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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, February 23, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, February 23, 2010New Projects.NET Beginners: This project is a summary of project for first time developer and .net beginners. the aim is to provide tools and libraries to get startet with dev...A simple ASP.NET Currency / Money TextBox User Control: A ASP.NET TextBox control used with AJAX maskeditextender makes it possible to enter numbers but it's not very intuitive to use. CurrencyTextBox co...Academiki: Academik The project aims to be a university social network with content sharing and intellectual property. Academik makes it easier for students t...Acessando Campos com XPath Expression: Esse é um exemplo de como usar Xpath Expression na orchestration do Biztalk 2006. O Artigo do exemplo esta em www.biztalkbrasil.blogspot.comAg.CommandManager: A command manager implementation for Silverlights. Supports commanding to more or less any event using the ICommand interfaceApunta Notas: Apunta notas is just a note taking program that I created to learn WPF. Now you can write everything you need to remember or tell somebody. Or you...AzureKit: AzureKit provides a more direct approach to Azure's Table Service, which takes more advantage of the NoSQL nature of the storage medium.CRM 4.0 Distribute Workflow Activity: This plugin allows to execute a workflow for each entity that has a 1:N or N:N relationship to a given entity. For example: execute a workflow for...Dbg Shell: Dbg Shell replaces WinDbg for debugging dumps. All standard Dbg commands are supported. You can also write scripts in .Net assemblies to automated ...Egg Timer: Egg Timer is a very simple Windows Form application for setting short time-frame alarms.Enterprise Library Extensions: Extensions for the Microsoft Enterprise Library applications blocks which makes programming applications even easier.Event Calendar 2.0 Data Extractor: Really simple app to recover event calendar 2.0 information from iGoogle settings files and turn them into CSV format info for importing to other c...iTwiit: Silverlight Twitter Clientlibtym: Have your complete movie collection at a glance to manage all your movie files very comfortably!Metabolite Enterprise Libraries for EPiServer CMS using Page Type Builder: The Metabolite Enterprise libraries are a set of C# Class Libraries developed for use with EPiServer 5 R2 SP2+ projects using PageTypeBuilder. They...Metro UX: Metro UXMTI: -Personal Expense Tracker: Personal Expense Tracker helps you track your expenses. I tried to find simple win forms expense tracker but found none interesting, so i made one...rarouš: repository for rarouš.weblog articlesSacDotNetUG: SacDotNetUG is an ASP.NET MVC 2 Web application intended for the Sacramento .NET user group. This project servers 2 main goals: to promote the adop...ShellLight: ShellLight is essentially a graphical shell for Silverlight applications that enables a quick auto-complete launcher for features in your solution.Sina Weibo(Microblog): sina weibo .NET libraries and applications.Terrain Independant Navigating Automaton v2.0: This is where members of the Robot Design Team from Stony Brook University come together and work on our unique TINA. This project is for a self-go...Url Rewrite.Net: Url Rewrite.Net is an open-source SEO project which contains Custom Http Module example and Custom Configrutaion Module.It is developed in C#.NET 2...WebPart and WebService Currency Converter: This is only a sample code how to get data from yahoo finance and how to implementing on Sharepoint WebPart or WebServices. This code it is freely...WPF AutoComplete TextBox Control: A AutoComplete TextBox Control written in WPF, Looks like the system built-in auto-completion(SHAutoComplete).ZWaveAPI: This project is aim to create an open class library on ZWave. It is based on article from digiWave.dk New Releases.NET Beginners: MathLab Visual Studio Project Template: First preview to a mathlab beginners library..NET Beginners: Turtle Visual Studio Project Template: The turtle engine is a very simlpe turtle which runs over a beach and leaves a track.A simple ASP.NET Currency / Money TextBox User Control: CurrencyTextBox Source v1.0: Source code with a test project.A simple ASP.NET Currency / Money TextBox User Control: CurrencyTextBox.dll: The User Control for use in projects.Acessando Campos com XPath Expression: Source Code SampleXPathExpression: O Source code contem o Projeto em Visual Studio 2005.Actipro WPF Controls Contrib: v2009.2 build 515: Minor tweaks and updated to target Actipro WPF Studio 2009.2 (build 515).Analysis Management System: 1.0.0.1 Update: Fix - Issue 4004 Nieuw - Beschikbare klanten kunnen nu bekeken worden via Extra/Aanvragers (Ctrl R)Apunta Notas: Apunta Notas 1.0 Release Candidate: There is the Release Candidate of Apunta Notas.ARSoft.Tools.Net - C# DNS and SPF Library: 1.2.0: Added asynchronous operations for DNS client.CRM 4.0 Distribute Workflow Activity: Beta: Initial release. Complete functionality, limited testing.Dbg Shell: First Public Release: First ReleaseDnDns and PocketDnDns - A .NET DNS Client Resolver Library: DnDns Library Release 2: A DNS protocol library written completely in managed code (C#). Supports common DNS records types like A, CNAME, MX, SRV, and more. Works on Window...Egg Timer: Egg Timer v1.0: Pretty simple application. Set the time directly or use the 5 minute and 1 hour increment/decrement buttons.EnhSim: EnhSim v1.9.7.2 BETA: 1.9.7.2 BETAImportant!: This beta version includes the changes to the Flame shock damage-over-time component which are currently on the PTR. Downlo...EnhSim: EnhSim v1.9.7.3 BETA: Important!: This beta version includes the changes to the Flame shock damage-over-time component which are currently on the PTR. Download 1.9.7.1 f...Esendex SMS SDK and Downloads for Microsoft.NET languages: Esendex .NET SDK v0.4.0: Features Messaging Service: Send a single SMS message and multiple SMS messages. Send a single Voice Message and multiple Voice Messages. Send...Event Calendar 2.0 Data Extractor: V1.0: First ever build of extractorExcelDna: ExcelDna Version 0.22: An important bugfix release that fixes a critical bug in the MultiThreaded marshaling support (under Excel 2007).InfoService: InfoService v1.5 Beta 8: InfoService Beta Release Please note this is a BETA. It should be stable, but i can't gurantee that! So use it on your own risk. Please read Plugi...Krypton Palette Selectors: Release 1.2: Adds the new KryptonPaletteContextMenu and refactors the KryptonPaletteDropButton to use it.kuuy static system: kss_v1.0beta: kuuy static sytem 1.0 beta editionlibtym: libtym: First public release version. Full functionality, tested. Please notify about bugs.mojoPortal: 2.3.3.9: see release notes on mojoPortal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2339-released.aspx This release makes it easy to use Artisteer html templa...Net Tool: v1.01: User interface has been changedOpen NFSe: Open NFSe 0.1 (Salvador): Open NFSe 0.1 (Salvador)Paint.NET PSD Plugin: 1.0.7: Further substantial improvements in speed of both loading and saving. In particular, loading is about 5x as fast as in version 1.0.6. Saving is ...Project Starlight: 2.0: Release 2.0 final Changes: -Numerous stability fixes -Firefox 3.5 support -Safari 64 bit support (Snow Leopard) Mac and Windows Binaries are avai...RoTwee: RoTwee 5.0.0.1: This version fix for 16620Secure Data: Secure Data 2010.02.22.01: This version has been rewritten and contains many enhancements and I encourage anyone interested to download the source code and work through the Q...TreeSizeNet: TreeSizeNet 0.10.1: - Complete Redesign - Improved Stability - Improved Performance - PieChart for directory contentUrl Rewrite.Net: Beta V0.1 Release: Includes : -Custom Http Module -Custom Configuration Section Module ( in web.config) -Rewriting ModuleVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30222.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWebPart and WebService Currency Converter: CurrencyConverter.zip: CurrencyConverter.zip Have 3 Project on this files: 1. Library Project 2. Load Library Project Using Web Services 3. Load Library Project Using We...WSUS Smart Approve: 1.0.0.2: Fix: 25903ZuneConsole: ZuneConsole: Console GUI for the Zune Customs library, which should make everything work. This is what you should download.ZuneConsole: ZuneConsole How-To Manual: A quick (only 9 pages lol) tutorial on how to add custom artist info to your Zune.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETDotNetNuke® Community EditionImage Resizer Powertoy Clone for WindowsMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsDinnerNow.netRawrBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleSharpyInfoServicejQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesPHPExcelpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibrarySharePoint Contrib

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• Migrating from SQL Trace to Extended Events

  - by extended_events

  In SQL Server codenamed “Denali” we are moving our diagnostic tracing capabilities forward by building a system on top of Extended Events. With every new system you face the specter of migration which is always a bit of a hassle. I’m obviously motivated to see everyone move their diagnostic tracing systems over to the new extended events based system, so I wanted to make sure we lowered the bar for the migration process to help ease your trials. In my initial post on Denali CTP 1 I described a couple tables that we created that will help map the existing SQL Trace Event Classes to the equivalent Extended Events events. In this post I’ll describe the tables in a bit more details, explain the relationship between the SQL Trace objects (Event Class & Column) and Extended Event objects (Events & Actions) and at the end provide some sample code for a managed stored procedure that will take an existing SQL Trace session (eg. a trace that you can see in sys.Traces) and converts it into event session DDL. Can you relate? In some ways, SQL Trace and Extended Events is kind of like the Standard and Metric measuring systems in the United States. If you spend too much time trying to figure out how to convert between the two it will probably make your head hurt. It’s often better to just use the new system without trying to translate between the two. That said, people like to relate new things to the things they’re comfortable with, so, with some trepidation, I will now explain how these two systems are related to each other. First, some terms… SQL Trace is made up of Event Classes and Columns. The Event Class occurs as the result of some activity in the database engine, for example, SQL:Batch Completed fires when a batch has completed executing on the server. Each Event Class can have any number of Columns associated with it and those Columns contain the data that is interesting about the Event Class, such as the duration or database name. In Extended Events we have objects named Events, EventData field and Actions. The Event (some people call this an xEvent but I’ll stick with Event) is equivalent to the Event Class in SQL Trace since it is the thing that occurs as the result of some activity taking place in the server. An  EventData field (from now on I’ll just refer to these as fields) is a piece of information that is highly correlated with the event and is always included as part of the schema of an Event. An Action is something that can be associated with any Event and it will cause some additional “action” to occur when ever the parent Event occurs. Actions can do a number of different things for example, there are Actions that collect additional data and, take memory dumps. When mapping SQL Trace onto Extended Events, Columns are covered by a combination of both fields and Actions. Knowing exactly where a Column is covered by a field and where it is covered by an Action is a bit of an art, so we created the mapping tables to make you an Artist without the years of practice. Let me draw you a map. Event Mapping The table dbo.trace_xe_event_map exists in the master database with the following structure: Column_name Type trace_event_id smallint package_name nvarchar xe_event_name nvarchar By joining this table sys.trace_events using trace_event_id and to the sys.dm_xe_objects using xe_event_name you can get a fair amount of information about how Event Classes are related to Events. The most basic query this lends itself to is to match an Event Class with the corresponding Event. SELECT     t.trace_event_id,     t.name [event_class],     e.package_name,     e.xe_event_name FROM sys.trace_events t INNER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_event_map e     ON t.trace_event_id = e.trace_event_id There are a couple things you’ll notice as you peruse the output of this query: For the most part, the names of Events are fairly close to the original Event Class; eg. SP:CacheMiss == sp_cache_miss, and so on. We’ve mostly stuck to a one to one mapping between Event Classes and Events, but there are a few cases where we have combined when it made sense. For example, Data File Auto Grow, Log File Auto Grow, Data File Auto Shrink & Log File Auto Shrink are now all covered by a single event named database_file_size_change. This just seemed like a “smarter” implementation for this type of event, you can get all the same information from this single event (grow/shrink, Data/Log, Auto/Manual growth) without having multiple different events. You can use Predicates if you want to limit the output to just one of the original Event Class measures. There are some Event Classes that did not make the cut and were not migrated. These fall into two categories; there were a few Event Classes that had been deprecated, or that just did not make sense, so we didn’t migrate them. (You won’t find an Event related to mounting a tape – sorry.) The second class is bigger; with rare exception, we did not migrate any of the Event Classes that were related to Security Auditing using SQL Trace. We introduced the SQL Audit feature in SQL Server 2008 and that will be the compliance and auditing feature going forward. Doing this is a very deliberate decision to support separation of duties for DBAs. There are separate permissions required for SQL Audit and Extended Events tracing so you can assign these tasks to different people if you choose. (If you’re wondering, the permission for Extended Events is ALTER ANY EVENT SESSION, which is covered by CONTROL SERVER.) Action Mapping The table dbo.trace_xe_action_map exists in the master database with the following structure: Column_name Type trace_column_id smallint package_name nvarchar xe_action_name nvarchar You can find more details by joining this to sys.trace_columns on the trace_column_id field. SELECT     c.trace_column_id,     c.name [column_name],     a.package_name,     a.xe_action_name FROM sys.trace_columns c INNER JOIN    dbo.trace_xe_action_map a     ON c.trace_column_id = a.trace_column_id If you examine this list, you’ll notice that there are relatively few Actions that map to SQL Trace Columns given the number of Columns that exist. This is not because we forgot to migrate all the Columns, but because much of the data for individual Event Classes is included as part of the EventData fields of the equivalent Events so there is no need to specify them as Actions. Putting it all together If you’ve spent a bunch of time figuring out the inner workings of SQL Trace, and who hasn’t, then you probably know that the typically set of Columns you find associated with any given Event Class in SQL Profiler is not fix, but is determine by the contents of the table sys.trace_event_bindings. We’ve used this table along with the mapping tables to produce a list of Event + Action combinations that duplicate the SQL Profiler Event Class definitions using the following query, which you can also find in the Books Online topic How To: View the Extended Events Equivalents to SQL Trace Event Classes. USE MASTER; GO SELECT DISTINCT    tb.trace_event_id,    te.name AS 'Event Class',    em.package_name AS 'Package',    em.xe_event_name AS 'XEvent Name',    tb.trace_column_id,    tc.name AS 'SQL Trace Column',    am.xe_action_name as 'Extended Events action' FROM (sys.trace_events te LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_event_map em    ON te.trace_event_id = em.trace_event_id) LEFT OUTER JOIN sys.trace_event_bindings tb    ON em.trace_event_id = tb.trace_event_id LEFT OUTER JOIN sys.trace_columns tc    ON tb.trace_column_id = tc.trace_column_id LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_action_map am    ON tc.trace_column_id = am.trace_column_id ORDER BY te.name, tc.name As you might imagine, it’s also possible to map an existing trace definition to the equivalent event session by judicious use of fn_trace_geteventinfo joined with the two mapping tables. This query extracts the list of Events and Actions equivalent to the trace with ID = 1, which is most likely the Default Trace. You can find this query, along with a set of other queries and steps required to migrate your existing traces over to Extended Events in the Books Online topic How to: Convert an Existing SQL Trace Script to an Extended Events Session. USE MASTER; GO DECLARE @trace_id int SET @trace_id = 1 SELECT DISTINCT el.eventid, em.package_name, em.xe_event_name AS 'event'    , el.columnid, ec.xe_action_name AS 'action' FROM (sys.fn_trace_geteventinfo(@trace_id) AS el    LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_event_map AS em       ON el.eventid = em.trace_event_id) LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.trace_xe_action_map AS ec    ON el.columnid = ec.trace_column_id WHERE em.xe_event_name IS NOT NULL AND ec.xe_action_name IS NOT NULL You’ll notice in the output that the list doesn’t include any of the security audit Event Classes, as I wrote earlier, those were not migrated. But wait…there’s more! If this were an infomercial there’d by some obnoxious guy next to me blogging “Well Mike…that’s pretty neat, but I’m sure you can do more. Can’t you make it even easier to migrate from SQL Trace?”  Needless to say, I’d blog back, in an overly excited way, “You bet I can' obnoxious blogger side-kick!” What I’ve got for you here is a Extended Events Team Blog only special – this tool will not be sold in any store; it’s a special offer for those of you reading the blog. I’ve wrapped all the logic of pulling the configuration information out of an existing trace and and building the Extended Events DDL statement into a handy, dandy CLR stored procedure. Once you load the assembly and register the procedure you just supply the trace id (from sys.traces) and provide a name for the event session. Run the procedure and out pops the DDL required to create an equivalent session. Any aspects of the trace that could not be duplicated are included in comments within the DDL output. This procedure does not actually create the event session – you need to copy the DDL out of the message tab and put it into a new query window to do that. It also requires an existing trace (but it doesn’t have to be running) to evaluate; there is no functionality to parse t-sql scripts. I’m not going to spend a bunch of time explaining the code here – the code is pretty well commented and hopefully easy to follow. If not, you can always post comments or hit the feedback button to send us some mail. Sample code: TraceToExtendedEventDDL   Installing the procedure Just in case you’re not familiar with installing CLR procedures…once you’ve compile the assembly you can load it using a script like this: -- Context to master USE master GO -- Create the assembly from a shared location. CREATE ASSEMBLY TraceToXESessionConverter FROM 'C:\Temp\TraceToXEventSessionConverter.dll' WITH PERMISSION_SET = SAFE GO -- Create a stored procedure from the assembly. CREATE PROCEDURE CreateEventSessionFromTrace @trace_id int, @session_name nvarchar(max) AS EXTERNAL NAME TraceToXESessionConverter.StoredProcedures.ConvertTraceToExtendedEvent GO Enjoy! -Mike

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• Restful Services, oData, and Rest Sharp

