <name>pkg:/first-boot-script</name> Make sure to update your Automated Install service with the new AI manifest via installadm update-manifest command.  Don't forget to boot your client from the network to watch the entire process unfold and your script get tested.  Once the system makes the initial reboot, the first boot script will be executed and whatever logic you've specified in it should be executed, too, followed by a nice reboot. When the system comes up, your service should stay in a disabled state, as specified by the tailing lines of your SMF script - this is normal and should be left as is as it helps provide an auditing trail for you.   Because the reboot is quite a significant action for the system, you may want to add additional logic to the script that actually places and then checks for presence of certain lock files in order to avoid doing a reboot unnecessarily. You may also want to, alternatively, remove the SMF service entirely - if you're unsure of the potential for someone to try and accidentally enable that service -- eventhough its role in life is to only run once upon the system's first boot. That is how I spent a good chunk of my pre-Halloween time this week, hope yours was just as SPARCkly^H^H^H^H fun!    

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 15, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 15, 2014Popular ReleasesGoogle .Net API: Drive.Sample: Google .NET Client API – Drive.SampleInstructions for the Google .NET Client API – Drive.Sample</h2> http://code.google.com/p/google-api-dotnet-client/source/browse/?repo=samples#hg%2FDrive.SampleBrowse Source, or main file http://code.google.com/p/google-api-dotnet-client/source/browse/Drive.Sample/Program.cs?repo=samplesProgram.cs <h3>1. Checkout Instructions</h3> <p><b>Prerequisites:</b> Install Visual Studio, and <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a>.</p> ...FineUI - jQuery / ExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v4.1.1: -??Form??????????????（???-5929）。 -?TemplateField??ExpandOnDoubleClick、ExpandOnEnter、ExpandToSelectRow????（LZOM-5932）。 -BodyPadding???????，??“5”“5 10”，???????????“5px”“5px 10px”。 -??TriggerBox?EnableEdit=false????，??????????????（Jango_Jing-5450）。 -???????????DataKeyNames???????????（yygy-6002）。 -????????????????????????（Gnid-6018）。 -??PageManager???AutoSizePanelID????，??????????????????（yygy-6008）。 -?FState???????????????，????????????????（????-5925）。 -??????OnClientClick???return?????????（FineU...SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.042.020 Release 1: Updated Mod support. On startup, only stock items will appear in the Components list. Upon selecting and loading a saved world, the mods for that world only will then be loaded, and only from the local drive. If a mod has not been downloaded in Space Engineers, it will not download it for you. If you are developing a Mod, hitting "Reload" will also reload the mods as well as the saved world. If SEToolbox is crashing when loading a saved world containing mods, it is most likely because one ...Gum UI Tool: Gum 0.6.09: Fixed bug which would not allow plugins to be loaded when the app was distributed. Added animation plugin7zbackup - PowerShell Script to Backup Files with 7zip: 7zBackup v. 1.9.8 Stable: Do you like this piece of software ? It took some time and effort to develop. Please consider helping me with a donation Feat : Lock file now holds process ID and RootDir. On subsequent launches script checks if previous process is still alive. In case it is not it will clean up orphaned junction root directory. Ensure no orphaned rootdirs are on disk and no lockfiles in %temp% directory before running this releaseDNN CMS Platform: 07.03.02: Major Highlights Fixed backwards compatibility issue with 3rd party control panels Fixed issue in the drag and drop functionality of the File Uploader in IE 11 and Safari Fixed issue where users were able to create pages with the same name Fixed issue that affected older versions of DNN that do not include the maxAllowedContentLength during upgrade Fixed issue that stopped some skins from being upgraded to newer versions Fixed issue that randomly showed an unexpected error during us...WordMat: WordMat for Mac: WordMat for Mac has a few limitations compared to the Windows version - Graph is not supported (Gnuplot, GeoGebra and Excel works) - Units are not supported yet (Coming up) The Mac version is yet as tested as the windows version.ConEmu - Windows console with tabs: ConEmu 140814 [Alpha]: ConEmu - developer build x86 and x64 versions. Written in C++, no additional packages required. Run "ConEmu.exe" or "ConEmu64.exe". Some useful information you may found: http://superuser.com/questions/tagged/conemu http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/ConEmuFAQ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/TableOfContents If you want to use ConEmu in portable mode, just create empty "ConEmu.xml" file