  - by jkrebsbach

  After a great presentation by Jason Sheehan at MDC about RestSharp, I decided to implement it. RestSharp is a .Net framework for consuming restful data sources via either Json or XML. My first step was to put together a Restful data source for RestSharp to consume.  Staying entirely withing .Net, I decided to use Microsoft's oData implementation, built on System.Data.Services.DataServices.  Natively, these support Json, or atom+pub xml.  (XML with a few bells and whistles added on) There are three main steps for creating an oData data source: 1)  override CreateDSPMetaData This is where the metadata data is returned.  The meta data defines the structure of the data to return.  The structure contains the relationships between data objects, along with what properties the objects expose.  The meta data can and should be somehow cached so that the structure is not rebuild with every data request. 2) override CreateDataSource The context contains the data the data source will publish.  This method is the conduit which will populate the metadata objects to be returned to the requestor. 3) implement static InitializeService At this point we can set up security, along with setting up properties of the web service (versioning, etc)   Here is a web service which publishes stock prices for various Products (stocks) in various Categories. namespace RestService {     public class RestServiceImpl : DSPDataService<DSPContext>     {         private static DSPContext _context;         private static DSPMetadata _metadata;         /// <summary>         /// Populate traversable data source         /// </summary>         /// <returns></returns>         protected override DSPContext CreateDataSource()         {             if (_context == null)             {                 _context = new DSPContext();                 Category utilities = new Category(0);                 utilities.Name = "Electric";                 Category financials = new Category(1);                 financials.Name = "Financial";                                 IList products = _context.GetResourceSetEntities("Products");                 Product electric = new Product(0, utilities);                 electric.Name = "ABC Electric";                 electric.Description = "Electric Utility";                 electric.Price = 3.5;                 products.Add(electric);                 Product water = new Product(1, utilities);                 water.Name = "XYZ Water";                 water.Description = "Water Utility";                 water.Price = 2.4;                 products.Add(water);                 Product banks = new Product(2, financials);                 banks.Name = "FatCat Bank";                 banks.Description = "A bank that's almost too big";                 banks.Price = 19.9; // This will never get to the client                 products.Add(banks);                 IList categories = _context.GetResourceSetEntities("Categories");                 categories.Add(utilities);                 categories.Add(financials);                 utilities.Products.Add(electric);                 utilities.Products.Add(electric);                 financials.Products.Add(banks);             }             return _context;         }         /// <summary>         /// Setup rules describing published data structure - relationships between data,         /// key field, other searchable fields, etc.         /// </summary>         /// <returns></returns>         protected override DSPMetadata CreateDSPMetadata()         {             if (_metadata == null)             {                 _metadata = new DSPMetadata("DemoService", "DataServiceProviderDemo");                 // Define entity type product                 ResourceType product = _metadata.AddEntityType(typeof(Product), "Product");                 _metadata.AddKeyProperty(product, "ProductID");                 // Only add properties we wish to share with end users                 _metadata.AddPrimitiveProperty(product, "Name");                 _metadata.AddPrimitiveProperty(product, "Description");                 EntityPropertyMappingAttribute att = new EntityPropertyMappingAttribute("Name",                     SyndicationItemProperty.Title, SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext, true);                 product.AddEntityPropertyMappingAttribute(att);                 att = new EntityPropertyMappingAttribute("Description",                     SyndicationItemProperty.Summary, SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext, true);                 product.AddEntityPropertyMappingAttribute(att);                 // Define products as a set of product entities                 ResourceSet products = _metadata.AddResourceSet("Products", product);                 // Define entity type category                 ResourceType category = _metadata.AddEntityType(typeof(Category), "Category");                 _metadata.AddKeyProperty(category, "CategoryID");                 _metadata.AddPrimitiveProperty(category, "Name");                 _metadata.AddPrimitiveProperty(category, "Description");                 // Define categories as a set of category entities                 ResourceSet categories = _metadata.AddResourceSet("Categories", category);                 att = new EntityPropertyMappingAttribute("Name",                     SyndicationItemProperty.Title, SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext, true);                 category.AddEntityPropertyMappingAttribute(att);                 att = new EntityPropertyMappingAttribute("Description",                     SyndicationItemProperty.Summary, SyndicationTextContentKind.Plaintext, true);                 category.AddEntityPropertyMappingAttribute(att);                 // A product has a category, a category has products                 _metadata.AddResourceReferenceProperty(product, "Category", categories);                 _metadata.AddResourceSetReferenceProperty(category, "Products", products);             }             return _metadata;         }         /// <summary>         /// Based on the requesting user, can set up permissions to Read, Write, etc.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="config"></param>         public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config)         {             config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All);             config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2;             config.DataServiceBehavior.AcceptProjectionRequests = true;         }     } }     The objects prefixed with DSP come from the samples on the oData site: http://www.odata.org/developers The products and categories objects are POCO business objects with no special modifiers. Three main options are available for defining the MetaData of data sources in .Net: 1) Generate Entity Data model (Potentially directly from SQL Server database).  This requires the least amount of manual interaction, and uses the edmx WYSIWYG editor to generate a data model.  This can be directly tied to the SQL Server database and generated from the database if you want a data access layer tightly coupled with your database. 2) Object model decorations.  If you already have a POCO data layer, you can decorate your objects with properties to statically inform the compiler how the objects are related.  The disadvantage is there are now tags strewn about your business layer that need to be updated as the business rules change.  3) Programmatically construct metadata object.  This is the object illustrated above in CreateDSPMetaData.  This puts all relationship information into one central programmatic location.  Here business rules are constructed when the DSPMetaData response object is returned.   Once you have your service up and running, RestSharp is designed for XML / Json, along with the native Microsoft library.  There are currently some differences between how Jason made RestSharp expect XML with how atom+pub works, so I found better results currently with the Json implementation - modifying the RestSharp XML parser to make an atom+pub parser is fairly trivial though, so use what implementation works best for you. I put together a sample console app which calls the RestSvcImpl.svc service defined above (and assumes it to be running on port 2000).  I used both RestSharp as a client, and also the default Microsoft oData client tools. namespace RestConsole {     class Program     {         private static DataServiceContext _ctx;         private enum DemoType         {             Xml,             Json         }         static void Main(string[] args)         {             // Microsoft implementation             _ctx = new DataServiceContext(new System.Uri("http://localhost:2000/RestServiceImpl.svc"));             var msProducts = RunQuery<Product>("Products").ToList();             var msCategory = RunQuery<Category>("/Products(0)/Category").AsEnumerable().Single();             var msFilteredProducts = RunQuery<Product>("/Products?$filter=length(Name) ge 4").ToList();             // RestSharp implementation                          DemoType demoType = DemoType.Json;             var client = new RestClient("http://localhost:2000/RestServiceImpl.svc");             client.ClearHandlers(); // Remove all available handlers             // Set up handler depending on what situation dictates             if (demoType == DemoType.Json)                 client.AddHandler("application/json", new RestSharp.Deserializers.JsonDeserializer());             else if (demoType == DemoType.Xml)             {                 client.AddHandler("application/atom+xml", new RestSharp.Deserializers.XmlDeserializer());             }                          var request = new RestRequest();             if (demoType == DemoType.Json)                 request.RootElement = "d"; // service root element for json             else if (demoType == DemoType.Xml)             {                 request.XmlNamespace = "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom";             }                              // Return all products             request.Resource = "/Products?$orderby=Name";             RestResponse<List<Product>> productsResp = client.Execute<List<Product>>(request);             List<Product> products = productsResp.Data;             // Find category for product with ProductID = 1             request.Resource = string.Format("/Products(1)/Category");             RestResponse<Category> categoryResp = client.Execute<Category>(request);             Category category = categoryResp.Data;             // Specialized queries             request.Resource = string.Format("/Products?$filter=ProductID eq {0}", 1);             RestResponse<Product> productResp = client.Execute<Product>(request);             Product product = productResp.Data;                          request.Resource = string.Format("/Products?$filter=Name eq '{0}'", "XYZ Water");             productResp = client.Execute<Product>(request);             product = productResp.Data;         }         private static IEnumerable<TElement> RunQuery<TElement>(string queryUri)         {             try             {                 return _ctx.Execute<TElement>(new Uri(queryUri, UriKind.Relative));             }             catch (Exception ex)             {                 throw ex;             }         }              } }   Feel free to step through the code a few times and to attach a debugger to the service as well to see how and where the context and metadata objects are constructed and returned.  Pay special attention to the response object being returned by the oData service - There are several properties of the RestRequest that can be used to help troubleshoot when the structure of the response is not exactly what would be expected.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, July 19, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, July 19, 2013Popular ReleasesuComponents: uComponents v5.5.0: Following on from our 101355 release, we bring you... v5.5.0! Resolved issues The following issues have been resolved in 5.5.0: 14634 14848 DataType Grid 14840 14842 14845 UpgradingThe best way to upgrade uComponents is to re-install via Umbraco's back-office package installer, (either from the package repository or a local package upload). Do not uninstall an existing uComponents package, as this may lead to data loss! Umbraco compatibilityThis release is compatible with Umbraco 4...51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.19.4: One Click Install from NuGet This release introduces the 51Degrees.mobi IIS Vary Header Fix. When Compression and Caching is used in IIS, the Vary header is overwritten, making intelligent caching with dynamic content impossible. Find out more about installing the Vary Header fix. Changes to Version 2.1.19.4Handlers now have a ‘Count’ property. This is an integer value that shows how many devices in the dataset that use that handler. Provider.cs -> GetDeviceInfoByID to address a problem w...SalarDbCodeGenerator: SalarDbCodeGenerator v2.1.2013.0719: Version 2.1.2013.0719 2013/7/19 Pattern Changes: * DapperContext pattern is added. * All patterns are updated to work with one-to-one relations. Changes: * One-to-one relation is supported. * Minor bug fixes.Scryber PDF Generation: Scryber.Installer.v0.8.3: This one has tables! A significant update to the scryber library, with the inclusion of tables. There is no column span, or row span, and nested tables are not fully supported. But - they overflow nicely and are well styled. And they can be data bound. Other updates The Link element has inner components directly as a child, rather than in a Content element. The existing files will still continue to work, but are invalid wrt the schema. Databinding is now supported at the document level, r...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows and WP (v1.3 beta 2): Includes all changes in v1.3 beta 1 Additional support for Windows 8.1 Preview New API (JS): addTextTrack New API (JS): msKeys New API (JS): msPlayToPreferredSourceUri New API (JS): msSetMediaKeys New API (JS): onmsneedkey New API (Xaml): SetMediaStreamSource method New API (Xaml): Stretch property New API (Xaml): StretchChanged event New API (Xaml): AreTransportControlsEnabled property New API (Xaml): IsFullWindow property New API (Xaml): PlayToPreferredSourceUri proper...Outlook 2013 Add-In: Multiple Calendars: As per popular request, this new version includes: - Support for multiple calendars. This can be enabled in the configuration by choosing which ones to show/hide appointments from. In some cases (public folders) it may time out and crash, and so far it only supports "My Calendars", so not shared ones yet. Also they're currently shown in the same font/color so there are no confusions with color categories, but please drop me a line on any suggestions you'd like to see implemented. - Added fri...GoAgent GUI: GoAgent GUI 1.2.0 ???: *???????，??????????????，?????????????? ????????* ????????(Beta) Beta????：https://goagent.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic ??????：uygw@outlook.com ????：https://goagent.codeplex.com/documentation ?????????????????。Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Beta 2: New in this release: Show grid in editor Cut/copy/paste support Bug fixesAscend 3D: Ascend (2013-07-17): Ascend 2.1 Animation bugfixes and speed/robustness improvements Added compatibility for multiple top-level bones on armatures Ascend Blender Exporter 2.1 Removed need to create parent-child relationship between armature and skinning mesh Added support for exporting multiple top-level bones on armatures AscendViewer 1.0.4 Updated to use latest version of Ascend libraryCommunity TFS Build Extensions: July 2013: The July 2013 release contains VS2010 Activities(target .NET 4.0) VS2012 Activities (target .NET 4.5) VS2013 Activities (target .NET 4.5.1) Community TFS Build Manager VS2012 The Community TFS Build Manager can also be found in the Visual Studio Gallery here where updates will first become available. A version supporting VS2010 is also available in the Gallery here.smoketestgit1: new release: Wiki Markup Guide bold italics underline Heading 1 Heading 2 Bullet List Bullet List 2 Number List Number List 2 http://www.example.com Do not apply formattingsmoketesthg: new release: Wiki Markup Guide bold italics underline Heading 1 Heading 2 Bullet List Bullet List 2 Number List Number List 2 http://www.example.com Do not apply formattingsmoketesttfs: new release: Wiki Markup Guide bold italics underline Heading 1 Heading 2 Bullet List Bullet List 2 Number List Number List 2 http://www.example.com Do not apply formattingdatajs - JavaScript Library for data-centric web applications: datajs version 1.1.1: datajs is a cross-browser and UI agnostic JavaScript library that enables data-centric web applications with the following features: OData client that enables CRUD operations including batching and metadata support using both ATOM and JSON payloads. Single store abstraction that provides a common API on top of HTML5 local storage technologies. Data cache component that allows reading data ranges from a collection and storing them locally to reduce the number of network requests. Changes ...Orchard Project: Orchard 1.7 RC: Planning releasedTerminals: Version 3.1 - Release: Changes since version 3.0:15992 Unified usage of icons in user interface Added context menu in Organize favorites grid Fixed:34219 34210 34223 33981 34209 Install notes:No changes in database (use database from release 3.0) No upgrade of configuration, passwords, credentials or favorites See also upgrade notes for release 3.0Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.573b: XBMC Link - Let MC update your XBMC Library Fixes in place, Enjoy the XBMC Link function Well, Phil's been busy in the background, and come up with a Great new feature for Media Companion. Currently only implemented for movies. Once we're happy that's working with no issues, we'll extend the functionality to include TV shows. All the help for this is build into the application. Go to General Preferences - XBMC Link for details. Help us make it better* Currently only tested on local and ...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1307.15: Fix a bug where WPP crash if 'ShowPendingUpdates' is start with wrong credentials. Fix a bug where WPP crash if ArrivalDateAfter and ArrivalDateBefore is equal in the ComputerView. Add a filter in the ComputerView. (Thanks to NorbertFe for this feature request) Add an option, when right-clicking on a computer, you can ask for display the current logon user of the remote computer. Add an option in settings to choose if WPP ping remote computers using IPv4, IPv6 or IPv6 and, if fail, IP...Lab Of Things: vBeta1: Initial release of LoTVidCoder: 1.4.23: New in 1.4.23 Added French translation. Fixed non-x264 video encoders not sticking in video tab. New in 1.4 Updated HandBrake core to 0.9.9 Blu-ray subtitle (PGS) support Additional framerates: 30, 50, 59.94, 60 Additional sample rates: 8, 11.025, 12 and 16 kHz Additional higher bitrates for audio Same as Source Constant Framerate 24-bit FLAC encoding Added Windows Phone 8 and Apple TV 3 presets Introduced process isolation for encodes. Now if HandBrake crashes, VidCoder will ...New Projects[C#]A Complete MySQL Manager Project: An open-source MySQL database manager oriented to multi-threading environments, supporting to create an entire database from scratch and edit it.bCal Javascript Calendar Generator: Using this simple javascript library, you can create simple navigable calendars in your website with just one line of user code.Better Network: Tools to delete network profile and network lists in Windows 8.C# Intellisense for Notepad++: 'CS-Script Intellisense' is a real C# intellisense solution based on CS-Script and ICSharpCode.NRefactory/Mono.Cecil.DARF: Dynamic Application Runtime Framework: A set of tools and libraries which help software developers create fully distributed and component-based applications. FeiXinV5: Just TestFollower Catcher: Game made for the 2012 Windows 8 Megathon. Second place in Madrid's local competition.MeeOS .NET: El primer sistema operativo GNU GPL en español.Music Vault: Music Vault is program to store your favorite music in one place, you can in any time move all your music library by moving only one file.MVC uTorrent: This is an ASP.NET MVC uTorrent front end, that utilises the uTorrent API. The main features: - Single page application - Can be hosted in IISMyTaskManager: This project Related to distribute the task to log in users OO2RDF: OO2RDF is a framework for data triplification. P(y)rotein Subcellular Location Image Database: A library that allows communication with an OMERO database, an open-source software for storage and manipulation of biological images.PE Toolbox: PE Toolbox ? ????? ?? ???????????, ????? ??????? ??? ??????????? ?? ?????. ???? ????? ??????????? ???????: - PE IFE (Importing from Excel) PeGscan: *PeGscan*ScriptZilla: ScriptZilla is an Free Editor for Windows with more Than 23 Languages.Sharepoint : Reconciliate SSRS Reports and Datasets with datasources Powershell: Powershell to link datasources to SSRS reports and datasetsSync-Moped: The idea behind the "Sync-Moped" is to synchronize two directories with backup functionality.System.Time: System.Time provides a type for .NET that allows the managing of a time in System.String, System.DateTime and System.TimeSpan form at the same time.Text Analytics: Project summary will be added later.Tibia Universal MC .NET: This tool was written as an attempt to port the [url:http://code.google.com/p/xenomc/] to the .NET Framework.VRFramework: VR Framework is a system for creating a virtual reality games using your PC, and Android smart phone, and Unity 3D.

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• PASS Summit Feedback

  - by Rob Farley

  PASS Feedback came in last week. I also saw my dentist for some fillings... At the PASS Summit this year, I delivered a couple of regular sessions and a Lightning Talk. People told me they enjoyed it, but when the rankings came out, they showed that I didn’t score particularly well. Brent Ozar was keen to discuss it with me. Brent: PASS speaker feedback is out. You did two sessions and a Lightning Talk. How did you go? Rob: Not so well actually, thanks for asking. Brent: Ha! Sorry. Of course you know that's why I wanted to discuss this with you. I was in one of your sessions at SQLBits in the UK a month before PASS, and I thought you rocked. You've got a really good and distinctive delivery style.  Then I noticed your talks were ranked in the bottom quarter of the Summit ratings and wanted to discuss it. Rob: Yeah, I know. You did ask me if we could do this...  I should explain – my presentation style is not the stereotypical IT conference one. I throw in jokes, and try to engage the audience thoroughly. I find many talks amazingly dry, and I guess I try to buck that trend. I also run training courses, and find that I get a lot of feedback from people thanking me for keeping things interesting. That said, I also get feedback criticising me for my style, and that’s basically what’s happened here. For the rest of this discussion, let’s focus on my talk about the Incredible Shrinking Execution Plan, which I considered to be my main talk. Brent: I thought that session title was the very best one at the entire Summit, and I had it on my recommended sessions list.  In four words, you managed to sum up the topic and your sense of humor.  I read that and immediately thought, "People need to be in this session," and then it didn't score well.  Tell me about your scores. Rob: The questions on the feedback form covered the usefulness of the information, the speaker’s presentation skills, their knowledge of the subject, how well the session was described, the amount of time allocated, and the quality of the presentation materials. Brent: Presentation materials? But you don’t do slides.  Did they rate your thong? Rob: No-one saw my flip-flops in this talk, Brent. I created a script in Management Studio, and published that afterwards, but I think people will have scored that question based on the lack of slides. I wasn’t expecting to do particularly well on that one. That was the only section that didn’t have 5/5 as the most popular score. Brent: See, that sucks, because cookbook-style scripts are often some of my favorites.  Adam Machanic's Service Broker workbench series helped me immensely when I was prepping for the MCM.  As an attendee, I'd rather have a commented script than a slide deck.  So how did you rank so low? Rob: When I look at the scores that you got (based on your blog post), you got very few scores below 3 – people that felt strong enough about your talk to post a negative score. In my scores, between 5% and 10% were below 3 (except on the question about whether I knew my stuff – I guess I came as knowledgeable). Brent: Wow – so quite a few people really didn’t like your talk then? Rob: Yeah. Mind you, based on the comments, some people really loved it. I’d like to think that there would be a certain portion of the room who may have rated the talk as one of the best of the conference. Some of my comments included “amazing!”, “Best presentation so far!”, “Wow, best session yet”, “fantastic” and “Outstanding!”. I think lots of talks can be “Great”, but not so many talks can be “Outstanding” without the word losing its meaning. One wrote “Pretty amazing presentation, considering it was completely extemporaneous.” Brent: Extemporaneous, eh? Rob: Yeah. I guess they don’t realise how much preparation goes into coming across as unprepared. In many ways it’s much easier to give a written speech than to deliver a presentation without slides as a prompt. Brent: That delivery style, the really relaxed, casual, college-professor approach was one of the things I really liked about your presentation at SQLbits.  As somebody who presents a lot, I "get" it - I know how hard it is to come off as relaxed and comfortable with your own material.  It's like improv done by jazz players and comedians - if you've never tried it, you don't realize how hard it is.  People also don't realize how hard it is to make a tough subject fun. Rob: Yeah well... There will be people writing comments on this post that say I wasn't trying to make the subject fun, and that I was making it all about me. Sometimes the style works, sometimes it doesn't. Most of the comments mentioned the fact that I tell jokes, some in a nice way, but some not so much (and it wasn't just a PASS thing - that's the mix of feedback I generally get). One comment at PASS was: “great stand up comedian - not what I'm looking for at pass”, and there were certainly a few that said “too many jokes”. I’m not trying to do stand-up – jokes are my way of engaging with the audience while I demonstrate some of the amazing things that the Query Optimizer can do if you write your queries the right way. Some people didn’t think it was technical enough, but I’ve also had some people tell me that the concepts I’m explaining are deep and profound. Brent: To me, that's a hallmark of a great explanation - when someone says, "But of course it has to work that way - how could it work any other way?  It seems so simple and logical."  Well, sure it does when it's explained correctly, but now pick up any number of thick SQL Server books and try to understand the Redundant Joins concept.  I guarantee it'll take more than 45 minutes. Rob: Some people in my audiences realise that, but definitely not everyone. There's only so much you can tell someone that something is profound. Generally it's something that they either have an epiphany on or not. I like to lull my audience into knowing what's going on, and do something that surprises them. Gain their trust, build a rapport, and then show them the deeper truth of what just happened. Brent: So you've learned your lesson about presentation scores, right?  From here on out, you're going to be dry, humorless, and all your presentations will consist of you reading bullet points off the screen. Rob: No Brent, I’m not. I'm also not going to suggest that most presentations at PASS are like that. No-one tries to present like that. There's a big space to occupy between what "dry and humourless" and me. My difference is to focus on the relationship I have with the crowd, rather than focussing on delivering the perfect session. I want to see people smiling and know they're relaxed. I think most presenters focus on the material, which is completely reasonable and safe. I remember once hearing someone talking about product creation. They talked about mediocrity. They said that one of the worst things that people can ever say about your product is that it’s “good”. What you want is for 10% of the world to love it enough to want to buy it. If 10% the world gave me a dollar, I’d have more money than I could ever use (assuming it wasn’t the SAME dollar they were giving me I guess). Brent: It's the Raving Fans theory.  It's better to have a small number of raving customers than a large number of almost-but-not-really customers who don't care that much about your product or service.  I know exactly how you feel - when I got survey feedback from my Quest video presentation when I was dressed up in a Richard Simmons costume, some of the attendees said I was unprofessional and distracting.  Some of the attendees couldn't get enough and Photoshopped all kinds of stuff into the screen captures.  On a whole, I probably didn't score that well, and I'm fine with that.  It sucks to look at the scores though - do those lower scores bother you? Rob: Of course they do. It hurts deeply. I open myself up and give presentations in a very personal way. All presenters do that, and we all feel the pain of negative feedback. I hate coming 146th & 162nd out of 185, but have to acknowledge that many sessions did worse still. Plus, once I feel the wounds have healed, I’ll be able to remember that there are people in the world that rave about my presentation style, and figure that people will hopefully talk about me. One day maybe those people that don’t like my presentation style will stay away and I might be able to score better. You don’t pay to hear country music if you prefer western... Lots of people find chili too spicy, but it’s still a popular food. Brent: But don’t you want to appeal to everyone? Rob: I do, but I don’t want to be lukewarm as in Revelation 3:16. I’d rather disgust and be discussed. Well, maybe not ‘disgust’, but I don’t want to conform. Conformity just isn’t the same any more. I’m not sure I’ve ever been one to do that. I try not to offend, but definitely like to be different. Brent: Count me among your raving fans, sir.  Where can we see you next? Rob: Considering I live in Adelaide in Australia, I’m not about to appear at anyone’s local SQL Saturday. I’m still trying to plan which events I’ll get to in 2011. I’ve submitted abstracts for TechEd North America, but won’t hold my breath. I’m also considering the SQLBits conferences in the UK in April, PASS in October, and I’m sure I’ll do some LiveMeeting presentations for user groups. Online, people download some of my recent SQLBits presentations at http://bit.ly/RFSarg and http://bit.ly/Simplification though. And they can download a 5-minute MP3 of my Lightning Talk at http://www.lobsterpot.com.au/files/Collation.mp3, in which I try to explain the idea behind collation, using thongs as an example. Brent: I was in the audience for http://bit.ly/RFSarg. That was a great presentation. Rob: Thanks, Brent. Now where’s my dollar?

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• Standards Corner: OAuth WG Client Registration Problem

  - by Tanu Sood

  Phil Hunt is an active member of multiple industry standards groups and committees (see brief bio at the end of the post) and has spearheaded discussions, creation and ratifications of  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} industry standards including the Kantara Identity Governance Framework, among others. Being an active voice in the industry standards development world, we have invited him to share his discussions, thoughts, news & updates, and discuss use cases, implementation success stories (and even failures) around industry standards on this monthly column. Author: Phil Hunt This afternoon, the OAuth Working Group will meet at IETF88 in Vancouver to discuss some important topics important to the maturation of OAuth. One of them is the OAuth client registration problem.OAuth (RFC6749) was initially developed with a simple deployment model where there is only monopoly or singleton cloud instance of a web API (e.g. there is one Facebook, one Google, on LinkedIn, and so on). When the API publisher and API deployer are the same monolithic entity, it easy for developers to contact the provider and register their app to obtain a client_id and credential.But what happens when the API is for an open source project where there may be 1000s of deployed copies of the API (e.g. such as wordpress). In these cases, the authors of the API are not the people running the API. In these scenarios, how does the developer obtain a client_id? An example of an "open deployed" API is OpenID Connect. Connect defines an OAuth protected resource API that can provide personal information about an authenticated user -- in effect creating a potentially common API for potential identity providers like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, or Oracle. In Oracle's case, Fusion applications will soon have RESTful APIs that are deployed in many different ways in many different environments. How will developers write apps that can work against an openly deployed API with whom the developer can have no prior relationship?At present, the OAuth Working Group has two proposals two consider: Dynamic RegistrationDynamic Registration was originally developed for OpenID Connect and UMA. It defines a RESTful API in which a prospective client application with no client_id creates a new client registration record with a service provider and is issued a client_id and credential along with a registration token that can be used to update registration over time.As proof of success, the OIDC community has done substantial implementation of this spec and feels committed to its use. Why not approve?Well, the answer is that some of us had some concerns, namely: Recognizing instances of software - dynamic registration treats all clients as unique. It has no defined way to recognize that multiple copies of the same client are being registered other then assuming if the registration parameters are similar it might be the same client. Versioning and Policy Approval of open APIs and clients - many service providers have to worry about change management. They expect to have approval cycles that approve versions of server and client software for use in their environment. In some cases approval might be wide open, but in many cases, approval might be down to the specific class of software and version. Registration updates - when does a client actually need to update its registration? Shouldn't it be never? Is there some characteristic of deployed code that would cause it to change? Options lead to complexity - because each client is treated as unique, it becomes unclear how the clients and servers will agree on what credentials forms are acceptable and what OAuth features are allowed and disallowed. Yet the reality is, developers will write their application to work in a limited number of ways. They can't implement all the permutations and combinations that potential service providers might choose. Stateful registration - if the primary motivation for registration is to obtain a client_id and credential, why can't this be done in a stateless fashion using assertions? Denial of service - With so much stateful registration and the need for multiple tokens to be issued, will this not lead to a denial of service attack / risk of resource depletion? At the very least, because of the information gathered, it would difficult for service providers to clean up "failed" registrations and determine active from inactive or false clients. There has yet to be much wide-scale "production" use of dynamic registration other than in small closed communities. Client Association A second proposal, Client Association, has been put forward by Tony Nadalin of Microsoft and myself. We took at look at existing use patterns to come up with a new proposal. At the Berlin meeting, we considered how WS-STS systems work. More recently, I took a review of how mobile messaging clients work. I looked at how Apple, Google, and Microsoft each handle registration with APNS, GCM, and WNS, and a similar pattern emerges. This pattern is to use an existing credential (mutual TLS auth), or client bearer assertion and swap for a device specific bearer assertion.In the client association proposal, the developer's registration with the API publisher is handled by having the developer register with an API publisher (as opposed to the party deploying the API) and obtaining a software "statement". Or, if there is no "publisher" that can sign a statement, the developer may include their own self-asserted software statement.A software statement is a special type of assertion that serves to lock application registration profile information in a signed assertion. The statement is included with the client application and can then be used by the client to swap for an instance specific client assertion as defined by section 4.2 of the OAuth Assertion draft and profiled in the Client Association draft. The software statement provides a way for service provider to recognize and configure policy to approve classes of software clients, and simplifies the actual registration to a simple assertion swap. Because the registration is an assertion swap, registration is no longer "stateful" - meaning the service provider does not need to store any information to support the client (unless it wants to). Has this been implemented yet? Not directly. We've only delivered draft 00 as an alternate way of solving the problem using well-known patterns whose security characteristics and scale characteristics are well understood. Dynamic Take II At roughly the same time that Client Association and Software Statement were published, the authors of Dynamic Registration published a "split" version of the Dynamic Registration (draft-richer-oauth-dyn-reg-core and draft-richer-oauth-dyn-reg-management). While some of the concerns above are addressed, some differences remain. Registration is now a simple POST request. However it defines a new method for issuing client tokens where as Client Association uses RFC6749's existing extension point. The concern here is whether future client access token formats would be addressed properly. Finally, Dyn-reg-core does not yet support software statements. Conclusion The WG has some interesting discussion to bring this back to a single set of specifications. Dynamic Registration has significant implementation, but Client Association could be a much improved way to simplify implementation of the overall OpenID Connect specification and improve adoption. In fairness, the existing editors have already come a long way. Yet there are those with significant investment in the current draft. There are many that have expressed they don't care. They just want a standard. There is lots of pressure on the working group to reach consensus quickly.And that folks is how the sausage is made.Note: John Bradley and Justin Richer recently published draft-bradley-stateless-oauth-client-00 which on first look are getting closer. Some of the details seem less well defined, but the same could be said of client-assoc and software-statement. I hope we can merge these specs this week. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} About the Writer: Phil Hunt joined Oracle as part of the November 2005 acquisition of OctetString Inc. where he headed software development for what is now Oracle Virtual Directory. Since joining Oracle, Phil works as CMTS in the Identity Standards group at Oracle where he developed the Kantara Identity Governance Framework and provided significant input to JSR 351. Phil participates in several standards development organizations such as IETF and OASIS working on federation, authorization (OAuth), and provisioning (SCIM) standards.  Phil blogs at www.independentid.com and a Twitter handle of @independentid.

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• This is the End of Business as Usual...

  - by Michael Snow

  This week, we'll be hosting our last Social Business Thought Leader Series Webcast for 2012. Our featured guest this week will be Brian Solis of Altimeter Group. As we've been going through the preparations for Brian's webcast, it became very clear that an hour's time is barely scraping the surface of the depth of Brian's insights and analysis. Accordingly, in the spirit of sharing Brian's perspective for all of our readers, we'll be featuring guest posts all this week pulled from Brian's larger collection of blog postings on his own website. If you like what you've read here this week, we highly recommend digging deeper into his tome of wisdom. Guest Post by Brian Solis, Analyst, Altimeter Group as originally featured on his site with the minor change of the video addition at the beginning of the post. This is the End of Business as Usual and the Beginning of a New Era of Relevance - Brian Solis, Principal Analyst, Altimeter Group The Times They Are A-Changin’ Come gather ’round people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have grown And accept it that soon You’ll be drenched to the bone If your time to you Is worth savin’ Then you better start swimmin’ Or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin’. - Bob Dylan I’m sure you are wondering why I chose lyrics to open this article. If you skimmed through them, stop here for a moment. Go back through the Dylan’s words and take your time. Carefully read, and feel, what it is he’s saying and savor the moment to connect the meaning of his words to the challenges you face today. His message is as important and true today as it was when they were first written in 1964. The tide is indeed once again turning. And even though the 60s now live in the history books, right here, right now, Dylan is telling us once again that this is our time to not only sink or swim, but to do something amazing. This is your time. This is our time. But, these times are different and what comes next is difficult to grasp. How people communicate. How people learn and share. How people make decisions. Everything is different now. Think about this…you’re reading this article because it was sent to you via email. Yet more people spend their online time in social networks than they do in email. Duh. According to Nielsen, of the total time spent online 22.5% are connecting and communicating in social networks. To put that in perspective, the time spent in the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube is greater than online gaming at 9.8%, email at 7.6% and search at 4%. Imagine for a moment if you and I were connected to one another in Facebook, which just so happens to be the largest social network in the world. How big? Well, Facebook is the size today of the entire Internet in 2004. There are over 1 billion people friending, Liking, commenting, sharing, and engaging in Facebook…that’s roughly 12% of the world’s population. Twitter has over 200 million users. Ever hear of tumblr? More time is spent on this popular microblogging community than Twitter. The point is that the landscape for communication and all that’s affected by human interaction is profoundly different than how you and I learned, shared or talked to one another yesterday. This transformation is only becoming more pervasive and, it’s not going back. Survival of the Fitting But social media is just one of the channels we can use to reach people. I must be honest. I’m as much a part of tomorrow as I am of yesteryear. It’s why I spend all of my time researching the evolution of media and its impact on business and culture. Because of you, I share everything I learn in newsletters, emails, blogs, Youtube videos, and also traditional books. I’m dedicated to helping everyone not only understand, but grasp the change that’s before you. Technologies such as social, mobile, virtual, augmented, et al compel us adapt our story and value proposition and extend our reach to be part of communities we don’t realize exist. The people who will keep you in business or running tomorrow are the very people you’re not reaching today. Before you continue to read on, allow me to clarify my point of view. My inspiration for writing this is to help you augment, not necessarily replace, the programs you’re running today. We must still reach those whom matter to us in the ways they prefer to be engaged. To reach what I call the connected consumer of Geneeration-C we must too reach them in the ways they wish to be engaged. And in all of my work, how they connect, talk to one another, influence others, and make decisions are not at all like the traditional consumers of the past. Nor are they merely the kids…the Millennial. Connected consumers are representative across every age group and demographic. As you can see, use of social networks, media sharing sites, microblogs, blogs, etc. equally span across Gen Y, Gen X, and Baby Boomers. The DNA of connected customers is indiscriminant of age or any other demographic for that matter. This is more about psychographics, the linkage of people through common interests (than it is their age, gender, education, nationality or level of income. Once someone is introduced to the marvels of connectedness, the sensation becomes a contagion. It touches and affects everyone. And, that’s why this isn’t going anywhere but normalcy. Social networking isn’t just about telling people what you’re doing. Nor is it just about generic, meaningless conversation. Today’s connected consumer is incredibly influential. They’re connected to hundreds and even thousands of other like-minded people. What they experiences, what they support, it’s shared throughout these networks and as information travels, it shapes and steers impressions, decisions, and experiences of others. For example, if we revisit the Nielsen research, we get an idea of just how big this is becoming. 75% spend heavily on music. How does that translate to the arts? I’d imagine the number is equally impressive. If 53% follow their favorite brand or organization, imagine what’s possible. Just like this email list that connects us, connections in social networks are powerful. The difference is however, that people spend more time in social networks than they do in email. Everything begins with an understanding of the “5 W’s and H.E.” – Who, What, When, Where, How, and to What Extent? The data that comes back tells you which networks are important to the people you’re trying to reach, how they connect, what they share, what they value, and how to connect with them. From there, your next steps are to create a community strategy that extends your mission, vision, and value and it align it with the interests, behavior, and values of those you wish to reach and galvanize. To help, I’ve prepared an action list for you, otherwise known as the 10 Steps Toward New Relevance: 1. Answer why you should engage in social networks and why anyone would want to engage with you 2. Observe what brings them together and define how you can add value to the conversation 3. Identify the influential voices that matter to your world, recognize what’s important to them, and find a way to start a dialogue that can foster a meaningful and mutually beneficial relationship 4. Study the best practices of not just organizations like yours, but also those who are successfully reaching the type of people you’re trying to reach – it’s benching marking against competitors and benchmarking against undefined opportunities 5. Translate all you’ve learned into a convincing presentation written to demonstrate tangible opportunity to your executive board, make the case through numbers, trends, data, insights – understanding they have no idea what’s going on out there and you are both the scout and the navigator (start with a recommended pilot so everyone can learn together) 6. Listen to what they’re saying and develop a process to learn from activity and adapt to interests and steer engagement based on insights 7. Recognize how they use social media and innovate based on what you observe to captivate their attention 8. Align your objectives with their objectives. If you’re unsure of what they’re looking for…ask 9. Invest in the development of content, engagement 10. Build a community, invest in values, spark meaningful dialogue, and offer tangible value…the kind of value they can’t get anywhere else. Take advantage of the medium and the opportunity! The reality is that we live and compete in a perpetual era of Digital Darwinism, the evolution of consumer behavior when society and technology evolve faster than our ability to adapt. This is why it’s our time to alter our course. We must connect with those who are defining the future of engagement, commerce, business, and how the arts are appreciated and supported. Even though it is the end of business as usual, it is the beginning of a new age of opportunity. The consumer revolution is already underway, and the question is: How do you better understand the role you play in this production as a connected or social consumer as well as business professional? Again, this is your time to define a new era of engagement and relevance. Originally written for The National Arts Marketing Project Connect with Brian via: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Google+ --- Note from Michael: If you really like this post above - check out Brian's TEDTalk and his thought process for preparing it in this post: 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} http://www.briansolis.com/2012/10/tedtalk-reinventing-consumer-capitalism-screw-business-as-usual/

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• Windows 8 Will be Here Tomorrow; but Should Silverlight be Gone Today?

  - by andrewbrust

  The software industry lives within an interesting paradox. IT in the enterprise moves slowly and cautiously, upgrading only when safe and necessary.  IT interests intentionally live in the past.  On the other hand, developers, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) not only want to use the latest and greatest technologies, but this constituency prides itself on gauging tech’s future, and basing its present-day strategy upon it.  Normally, we as an industry manage this paradox with a shrug of the shoulder and musings along the lines of “it takes all kinds.”  Different subcultures have different tendencies.  So be it. Microsoft, with its Windows operating system (OS), can’t take such a laissez-faire view of the world though.  Redmond relies on IT to deploy Windows and (at the very least) influence its procurement, but it also relies on developers to build software for Windows, especially software that has a dependency on features in new versions of the OS.  It must indulge and nourish developers’ fetish for an early birthing of the next generation of software, even as it acknowledges the IT reality that the next wave will arrive on-schedule in Redmond and will travel very slowly to end users. With the move to Windows 8, and the corresponding shift in application development models, this paradox is certainly in place. On the one hand, the next version of Windows is widely expected sometime in 2012, and its full-scale deployment will likely push into 2014 or even later.  Meanwhile, there’s a technology that runs on today’s Windows 7, will continue to run in the desktop mode of Windows 8 (the next version’s codename), and provides absolutely the best architectural bridge to the Windows 8 Metro-style application development stack.  That technology is Silverlight.  And given what we now know about Windows 8, one might think, as I do, that Microsoft ecosystem developers should be flocking to it. But because developers are trying to get a jump on the future, and since many of them believe the impending v5.0 release of Silverlight will be the technology’s last, not everyone is flocking to it; in fact some are fleeing from it.  Is this sensible?  Is it not unprecedented?  What options does it lead to?  What’s the right way to think about the situation? Is v5.0 really the last major version of the technology called Silverlight?  We don’t know.  But Scott Guthrie, the “father” and champion of the technology, left the Developer Division of Microsoft months ago to work on the Windows Azure team, and he took his people with him.  John Papa, who was a very influential Redmond-based evangelist for Silverlight (and is a Visual Studio Magazine author), left Microsoft completely.  About a year ago, when initial suspicion of Silverlight’s demise reached significant magnitude, Papa interviewed Guthrie on video and their discussion served to dispel developers’ fears; but now they’ve moved on. So read into that what you will and let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, speculation that Silverlight’s days of major revision and iteration are over now is correct.  Let’s assume the shine and glimmer has dimmed.  Let’s assume that any Silverlight application written today, and that therefore any investment of financial and human resources made in Silverlight development today, is destined for rework and extra investment in a few years, if the application’s platform needs to stay current. Is this really so different from any technology investment we make?  Every framework, language, runtime and operating system is subject to change, to improvement, to flux and, yes, to obsolescence.  What differs from project to project, is how near-term that obsolescence is and how disruptive the change will be.  The shift from .NET 1.1. to 2.0 was incremental.  Some of the further changes were too.  But the switch from Windows Forms to WPF was major, and the change from ASP.NET Web Services (asmx) to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) was downright fundamental. Meanwhile, the transition to the .NET development model for Windows 8 Metro-style applications is actually quite gentle.  The finer points of this subject are covered nicely in Magenic’s excellent white paper “Assessing the Windows 8 Development Platform.” As the authors of that paper (including Rocky Lhotka)  point out, Silverlight code won’t just “port” to Windows 8.  And, no, Silverlight user interfaces won’t either; Metro always supports XAML, but that relationship is not commutative.  But the concepts, the syntax, the architecture and developers’ skills map from Silverlight to Windows 8 Metro and the Windows Runtime (WinRT) very nicely.  That’s not a coincidence.  It’s not an accident.  This is a protected transition.  It’s not a slap in the face. There are few things that are unnerving about this transition, which make it seem markedly different from others: The assumed end of the road for Silverlight is something many think they can see.  Instead of being ignorant of the technology’s expiration date, we believe we know it.  If ignorance is bliss, it would seem our situation lacks it. The new technology involving WinRT and Metro involves a name change from Silverlight. .NET, which underlies both Silverlight and the XAML approach to WinRT development, has just about reached 10 years of age.  That’s equivalent to 80 in human years, or so many fear. My take is that the combination of these three factors has contributed to what for many is a psychologically compelling case that Silverlight should be abandoned today and HTML 5 (the agnostic kind, not the Windows RT variety) should be embraced in its stead.  I understand the logic behind that.  I appreciate the preemptive, proactive, vigilant conscientiousness involved in its calculus.  But for a great many scenarios, I don’t agree with it.  HTML 5 clients, no matter how impressive their interactivity and the emulation of native application interfaces they present may be, are still second-class clients.  They are getting better, especially when hardware acceleration and fast processors are involved.  But they still lag.  They still feel like they’re emulating something, like they’re prototypes, like they’re not comfortable in their own skins.  They are based on compromise, and they feel compromised too. HTML 5/JavaScript development tools are getting better, and will get better still, but they are not as productive as tools for other environments, like Flash, like Silverlight or even more primitive tooling for iOS or Android.  HTML’s roots as a document markup language, rather than an application interface, create a disconnect that impedes productivity.  I do not necessarily think that problem is insurmountable, but it’s here today. If you’re building line-of-business applications, you need a first-class client and you need productivity.  Lack of productivity increases your costs and worsens your backlog.  A second class client will erode user satisfaction, which is never good.  Worse yet, this erosion will be inconspicuous, rather than easily identified and diagnosed, because the inferiority of an HTML 5 client over a native one is hard to identify and, notably, doing so at this juncture in the industry is unpopular.  Why would you fault a technology that everyone believes is revolutionary?  Instead, user disenchantment will remain latent and yet will add to the malaise caused by slower development. If you’re an ISV and you’re coveting the reach of running multi-platform, it’s a different story.  You’ve likely wanted to move to HTML 5 already, and the uncertainty around Silverlight may be the only remaining momentum or pretext you need to make the shift.  You’re deploying many more copies of your application than a line-of-business developer is anyway; this makes the economic hit from lower productivity less impactful, and the wider potential installed base might even make it profitable. But no matter who you are, it’s important to take stock of the situation and do it accurately.  Continued, but merely incremental changes in a development model lead to conservatism and general lack of innovation in the underlying platform.  Periods of stability and equilibrium are necessary, but permanence in that equilibrium leads to loss of platform relevance, market share and utility.  Arguably, that’s already happened to Windows.  The change Windows 8 brings is necessary and overdue.  The marked changes in using .NET if we’re to build applications for the new OS are inevitable.  We will ultimately benefit from the change, and what we can reasonably hope for in the interim is a migration path for our code and skills that is navigable, logical and conceptually comfortable. That path takes us to a place called WinRT, rather than a place called Silverlight.  But considering everything that is changing for the good, the number of disruptive changes is impressively minimal.  The name may be changing, and there may even be some significance to that in terms of Microsoft’s internal management of products and technologies.  But as the consumer, you should care about the ingredients, not the name.  Turkish coffee and Greek coffee are much the same. Although you’ll find plenty of interested parties who will find the names significant, drinkers of the beverage should enjoy either one.  It’s all coffee, it’s all sweet, and you can tell your fortune from the grounds that are left at the end.  Back on the software side, it’s all XAML, and C# or VB .NET, and you can make your fortune from the product that comes out at the end.  Coffee drinkers wouldn’t switch to tea.  Why should XAML developers switch to HTML?

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• Glassfish alive or dead? WebLogic SE cost is less than Glassfish!