near to "ConEmu.exe" HP OneView PowerShell Library: HP OneView PowerShell Library 1.10.1193: Branch to HP OneView 1.10 Release. NOTE: This library version does not support older appliance versions. Fixed New-HPOVProfile to check for Firmware and BIOS management for supported platforms. Would erroneously error when neither -firmware or -bios were passed. Fixed Remove-HPOV* cmdlets which did not handle -force switch parameter correctly Fixed New-HPOVUplinkSet and New-HPOVNetwork Fixed Download-File where HTTP stream compression was not handled, resulting in incorrectly writt...NeoLua (Lua for .net dynamic language runtime): NeoLua-0.8.17: Fix: table.insert Fix: table auto convert Fix: Runtime-functions were defined as private it should be internal. Fix: min,max MichaelSenko release.MFCMAPI: August 2014 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1042 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 2010/2013 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeOooPlayer: 1.1: Added: Support for speex, TAK and OptimFrog files Added: An option to not to load cover art Added: Smaller package size Fixed: Unable to drag&drop audio files to playlist Updated: FLAC, WacPack and Opus playback libraries Updated: ID3v1 and ID3v2 tag librariesEWSEditor: EwsEditor 1.10 Release: • Export and import of items as a full fidelity steam works - without proxy classes! - I used raw EWS POSTs. • Turned off word wrap for EWS request field in EWS POST windows. • Several windows with scrolling texts boxes were limiting content to 32k - I removed this restriction. • Split server timezone info off to separate menu item from the timezone info windows so that the timezone info window could be used without logging into a mailbox. • Lots of updates to the TimeZone window. • UserAgen...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 2.1 RC: Release notes for PTVS 2.1 RC We’re pleased to announce the release candidate for Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.1. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, editing, IntelliSense, interactive debugging, profiling, Microsoft Azure, IPython, and cross-platform debugging support. PTVS 2.1 RC is available for: Visual Studio Expre...Sense/Net ECM - Enterprise CMS: SenseNet 6.3.1 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.3.1 Community EditionSense/Net 6.3.1 is an important step toward a more modular infrastructure, robustness and maintainability. With this release we finally introduce a packaging and a task management framework, and the Image Editor that will surely make the job of content editors more fun. Please review the changes and new features since Sense/Net 6.3 and give a feedback on our forum! Main new featuresSnAdmin (packaging framework) Task Management Image Editor OData REST A...Fluffy: Fluffy 0.3.35.4: Change log: Text editorSKGL - Serial Key Generating Library: SKGL Extension Methods 4 (1.0.5.1): This library contains methods for: Time change check (make sure the time has not been changed on the client computer) Key Validation (this will use http://serialkeymanager.com/ to validate keys against the database) Key Activation (this will, depending on the settings, activate a key with a specific machine code) Key Activation Trial (allows you to update a key if it is a trial key) Get Machine Code (calculates a machine code given any hash function) Get Eight Byte Hash (returns an...Touchmote: Touchmote 1.0 beta 13: Changes Less GPU usage Works together with other Xbox 360 controls Bug fixesModern UI for WPF: Modern UI 1.0.6: The ModernUI assembly including a demo app demonstrating the various features of Modern UI for WPF. BREAKING CHANGE LinkGroup.GroupName renamed to GroupKey NEW FEATURES Improved rendering on high DPI screens, including support for per-monitor DPI awareness available in Windows 8.1 (see also Per-monitor DPI awareness) New ModernProgressRing control with 8 builtin styles New LinkCommands.NavigateLink routed command New Visual Studio project templates 'Modern UI WPF App' and 'Modern UI W...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.74.0: Multiple thread safe improvements including AdjustToContents XLHelper XLColor_Static IntergerExtensions.ToStringLookup Exception now thrown when saving a workbook with no sheets, instead of creating a corrupt workbook Fix for hyperlinks with non-ASCII Characters Added basic workbook protection Fix for error thrown, when a spreadsheet contained comments and images Fix to Trim function Fix Invalid operation Exception thrown when the formula functions MAX, MIN, and AVG referenc...New Projectsapple TV: Apple TV project homepageArma 3 Battle Eye Client: Arma3BEClientASP.NET MVC AngularJS w/ Google Maps API: ASP.NET MVC sample using Google Maps API w/ AngularJS.CC-Classwork: Classwork from CoderCampsCompanyPortal: CompanyPortalcore: Building an Internet of Things (IoT, also Cloud of Things or CoT) core, drawing inspirations from the