  - by JuergenKress

  Is a hot discussion in the community in the last few days! Send us your opinion on tiwtter @wlscommunity #Glassfish #WebLogicCommunity We posted theGlassFishStrategy.pptx at our WebLogic Community Workspace (WebLogic Community membership required). Please read also the Java EE and GlassFish Server Roadmap Update Bruno Borges ?Another great article covering story about #GlassFish. Comments starting to be reasonable ;-) 6 facts helped a lot http://adtmag.com/articles/2013/11/08/oracle-drops-glassfish.aspx … Adam Bien ?What Oracle Could Do For GlassFish Now: Move the sources to GitHub (GitHub is the most popular collaboration p... http://bit.ly/1d1uo24 JAXenter.com ?Oracle evangelist: “GlassFish Open Source Edition is not dead” http://jaxenter.com/oracle-evangelist-glassfish-open-source-edition-is-not-dead-48830.html … GlassFish 6 Facts About #GlassFish Announcement and the Future of #JavaEE http://bit.ly/1bbSVPf via @brunoborges David Blevins ?In support of our #GlassFish friends and open source in general: Feed the Fish http://www.tomitribe.com/blog/2013/11/feed-the-fish/ … #JavaEE #opensource #manifesto GlassFish ?GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.1 is scheduled for 2014. Version 5.0 as impl for #JavaEE8 https://blogs.oracle.com/theaquarium/entry/java_ee_and_glassfish_server … #Community focused C2B2 Consulting ?C2B2 continues to offer support for your operational #JEE applications running on #GlassFish http://blog.c2b2.co.uk/2013/11/oracle-dropping-commercial-support-of.html … #Java Markus Eisele ?RT @InfoQ: #GlassFish Commercial Edition is Dead http://bit.ly/17eFB0Z < at least they agree to my points... Adam Bien suggests: Move the sources to GitHub (GitHub is the most popular collaboration platform). It is more likely for an individual to contribute via GitHub, than the current infrastructure. Introduce a business friendlier license like e.g. the Apache license. Companies interesting in providing added value (and commercial support) on top of existing sources would appreciate it. Implement GitHub-based, open source, CI system with nightly builds. Introduce a transparent voting process / pull-request acceptance process. Release more frequently. Keep https://glassfish.java.net as the main hub. C2B2 offers Glassfish support by Steve Millidge Oracle have just announced that commercial support for GlassFish 4 will not be available from Oracle. In light of this announcement I thought I would put together some thoughts about how I see this development. I think the key word in this announcement is "commercial", nowhere does Oracle announce the "death of GlassFish" in contrary Oracle reaffirm; GlassFish Server Open Source Edition continues to be the strategic foundation for Java EE reference implementation going forward. And for developers, updates will be delivered as needed to continue to deliver a great developer experience for GlassFish Server Open Source Edition so GlassFish is not about to go away soon. In a similar fashion RedHat do not provide commercial support for WildFly and only provide commercial support for JBoss EAP. Admittedly JBoss EAP and WildFly are much closer together than GlassFish and WebLogic but WildFly and JBoss EAP are absolutely NOT the same thing. The key going forward to the viability of GlassFish as a production platform is how the GlassFish community develops; How often does the community release binary builds? How open is the community to bug fixes? How much engineering resource does Oracle commit to GlassFish? At this stage we just don't know the answers to these questions. If the GlassFish open source project continues on it's current trajectory without a commercial support offering then I don't see much of a problem. Oracle just have to work harder to sell migration paths to WebLogic in the same way as RedHat have to sell migration paths from WildFly to JBoss EAP. In the meantime C2B2 continues to offer support for your operational JEE applications running on GlassFish and we will endeavour to work with the community to get any bugs fixed. The key difference is we can no longer back our Expert Support with a support contract from Oracle for patches and fixes for any release greater than 3.x. Read the complete article here. 6 Facts About GlassFish Announcement By Bruno.Borges Fact #1 - GlassFish Open Source Edition is not dead GlassFish Server Open Source Edition will remain the reference implementation of Java EE. The current trunk is where an implementation for Java EE 8 will flourish, and this will become the future GlassFish 5.0. Calling "GlassFish is dead" does no good to the Java EE ecosystem. The GlassFish Community will remain strong towards the future of Java EE. Without revenue-focused mind, this might actually help the GlassFish community to shape the next version, and set free from any ties with commercial decisions. Fact #2 - OGS support is not over As I said before, GlassFish Server Open Source Edition will continue. Main change is that there will be no more future commercial releases of Oracle GlassFish Server. New and existing OGS 2.1.x and 3.1.x commercial customers will continue to be supported according to the Oracle Lifetime Support Policy. In parallel, I believe there's no other company in the Java EE business that offers commercial support to more than one build of a Java EE application server. This new direction can actually help customers and partners, simplifying decision through commercial negotiations. Fact #3 - WebLogic is not always more expensive than OGS Oracle GlassFish Server ("OGS") is a build of GlassFish Server Open Source Edition bundled with a set of commercial features called GlassFish Server Control and license bundles such as Java SE Support. OGS has at the moment of this writing the pricelist of U$ 5,000 / processor. One information that some bloggers are mentioning is that WebLogic is more expensive than this. Fact 3.1: it is not necessarily the case. The initial edition of WebLogic is called "Standard Edition" and falls into a policy where some “Standard Edition” products are licensed on a per socket basis. As of current pricelist, US$ 10,000 / socket. If you do the math, you will realize that WebLogic SE can actually be significantly more cost effective than OGS, and a customer can save money if running on a CPU with 4 cores or more for example. Quote from the price list: “When licensing Oracle programs with Standard Edition One or Standard Edition in the product name (with the exception of Java SE Support, Java SE Advanced, and Java SE Suite), a processor is counted equivalent to an occupied socket; however, in the case of multi-chip modules, each chip in the multi-chip module is counted as one occupied socket.” For more details speak to your Oracle sales representative - this is clearly at list price and every customer typically has a relationship with Oracle (like they do with other vendors) and different contractual details may apply. And although OGS has always been production-ready for Java EE applications, it is no secret that WebLogic has always been more enterprise, mission critical application server than OGS since BEA. Different editions of WLS provide features and upgrade irons like the WebLogic Diagnostic Framework, Work Managers, Side by Side Deployment, ADF and TopLink bundled license, Web Tier (Oracle HTTP Server) bundled licensed, Fusion Middleware stack support, Oracle DB integration features, Oracle RAC features (such as GridLink), Coherence Management capabilities, Advanced HA (Whole Service Migration and Server Migration), Java Mission Control, Flight Recorder, Oracle JDK support, etc. Fact #4 - There’s no major vendor supporting community builds of Java EE app servers There are no major vendors providing support for community builds of any Open Source application server. For example, IBM used to provide community support for builds of Apache Geronimo, not anymore. Red Hat does not commercially support builds of WildFly and if I remember correctly, never supported community builds of former JBoss AS. Oracle has never commercially supported GlassFish Server Open Source Edition builds. Tomitribe appears to be the exception to the rule, offering commercial support for Apache TomEE. Fact #5 - WebLogic and GlassFish share several Java EE implementations It has been no secret that although GlassFish and WebLogic share some JSR implementations (as stated in the The Aquarium announcement: JPA, JSF, WebSockets, CDI, Bean Validation, JAX-WS, JAXB, and WS-AT) and WebLogic understands GlassFish deployment descriptors, they are not from the same codebase. Fact #6 - WebLogic is not for GlassFish what JBoss EAP is for WildFly WebLogic is closed-source offering. It is commercialized through a license-based plus support fee model. OGS although from an Open Source code, has had the same commercial model as WebLogic. Still, one cannot compare GlassFish/WebLogic to WildFly/JBoss EAP. It is simply not the same case, since Oracle has had two different products from different codebases. The comparison should be limited to GlassFish Open Source / Oracle GlassFish Server versus WildFly / JBoss EAP. Read the complete article here WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: Glassfish,training,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Set-Cookie Headers getting stripped in ASP.NET HttpHandlers

  - by Rick Strahl

  Yikes, I ran into a real bummer of an edge case yesterday in one of my older low level handler implementations (for West Wind Web Connection in this case). Basically this handler is a connector for a backend Web framework that creates self contained HTTP output. An ASP.NET Handler captures the full output, and then shoves the result down the ASP.NET Response object pipeline writing out the content into the Response.OutputStream and seperately sending the HttpHeaders in the Response.Headers collection. The headers turned out to be the problem and specifically Http Cookies, which for some reason ended up getting stripped out in some scenarios. My handler works like this: Basically the HTTP response from the backend app would return a full set of HTTP headers plus the content. The ASP.NET handler would read the headers one at a time and then dump them out via Response.AppendHeader(). But I found that in some situations Set-Cookie headers sent along were simply stripped inside of the Http Handler. After a bunch of back and forth with some folks from Microsoft (thanks Damien and Levi!) I managed to pin this down to a very narrow edge scenario. It's easiest to demonstrate the problem with a simple example HttpHandler implementation. The following simulates the very much simplified output generation process that fails in my handler. Specifically I have a couple of headers including a Set-Cookie header and some output that gets written into the Response object.using System.Web; namespace wwThreads { public class Handler : IHttpHandler { /* NOTE: * * Run as a web.config set handler (see entry below) * * Best way is to look at the HTTP Headers in Fiddler * or Chrome/FireBug/IE tools and look for the * WWHTREADSID cookie in the outgoing Response headers * ( If the cookie is not there you see the problem! ) */ public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { HttpRequest request = context.Request; HttpResponse response = context.Response; // If ClearHeaders is used Set-Cookie header gets removed! // if commented header is sent... response.ClearHeaders(); response.ClearContent(); // Demonstrate that other headers make it response.AppendHeader("RequestId", "asdasdasd"); // This cookie gets removed when ClearHeaders above is called // When ClearHEaders is omitted above the cookie renders response.AppendHeader("Set-Cookie", "WWTHREADSID=ThisIsThEValue; path=/"); // *** This always works, even when explicit // Set-Cookie above fails and ClearHeaders is called //response.Cookies.Add(new HttpCookie("WWTHREADSID", "ThisIsTheValue")); response.Write(@"Output was created.<hr/> Check output with Fiddler or HTTP Proxy to see whether cookie was sent."); } public bool IsReusable { get { return false; } } } } In order to see the problem behavior this code has to be inside of an HttpHandler, and specifically in a handler defined in web.config with: <add name=".ck_handler" path="handler.ck" verb="*" type="wwThreads.Handler" preCondition="integratedMode" /> Note: Oddly enough this problem manifests only when configured through web.config, not in an ASHX handler, nor if you paste that same code into an ASPX page or MVC controller. What's the problem exactly? The code above simulates the more complex code in my live handler that picks up the HTTP response from the backend application and then peels out the headers and sends them one at a time via Response.AppendHeader. One of the headers in my app can be one or more Set-Cookie. I found that the Set-Cookie headers were not making it into the Response headers output. Here's the Chrome Http Inspector trace: Notice, no Set-Cookie header in the Response headers! Now, running the very same request after removing the call to Response.ClearHeaders() command, the cookie header shows up just fine: As you might expect it took a while to track this down. At first I thought my backend was not sending the headers but after closer checks I found that indeed the headers were set in the backend HTTP response, and they were indeed getting set via Response.AppendHeader() in the handler code. Yet, no cookie in the output. In the simulated example the problem is this line:response.AppendHeader("Set-Cookie", "WWTHREADSID=ThisIsThEValue; path=/"); which in my live code is more dynamic ( ie. AppendHeader(token[0],token[1[]) )as it parses through the headers. Bizzaro Land: Response.ClearHeaders() causes Cookie to get stripped Now, here is where it really gets bizarre: The problem occurs only if: Response.ClearHeaders() was called before headers are added It only occurs in Http Handlers declared in web.config Clearly this is an edge of an edge case but of course - knowing my relationship with Mr. Murphy - I ended up running smack into this problem. So in the code above if you remove the call to ClearHeaders(), the cookie gets set!  Add it back in and the cookie is not there. If I run the above code in an ASHX handler it works. If I paste the same code (with a Response.End()) into an ASPX page, or MVC controller it all works. Only in the HttpHandler configured through Web.config does it fail! Cue the Twilight Zone Music. Workarounds As is often the case the fix for this once you know the problem is not too difficult. The difficulty lies in tracking inconsistencies like this down. Luckily there are a few simple workarounds for the Cookie issue. Don't use AppendHeader for Cookies The easiest and obvious solution to this problem is simply not use Response.AppendHeader() to set Cookies. Duh! Under normal circumstances in application level code there's rarely a reason to write out a cookie like this:response.AppendHeader("Set-Cookie", "WWTHREADSID=ThisIsThEValue; path=/"); but rather create the cookie using the Response.Cookies collection:response.Cookies.Add(new HttpCookie("WWTHREADSID", "ThisIsTheValue")); Unfortunately, in my case where I dynamically read headers from the original output and then dynamically  write header key value pairs back  programmatically into the Response.Headers collection, I actually don't look at each header specifically so in my case the cookie is just another header. My first thought was to simply trap for the Set-Cookie header and then parse out the cookie and create a Cookie object instead. But given that cookies can have a lot of different options this is not exactly trivial, plus I don't really want to fuck around with cookie values which can be notoriously brittle. Don't use Response.ClearHeaders() The real mystery in all this is why calling Response.ClearHeaders() prevents a cookie value later written with Response.AppendHeader() to fail. I fired up Reflector and took a quick look at System.Web and HttpResponse.ClearHeaders. There's all sorts of resetting going on but nothing that seems to indicate that headers should be removed later on in the request. The code in ClearHeaders() does access the HttpWorkerRequest, which is the low level interface directly into IIS, and so I suspect it's actually IIS that's stripping the headers and not ASP.NET, but it's hard to know. Somebody from Microsoft and the IIS team would have to comment on that. In my application it's probably safe to simply skip ClearHeaders() in my handler. The ClearHeaders/ClearContent was mainly for safety but after reviewing my code there really should never be a reason that headers would be set prior to this method firing. However, if for whatever reason headers do need to be cleared, it's easy enough to manually clear the headers out:private void RemoveHeaders(HttpResponse response) { List<string> headers = new List<string>(); foreach (string header in response.Headers) { headers.Add(header); } foreach (string header in headers) { response.Headers.Remove(header); } response.Cookies.Clear(); } Now I can replace the call the Response.ClearHeaders() and I don't get the funky side-effects from Response.ClearHeaders(). Summary I realize this is a total edge case as this occurs only in HttpHandlers that are manually configured. It looks like you'll never run into this in any of the higher level ASP.NET frameworks or even in ASHX handlers - only web.config defined handlers - which is really, really odd. After all those frameworks use the same underlying ASP.NET architecture. Hopefully somebody from Microsoft has an idea what crazy dependency was triggered here to make this fail. IAC, there are workarounds to this should you run into it, although I bet when you do run into it, it'll likely take a bit of time to find the problem or even this post in a search because it's not easily to correlate the problem to the solution. It's quite possible that more than cookies are affected by this behavior. Searching for a solution I read a few other accounts where headers like Referer were mysteriously disappearing, and it's possible that something similar is happening in those cases. Again, extreme edge case, but I'm writing this up here as documentation for myself and possibly some others that might have run into this. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET   IIS7   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Right-Time Retail Part 3

  - by David Dorf

  This is part three of the three-part series.  Read Part 1 and Part 2 first. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Right-Time Marketing Real-time isn’t just about executing faster; it extends to interactions with customers as well. As an industry, we’ve spent many years analyzing all the data that’s been collected. Yes, that data has been invaluable in helping us make better decisions like where to open new stores, how to assort those stores, and how to price our products. But the recent advances in technology are now making it possible to analyze and deliver that data very quickly… fast enough to impact a potential sale in near real-time. Let me give you two examples. Salesmen in car dealerships get pretty good at sizing people up. When a potential customer walks in the door, it doesn’t take long for the salesman to figure out the revenue at stake. Is this person a real buyer, or just looking for a fun test drive? Will this person buy today or three months from now? Will this person opt for the expensive packages, or go bare bones? While the salesman certainly asks some leading questions, much of information is discerned through body language. But body language doesn’t translate very well over the web. Eloqua, which was acquired by Oracle earlier this year, reads internet body language. By tracking the behavior of the people visiting your web site, Eloqua categorizes visitors based on their propensity to buy. While Eloqua’s roots have been in B2B, we’ve been looking at leveraging the technology with ATG to target B2C. Knowing what sites were previously visited, how often the customer has been to your site recently, and how long they’ve spent searching can help understand where the customer is in their purchase journey. And knowing that bit of information may be enough to help close the deal with a real-time offer, follow-up email, or online customer service pop-up. This isn’t so different from the days gone by when the clerk behind the counter of the corner store noticed you were lingering in a particular aisle, so he walked over to help you compare two products and close the sale. You appreciated the personalized service, and he knew the value of the long-term relationship. Move that same concept into the digital world and you have Oracle’s CX Suite, a cloud-based offering of end-to-end customer experience tools, assembled primarily from acquisitions. Those tools are Oracle Marketing (Eloqua), Oracle Commerce (ATG, Endeca), Oracle Sales (Oracle CRM On Demand), Oracle Service (RightNow), Oracle Social (Collective Intellect, Vitrue, Involver), and Oracle Content (Fatwire). We are providing the glue that binds the CIO and CMO together to unleash synergies that drive the top-line higher, and by virtue of the cloud-approach, keep costs at bay. My second example of real-time marketing takes place in the store but leverages the concepts of Web marketing. In 1962 the decline of personalized service in retail began. Anyone know the significance of that year? That’s when Target, K-Mart, and Walmart each opened their first stores, and over the succeeding years the industry chose scale over personal service. No longer were you known as “Jane with the snotty kid so make sure we check her out fast,” but you suddenly became “time-starved female age 20-30 with kids.” I’m not saying that was a bad thing – it was the right thing for our industry at the time, and it enabled a huge amount of growth, cheaper prices, and more variety of products. But scale alone is no longer good enough. Today’s sophisticated consumer demands scale, experience, and personal attention. To some extent we’ve delivered that on websites via the magic of cookies, your willingness to log in, and sophisticated data analytics. What store manager wouldn’t love a report detailing all the visitors to his store, where they came from, and which products that examined? People trackers are getting more sophisticated, incorporating infrared, video analytics, and even face recognition. (Next time you walk in front on a mannequin, don’t be surprised if it’s looking back.) But the ultimate marketing conduit is the mobile phone. Since each mobile phone emits a unique number on WiFi networks, it becomes the cookie of the physical world. Assuming congress keeps privacy safeguards reasonable, we’ll have a win-win situation for both retailers and consumers. Retailers get to know more about the consumer’s purchase journey, and consumers get higher levels of service with the retailer. When I call my bank, a couple things happen before the call is connected. A reverse look-up on my phone number identifies me so my accounts can be retrieved from Siebel CRM. Then the system anticipates why I’m calling based on recent transactions. In this example, it sees that I was just charged a foreign currency fee, so it assumes that’s the reason I’m calling. It puts all the relevant information on the customer service rep’s screen as it connects the call. When I complain about the fee, the rep immediately sees I’m a great customer and I travel lots, so she suggests switching me to their traveler’s card that doesn’t have foreign transaction fees. That technology is powered by a product called Oracle Real-Time Decisions, a rules engine built to execute very quickly, basically in the time it takes the phone to ring once. So let’s combine the power of that product with our new-found mobile cookie and provide contextual customer interactions in real-time. Our first opportunity comes when a customer crosses a pre-defined geo-fence, typically a boundary around the store. Context is the key to our interaction: that’s the customer (known or anonymous), the time of day and day of week, and location. Thomas near the downtown store on a Wednesday at noon means he’s heading to lunch. If he were near the mall location on a Saturday morning, that’s a completely different context. But on his way to lunch, we’ll let Thomas know that we’ve got a new shipment of ASICS running shoes on display with a simple text message. We used the context to look-up Thomas’ past purchases and understood he was an avid runner. We used the fact that this was lunchtime to select the type of message, in this case an informational message instead of an offer. Thomas enters the store, phone in hand, and walks to the shoe department. He scans one of the new ASICS shoes using the convenient QR Codes we provided on the shelf-tags, but then he starts scanning low-end Nikes. Each scan is another opportunity to both learn from Thomas and potentially interact via another message. Since he historically buys low-end Nikes and keeps scanning them, he’s likely falling back into his old ways. Our marketing rules are currently set to move loyal customer to higher margin products. We could have set the dials to increase visit frequency, move overstocked items, increase basket size, or many other settings, but today we are trying to move Thomas to higher-margin products. We send Thomas another text message, this time it’s a personalized offer for 10% off ASICS good for 24 hours. Offering him a discount on Nikes would be throwing margin away since he buys those anyway. We are using our marketing dollars to change behavior that increases the long-term value of Thomas. He decides to buy the ASICS and scans the discount code on his phone at checkout. Checkout is yet another opportunity to interact with Thomas, so the transaction is sent back to Oracle RTD for evaluation. Since Thomas didn’t buy anything with the shoes, we’ll print a bounce-back coupon on the receipt offering 30% off ASICS socks if he returns within seven days. We have successfully started moving Thomas from low-margin to high-margin products. In both of these marketing scenarios, we are able to leverage data in near real-time to decide how best to interact with the customer and lead to an increase in the lifetime value of the customer. The key here is acting at the moment the customer shows interest using the context of the situation. We aren’t pushing random products at haphazard times. We are tailoring the marketing to be very specific to this customer, and it’s the technology that allows this to happen in near real-time. Conclusion As we enable more right-time integrations and interactions, retailers will begin to offer increased service to their customers. Localized and personalized service at scale will drive loyalty and lead to meaningful revenue growth for the retailers that execute well. Our industry needs to support Commerce Anywhere…and commerce anytime as well.

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• Different Flavors of Leases Back On

  - by Theresa Hickman

  Given the continued interest regarding the proposed changes to Lease Accounting, I decided to write another entry on this controversial topic with colorful commentary from our resident accounting expert, Seamus Moran. Background (A History Lesson) Back in 1976, the FASB issued FAS 13, “Accounting for Leases” that permitted leases to be either an operating lease or capital (finance) lease. In substance, operating leases are a form of off-balance sheet financing. According to Seamus, operating leases date back to the launch of the Boeing 707 in the 1950s.  Because the aircraft was so much more expensive than previous aircrafts, the industry came up with the operating lease concept to accommodate these jet liners that dominated air transport.  How it worked was the bank would buy the plane and lease it to the airline.  Because the bank never controlled or flew the plane, they never placed the asset on their balance sheet, and because the airline never owned the plane, they didn’t place it on their balance sheet either. They simply treated the monthly lease payments as rental expenses on the P&L.   August 2010 Original Lease Accounting Changes In August 2010, FASB and IASB decided to overhaul lease accounting as part of their joint commitment “to insure that investors and other users of financial statements are provided useful, transparent, and complete information about leasing transactions in the financial statements.”  Some say that the current lease accounting standards are broken because it keeps assets off the balance sheet, hidden from investors’ view. The original proposal abolished operating leases and only permitted capital leases where all leases would be recorded on the balance sheet as assets and liabilities. The asset side would reflect the right to use the asset for the leased term, and the liability side would reflect the obligation to make lease payments.   Why Companies Were Freaking Out According to the SEC, the financial impact of the aforementioned lease changes was estimated to add more than $1.3 trillion of operating lease obligations to corporate balance sheets. Many companies in various industries, especially retail, are concerned because the changes are significant and will impact existing leases with no grandfather clause for existing operating leases. Of course, the banks and airlines I mentioned earlier really hate this because neither wants to report the airplane (now costing around $60 M) as an asset. Regular companies were concerned that they would have to report routine short term leases of real estate or equipment as fixed assets, even though they were really just longer term rentals.  One company we spoke to leased roadside billboards, and really did not consider them to be fixed assets in any way. Obviously, these changes would have had a profound and lasting effect on a company’s financial and real estate strategies and significantly impact its financial statements.  Financial statements would show higher depreciation and interest expense with significantly higher total assets and debt. In terms of financial metrics, they’re negatively impacted. It would raise a company’s debt-to-capital ratio to reflect the higher debt compared to equity, it would negatively impact their return-on-assets because now companies will appear more asset intensive, and it will decrease EPS, lowering shareholder ROI. Feb. 2011 Recent Update The comment period on leases closed in December 2010. The FASB and the IASB have met several times since then and published their initial responses to the input they received from the various interested parties.  They are “redeliberating” the principles involved in Lease Accounting.  Some of the issues they are looking at include: The core definition of a lease.  This will articulate principles on what is a lease and what is “not-a-lease.” One theory or supposition is that they might define a lease as the transfer of certain but not all major ownership attributes for a certain period of time.  So a year’s lease of an aircraft might be a “lease,” but a year’s lease of half a floor in an office building would be “not-a-lease.”  The ownership attributes transferred from the core owner to the user are different; the airline must maintain, paint, and do whatever it needs to do on the aircraft. However, the office renter will have strictly limited rights in respect to the rented space. The differences between a lease contract and service contract.  Even if they call them “leases” for the purpose of commercial law, a service contract might not be accounted for as a lease. The accounting to be done by the lessee.  They would define when the bank or landlord would retain the asset on their balance sheet, and perhaps by implication, when the lessor would not need to include the asset on theirs.  So if the finance house keeps the airplane or office on their balance sheet, the tenant doesn’t need to.  I’m not sure that I can draw the opposite conclusion where the finance house doesn’t report but the tenant must. The difference, if any, between a financing lease and other leases, and the implications to the accounting. The present value calculation when renewable terms exist. They have reduced the circumstances in which one must look at the renewable terms of a lease in calculating the present value.  In most circumstances, you will use the lease term rather than the potential renewable term. Their latest discussion this past week with the contents of the discussion was not available at the time of me writing this entry.  For more details, the results of the discussions are posted on both the FASB and the IASB websites. Implied Software Changes Whatever the final rules turn out to be, all ERP systems, such as Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards, and Oracle Hyperion will need to change their software to accommodate the new rules. The following lists some changes that might have to be made to accounting software depending on what the final standards will be in June 2011: Lease tracking may require modifications with tracking of additional lease details that might require a centralized repository to maintain Accounting may need to be modified as there are many changes to how capital leases and the new “other than finance” leases are accounted for both on the lessee and lessor side.  For example, valuation, amortization, and disclosure will be considerably different requiring different types of data to be captured. Companies may need to modify their chart of accounts depending on how they want to track leases, which could then impact financial reporting and consolidation Business processes may require changes which could then impact internal controls Software applications may need to perform more advanced computations on leases Reports and KPIs may need to reflect new operating metrics Hold Onto Your Seats           Before you redo all your lease agreements and call your software vendors asking when the changes to the software will be made, remember that the rules are not finalized yet, and from appearances, will not reflect the proposals in the exposure draft.  Not only are there objections to putting the operating lease assets on anyone’s balance sheet, there are lots of objections to subjectivity and the data required for the valuation.  According to Seamus, there is huge opposition from New York bankers, the airlines, the EU, the Communist Party of China (since it impacts their exporting business), and Republicans (hearing complaints from small and large businesses). Even if everyone can agree on the proposed changes, 2013 might be the earliest that companies would need to change how they report leases. The Boards will finish their deliberations in April, May or June 2011.  As we’ve seen with other Exposure Drafts, if the changes are minor and the principles met the General Acceptance consensus criteria, the Standard could be finalized at that time.  However, if substantial changes are made, a fresh exposure draft, comment period, and review period might be involved, too. Seamus added an interesting perspective. Even if the proposed changes do pass, don’t you think our customers, such as Boeing, GE Capital, United Airlines, etc. will be clever enough to come up with a new kind of financing arrangement that complies with the new accounting? How about the large retail customers, such as Best Buy and Macerich? Don’t you think they might simply cut deals around retail locations with new contracts that prevent their leases from being capital leases? Instead of blindly adapting the software to meet the principles outlined in the final standard, our software needs to accommodate how businesses will respond to the new rules. We cannot know our customers’ responses until the rules are finalized. Oracle is aware of the potential changes and is staying abreast of the developments through our domain expertise staff, our relationship with customers, our market awareness, and, of course, our relationships with the Big 4. This is part of our normal process with respect to worldwide regulatory compliance. Oracle products have been IFRS and GAAP compliant for years and we will continue to maintain those standards going forward.