pre-existing Linus Torvalds linux kernel made from GNU/nixCRM Early Bound Class Simplifier: Simplifies the creation of a Dynamics CRM Early Bound Class. Dirección Desconcentrada de Cultura: Este proyecto web se ha elaborado para la dirección desconcentrada de cultura de cajamarca a cargo de los practicantes de UPNC Sitemas computacionales.Energy Trail Site: NGO Site for designing and collaboration work.Hybrid Platform - Build anything: A Platform that built by loosely coupled architecture. You can build applications for Web, Desktop, Mobile, WCF Services - ASP.NET MVC on this concrete platformipad air: a web tool to sim display same as ipad airipad apps: A serices to support Ipad HD devise to request CURD for codeplex.comiphone 6: iphone6iphone air: Opend API lists for IPhone 6(iphone air)iphone apps: Bus API for iphoneiwatch: A priview version for iwtach API Named Colors in Silverlight: This project is a Silverlight dll to add the missing named colors from System.Windows.Media.Color. Once added as a reference, it makes using named colors easy!OOP_2113110295: Name: Nguyen Trung Thao ID 2113110295 Truong Cao Dang Cong Thuong Mon: OOPPagepark: PageparkProjektRepository: Eine virtuelle Forschungsumgebung (VFU) um Forschungsdaten und Artefakte zu sammeln, gemeinsam zu nutzen, erschließen und mit Metadaten anreichern zu könnenRamonaSniffer: This will be the repository to host the zigbee snifferseawol: A Blog system base on node.jsSonar settings for TFS Build: Sample of configurations for Sonar to work with TFS for copy/pasteSon's Homework and learning to code: Just a collection of coding projects to learn from.SunBurn Terrain Editor: A fully functional standalone WYSWYG terrain (height map and color map) editor. Built upon the SunBurn Platform Framework allowing scope for Linux and Mac ports????.????????: 1) ??????? ???????? ?? 2) C# ?????????? (??????) ??? ???????? ?????? ???? (? ??????? *.dbf) ? ????? ???? 3) WinForms-?????????? ??? ???????????? ?????? ????

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• XSLT Exclude Specific Tags

  - by MMKD

  I have a problem i am trying to resolve in an XSLT but i an unable to find a solution. The example below is related to a payment system it is adding items to a basket then removing them. The out XML provides a audit trail of actions conducted on a basket. Senario: Add Item (Id 1) Add Item (Id 1) With a price change Void Item (Id 1) Void Item (Id 1) With a price change Add Item (Id 1) Add Item (Id 1) Expected Outcome Remove: Add Item (Id 1) Add Item (Id 1) With a price change Output XML Contains Void Item (Id 1) Void Item (Id 1) With a price change Add Item (Id 1) Add Item (Id 1) Input XML: <xml> <product void="false"> <sequence_number>1</sequence_number> <item_id>11111111</item_id> <price>12</price> </product> <product void="false"> <sequence_number>2</sequence_number> <item_id>11111111</item_id> <price>12</price> <price_change> <price>10</price> </price_change> </product> <product void="true"> <sequence_number>3</sequence_number> <item_id>11111111</item_id> <price>12</price> <price_change> <price>10</price> </price_change> </product> <product void="true"> <sequence_number>4</sequence_number> <item_id>11111111</item_id> <price>12</price> </product> <product void="false"> <sequence_number>5</sequence_number> <item_id>11111111</item_id> <price>12</price> </product> <product void="false"> <sequence_number>6</sequence_number> <item_id>11111111</item_id> <price>12</price> </product> </xml> Expected outcome: <xml> <product void="true"> <sequence_number>3</sequence_number> <item_id>11111111</item_id> <price>12</price> <price_change> <price>10</price> </price_change> </product> <product void="true"> <sequence_number>4</sequence_number> <item_id>11111111</item_id> <price>12</price> </product> <product void="false"> <sequence_number>5</sequence_number> <item_id>11111111</item_id> <price>12</price> </product> <product void="false"> <sequence_number>6</sequence_number> <item_id>11111111</item_id> <price>12</price> </product> </xml> XSLT <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:template match="@*|node()"> <xsl:copy> <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/> </xsl:copy> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="//product[@void='false']"> <xsl:if test="item_id != //product[@void='true']/item_id"> <xsl:copy> <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/> </xsl:copy> </xsl:if> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> The problem with this is that it is deleting all products that are not voided and have the same id and not taking into account the number of void items vs the number of none void items. If you have 1 void item it should only delete one product that is not voided but has exactly the same tags as itself

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• Guidance: A Branching strategy for Scrum Teams