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• Managed Service Architectures Part I

  - by barryoreilly

  Instead of thinking about service oriented architecture, a concept that is continually defined, redefined, abused and mistreated, perhaps it is time to drop the acronym and consider what we actually need to get the job done.   ‘Pure’ SOA involves the modeling of an organisation’s processes, the so called ‘Top Down’ approach, followed by the implementation of these processes as services.     Another approach, more commonly seen in the wild, is the bottom up approach. This usually involves services that simply start popping up in the organization, and SOA in this case is often just an attempt to rein in these services. Such projects, although described as SOA projects for a variety of reasons, have clearly little relation to process driven architecture. Much has been written about these two approaches, with many deciding that a hybrid of both methods is needed to succeed with SOA.   These hybrid methods are a sensible compromise, but one gets the feeling that there is too much focus on ‘Succeeding with SOA’. Organisations who focus too much on bottom up development, or who waste too much time and money on top down approaches that don’t produce results, are often recommended to attempt an ‘agile’(Erl) or ‘middle-out’ (Microsoft) approach in order to succeed with SOA.  The problem with recommending this approach is that, in most cases, succeeding with SOA isn’t the aim of the project. If a project is started with the simple aim of ‘Succeeding with SOA’ then the reasons for the projects existence probably need to be questioned.   There are a number of things we can be sure of: ·         An organisation will have a number of disparate IT systems ·         Some of these systems will have redundant data and functionality ·         Integration will give considerable ROI ·         Integration will already be under way. ·         Services will already exist in the organisation ·         These services will be inconsistent in their implementation and in their governance   So there are three goals here: 1.       Alignment between the business and IT 2.     Integration of disparate systems 3.     Management of services.   2 and 3 are going to happen,  in fact they must happen if any degree of return is expected from the IT department. Ignoring 1 is considered a typical mistake in SOA implementations, as it ignores the business implications. However, the business implication of this approach is the money saved in more efficient IT processes. 2 and 3 are ongoing, and they will continue happening, even if a large project to produce a SOA metamodel is started. The result will then be an unstructured cackle of services, and a metamodel that is already going out of date. So we get stuck in and rebuild our services so that they match the metamodel, with the far reaching consequences that this will have on all our LOB systems are current. Lets imagine that this actually works ( how often do we rip and replace working software because it doesn't fit a certain pattern? Never -that's the point of integration), we will now be working with a metamodel that is out of date, and most likely incomplete if the organisation is large.      Accepting that an object can have more than one model over time, with perhaps more than one model being  at any given time will help us realise the limitations of the top down model. It is entirely normal , and perhaps necessary, for an organisation to be able to view an entity from different perspectives.   So, instead of trying to constantly force these goals in a straight line, why not let them happen in parallel, and manage the changes in each layer.     If  company A has chosen to model their business processes and create a business architecture, there will be a reason behind this. Often the aim is to make the business more flexible and able to cope with change, through alignment between the business and the IT department.   If company B’s IT department recognizes the problem of wild services springing up everywhere, and decides to do something about it, by designing a platform and processes for the introduction of services, is this not a valid approach?   With the hybrid approach, it is recommended that company A begin deploying services as quickly as possible. Based on models that are clearly incomplete, and which will therefore change rapidly and often in the near future. Natural business evolution will also mean that the models can be guaranteed to change in the not so near future. To ‘Succeed with SOA’ Company B needs to go back to the drawing board and start modeling processes and objects. So, in effect, we are telling business analysts to start developing code based on a model they are unsure of, and telling programmers to ignore the obvious and growing problems in their IT department and start drawing lines and boxes.     Could the problem be that there are two different problem domains? And the whole concept of SOA as it being described by clever salespeople today creates an example of oft dreaded ‘tight coupling’ between these two domains?   Could it be that we have taken two large problem areas, and bundled the solution together in order to create a magic bullet? And then convinced ourselves that the bullet actually exists?   Company A wants to have a closer relationship between the business and its IT department, in order to become a more flexible organization. Company B wants to decrease the maintenance costs of its IT infrastructure. If both companies focus on succeeding with SOA, then they aren’t focusing on their actual goals.   If Company A starts building services from incomplete models, without a gameplan, they will end up in the same situation as company B, with wild services. If company B focuses on modeling, they could easily end up with the same problems as company A.   Now we have two companies, who a short while ago had one problem each, that now have two problems each. This has happened because of a focus on ‘Succeeding with SOA’, rather than solving the problem at hand.   This is not to suggest that the two problem domains are unrelated, a strategy that encompasses both will obviously be good for the organization. But only if the organization realizes this and can develop such a strategy. This strategy cannot be bought in a box.       Anyone who has worked with SOA for a while will be used to analyzing the solutions to a problem and judging the solution’s level of coupling. If we have two applications that each perform separate functions, but need to communicate with each other, we create a integration layer between them, perhaps with a service, but we do all we can to reduce the dependency between the two systems. Using the same approach, we can separate the modeling (business architecture) and the service hosting (technical architecture).     The business architecture describes the processes and business objects in the business domain.   The technical architecture describes the hosting and management and implementation of services.   The glue that binds these together, the integration layer in our analogy, is the service contract, where the operations map the processes to their technical implementation, and the messages map business concepts to software objects in the implementation.   If we reduce the coupling between these layers, we should be able to allow developers to develop services, and business analysts to develop models, without the changes rippling through from one side to the other.   This would allow company A to carry on modeling, and company B to develop a service platform, each achieving their intended goal, without necessarily creating the problems seen in pure top down or bottom up approaches. Company B could then at a later date map their service infrastructure to a unified model, and company A could carry on modeling, insulating deployed services from changes in the ongoing modeling.   How do we do this?  The concept of service virtualization has been around for a while, and is instantly realizable in Microsoft’s Managed Services Engine. Here we can create a layer of virtual services, which represent the business analyst’s view, presenting uniform contracts to the outside world. These services can then transform and route messages to the actual service implementations. I like to think of the virtual services with their beautifully modeled interfaces as ‘SOA services’, and the implementations as simple integration ‘adapter’ services providing an interface to a technical implementation. The Managed Services Engine also provides policy based control over services, regardless of where they are deployed, simplifying handling of security, logging, exception handling etc.   This solves a big problem. The pressure to deliver services quickly is always there in projects. It is very important to quickly show value when implementing service architectures. There is also pressure to deliver quality, and you can’t easily do both at the same time. This approach allows quick delivery with quality increasing over time, allowing modeling and service development to occur in parallel and independent of each other. The link between business modeling and service implementation is not one that is obvious to many organizations, and requires a certain maturity to realize and drive forward. It is also completely possible that a company can benefit from one without the other, even if this approach is frowned upon today, there are many companies doing so and seeing ROI.   Of course there are disadvantages to this. The biggest one being the transformations necessary between the virtual interfaces and the service implementations. Bad choices in developing the services in the service implementation could mean that it is impossible to map the modeled processes to the implementation with redevelopment of the service. In many cases the architect will not have a choice here anyway, as proprietary systems are often delivered with predeveloped services. The alternative is to wait until the model is finished and then build the service according the model. However, if that approach worked we wouldn’t be having this discussion! And even when it does work, natural business evolution will mean that the two concepts (model and implementation) will immediately start to drift away from each other, so coupling them tightly together so that they are forever bound to the model that only applies at the time of the modeling work will not really achieve a great deal. Architecture is all about trade offs, and here a choice has to be made. The choice is between something will initially be of low quality but will work, or something that may well be impossible to achieve in most situations.         In conclusion, top-down is a natural approach for business analysts, and bottom-up  is a natural approach for developers. Instead of trying to force something on both that neither want, and which has not shown itself to be successful,  why not let them get on with their jobs, and let an enterprise architect coordinate the processes?

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• Big GRC: Turning Data into Actionable GRC Intelligence

  - by Jenna Danko

  While it’s no longer headline news that Governments have carried out large scale data-mining programmes aimed at terrorism detection and identifying other patterns of interest across a wide range of digital data sources, the debate over the ethics and justification over this action, will clearly continue for some time to come. What is becoming clear is that these programmes are a framework for the collation and aggregation of massive amounts of unstructured data and from this, the creation of actionable intelligence from analyses that allowed the analysts to explore and extract a variety of patterns and then direct resources. This data included audio and video chats, phone calls, photographs, e-mails, documents, internet searches, social media posts and mobile phone logs and connections. Although Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) professionals are not looking at the implementation of such programmes, there are many similar GRC “Big data” challenges to be faced and potential lessons to be learned from these high profile government programmes that can be applied a lot closer to home. For example, how can GRC professionals collect, manage and analyze an enormous and disparate volume of data to create and manage their own actionable intelligence covering hidden signs and patterns of criminal activity, the early or retrospective, violation of regulations/laws/corporate policies and procedures, emerging risks and weakening controls etc. Not exactly the stuff of James Bond to be sure, but it is certainly more applicable to most GRC professional’s day to day challenges. So what is Big Data and how can it benefit the GRC process? Although it often varies, the definition of Big Data largely refers to the following types of data: Traditional Enterprise Data – includes customer information from CRM systems, transactional ERP data, web store transactions, and general ledger data. Machine-Generated /Sensor Data – includes Call Detail Records (“CDR”), weblogs and trading systems data. Social Data – includes customer feedback streams, micro-blogging sites like Twitter, and social media platforms like Facebook. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that data volume is growing 40% per year, and will grow 44x between 2009 and 2020. But while it’s often the most visible parameter, volume of data is not the only characteristic that matters. In fact, according to sources such as Forrester there are four key characteristics that define big data: Volume. Machine-generated data is produced in much larger quantities than non-traditional data. This is all the data generated by IT systems that power the enterprise. This includes live data from packaged and custom applications – for example, app servers, Web servers, databases, networks, virtual machines, telecom equipment, and much more. Velocity. Social media data streams – while not as massive as machine-generated data – produce a large influx of opinions and relationships valuable to customer relationship management as well as offering early insight into potential reputational risk issues. Even at 140 characters per tweet, the high velocity (or frequency) of Twitter data ensures large volumes (over 8 TB per day) need to be managed. Variety. Traditional data formats tend to be relatively well defined by a data schema and change slowly. In contrast, non-traditional data formats exhibit a dizzying rate of change. Without question, all GRC professionals work in a dynamic environment and as new services, new products, new business lines are added or new marketing campaigns executed for example, new data types are needed to capture the resultant information.  Value. The economic value of data varies significantly. Typically, there is good information hidden amongst a larger body of non-traditional data that GRC professionals can use to add real value to the organisation; the greater challenge is identifying what is valuable and then transforming and extracting that data for analysis and action. For example, customer service calls and emails have millions of useful data points and have long been a source of information to GRC professionals. Those calls and emails are critical in helping GRC professionals better identify hidden patterns and implement new policies that can reduce the amount of customer complaints.   Now on a scale and depth far beyond those in place today, all that unstructured call and email data can be captured, stored and analyzed to reveal the reasons for the contact, perhaps with the aggregated customer results cross referenced against what is being said about the organization or a similar peer organization on social media. The organization can then take positive actions, communicating to the market in advance of issues reaching the press, strengthening controls, adjusting risk profiles, changing policy and procedures and completely minimizing, if not eliminating, complaints and compensation for that specific reason in the future. In this one example of many similar ones, the GRC team(s) has demonstrated real and tangible business value. Big Challenges - Big Opportunities As pointed out by recent Forrester research, high performing companies (those that are growing 15% or more year-on-year compared to their peers) are taking a selective approach to investing in Big Data.  "Tomorrow's winners understand this, and they are making selective investments aimed at specific opportunities with tangible benefits where big data offers a more economical solution to meet a need." (Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence and Big Data, Q4 2012) As pointed out earlier, with the ever increasing volume of regulatory demands and fines for getting it wrong, limited resource availability and out of date or inadequate GRC systems all contributing to a higher cost of compliance and/or higher risk profile than desired – a big data investment in GRC clearly falls into this category. However, to make the most of big data organizations must evolve both their business and IT procedures, processes, people and infrastructures to handle these new high-volume, high-velocity, high-variety sources of data and be able integrate them with the pre-existing company data to be analyzed. GRC big data clearly allows the organization access to and management over a huge amount of often very sensitive information that although can help create a more risk intelligent organization, also presents numerous data governance challenges, including regulatory compliance and information security. In addition to client and regulatory demands over better information security and data protection the sheer amount of information organizations deal with the need to quickly access, classify, protect and manage that information can quickly become a key issue  from a legal, as well as technical or operational standpoint. However, by making information governance processes a bigger part of everyday operations, organizations can make sure data remains readily available and protected. The Right GRC & Big Data Partnership Becomes Key  The "getting it right first time" mantra used in so many companies remains essential for any GRC team that is sponsoring, helping kick start, or even overseeing a big data project. To make a big data GRC initiative work and get the desired value, partnerships with companies, who have a long history of success in delivering successful GRC solutions as well as being at the very forefront of technology innovation, becomes key. Clearly solutions can be built in-house more cheaply than through vendor, but as has been proven time and time again, when it comes to self built solutions covering AML and Fraud for example, few have able to scale or adapt appropriately to meet the changing regulations or challenges that the GRC teams face on a daily basis. This has led to the creation of GRC silo’s that are causing so many headaches today. The solutions that stand out and should be explored are the ones that can seamlessly merge the traditional world of well-known data, analytics and visualization with the new world of seemingly innumerable data sources, utilizing Big Data technologies to generate new GRC insights right across the enterprise.Ultimately, Big Data is here to stay, and organizations that embrace its potential and outline a viable strategy, as well as understand and build a solid analytical foundation, will be the ones that are well positioned to make the most of it. A Blueprint and Roadmap Service for Big Data Big data adoption is first and foremost a business decision. As such it is essential that your partner can align your strategies, goals, and objectives with an architecture vision and roadmap to accelerate adoption of big data for your environment, as well as establish practical, effective governance that will maintain a well managed environment going forward. Key Activities: While your initiatives will clearly vary, there are some generic starting points the team and organization will need to complete: Clearly define your drivers, strategies, goals, objectives and requirements as it relates to big data Conduct a big data readiness and Information Architecture maturity assessment Develop future state big data architecture, including views across all relevant architecture domains; business, applications, information, and technology Provide initial guidance on big data candidate selection for migrations or implementation Develop a strategic roadmap and implementation plan that reflects a prioritization of initiatives based on business impact and technology dependency, and an incremental integration approach for evolving your current state to the target future state in a manner that represents the least amount of risk and impact of change on the business Provide recommendations for practical, effective Data Governance, Data Quality Management, and Information Lifecycle Management to maintain a well-managed environment Conduct an executive workshop with recommendations and next steps There is little debate that managing risk and data are the two biggest obstacles encountered by financial institutions.  Big data is here to stay and risk management certainly is not going anywhere, and ultimately financial services industry organizations that embrace its potential and outline a viable strategy, as well as understand and build a solid analytical foundation, will be best positioned to make the most of it. Matthew Long is a Financial Crime Specialist for Oracle Financial Services. He can be reached at matthew.long AT oracle.com.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 16, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 16, 2014Popular ReleasesTHN MVC Web Server: 2014 May 15 release: Added support for URL-encoded form data on HTTP Post.Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query (1.0.71.456): Minor fixes and template corrections.THN Web Server: 2014 May 15 Release: Added support for URL-encoded form data on POST.THN HTTP Stack: 2014 May 15 Release: Added support for URL-encoded form data on POSTQuickMon: Version 3.10: Adding the ability to see 'history' of Collector states (including details of errors or warnings at that time). The history size is configurable (default is switched off) and the Windows Service completely ignores keeping history (no UI or user to access it anyway). The Collector stats window now displays this history plus multiple collector stats windows can be opened at the same time. Additionally fixed a bug in the event log collector that reported an 'Error' state when an 'out of bounds' ...TFS Planning and Disaster Recovery Avoidance Guide: v1.4.BETA - TFS, DR and Azure IaaS Planning Guides: Welcome to the TFS Planning and DR Avoidance Guidance What is new? A new crisper, more compact style, which is easier to consume on multiple devices without sacrificing any content. Also included are the new TFS on Azure IaaS guide and supplementary guides. Note Capacity planning workbook and posters are included in the Everything Zip package. Quality-Bar Detail Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has been through an independent technical review ...WinAudit: WinAudit Freeware v3.0: WinAudit.exe v3.0 MD5: 88750CCF49FF7418199B2645755830FA Known Issues: 1. Report creation can be very slow when right-to-left (Hebrew) characters are present. 2. Emsisoft Anti-Malware may stop and/or quarantine WinAudit. This happens when WinAudit attempts to obtain a list if running programmes. You will need to set an exception rule in Emsisoft to allow WinAudit to run.Aspose for Sitefinity: Sitefinity Export to Microsoft Word and PDF: Aspose Sitefinity Content Export Add-on allow users to export online content into Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat PDF document using Aspose.Words. This Add-on makes it very simple and easy to have an offline copy of your favorite online content for editing, sharing and printing etc. in popular Microsoft Word Doc/Docx or PDF format. It adds simple Export to Word and Export to Pdf buttons at any desired location on the page and clicking the button dynamically exports the content of the page int...MVCwCMS - ASP.NET MVC CMS: MVCwCMS 2.2.2: Updated CKFinder config. For the installation instructions visit the documentation page: https://mvcwcms.codeplex.com/documentationTerraMap (Terraria World Map Viewer): TerraMap 1.0.4: Added support for the new Terraria v1.2.4 update. New items, walls, and tiles Fixed Issue 35206: Hightlight/Find doesn't work for Demon Altars Fixed finding Demon Hearts/Shadow Orbs Added ability to find Enchanted Swords (in the stone) and Water Bolt books Fixed installer not uninstalling older versions The setup file will make sure .NET 4 is installed, install TerraMap, create desktop and start menu shortcuts, add a .wld file association, and launch TerraMap. If you prefer the zip ...WPF Localization Extension: v2.2.1: Issue #9277 Issue #9292 Issue #9311 Issue #9312 Issue #9313 Issue #9314CtrlAltStudio Viewer: CtrlAltStudio Viewer 1.2.1.41167 Release: This release of the CtrlAltStudio Viewer includes the following significant features: Oculus Rift support. Stereoscopic 3D display support. Variable walking / flying speed. Xbox 360 Controller support. Kinect for Windows support. Based on Firestorm viewer 4.6.5 codebase. For more details, see the release notes linked to below. Release notes: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/release-notes/1-2-1-41167-release Support info: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/support Privacy policy: http:/...Grade Calculator For BTEC First Diploma in IT level 2: Grade Calculator For BTEC First Diploma in IT: Grade Calculator For BTEC First Diploma in IT level 2Spaghetti CMS: Version 1.50: New: Backend with new design, bootstrap integration New: Patch function for assigning themes, master page files to pages New: Wysiwyg editor (possible to link css file against editor) and filemanager New: Support time triggered content New: Edit css, js, skin, master file within the CMS New: Dynamically add controls to the CMS New: Change password for an user (usermanagement) New: Localize CMS In the near future we will open our new website for documentation and demo. http://...ExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v4.0.6: FineUI（???） ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET ??? FineUI??? ?? No JavaScript，No CSS，No UpdatePanel，No ViewState，No WebServices ??????? ?????? IE 8.0+、Chrome、Firefox、Opera、Safari ???? Apache License v2.0 ?：ExtJS ?? GPL v3 ?????(http://www.sencha.com/license) ???? ??：http://fineui.com/ ??：http://fineui.com/bbs/ ??：http://fineui.com/demo/ ??：http://fineui.com/doc/ ??：http://fineui.codeplex.com/ FineUI ???? ExtJS ????????，???? ExtJS ?，?????： 1. ????? FineUI ? ExtJS ? http://fineui.com/bbs/forum.ph...Office App Model Samples: Office App Model Samples v2.0: Office App Model Samples v2.0Readable Passphrase Generator: KeePass Plugin 0.13.0: Version 0.13.0 Added "mutators" which add uppercase and numbers to passphrases (to help complying with upper, lower, number complexity rules). Additional API methods which help consuming the generator from 3rd party c# projects. 13,160 words in the default dictionary (~600 more than previous release).CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.25.0: Release v1.0.25.0 MemberInfo/MethodInfo popup is now positioned properly to fit the screen In MethodInfo popup method signatures are word-wrapped Implemented Debug text value visualizer Pining sub-values from Watch PanelR.NET: R.NET 1.5.12: R.NET 1.5.12 is a beta release towards R.NET 1.6. You are encouraged to use 1.5.12 now and give feedback. See the documentation for setup and usage instructions. Main changes for R.NET 1.5.12: The C stack limit was not disabled on Windows. For reasons possibly peculiar to R, this means that non-concurrent access to R from multiple threads was not stable. This is now fixed, with the fix validated with a unit test. Thanks to Odugen, skyguy94, and previously others (evolvedmicrobe, tomasp) fo...SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.029.006 Release 1: Fix to allow keyboard search on load dialog. (type the first few letters of your save) Fixed check for new release. Changed the way ship details are loaded to alleviate load time for worlds with very large ships (100,000+ blocks). Fixed Image importer, was incorrectly listing 'Asteroid' as import option. Minor changes to menus (text and appearance) for clarity and OS consistency. Added in reading of world palette for color dialog editor. WIP on subsystem editor. Can now multiselec...New ProjectsAmqp.Net Lite: AMQP.Net Lite is a lightweight AMQP client library for use on a broad range of .Net Framework platforms, including .Net Micro Framework, .Net Compact.Aspose for JetBrains: Aspose for NetBeans allows developers to create an Aspose project through a wizard.Connecting Social Media with Sharepoint: Interaction with Twitter and Face book in sharepoint webparteNom DynamicDNS Updater: eNom Dynamic DNS updater client for your dns nameserver hosting with eNomFree Send SMS Software: send SMS from Desktop to Mobifone. Source Data is a Excel file, you can merge you data into SMS content. So each phone number will reveive a SMS with their infohareta_spc_wm: summaryIT eBooks API Info Library: Library to abstract the use of the IT-eBooks API Info.Library Management Mz: This project is aimed to help a librarian manage its daily tasks of book issues and returns etc. This project will make a library fast paced and efficient.PC/SC Tracker: A multi-platform graphical tool to track smart cards states and events.ProjectQLSVTTHH: haizaaaaREST Client: Use this for all your REST development/inspecting needs. Supports Basic authentication. Supports Query string parameters.SymDiff: A Platform for Differential Program Verification: SymDiff (aka Symbolic Differencing) is an infrastructure for leveraging and extending program verification to reason about relationship between two programs. TerminalNowhereplaceGrupo1: Terminal.Ticket to Ride Track Scorer: An HTML- and JavaScript-based track scoring UI for the Ticket to Ride board game.tihai: tihai project support web practise for working betterVerificador Vales 3: DESARROLLADO PARA AUTES 2014????-????【??】????????: ??????????????????,????????????,?????、??、????,?????,??????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????!???????????,??????,????,?????????????,????????,??????,????,?????... ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????,??????????????????????:???????,??????,????,????,????,????,????,???????！ ????-????【??】????????: ????????!???????????,??????,????,?????????????,????????,??????,????,?????... ?????-?????【??】?????????: ??????????????,??????????????,???????????,??????,????,??????,??????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,???、???!???????,????????????????,????????????,???! ????-????【??】????????: ??????????????,?????????????? ??。??????????、????、????、?????????? ???????。 ?????-?????【??】?????????: ????????????、?????、?????、?????、?????、????,???????????,?????,??????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????,??????????????????????:???????,??????,????,????,????,????,????,???????！ ????-????【??】????????: ??????????????,??????????????,???????????,??????,????,??????,??????。 ?????-?????【??】?????????: ????????????????,?????????????。?????????,???????,???????,?????????????。 ?????-?????【??】?????????: ??????????????,????,???????、???????????,???????????,????,?????,???????。

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• Why unhandled exceptions are useful

  - by Simon Cooper

  It’s the bane of most programmers’ lives – an unhandled exception causes your application or webapp to crash, an ugly dialog gets displayed to the user, and they come complaining to you. Then, somehow, you need to figure out what went wrong. Hopefully, you’ve got a log file, or some other way of reporting unhandled exceptions (obligatory employer plug: SmartAssembly reports an application’s unhandled exceptions straight to you, along with the entire state of the stack and variables at that point). If not, you have to try and replicate it yourself, or do some psychic debugging to try and figure out what’s wrong. However, it’s good that the program crashed. Or, more precisely, it is correct behaviour. An unhandled exception in your application means that, somewhere in your code, there is an assumption that you made that is actually invalid. Coding assumptions Let me explain a bit more. Every method, every line of code you write, depends on implicit assumptions that you have made. Take this following simple method, that copies a collection to an array and includes an item if it isn’t in the collection already, using a supplied IEqualityComparer: public static T[] ToArrayWithItem( ICollection<T> coll, T obj, IEqualityComparer<T> comparer) { // check if the object is in collection already // using the supplied comparer foreach (var item in coll) { if (comparer.Equals(item, obj)) { // it's in the collection already // simply copy the collection to an array // and return it T[] array = new T[coll.Count]; coll.CopyTo(array, 0); return array; } } // not in the collection // copy coll to an array, and add obj to it // then return it T[] array = new T[coll.Count+1]; coll.CopyTo(array, 0); array[array.Length-1] = obj; return array; } What’s all the assumptions made by this fairly simple bit of code? coll is never null comparer is never null coll.CopyTo(array, 0) will copy all the items in the collection into the array, in the order defined for the collection, starting at the first item in the array. The enumerator for coll returns all the items in the collection, in the order defined for the collection comparer.Equals returns true if the items are equal (for whatever definition of ‘equal’ the comparer uses), false otherwise comparer.Equals, coll.CopyTo, and the coll enumerator will never throw an exception or hang for any possible input and any possible values of T coll will have less than 4 billion items in it (this is a built-in limit of the CLR) array won’t be more than 2GB, both on 32 and 64-bit systems, for any possible values of T (again, a limit of the CLR) There are no threads that will modify coll while this method is running and, more esoterically: The C# compiler will compile this code to IL according to the C# specification The CLR and JIT compiler will produce machine code to execute the IL on the user’s computer The computer will execute the machine code correctly That’s a lot of assumptions. Now, it could be that all these assumptions are valid for the situations this method is called. But if this does crash out with an exception, or crash later on, then that shows one of the assumptions has been invalidated somehow. An unhandled exception shows that your code is running in a situation which you did not anticipate, and there is something about how your code runs that you do not understand. Debugging the problem is the process of learning more about the new situation and how your code interacts with it. When you understand the problem, the solution is (usually) obvious. The solution may be a one-line fix, the rewrite of a method or class, or a large-scale refactoring of the codebase, but whatever it is, the fix for the crash will incorporate the new information you’ve gained about your own code, along with the modified assumptions. When code is running with an assumption or invariant it depended on broken, then the result is ‘undefined behaviour’. Anything can happen, up to and including formatting the entire disk or making the user’s computer sentient and start doing a good impression of Skynet. You might think that those can’t happen, but at Halting problem levels of generality, as soon as an assumption the code depended on is broken, the program can do anything. That is why it’s important to fail-fast and stop the program as soon as an invariant is broken, to minimise the damage that is done. What does this mean in practice? To start with, document and check your assumptions. As with most things, there is a level of judgement required. How you check and document your assumptions depends on how the code is used (that’s some more assumptions you’ve made), how likely it is a method will be passed invalid arguments or called in an invalid state, how likely it is the assumptions will be broken, how expensive it is to check the assumptions, and how bad things are likely to get if the assumptions are broken. Now, some assumptions you can assume unless proven otherwise. You can safely assume the C# compiler, CLR, and computer all run the method correctly, unless you have evidence of a compiler, CLR or processor bug. You can also assume that interface implementations work the way you expect them to; implementing an interface is more than simply declaring methods with certain signatures in your type. The behaviour of those methods, and how they work, is part of the interface contract as well. For example, for members of a public API, it is very important to document your assumptions and check your state before running the bulk of the method, throwing ArgumentException, ArgumentNullException, InvalidOperationException, or another exception type as appropriate if the input or state is wrong. For internal and private methods, it is less important. If a private method expects collection items in a certain order, then you don’t necessarily need to explicitly check it in code, but you can add comments or documentation specifying what state you expect the collection to be in at a certain point. That way, anyone debugging your code can immediately see what’s wrong if this does ever become an issue. You can also use DEBUG preprocessor blocks and Debug.Assert to document and check your assumptions without incurring a performance hit in release builds. On my coding soapbox… A few pet peeves of mine around assumptions. Firstly, catch-all try blocks: try { ... } catch { } A catch-all hides exceptions generated by broken assumptions, and lets the program carry on in an unknown state. Later, an exception is likely to be generated due to further broken assumptions due to the unknown state, causing difficulties when debugging as the catch-all has hidden the original problem. It’s much better to let the program crash straight away, so you know where the problem is. You should only use a catch-all if you are sure that any exception generated in the try block is safe to ignore. That’s a pretty big ask! Secondly, using as when you should be casting. Doing this: (obj as IFoo).Method(); or this: IFoo foo = obj as IFoo; ... foo.Method(); when you should be doing this: ((IFoo)obj).Method(); or this: IFoo foo = (IFoo)obj; ... foo.Method(); There’s an assumption here that obj will always implement IFoo. If it doesn’t, then by using as instead of a cast you’ve turned an obvious InvalidCastException at the point of the cast that will probably tell you what type obj actually is, into a non-obvious NullReferenceException at some later point that gives you no information at all. If you believe obj is always an IFoo, then say so in code! Let it fail-fast if not, then it’s far easier to figure out what’s wrong. Thirdly, document your assumptions. If an algorithm depends on a non-trivial relationship between several objects or variables, then say so. A single-line comment will do. Don’t leave it up to whoever’s debugging your code after you to figure it out. Conclusion It’s better to crash out and fail-fast when an assumption is broken. If it doesn’t, then there’s likely to be further crashes along the way that hide the original problem. Or, even worse, your program will be running in an undefined state, where anything can happen. Unhandled exceptions aren’t good per-se, but they give you some very useful information about your code that you didn’t know before. And that can only be a good thing.

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• Azure &ndash; Part 5 &ndash; Repository Pattern for Table Service

  - by Shaun

  In my last post I created a very simple WCF service with the user registration functionality. I created an entity for the user data and a DataContext class which provides some methods for operating the entities such as add, delete, etc. And in the service method I utilized it to add a new entity into the table service. But I didn’t have any validation before registering which is not acceptable in a real project. So in this post I would firstly add some validation before perform the data creation code and show how to use the LINQ for the table service.   LINQ to Table Service Since the table service utilizes ADO.NET Data Service to expose the data and the managed library of ADO.NET Data Service supports LINQ we can use it to deal with the data of the table service. Let me explain with my current example: I would like to ensure that when register a new user the email address should be unique. So I need to check the account entities in the table service before add. If you remembered, in my last post I mentioned that there’s a method in the TableServiceContext class – CreateQuery, which will create a IQueryable instance from a given type of entity. So here I would create a method under my AccountDataContext class to return the IQueryable<Account> which named Load. 1: public class AccountDataContext : TableServiceContext 2: { 3: private CloudStorageAccount _storageAccount; 4:  5: public AccountDataContext(CloudStorageAccount storageAccount) 6: : base(storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, storageAccount.Credentials) 7: { 8: _storageAccount = storageAccount; 9:  10: var tableStorage = new CloudTableClient(_storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, 11: _storageAccount.Credentials); 12: tableStorage.CreateTableIfNotExist("Account"); 13: } 14:  15: public void Add(Account accountToAdd) 16: { 17: AddObject("Account", accountToAdd); 18: SaveChanges(); 19: } 20:  21: public IQueryable<Account> Load() 22: { 23: return CreateQuery<Account>("Account"); 24: } 25: } The method returns the IQueryable<Account> so that I can perform the LINQ operation on it. And back to my service class, I will use it to implement my validation. 1: public bool Register(string email, string password) 2: { 3: var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString"); 4: var accountToAdd = new Account(email, password) { DateCreated = DateTime.Now }; 5: var accountContext = new AccountDataContext(storageAccount); 6:  7: // validation 8: var accountNumber = accountContext.Load() 9: .Where(a => a.Email == accountToAdd.Email) 10: .Count(); 11: if (accountNumber > 0) 12: { 13: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("Your account {0} had been used.", accountToAdd.Email)); 14: } 15:  16: // create entity 17: try 18: { 19: accountContext.Add(accountToAdd); 20: return true; 21: } 22: catch (Exception ex) 23: { 24: Trace.TraceInformation(ex.ToString()); 25: } 26: return false; 27: } I used the Load method to retrieve the IQueryable<Account> and use Where method to find the accounts those email address are the same as the one is being registered. If it has I through an exception back to the client side. Let’s run it and test from my simple client application. Oops! Looks like we encountered an unexpected exception. It said the “Count” is not support by the ADO.NET Data Service LINQ managed library. That is because the table storage managed library (aka. TableServiceContext) is based on the ADO.NET Data Service and it supports very limit LINQ operation. Although I didn’t find a full list or documentation about which LINQ methods it supports I could even refer a page on msdn here. It gives us a roughly summary of which query operation the ADO.NET Data Service managed library supports and which doesn't. As you see the Count method is not in the supported list. Not only the query operation, there inner lambda expression in the Where method are limited when using the ADO.NET Data Service managed library as well. For example if you added (a => !a.DateDeleted.HasValue) in the Where method to exclude those deleted account it will raised an exception said "Invalid Input". Based on my experience you should always use the simple comparison (such as ==, >, <=, etc.) on the simple members (such as string, integer, etc.) and do not use any shortcut methods (such as string.Compare, string.IsNullOrEmpty etc.). 1: // validation 2: var accountNumber = accountContext.Load() 3: .Where(a => a.Email == accountToAdd.Email) 4: .ToList() 5: .Count; 6: if (accountNumber > 0) 7: { 8: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("Your account {0} had been used.", accountToAdd.Email)); 9: } We changed the a bit and try again. Since I had created an account with my mail address so this time it gave me an exception said that the email had been used, which is correct.   Repository Pattern for Table Service The AccountDataContext takes the responsibility to save and load the account entity but only for that specific entity. Is that possible to have a dynamic or generic DataContext class which can operate any kinds of entity in my system? Of course yes. Although there's no typical database in table service we can threat the entities as the records, similar with the data entities if we used OR Mapping. As we can use some patterns for ORM architecture here we should be able to adopt the one of them - Repository Pattern in this example. We know that the base class - TableServiceContext provide 4 methods for operating the table entities which are CreateQuery, AddObject, UpdateObject and DeleteObject. And we can create a relationship between the enmity class, the table container name and entity set name. So it's really simple to have a generic base class for any kinds of entities. Let's rename the AccountDataContext to DynamicDataContext and make the type of Account as a type parameter if it. 1: public class DynamicDataContext<T> : TableServiceContext where T : TableServiceEntity 2: { 3: private CloudStorageAccount _storageAccount; 4: private string _entitySetName; 5:  6: public DynamicDataContext(CloudStorageAccount storageAccount) 7: : base(storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, storageAccount.Credentials) 8: { 9: _storageAccount = storageAccount; 10: _entitySetName = typeof(T).Name; 11:  12: var tableStorage = new CloudTableClient(_storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, 13: _storageAccount.Credentials); 14: tableStorage.CreateTableIfNotExist(_entitySetName); 15: } 16:  17: public void Add(T entityToAdd) 18: { 19: AddObject(_entitySetName, entityToAdd); 20: SaveChanges(); 21: } 22:  23: public void Update(T entityToUpdate) 24: { 25: UpdateObject(entityToUpdate); 26: SaveChanges(); 27: } 28:  29: public void Delete(T entityToDelete) 30: { 31: DeleteObject(entityToDelete); 32: SaveChanges(); 33: } 34:  35: public IQueryable<T> Load() 36: { 37: return CreateQuery<T>(_entitySetName); 38: } 39: } I saved the name of the entity type when constructed for performance matter. The table name, entity set name would be the same as the name of the entity class. The Load method returned a generic IQueryable instance which supports the lazy load feature. Then in my service class I changed the AccountDataContext to DynamicDataContext and that's all. 1: var accountContext = new DynamicDataContext<Account>(storageAccount); Run it again and register another account. The DynamicDataContext now can be used for any entities. For example, I would like the account has a list of notes which contains 3 custom properties: Account Email, Title and Content. We create the note entity class. 1: public class Note : TableServiceEntity 2: { 3: public string AccountEmail { get; set; } 4: public string Title { get; set; } 5: public string Content { get; set; } 6: public DateTime DateCreated { get; set; } 7: public DateTime? DateDeleted { get; set; } 8:  9: public Note() 10: : base() 11: { 12: } 13:  14: public Note(string email) 15: : base(email, string.Format("{0}_{1}", email, Guid.NewGuid().ToString())) 16: { 17: AccountEmail = email; 18: } 19: } And no need to tweak the DynamicDataContext we can directly go to the service class to implement the logic. Notice here I utilized two DynamicDataContext instances with the different type parameters: Note and Account. 1: public class NoteService : INoteService 2: { 3: public void Create(string email, string title, string content) 4: { 5: var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString"); 6: var accountContext = new DynamicDataContext<Account>(storageAccount); 7: var noteContext = new DynamicDataContext<Note>(storageAccount); 8:  9: // validate - email must be existed 10: var accounts = accountContext.Load() 11: .Where(a => a.Email == email) 12: .ToList() 13: .Count; 14: if (accounts <= 0) 15: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("The account {0} does not exsit in the system please register and try again.", email)); 16:  17: // save the note 18: var noteToAdd = new Note(email) { Title = title, Content = content, DateCreated = DateTime.Now }; 19: noteContext.Add(noteToAdd); 20: } 21: } And updated our client application to test the service. I didn't implement any list service to show all notes but we can have a look on the local SQL database if we ran it at local development fabric.   Summary In this post I explained a bit about the limited LINQ support for the table service. And then I demonstrated about how to use the repository pattern in the table service data access layer and make the DataContext dynamically. The DynamicDataContext I created in this post is just a prototype. In fact we should create the relevant interface to make it testable and for better structure we'd better separate the DataContext classes for each individual kind of entity. So it should have IDataContextBase<T>, DataContextBase<T> and for each entity we would have class AccountDataContext<Account> : IDataContextBase<Account>, DataContextBase<Account> { … } class NoteDataContext<Note> : IDataContextBase<Note>, DataContextBase<Note> { … }   Besides the structured data saving and loading, another common scenario would be saving and loading some binary data such as images, files. In my next post I will show how to use the Blob Service to store the bindery data - make the account be able to upload their logo in my example.   Hope this helps, Shaun   All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Building Queries Systematically