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Having a good branching strategy will save your bacon, or at least your code. Be careful when deviating from your branching strategy because if you do, you may be worse off than when you started! This is one possible branching strategy for Scrum teams and I will not be going in depth with Scrum but you can find out more about Scrum by reading the Scrum Guide and you can even assess your Scrum knowledge by having a go at the Scrum Open Assessment. You can also read SSW’s Rules to Better Scrum using TFS which have been developed during our own Scrum implementations. Acknowledgements Bill Heys – Bill offered some good feedback on this post and helped soften the language. Note: Bill is a VS ALM Ranger and co-wrote the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Willy-Peter Schaub – Willy-Peter is an ex Visual Studio ALM MVP turned blue badge and has been involved in most of the guidance including the Branching Guidance for TFS 2010 Chris Birmele – Chris wrote some of the early TFS Branching and Merging Guidance. Dr Paul Neumeyer, Ph.D Parallel Processes, ScrumMaster and SSW Solution Architect – Paul wanted to have feature branches coming from the release branch as well. We agreed that this is really a spin-off that needs own project, backlog, budget and Team. Scenario: A product is developed RTM 1.0 is released and gets great sales.  Extra features are demanded but the new version will have double to price to pay to recover costs, work is approved by the guys with budget and a few sprints later RTM 2.0 is released.  Sales a very low due to the pricing strategy. There are lots of clients on RTM 1.0 calling out for patches. As I keep getting Reverse Integration and Forward Integration mixed up and Bill keeps slapping my wrists I thought I should have a reminder: You still seemed to use reverse and/or forward integration in the wrong context. I would recommend reviewing your document at the end to ensure that it agrees with the common understanding of these terms merge (forward integration) from parent to child (same direction as the branch), and merge  (reverse integration) from child to parent (the reverse direction of the branch). - one of my many slaps on the wrist from Bill Heys.   As I mentioned previously we are using a single feature branching strategy in our current project. The single biggest mistake developers make is developing against the “Main” or “Trunk” line. This ultimately leads to messy code as things are added and never finished. Your only alternative is to NEVER check in unless your code is 100%, but this does not work in practice, even with a single developer. Your ADD will kick in and your half-finished code will be finished enough to pass the build and the tests. You do use builds don’t you? Sadly, this is a very common scenario and I have had people argue that branching merely adds complexity. Then again I have seen the other side of the universe ... branching  structures from he... We should somehow convince everyone that there is a happy between no-branching and too-much-branching. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   A key benefit of branching for development is to isolate changes from the stable Main branch. Branching adds sanity more than it adds complexity. We do try to stress in our guidance that it is important to justify a branch, by doing a cost benefit analysis. The primary cost is the effort to do merges and resolve conflicts. A key benefit is that you have a stable code base in Main and accept changes into Main only after they pass quality gates, etc. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft The second biggest mistake developers make is branching anything other than the WHOLE “Main” line. If you branch parts of your code and not others it gets out of sync and can make integration a nightmare. You should have your Source, Assets, Build scripts deployment scripts and dependencies inside the “Main” folder and branch the whole thing. Some departments within MSFT even go as far as to add the environments used to develop the product in there as well; although I would not recommend that unless you have a massive SQL cluster to house your source code. We tried the “add environment” back in South-Africa and while it was “phenomenal”, especially when having to switch between environments, the disk storage and processing requirements killed us. We opted for virtualization to skin this cat of keeping a ready-to-go environment handy. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft   I think people often think that you should have separate branches for separate environments (e.g. Dev, Test, Integration Test, QA, etc.). I prefer to think of deploying to environments (such as from Main to QA) rather than branching for QA). - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   You can read about SSW’s Rules to better Source Control for some additional information on what Source Control to use and how to use it. There are also a number of branching Anti-Patterns that should be avoided at all costs: You know you are on the wrong track if you experience one or more of the following symptoms in your development environment: Merge Paranoia—avoiding merging at all cost, usually because of a fear of the consequences. Merge Mania—spending too much time merging software assets instead of developing them. Big Bang Merge—deferring branch merging to the end of the development effort and attempting to merge all branches simultaneously. Never-Ending Merge—continuous merging activity because there is always more to merge. Wrong-Way Merge—merging a software asset version with an earlier version. Branch Mania—creating many branches for no apparent reason. Cascading Branches—branching but never merging back to the main line. Mysterious Branches—branching for no apparent reason. Temporary Branches—branching for changing reasons, so the branch becomes a permanent temporary workspace. Volatile Branches—branching with unstable software assets shared by other branches or merged into another branch. Note   Branches are volatile most of the time while they exist as independent branches. That is the point of having them. The difference is that you should not share or merge branches while they are in an unstable state. Development Freeze—stopping all development activities while branching, merging, and building new base lines. Berlin Wall—using branches to divide the development team members, instead of dividing the work they are performing. -Branching and Merging Primer by Chris Birmele - Developer Tools Technical Specialist at Microsoft Pty Ltd in Australia   In fact, this can result in a merge exercise no-one wants to be involved in, merging hundreds of thousands of change sets and trying to get a consolidated build. Again, we need to find a happy medium. - Willy-Peter Schaub on Merge Paranoia Merge conflicts are generally the result of making changes to the same file in both the target and source branch. If you create merge conflicts, you will eventually need to resolve them. Often the resolution is manual. Merging more frequently allows you to resolve these conflicts close to when they happen, making the resolution clearer. Waiting weeks or months to resolve them, the Big Bang approach, means you are more likely to resolve conflicts incorrectly. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Main line, this is where your stable code lives and where any build has known entities, always passes and has a happy test that passes as well? Many development projects consist of, a single “Main” line of source and artifacts. This is good; at least there is source control . There are however a couple of issues that need to be considered. What happens if: you and your team are working on a new set of features and the customer wants a change to his current version? you are working on two features and the customer decides to abandon one of them? you have two teams working on different feature sets and their changes start interfering with each other? I just use labels instead of branches? That's a lot of “what if’s”, but there is a simple way of preventing this. Branching… In TFS, labels are not immutable. This does not mean they are not useful. But labels do not provide a very good development isolation mechanism. Branching allows separate code sets to evolve separately (e.g. Current with hotfixes, and vNext with new development). I don’t see how labels work here. - Bill Heys, VS ALM Ranger & TFS Branching Lead, Microsoft   Figure: Creating a single feature branch means you can isolate the development work on that branch.   Its standard practice for large projects with lots of developers to use Feature branching and you can check the Branching Guidance for the latest recommendations from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers for other methods. In the diagram above you can see my recommendation for branching when using Scrum development with TFS 2010. It consists of a single Sprint branch to contain all the changes for the current sprint. The main branch has the permissions changes so contributors to the project can only Branch and Merge with “Main”. This will prevent accidental check-ins or checkouts of the “Main” line that would contaminate the code. The developers continue to develop on sprint one until the completion of the sprint. Note: In the real world, starting a new Greenfield project, this process starts at Sprint 2 as at the start of Sprint 1 you would have artifacts in version control and no need for isolation.   