  - by Jeremy Smyth

  The SQL language is a bit like a toolkit for data. It consists of lots of little fiddly bits of syntax that, taken together, allow you to build complex edifices and return powerful results. For the uninitiated, the many tools can be quite confusing, and it's sometimes difficult to decide how to go about the process of building non-trivial queries, that is, queries that are more than a simple SELECT a, b FROM c; A System for Building Queries When you're building queries, you could use a system like the following:  Decide which fields contain the values you want to use in our output, and how you wish to alias those fields Values you want to see in your output Values you want to use in calculations . For example, to calculate margin on a product, you could calculate price - cost and give it the alias margin. Values you want to filter with. For example, you might only want to see products that weigh more than 2Kg or that are blue. The weight or colour columns could contain that information. Values you want to order by. For example you might want the most expensive products first, and the least last. You could use the price column in descending order to achieve that. Assuming the fields you've picked in point 1 are in multiple tables, find the connections between those tables Look for relationships between tables and identify the columns that implement those relationships. For example, The Orders table could have a CustomerID field referencing the same column in the Customers table. Sometimes the problem doesn't use relationships but rests on a different field; sometimes the query is looking for a coincidence of fact rather than a foreign key constraint. For example you might have sales representatives who live in the same state as a customer; this information is normally not used in relationships, but if your query is for organizing events where sales representatives meet customers, it's useful in that query. In such a case you would record the names of columns at either end of such a connection. Sometimes relationships require a bridge, a junction table that wasn't identified in point 1 above but is needed to connect tables you need; these are used in "many-to-many relationships". In these cases you need to record the columns in each table that connect to similar columns in other tables. Construct a join or series of joins using the fields and tables identified in point 2 above. This becomes your FROM clause. Filter using some of the fields in point 1 above. This becomes your WHERE clause. Construct an ORDER BY clause using values from point 1 above that are relevant to the desired order of the output rows. Project the result using the remainder of the fields in point 1 above. This becomes your SELECT clause. A Worked Example   Let's say you want to query the world database to find a list of countries (with their capitals) and the change in GNP, using the difference between the GNP and GNPOld columns, and that you only want to see results for countries with a population greater than 100,000,000. Using the system described above, we could do the following:  The Country.Name and City.Name columns contain the name of the country and city respectively.  The change in GNP comes from the calculation GNP - GNPOld. Both those columns are in the Country table. This calculation is also used to order the output, in descending order To see only countries with a population greater than 100,000,000, you need the Population field of the Country table. There is also a Population field in the City table, so you'll need to specify the table name to disambiguate. You can also represent a number like 100 million as 100e6 instead of 100000000 to make it easier to read. Because the fields come from the Country and City tables, you'll need to join them. There are two relationships between these tables: Each city is hosted within a country, and the city's CountryCode column identifies that country. Also, each country has a capital city, whose ID is contained within the country's Capital column. This latter relationship is the one to use, so the relevant columns and the condition that uses them is represented by the following FROM clause:  FROM Country JOIN City ON Country.Capital = City.ID The statement should only return countries with a population greater than 100,000,000. Country.Population is the relevant column, so the WHERE clause becomes:  WHERE Country.Population > 100e6  To sort the result set in reverse order of difference in GNP, you could use either the calculation, or the position in the output (it's the third column): ORDER BY GNP - GNPOld or ORDER BY 3 Finally, project the columns you wish to see by constructing the SELECT clause: SELECT Country.Name AS Country, City.Name AS Capital,        GNP - GNPOld AS `Difference in GNP`  The whole statement ends up looking like this:  mysql> SELECT Country.Name AS Country, City.Name AS Capital, -> GNP - GNPOld AS `Difference in GNP` -> FROM Country JOIN City ON Country.Capital = City.ID -> WHERE Country.Population > 100e6 -> ORDER BY 3 DESC; +--------------------+------------+-------------------+ | Country            | Capital    | Difference in GNP | +--------------------+------------+-------------------+ | United States | Washington | 399800.00 | | China | Peking | 64549.00 | | India | New Delhi | 16542.00 | | Nigeria | Abuja | 7084.00 | | Pakistan | Islamabad | 2740.00 | | Bangladesh | Dhaka | 886.00 | | Brazil | Brasília | -27369.00 | | Indonesia | Jakarta | -130020.00 | | Russian Federation | Moscow | -166381.00 | | Japan | Tokyo | -405596.00 | +--------------------+------------+-------------------+ 10 rows in set (0.00 sec) Queries with Aggregates and GROUP BY While this system might work well for many queries, it doesn't cater for situations where you have complex summaries and aggregation. For aggregation, you'd start with choosing which columns to view in the output, but this time you'd construct them as aggregate expressions. For example, you could look at the average population, or the count of distinct regions.You could also perform more complex aggregations, such as the average of GNP per head of population calculated as AVG(GNP/Population). Having chosen the values to appear in the output, you must choose how to aggregate those values. A useful way to think about this is that every aggregate query is of the form X, Y per Z. The SELECT clause contains the expressions for X and Y, as already described, and Z becomes your GROUP BY clause. Ordinarily you would also include Z in the query so you see how you are grouping, so the output becomes Z, X, Y per Z.  As an example, consider the following, which shows a count of  countries and the average population per continent:  mysql> SELECT Continent, COUNT(Name), AVG(Population)     -> FROM Country     -> GROUP BY Continent; +---------------+-------------+-----------------+ | Continent     | COUNT(Name) | AVG(Population) | +---------------+-------------+-----------------+ | Asia          |          51 |   72647562.7451 | | Europe        |          46 |   15871186.9565 | | North America |          37 |   13053864.8649 | | Africa        |          58 |   13525431.0345 | | Oceania       |          28 |    1085755.3571 | | Antarctica    |           5 |          0.0000 | | South America |          14 |   24698571.4286 | +---------------+-------------+-----------------+ 7 rows in set (0.00 sec) In this case, X is the number of countries, Y is the average population, and Z is the continent. Of course, you could have more fields in the SELECT clause, and  more fields in the GROUP BY clause as you require. You would also normally alias columns to make the output more suited to your requirements. More Complex Queries  Queries can get considerably more interesting than this. You could also add joins and other expressions to your aggregate query, as in the earlier part of this post. You could have more complex conditions in the WHERE clause. Similarly, you could use queries such as these in subqueries of yet more complex super-queries. Each technique becomes another tool in your toolbox, until before you know it you're writing queries across 15 tables that take two pages to write out. But that's for another day...

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• Contract Work - Lessons Learned

  - by samerpaul

  I thought I would write a post of a different nature today, but still relevant to the tech world. I do a lot of contract jobs myself and really enjoy it. It's nice to keep jumping from project to project, and not having to go to an office or keep regular hours, etc. I really enjoy it. I have learned a lot in the past few years of doing it (both from experience and from help given to me from others, and the internet) so I thought I'd share some of that knowledge/experience today.So here's my own personal "lesson's learned" that hopefully will help you if you find yourself doing contract work:Should I take the job?Ok, so this is the first step. Assuming you were given sufficient information about what they want, then you should really think about what you're capable of doing and whether or not you should take this job. Personally, my rule is, if I know it's possible, I'll say yes, even if I don't yet know how to do it. That's because the internet is such a great help, it would be rare to run into an issue that you can't figure out with some help. So if your clients are asking for something that you don't yet know how to program, but you know you can do it on the platform then go for it. How else are you going to learn?Use this rule with some limitation, however. If you're really lacking the expertise or foundation in something, then unless you have tons of time to complete the project, then I wouldn't say yes. For example, I haven't personally done any 3d/openGL programming yet so I wouldn't say yes to a project that extensively uses it. OK, so I want the job, but how much do I charge?This part can be tricky. There is no set formula really, but I have some tips for pricing that will hopefully give you a better idea on how to confidently ask your price and have them accept. Here are some personal guidelinesHow much time do you have to complete the project? If it's shorter than average, then charge more. You can even make a subtle note about this (or not so subtle if they still don't get it.) If it seems too short of a time (i.e. near impossible to complete), be sure to say that. It looks bad to promise a time that you can't keep--and it makes it less likely for them to return to you for work.Your Hourly rate: How long have you been working in that language? Do you have existing projects to back you up? Or previous contacts that can vouch for your work? Are there very few people with your particular skill set? All of these things will lend themselves to setting an hourly rate. I'd also try out a quick google search of what your line of work is, to see what the industry standard is at that point in time.I wouldn't price too low, because you want to make your time worth it. You also want them to feel like they're paying for quality work (assuming you can deliver it :) ). Finally, think about your client. If it's a small business, then don't price it too high if you want the job. If it's an enterprise (like a Fortune company), then don't be afraid to price higher. They have the budget for it.Fixed price: If they want a fixed price project, then you need to think about how many hours it will take you to complete it and multiply it by the hourly rate you set for yourself. Then, honestly, I would add 10-20% on top of that. Why? Because nothing ever works exactly how you want it to. There are lots of times that something "trivial" is way harder than it should be, or something that "should work" doesn't for hours and it eats away at your hourly rate. I can't count the number of times I encountered a logical bug that took away an entire's day work because debuggers don't help in those cases. By adding that padding in, it's still OK to have those days where you don't get as much done as you want. And another useful tip: Depending on your client, and the scope, you most likely want to set that you both sign off on a specification sheet before doing any work, and that any changes will result in a re-evaulation of the price. This is to help protect you from being handed a huge new addition to the project half-way in, without any extra payment.Scope of project: Finally, is it a huge project? Is it really small/fast? This affects how much your client will be willing to pay. If it sounds big, they will be willing to pay more for it. If it seems really small, then you won't be able to get away with a large asking price (as easily).Ok, I priced it, now what?So now that you have the price, you want to make sure it feels justified to your client. I never set a price before I can really think about everything. For example, if you're still in your introduction phase, and they want a price, don't give one! Just comment that you will send them a proposal sheet with all the features outlined, and a price for everything. You don't want to shout out a low number and then deliver something that is way higher. You also don't want to shock them with a big number before they feel like they are getting a great product.Make up a proposal document in a word editor. Personally, I leave the price till the very end. Why? Because by the time they reach the end, you've already discussed all the great features you plan to implement, and how it's the best product they'll ever use, etc etc...so your price comes off as a steal! If you hit them up front with a price, they will read through the document with a negative bias. Think about those commercials on TV. They always go on about their product, then at the end, ask "What would you pay for something like this? $100? $50? How about $20!!". This is not by accident.Scenario: I finished the job way earlier than expectedYou have two options then. You can either polish the hell out of the application, and even throw in a few bonus features (assuming they are in-line with the customer's needs) or you can sit and wait on it until you near your deadline. Why don't you want to turn it in too early? Because you should treat that extra time as a surplus. If you said it is going to take you 3 weeks, and it took you only 1, you have a surplus of 2 weeks. I personally don't want to let them know that I can do a 3 week project in 1 week. Why not? Because that may not always be the case! I may later have a 3 week project that takes all 3 weeks, but if I set a precedent of delivering super early, then the pressure is on for that longer project. It also makes it harder to quote longer times if you keep delivering too early.Feel free to deliver early, but again, don't do it too early. They may also wonder why they paid you for 3 weeks of work if you're done in 1. They may further wonder if the product sucks, or what is wrong with it, if it's done so early, etc.I would just polish the application. Everyone loves polish in their applications. The smallest details are what make an application go from "functional" to "fantastic". And since you are still delivering on time, then they are still going to be very happy with you.Scenario: It's taking way too long to finish this, and the deadline is nearing/here!So this is not a fun scenario to be in, but it'll happen. Sometimes the scope of the project gets out of hand. The best policy here is OPENNESS/HONESTY. Tell them that the project is taking longer than expected, and give a reasonable time for when you think you'll have it done. I typically explain it in a way that makes it sound like it isn't something that I did wrong, but it's just something about the nature of the project. This really goes for any scenario, to be honest. Just continue to stay open and communicative about your progress. This doesn't mean that you should email them every five minutes (unless they want you to), but it does mean that maybe every few days or once a week, give them an update on where you're at, and what's next. They'll be happy to know they are paying for progress, and it'll make it easier to ask for an extension when something goes wrong, because they know that you've been working on it all along.Final tips and thoughts:In general, contract work is really fun and rewarding. It's nice to learn new things all the time, as mandated by the project ,and to challenge yourself to do things you may not have done before. The key is to build a great relationship with your clients for future work, and for recommendations. I am always very honest with them and I never promise something I can't deliver. Again, under promise, over deliver!I hope this has proved helpful!Cheers,samerpaul

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• Reference Data Management

  - by rahulkamath

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2 {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:1; mso-tstyle-colband-size:1; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-tstyle-shading:#F8EDED; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent2; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:25; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; color:black; mso-themecolor:text1;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2FirstRow {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:first-row; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#9E3A38; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent2; mso-tstyle-shading-themeshade:204; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.5pt solid white; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:background1; color:white; mso-themecolor:background1; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2LastRow {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:last-row; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:white; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:background1; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.5pt solid black; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:text1; color:#9E3A38; mso-themecolor:accent2; mso-themeshade:204; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2FirstCol {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:first-column; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2LastCol {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:last-column; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2OddColumn {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:odd-column; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#EFD3D2; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent2; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63; mso-tstyle-border-top:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-left:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-right:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-insideh:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-insidev:cell-none;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2OddRow {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:odd-row; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F2DBDB; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent2; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:51;} Reference Data Management Oracle Data Relationship Management (DRM) has always been extremely powerful as an Enterprise MDM solution that can help manage changes to master data in a way that influences enterprise structure, whether it be mastering chart of accounts to enable financial transformation, or revamping organization structures to drive business transformation and operational efficiencies, or mastering sales territories in light of rapid fire acquisitions that require frequent sales territory refinement, equitable distribution of leads and accounts to salespersons, and alignment of budget/forecast with results to optimize sales coverage. Increasingly, DRM is also being utilized by Oracle customers for reference data management, an emerging solution space that deserves some explanation. What is reference data? Reference data is a close cousin of master data. While master data may be more rapidly changing, requires consensus building across stakeholders and lends structure to business transactions, reference data is simpler, more slowly changing, but has semantic content that is used to categorize or group other information assets – including master data – and give them contextual value. The following table contains an illustrative list of examples of reference data by type. Reference data types may include types and codes, business taxonomies, complex relationships & cross-domain mappings or standards. Types & Codes Taxonomies Relationships / Mappings Standards Transaction Codes Industry Classification Categories and Codes, e.g., North America Industry Classification System (NAICS) Product / Segment; Product / Geo Calendars (e.g., Gregorian, Fiscal, Manufacturing, Retail, ISO8601) Lookup Tables (e.g., Gender, Marital Status, etc.) Product Categories City à State à Postal Codes Currency Codes (e.g., ISO) Status Codes Sales Territories (e.g., Geo, Industry Verticals, Named Accounts, Federal/State/Local/Defense) Customer / Market Segment; Business Unit / Channel Country Codes (e.g., ISO 3166, UN) Role Codes Market Segments Country Codes / Currency Codes / Financial Accounts Date/Time, Time Zones (e.g., ISO 8601) Domain Values Universal Standard Products and Services Classification (UNSPSC), eCl@ss International Classification of Diseases (ICD) e.g., ICD9 à IC10 mappings Tax Rates Why manage reference data? Reference data carries contextual value and meaning and therefore its use can drive business logic that helps execute a business process, create a desired application behavior or provide meaningful segmentation to analyze transaction data. Further, mapping reference data often requires human judgment. Sample Use Cases of Reference Data Management Healthcare: Diagnostic Codes The reference data challenges in the healthcare industry offer a case in point. Part of being HIPAA compliant requires medical practitioners to transition diagnosis codes from ICD-9 to ICD-10, a medical coding scheme used to classify diseases, signs and symptoms, causes, etc. The transition to ICD-10 has a significant impact on business processes, procedures, contracts, and IT systems. Since both code sets ICD-9 and ICD-10 offer diagnosis codes of very different levels of granularity, human judgment is required to map ICD-9 codes to ICD-10. The process requires collaboration and consensus building among stakeholders much in the same way as does master data management. Moreover, to build reports to understand utilization, frequency and quality of diagnoses, medical practitioners may need to “cross-walk” mappings -- either forward to ICD-10 or backwards to ICD-9 depending upon the reporting time horizon. Spend Management: Product, Service & Supplier Codes Similarly, as an enterprise looks to rationalize suppliers and leverage their spend, conforming supplier codes, as well as product and service codes requires supporting multiple classification schemes that may include industry standards (e.g., UNSPSC, eCl@ss) or enterprise taxonomies. Aberdeen Group estimates that 90% of companies rely on spreadsheets and manual reviews to aggregate, classify and analyze spend data, and that data management activities account for 12-15% of the sourcing cycle and consume 30-50% of a commodity manager’s time. Creating a common map across the extended enterprise to rationalize codes across procurement, accounts payable, general ledger, credit card, procurement card (P-card) as well as ACH and bank systems can cut sourcing costs, improve compliance, lower inventory stock, and free up talent to focus on value added tasks. Specialty Finance: Point of Sales Transaction Codes and Product Codes In the specialty finance industry, enterprises are confronted with usury laws – governed at the state and local level – that regulate financial product innovation as it relates to consumer loans, check cashing and pawn lending. To comply, it is important to demonstrate that transactions booked at the point of sale are posted against valid product codes that were on offer at the time of booking the sale. Since new products are being released at a steady stream, it is important to ensure timely and accurate mapping of point-of-sale transaction codes with the appropriate product and GL codes to comply with the changing regulations. Multi-National Companies: Industry Classification Schemes As companies grow and expand across geographies, a typical challenge they encounter with reference data represents reconciling various versions of industry classification schemes in use across nations. While the United States, Mexico and Canada conform to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) standard, European Union countries choose different variants of the NACE industry classification scheme. Multi-national companies must manage the individual national NACE schemes and reconcile the differences across countries. Enterprises must invest in a reference data change management application to address the challenge of distributing reference data changes to downstream applications and assess which applications were impacted by a given change.

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• Database Migration Scripts: Getting from place A to place B

  - by Phil Factor

  We’ll be looking at a typical database ‘migration’ script which uses an unusual technique to migrate existing ‘de-normalised’ data into a more correct form. So, the book-distribution business that uses the PUBS database has gradually grown organically, and has slipped into ‘de-normalisation’ habits. What’s this? A new column with a list of tags or ‘types’ assigned to books. Because books aren’t really in just one category, someone has ‘cured’ the mismatch between the database and the business requirements. This is fine, but it is now proving difficult for their new website that allows searches by tags. Any request for history book really has to look in the entire list of associated tags rather than the ‘Type’ field that only keeps the primary tag. We have other problems. The TypleList column has duplicates in there which will be affecting the reporting, and there is the danger of mis-spellings getting there. The reporting system can’t be persuaded to do reports based on the tags and the Database developers are complaining about the unCoddly things going on in their database. In your version of PUBS, this extra column doesn’t exist, so we’ve added it and put in 10,000 titles using SQL Data Generator. /* So how do we refactor this database? firstly, we create a table of all the tags. */IF  OBJECT_ID('TagName') IS NULL OR OBJECT_ID('TagTitle') IS NULL  BEGIN  CREATE TABLE  TagName (TagName_ID INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY ,     Tag VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL UNIQUE)  /* ...and we insert into it all the tags from the list (remembering to take out any leading spaces */  INSERT INTO TagName (Tag)     SELECT DISTINCT LTRIM(x.y.value('.', 'Varchar(80)')) AS [Tag]     FROM     (SELECT  Title_ID,          CONVERT(XML, '<list><i>' + REPLACE(TypeList, ',', '</i><i>') + '</i></list>')          AS XMLkeywords          FROM   dbo.titles)g    CROSS APPLY XMLkeywords.nodes('/list/i/text()') AS x ( y )  /* we can then use this table to provide a table that relates tags to articles */  CREATE TABLE TagTitle   (TagTitle_ID INT IDENTITY(1, 1),   [title_id] [dbo].[tid] NOT NULL REFERENCES titles (Title_ID),   TagName_ID INT NOT NULL REFERENCES TagName (Tagname_ID)   CONSTRAINT [PK_TagTitle]       PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([title_id] ASC, TagName_ID)       ON [PRIMARY])        CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX idxTagName_ID  ON  TagTitle (TagName_ID)  INCLUDE (TagTitle_ID,title_id)        /* ...and it is easy to fill this with the tags for each title ... */        INSERT INTO TagTitle (Title_ID, TagName_ID)    SELECT DISTINCT Title_ID, TagName_ID      FROM        (SELECT  Title_ID,          CONVERT(XML, '<list><i>' + REPLACE(TypeList, ',', '</i><i>') + '</i></list>')          AS XMLkeywords          FROM   dbo.titles)g    CROSS APPLY XMLkeywords.nodes('/list/i/text()') AS x ( y )    INNER JOIN TagName ON TagName.Tag=LTRIM(x.y.value('.', 'Varchar(80)'))    END    /* That's all there was to it. Now we can select all titles that have the military tag, just to try things out */SELECT Title FROM titles  INNER JOIN TagTitle ON titles.title_ID=TagTitle.Title_ID  INNER JOIN Tagname ON Tagname.TagName_ID=TagTitle.TagName_ID  WHERE tagname.tag='Military'/* and see the top ten most popular tags for titles */SELECT Tag, COUNT(*) FROM titles  INNER JOIN TagTitle ON titles.title_ID=TagTitle.Title_ID  INNER JOIN Tagname ON Tagname.TagName_ID=TagTitle.TagName_ID  GROUP BY Tag ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC/* and if you still want your list of tags for each title, then here they are */SELECT title_ID, title, STUFF(  (SELECT ','+tagname.tag FROM titles thisTitle    INNER JOIN TagTitle ON titles.title_ID=TagTitle.Title_ID    INNER JOIN Tagname ON Tagname.TagName_ID=TagTitle.TagName_ID  WHERE ThisTitle.title_id=titles.title_ID  FOR XML PATH(''), TYPE).value('.', 'varchar(max)')  ,1,1,'')    FROM titles  ORDER BY title_ID So we’ve refactored our PUBS database without pain. We’ve even put in a check to prevent it being re-run once the new tables are created. Here is the diagram of the new tag relationship We’ve done both the DDL to create the tables and their associated components, and the DML to put the data in them. I could have also included the script to remove the de-normalised TypeList column, but I’d do a whole lot of tests first before doing that. Yes, I’ve left out the assertion tests too, which should check the edge cases and make sure the result is what you’d expect. One thing I can’t quite figure out is how to deal with an ordered list using this simple XML-based technique. We can ensure that, if we have to produce a list of tags, we can get the primary ‘type’ to be first in the list, but what if the entire order is significant? Thank goodness it isn’t in this case. If it were, we might have to revisit a string-splitter function that returns the ordinal position of each component in the sequence. You’ll see immediately that we can create a synchronisation script for deployment from a comparison tool such as SQL Compare, to change the schema (DDL). On the other hand, no tool could do the DML to stuff the data into the new table, since there is no way that any tool will be able to work out where the data should go. We used some pretty hairy code to deal with a slightly untypical problem. We would have to do this migration by hand, and it has to go into source control as a batch. If most of your database changes are to be deployed by an automated process, then there must be a way of over-riding this part of the data synchronisation process to do this part of the process taking the part of the script that fills the tables, Checking that the tables have not already been filled, and executing it as part of the transaction. Of course, you might prefer the approach I’ve taken with the script of creating the tables in the same batch as the data conversion process, and then using the presence of the tables to prevent the script from being re-run. The problem with scripting a refactoring change to a database is that it has to work both ways. If we install the new system and then have to rollback the changes, several books may have been added, or had their tags changed, in the meantime. Yes, you have to script any rollback! These have to be mercilessly tested, and put in source control just in case of the rollback of a deployment after it has been in place for any length of time. I’ve shown you how to do this with the part of the script .. /* and if you still want your list of tags for each title, then here they are */SELECT title_ID, title, STUFF(  (SELECT ','+tagname.tag FROM titles thisTitle    INNER JOIN TagTitle ON titles.title_ID=TagTitle.Title_ID    INNER JOIN Tagname ON Tagname.TagName_ID=TagTitle.TagName_ID  WHERE ThisTitle.title_id=titles.title_ID  FOR XML PATH(''), TYPE).value('.', 'varchar(max)')  ,1,1,'')    FROM titles  ORDER BY title_ID …which would be turned into an UPDATE … FROM script. UPDATE titles SET  typelist= ThisTaglistFROM     (SELECT title_ID, title, STUFF(    (SELECT ','+tagname.tag FROM titles thisTitle      INNER JOIN TagTitle ON titles.title_ID=TagTitle.Title_ID      INNER JOIN Tagname ON Tagname.TagName_ID=TagTitle.TagName_ID    WHERE ThisTitle.title_id=titles.title_ID    ORDER BY CASE WHEN tagname.tag=titles.[type] THEN 1 ELSE 0  END DESC    FOR XML PATH(''), TYPE).value('.', 'varchar(max)')    ,1,1,'')  AS ThisTagList  FROM titles)fINNER JOIN Titles ON f.title_ID=Titles.title_ID You’ll notice that it isn’t quite a round trip because the tags are in a different order, though we’ve managed to make sure that the primary tag is the first one as originally. So, we’ve improved the database for the poor book distributors using PUBS. It is not a major deal but you’ve got to be prepared to provide a migration script that will go both forwards and backwards. Ideally, database refactoring scripts should be able to go from any version to any other. Schema synchronization scripts can do this pretty easily, but no data synchronisation scripts can deal with serious refactoring jobs without the developers being able to specify how to deal with cases like this.