Figure: Once the sprint is complete the Sprint 1 code can then be merged back into the Main line. There are always good practices to follow, and one is to always do a Forward Integration from Main into Sprint 1 before you do a Reverse Integration from Sprint 1 back into Main. In this case it may seem superfluous, but this builds good muscle memory into your developer’s work ethic and means that no bad habits are learned that would interfere with additional Scrum Teams being added to the Product. The process of completing your sprint development: The Team completes their work according to their definition of done. Merge from “Main” into “Sprint1” (Forward Integration) Stabilize your code with any changes coming from other Scrum Teams working on the same product. If you have one Scrum Team this should be quick, but there may have been bug fixes in the Release branches. (we will talk about release branches later) Merge from “Sprint1” into “Main” to commit your changes. (Reverse Integration) Check-in Delete the Sprint1 branch Note: The Sprint 1 branch is no longer required as its useful life has been concluded. Check-in Done But you are not yet done with the Sprint. The goal in Scrum is to have a “potentially shippable product” at the end of every Sprint, and we do not have that yet, we only have finished code.   Figure: With Sprint 1 merged you can create a Release branch and run your final packaging and testing In 99% of all projects I have been involved in or watched, a “shippable product” only happens towards the end of the overall lifecycle, especially when sprints are short. The in-between releases are great demonstration releases, but not shippable. Perhaps it comes from my 80’s brain washing that we only ship when we reach the agreed quality and business feature bar. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft Although you should have been testing and packaging your code all the way through your Sprint 1 development, preferably using an automated process, you still need to test and package with stable unchanging code. This is where you do what at SSW we call a “Test Please”. This is first an internal test of the product to make sure it meets the needs of the customer and you generally use a resource external to your Team. Then a “Test Please” is conducted with the Product Owner to make sure he is happy with the output. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: If you find a deviation from the expected result you fix it on the Release branch. If during your final testing or your “Test Please” you find there are issues or bugs then you should fix them on the release branch. If you can’t fix them within the time box of your Sprint, then you will need to create a Bug and put it onto the backlog for prioritization by the Product owner. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your merge from the development branch to find and fix any problems that are uncovered. This process is commonly called Stabilization and should always be conducted once you have completed all of your User Stories and integrated all of your branches. Even once you have stabilized and released, you should not delete the release branch as you would with the Sprint branch. It has a usefulness for servicing that may extend well beyond the limited life you expect of it. Note: Don't get forced by the business into adding features into a Release branch instead that indicates the unspoken requirement is that they are asking for a product spin-off. In this case you can create a new Team Project and branch from the required Release branch to create a new Main branch for that product. And you create a whole new backlog to work from.   Figure: When the Team decides it is happy with the product you can create a RTM branch. Once you have fixed all the bugs you can, and added any you can’t to the Product Backlog, and you Team is happy with the result you can create a Release. This would consist of doing the final Build and Packaging it up ready for your Sprint Review meeting. You would then create a read-only branch that represents the code you “shipped”. This is really an Audit trail branch that is optional, but is good practice. You could use a Label, but Labels are not Auditable and if a dispute was raised by the customer you can produce a verifiable version of the source code for an independent party to check. Rare I know, but you do not want to be at the wrong end of a legal battle. Like the Release branch the RTM branch should never be deleted, or only deleted according to your companies legal policy, which in the UK is usually 7 years.   Figure: If you have made any changes in the Release you will need to merge back up to Main in order to finalise the changes. Nothing is really ever done until it is in Main. The same rules apply when merging any fixes in the Release branch back into Main and you should do a reverse merge before a forward merge, again for the muscle memory more than necessity at this stage. Your Sprint is now nearly complete, and you can have a Sprint Review meeting knowing that you have made every effort and taken every precaution to protect your customer’s investment. Note: In order to really achieve protection for both you and your client you would add Automated Builds, Automated Tests, Automated Acceptance tests, Acceptance test tracking, Unit Tests, Load tests, Web test and all the other good engineering practices that help produce reliable software.     Figure: After the Sprint Planning meeting the process begins again. Where the Sprint Review and Retrospective meetings mark the end of the Sprint, the Sprint Planning meeting marks the beginning. After you have completed your Sprint Planning and you know what you are trying to achieve in Sprint 2 you can create your new Branch to develop in. How do we handle a bug(s) in production that can’t wait? Although in Scrum the only work done should be on the backlog there should be a little buffer added to the Sprint Planning for contingencies. One of these contingencies is a bug in the current release that can’t wait for the Sprint to finish. But how do you handle that? Willy-Peter Schaub asked an excellent question on the release activities: In reality Sprint 2 starts when sprint 1 ends + weekend. Should we not cater for a possible parallelism between Sprint 2 and the release activities of sprint 1? It would introduce FI’s from main to sprint 2, I guess. Your “Figure: Merging print 2 back into Main.” covers, what I tend to believe to be reality in most cases. - Willy-Peter Schaub, VS ALM Ranger, Microsoft I agree, and if you have a single Scrum team then your resources are limited. The Scrum Team is responsible for packaging and release, so at least one run at stabilization, package and release should be included in the Sprint time box. If more are needed on the current production release during the Sprint 2 time box then resource needs to be pulled from Sprint 2. The Product Owner and the Team have four choices (in order of disruption/cost): Backlog: Add the bug to the backlog and fix it in the next Sprint Buffer Time: Use any buffer time included in the current Sprint to fix the bug quickly Make time: Remove a Story from the current Sprint that is of equal value to the time lost fixing the bug(s) and releasing. Note: The Team must agree that it can still meet the Sprint Goal. Cancel Sprint: Cancel the sprint and concentrate all resource on fixing the bug(s) Note: This can be a very costly if the current sprint has already had a lot of work completed as it will be lost. The choice will depend on the complexity and severity of the bug(s) and both the Product Owner and the Team need to agree. In this case we will go with option #2 or #3 as they are uncomplicated but severe bugs. Figure: Real world issue where a bug needs fixed in the current release. If the bug(s) is urgent enough then then your only option is to fix it in place. You can edit the release branch to find and fix the bug, hopefully creating a test so it can’t happen again. Follow the prior process and conduct an internal and customer “Test Please” before releasing. You can read about how to conduct a Test Please on our Rules to Successful Projects: Do you conduct an internal "test please" prior to releasing a version to a client?   Figure: After you have fixed the bug you need to ship again. You then need to again create an RTM branch to hold the version of the code you released in escrow.   Figure: Main is now out of sync with your Release. We now need to get these new changes back up into the Main branch. Do a reverse and then forward merge again to get the new code into Main. But what about the branch, are developers not working on Sprint 2? Does Sprint 2 now have changes that are not in Main and Main now have changes that are not in Sprint 2? Well, yes… and this is part of the hit you take doing branching. But would this scenario even have been possible without branching?   Figure: Getting the changes in Main into Sprint 2 is very important. The Team now needs to do a Forward Integration merge into their Sprint and resolve any conflicts that occur. Maybe the bug has already been fixed in Sprint 2, maybe the bug no longer exists! This needs to be identified and resolved by the developers before they continue to get further out of Sync with Main. Note: Avoid the “Big bang merge” at all costs.   Figure: Merging Sprint 2 back into Main, the Forward Integration, and R0 terminates. Sprint 2 now merges (Reverse Integration) back into Main following the procedures we have already established.   Figure: The logical conclusion. This then allows the creation of the next release. By now you should be getting the big picture and hopefully you learned something useful from this post. I know I have enjoyed writing it as I find these exploratory posts coupled with real world experience really help harden my understanding.  Branching is a tool; it is not a silver bullet. Don’t over use it, and avoid “Anti-Patterns” where possible. Although the diagram above looks complicated I hope showing you how it is formed simplifies it as much as possible.   Technorati Tags: Branching,Scrum,VS ALM,TFS 2010,VS2010

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