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• Project Jigsaw: Late for the train: The Q&A

  - by Mark Reinhold

  I recently proposed, to the Java community in general and to the SE 8 (JSR 337) Expert Group in particular, to defer Project Jigsaw from Java 8 to Java 9. I also proposed to aim explicitly for a regular two-year release cycle going forward. Herewith a summary of the key questions I’ve seen in reaction to these proposals, along with answers. Making the decision Q Has the Java SE 8 Expert Group decided whether to defer the addition of a module system and the modularization of the Platform to Java SE 9? A No, it has not yet decided. Q By when do you expect the EG to make this decision? A In the next month or so. Q How can I make sure my voice is heard? A The EG will consider all relevant input from the wider community. If you have a prominent blog, column, or other communication channel then there’s a good chance that we’ve already seen your opinion. If not, you’re welcome to send it to the Java SE 8 Comments List, which is the EG’s official feedback channel. Q What’s the overall tone of the feedback you’ve received? A The feedback has been about evenly divided as to whether Java 8 should be delayed for Jigsaw, Jigsaw should be deferred to Java 9, or some other, usually less-realistic, option should be taken. Project Jigsaw Q Why is Project Jigsaw taking so long? A Project Jigsaw started at Sun, way back in August 2008. Like many efforts during the final years of Sun, it was not well staffed. Jigsaw initially ran on a shoestring, with just a handful of mostly part-time engineers, so progress was slow. During the integration of Sun into Oracle all work on Jigsaw was halted for a time, but it was eventually resumed after a thorough consideration of the alternatives. Project Jigsaw was really only fully staffed about a year ago, around the time that Java 7 shipped. We’ve added a few more engineers to the team since then, but that can’t make up for the inadequate initial staffing and the time lost during the transition. Q So it’s really just a matter of staffing limitations and corporate-integration distractions? A Aside from these difficulties, the other main factor in the duration of the project is the sheer technical difficulty of modularizing the JDK. Q Why is modularizing the JDK so hard? A There are two main reasons. The first is that the JDK code base is deeply interconnected at both the API and the implementation levels, having been built over many years primarily in the style of a monolithic software system. We’ve spent considerable effort eliminating or at least simplifying as many API and implementation dependences as possible, so that both the Platform and its implementations can be presented as a coherent set of interdependent modules, but some particularly thorny cases remain. Q What’s the second reason? A We want to maintain as much compatibility with prior releases as possible, most especially for existing classpath-based applications but also, to the extent feasible, for applications composed of modules. Q Is modularizing the JDK even necessary? Can’t you just put it in one big module? A Modularizing the JDK, and more specifically modularizing the Java SE Platform, will enable standard yet flexible Java runtime configurations scaling from large servers down to small embedded devices. In the long term it will enable the convergence of Java SE with the higher-end Java ME Platforms. Q Is Project Jigsaw just about modularizing the JDK? A As originally conceived, Project Jigsaw was indeed focused primarily upon modularizing the JDK. The growing demand for a truly standard module system for the Java Platform, which could be used not just for the Platform itself but also for libraries and applications built on top of it, later motivated expanding the scope of the effort. Q As a developer, why should I care about Project Jigsaw? A The introduction of a modular Java Platform will, in the long term, fundamentally change the way that Java implementations, libraries, frameworks, tools, and applications are designed, built, and deployed. Q How much progress has Project Jigsaw made? A We’ve actually made a lot of progress. Much of the core functionality of the module system has been prototyped and works at both compile time and run time. We’ve extended the Java programming language with module declarations, worked out a structure for modular source trees and corresponding compiled-class trees, and implemented these features in javac. We’ve defined an efficient module-file format, extended the JVM to bootstrap a modular JRE, and designed and implemented a preliminary API. We’ve used the module system to make a good first cut at dividing the JDK and the Java SE API into a coherent set of modules. Among other things, we’re currently working to retrofit the java.util.ServiceLoader API to support modular services. Q I want to help! How can I get involved? A Check out the project page, read the draft requirements and design overview documents, download the latest prototype build, and play with it. You can tell us what you think, and follow the rest of our work in real time, on the jigsaw-dev list. The Java Platform Module System JSR Q What’s the relationship between Project Jigsaw and the eventual Java Platform Module System JSR? A At a high level, Project Jigsaw has two phases. In the first phase we’re exploring an approach to modularity that’s markedly different from that of existing Java modularity solutions. We’ve assumed that we can change the Java programming language, the virtual machine, and the APIs. Doing so enables a design which can strongly enforce module boundaries in all program phases, from compilation to deployment to execution. That, in turn, leads to better usability, diagnosability, security, and performance. The ultimate goal of the first phase is produce a working prototype which can inform the work of the Module-System JSR EG. Q What will happen in the second phase of Project Jigsaw? A The second phase will produce the reference implementation of the specification created by the Module-System JSR EG. The EG might ultimately choose an entirely different approach than the one we’re exploring now. If and when that happens then Project Jigsaw will change course as necessary, but either way I think that the end result will be better for having been informed by our current work. Maven & OSGi Q Why not just use Maven? A Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. As such it can be seen as a kind of build-time module system but, by its nature, it does nothing to support modularity at run time. Q Why not just adopt OSGi? A OSGi is a rich dynamic component system which includes not just a module system but also a life-cycle model and a dynamic service registry. The latter two facilities are useful to some kinds of sophisticated applications, but I don’t think they’re of wide enough interest to be standardized as part of the Java SE Platform. Q Okay, then why not just adopt the module layer of OSGi? A The OSGi module layer is not operative at compile time; it only addresses modularity during packaging, deployment, and execution. As it stands, moreover, it’s useful for library and application modules but, since it’s built strictly on top of the Java SE Platform, it can’t be used to modularize the Platform itself. Q If Maven addresses modularity at build time, and the OSGi module layer addresses modularity during deployment and at run time, then why not just use the two together, as many developers already do? A The combination of Maven and OSGi is certainly very useful in practice today. These systems have, however, been built on top of the existing Java platform; they have not been able to change the platform itself. This means, among other things, that module boundaries are weakly enforced, if at all, which makes it difficult to diagnose configuration errors and impossible to run untrusted code securely. The prototype Jigsaw module system, by contrast, aims to define a platform-level solution which extends both the language and the JVM in order to enforce module boundaries strongly and uniformly in all program phases. Q If the EG chooses an approach like the one currently being taken in the Jigsaw prototype, will Maven and OSGi be made obsolete? A No, not at all! No matter what approach is taken, to ensure wide adoption it’s essential that the standard Java Platform Module System interact well with Maven. Applications that depend upon the sophisticated features of OSGi will no doubt continue to use OSGi, so it’s critical that implementations of OSGi be able to run on top of the Java module system and, if suitably modified, support OSGi bundles that depend upon Java modules. Ideas for how to do that are currently being explored in Project Penrose. Java 8 & Java 9 Q Without Jigsaw, won’t Java 8 be a pretty boring release? A No, far from it! It’s still slated to include the widely-anticipated Project Lambda (JSR 335), work on which has been going very well, along with the new Date/Time API (JSR 310), Type Annotations (JSR 308), and a set of smaller features already in progress. Q Won’t deferring Jigsaw to Java 9 delay the eventual convergence of the higher-end Java ME Platforms with Java SE? A It will slow that transition, but it will not stop it. To allow progress toward that convergence to be made with Java 8 I’ve suggested to the Java SE 8 EG that we consider specifying a small number of Profiles which would allow compact configurations of the SE Platform to be built and deployed. Q If Jigsaw is deferred to Java 9, would the Oracle engineers currently working on it be reassigned to other Java 8 features and then return to working on Jigsaw again after Java 8 ships? A No, these engineers would continue to work primarily on Jigsaw from now until Java 9 ships. Q Why not drop Lambda and finish Jigsaw instead? A Even if the engineers currently working on Lambda could instantly switch over to Jigsaw and immediately become productive—which of course they can’t—there are less than nine months remaining in the Java 8 schedule for work on major features. That’s just not enough time for the broad review, testing, and feedback which such a fundamental change to the Java Platform requires. Q Why not ship the module system in Java 8, and then modularize the platform in Java 9? A If we deliver a module system in one release but don’t use it to modularize the JDK until some later release then we run a big risk of getting something fundamentally wrong. If that happens then we’d have to fix it in the later release, and fixing fundamental design flaws after the fact almost always leads to a poor end result. Q Why not ship Jigsaw in an 8.5 release, less than two years after 8? Or why not just ship a new release every year, rather than every other year? A Many more developers work on the JDK today than a couple of years ago, both because Oracle has dramatically increased its own investment and because other organizations and individuals have joined the OpenJDK Community. Collectively we don’t, however, have the bandwidth required to ship and then provide long-term support for a big JDK release more frequently than about every other year. Q What’s the feedback been on the two-year release-cycle proposal? A For just about every comment that we should release more frequently, so that new features are available sooner, there’s been another asking for an even slower release cycle so that large teams of enterprise developers who ship mission-critical applications have a chance to migrate at a comfortable pace.

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• Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part III)

  The last post ended with us just getting started on stumbling into text template file customization, a task that required a Visual Studio extension (Tangible T4 Editor) to even have a chance at completing.  Despite the benefits of the Tangible T4 Editor, I still had a hard time putting together a solid text template that would be easy to explain.  This is mostly due to the way the files allow you to mix code (encapsulated in <# #>) with straight-up text to generate.  It is effective to be sure, but not very readable.  Nevertheless, I will try and explain what was accomplished in my custom tt file, though the details of which are not really the point of this article (my way of saying dont criticize my crappy code, and certainly dont use it in any somewhat real application.  You may become dumber just by looking at this code.  You have been warned really the footnote I should put at the end of all of my blog posts). To begin with, there were two basic requirements that I needed the code generator to satisfy:  Reading one to many entity framework files, and using the entities that were found to write one to many class files.  Thankfully, using the Entity Object Generator as a starting point gave us an example on how to do exactly that by using the MetadataLoader and EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager you include references to these items and use them like so: // Instantiate an entity framework file reader and file writer MetadataLoader loader = new MetadataLoader(this); EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager fileManager = EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager.Create(this); // Load the entity model metadata workspace MetadataWorkspace metadataWorkspace = null; bool allMetadataLoaded =loader.TryLoadAllMetadata("MFL.tt", out metadataWorkspace); EdmItemCollection ItemCollection = (EdmItemCollection)metadataWorkspace.GetItemCollection(DataSpace.CSpace); // Create an IO class to contain the 'get' methods for all entities in the model fileManager.StartNewFile("MFL.IO.gen.cs"); Next, we want to be able to loop through all of the entities found in the model, and then each property for each entity so we can generate classes and methods for each.  The code for that is blissfully simple: // Iterate through each entity in the model foreach (EntityType entity in ItemCollection.GetItems<EntityType>().OrderBy(e => e.Name)) {     // Iterate through each primitive property of the entity     foreach (EdmProperty edmProperty in entity.Properties.Where(p => p.TypeUsage.EdmType is PrimitiveType && p.DeclaringType == entity))     {         // TODO:  Create properties     }     // Iterate through each relationship of the entity     foreach (NavigationProperty navProperty in entity.NavigationProperties.Where(np => np.DeclaringType == entity))     {         // TODO:  Create associations     } } There really isnt anything more advanced than that going on in the text template the only thing I had to blunder through was realizing that if you want the generator to interpret a line of code (such as our iterations above), you need to enclose the code in <# and #> while if you want the generator to interpret the VALUE of code, such as putting the entity name into the class name, you need to enclose the code in <#= and #> like so: public partial class <#=entity.Name#> To make a long story short, I did a lot of repetition of the above to come up with a text template that generates a class for each entity based on its properties, and a set of IO methods for each entity based on its relationships.  The two work together to provide lazy-loading for hierarchical data (such getting Team.Players) so it should be pretty intuitive to use on a front-end.  This text template is available here you can tweak the inputFiles array to load one or many different edmx models and generate the basic xml IO and class files, though it will probably only work correctly in the simplest of cases, like our MFL model described in the previous post.  Additionally, there is no validation, logging or error handling which is something I want to handle later by stumbling through the enterprise library 5.0. The code that gets generated isnt anything special, though using the LINQ to XML feature was something very new and exciting for me I had only worked with XML in the past using the DOM or XML Reader objects along with XPath, and the LINQ to XML model is just so much more elegant and supposedly efficient (something to test later).  For example, the following code was generated to create a Player object for each Player node in the XML:         return from element in GetXmlData(_PlayerDataFile).Descendants("Player")             select new Player             {                 Id = int.Parse(element.Attribute("Id").Value)                 ,ParentName = element.Parent.Name.LocalName                 ,ParentId = long.Parse(element.Parent.Attribute("Id").Value)                 ,Name = element.Attribute("Name").Value                 ,PositionId = int.Parse(element.Attribute("PositionId").Value)             }; It is all done in one line of code, no looping needed.  Even though GetXmlData loads the entire xml file just like the old XML DOM approach would have, it is supposed to be much less resource intensive.  I will definitely put that to the test after we develop a user interface for getting at this data.  Speaking of the data where IS the data?  Weve put together a pretty model and a bunch of code around it, but we dont have any data to speak of.  We can certainly drop to our favorite XML editor and crank out some data, but if it doesnt totally match our model, it will not load correctly.  To help with this, Ive built in a method to generate xml at any given layer in the hierarchy.  So for us to get the closest possible thing to real data, wed need to invoke MFL.IO.GenerateTeamXML and save the results to file.  Doing so should get us something that looks like this: <Team Id="0" Name="0">   <Player Id="0" Name="0" PositionId="0">     <Statistic Id="0" PassYards="0" RushYards="0" Year="0" />   </Player> </Team> Sadly, it is missing the Positions node (havent thought of a way to generate lookup xml yet) and the data itself isnt quite realistic (well, as realistic as MFL data can be anyway).  Lets manually remedy that for now to give us a decent starter set of data.  Note that this is TWO xml files Lookups.xml and Teams.xml: <Lookups Id=0>   <Position Id="0" Name="Quarterback"/>   <Position Id="1" Name="Runningback"/> </Lookups> <Teams Id=0>   <Team Id="0" Name="Chicago">     <Player Id="0" Name="QB Bears" PositionId="0">       <Statistic Id="0" PassYards="4000" RushYards="120" Year="2008" />       <Statistic Id="1" PassYards="4200" RushYards="180" Year="2009" />     </Player>     <Player Id="1" Name="RB Bears" PositionId="1">       <Statistic Id="2" PassYards="0" RushYards="800" Year="2007" />       <Statistic Id="3" PassYards="0" RushYards="1200" Year="2008" />       <Statistic Id="4" PassYards="3" RushYards="1450" Year="2009" />     </Player>   </Team> </Teams> Ok, so we have some data, we have a way to read/write that data and we have a friendly way of representing that data.  Now, what remains is the part that I have been looking forward to the most: present the data to the user and give them the ability to add/update/delete, and doing so in a way that is very intuitive (easy) from a development standpoint.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part III)

  The last post ended with us just getting started on stumbling into text template file customization, a task that required a Visual Studio extension (Tangible T4 Editor) to even have a chance at completing.  Despite the benefits of the Tangible T4 Editor, I still had a hard time putting together a solid text template that would be easy to explain.  This is mostly due to the way the files allow you to mix code (encapsulated in <# #>) with straight-up text to generate.  It is effective to be sure, but not very readable.  Nevertheless, I will try and explain what was accomplished in my custom tt file, though the details of which are not really the point of this article (my way of saying dont criticize my crappy code, and certainly dont use it in any somewhat real application.  You may become dumber just by looking at this code.  You have been warned really the footnote I should put at the end of all of my blog posts). To begin with, there were two basic requirements that I needed the code generator to satisfy:  Reading one to many entity framework files, and using the entities that were found to write one to many class files.  Thankfully, using the Entity Object Generator as a starting point gave us an example on how to do exactly that by using the MetadataLoader and EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager you include references to these items and use them like so: // Instantiate an entity framework file reader and file writer MetadataLoader loader = new MetadataLoader(this); EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager fileManager = EntityFrameworkTemplateFileManager.Create(this); // Load the entity model metadata workspace MetadataWorkspace metadataWorkspace = null; bool allMetadataLoaded =loader.TryLoadAllMetadata("MFL.tt", out metadataWorkspace); EdmItemCollection ItemCollection = (EdmItemCollection)metadataWorkspace.GetItemCollection(DataSpace.CSpace); // Create an IO class to contain the 'get' methods for all entities in the model fileManager.StartNewFile("MFL.IO.gen.cs"); Next, we want to be able to loop through all of the entities found in the model, and then each property for each entity so we can generate classes and methods for each.  The code for that is blissfully simple: // Iterate through each entity in the model foreach (EntityType entity in ItemCollection.GetItems<EntityType>().OrderBy(e => e.Name)) {     // Iterate through each primitive property of the entity     foreach (EdmProperty edmProperty in entity.Properties.Where(p => p.TypeUsage.EdmType is PrimitiveType && p.DeclaringType == entity))     {         // TODO:  Create properties     }     // Iterate through each relationship of the entity     foreach (NavigationProperty navProperty in entity.NavigationProperties.Where(np => np.DeclaringType == entity))     {         // TODO:  Create associations     } } There really isnt anything more advanced than that going on in the text template the only thing I had to blunder through was realizing that if you want the generator to interpret a line of code (such as our iterations above), you need to enclose the code in <# and #> while if you want the generator to interpret the VALUE of code, such as putting the entity name into the class name, you need to enclose the code in <#= and #> like so: public partial class <#=entity.Name#> To make a long story short, I did a lot of repetition of the above to come up with a text template that generates a class for each entity based on its properties, and a set of IO methods for each entity based on its relationships.  The two work together to provide lazy-loading for hierarchical data (such getting Team.Players) so it should be pretty intuitive to use on a front-end.  This text template is available here you can tweak the inputFiles array to load one or many different edmx models and generate the basic xml IO and class files, though it will probably only work correctly in the simplest of cases, like our MFL model described in the previous post.  Additionally, there is no validation, logging or error handling which is something I want to handle later by stumbling through the enterprise library 5.0. The code that gets generated isnt anything special, though using the LINQ to XML feature was something very new and exciting for me I had only worked with XML in the past using the DOM or XML Reader objects along with XPath, and the LINQ to XML model is just so much more elegant and supposedly efficient (something to test later).  For example, the following code was generated to create a Player object for each Player node in the XML:         return from element in GetXmlData(_PlayerDataFile).Descendants("Player")             select new Player             {                 Id = int.Parse(element.Attribute("Id").Value)                 ,ParentName = element.Parent.Name.LocalName                 ,ParentId = long.Parse(element.Parent.Attribute("Id").Value)                 ,Name = element.Attribute("Name").Value                 ,PositionId = int.Parse(element.Attribute("PositionId").Value)             }; It is all done in one line of code, no looping needed.  Even though GetXmlData loads the entire xml file just like the old XML DOM approach would have, it is supposed to be much less resource intensive.  I will definitely put that to the test after we develop a user interface for getting at this data.  Speaking of the data where IS the data?  Weve put together a pretty model and a bunch of code around it, but we dont have any data to speak of.  We can certainly drop to our favorite XML editor and crank out some data, but if it doesnt totally match our model, it will not load correctly.  To help with this, Ive built in a method to generate xml at any given layer in the hierarchy.  So for us to get the closest possible thing to real data, wed need to invoke MFL.IO.GenerateTeamXML and save the results to file.  Doing so should get us something that looks like this: <Team Id="0" Name="0">   <Player Id="0" Name="0" PositionId="0">     <Statistic Id="0" PassYards="0" RushYards="0" Year="0" />   </Player> </Team> Sadly, it is missing the Positions node (havent thought of a way to generate lookup xml yet) and the data itself isnt quite realistic (well, as realistic as MFL data can be anyway).  Lets manually remedy that for now to give us a decent starter set of data.  Note that this is TWO xml files Lookups.xml and Teams.xml: <Lookups Id=0>   <Position Id="0" Name="Quarterback"/>   <Position Id="1" Name="Runningback"/> </Lookups> <Teams Id=0>   <Team Id="0" Name="Chicago">     <Player Id="0" Name="QB Bears" PositionId="0">       <Statistic Id="0" PassYards="4000" RushYards="120" Year="2008" />       <Statistic Id="1" PassYards="4200" RushYards="180" Year="2009" />     </Player>     <Player Id="1" Name="RB Bears" PositionId="1">       <Statistic Id="2" PassYards="0" RushYards="800" Year="2007" />       <Statistic Id="3" PassYards="0" RushYards="1200" Year="2008" />       <Statistic Id="4" PassYards="3" RushYards="1450" Year="2009" />     </Player>   </Team> </Teams> Ok, so we have some data, we have a way to read/write that data and we have a friendly way of representing that data.  Now, what remains is the part that I have been looking forward to the most: present the data to the user and give them the ability to add/update/delete, and doing so in a way that is very intuitive (easy) from a development standpoint.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• How can I eager-load a child collection mapped to a non-primary key in NHibernate 2.1.2?

  - by David Rubin

  Hi, I have two objects with a many-to-many relationship between them, as follows: public class LeftHandSide { public LeftHandSide() { Name = String.Empty; Rights = new HashSet<RightHandSide>(); } public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public ICollection<RightHandSide> Rights { get; set; } } public class RightHandSide { public RightHandSide() { OtherProp = String.Empty; Lefts = new HashSet<LeftHandSide>(); } public int Id { get; set; } public string OtherProp { get; set; } public ICollection<LeftHandSide> Lefts { get; set; } } and I'm using a legacy database, so my mappings look like: Notice that LeftHandSide and RightHandSide are associated by a different column than RightHandSide's primary key. <class name="LeftHandSide" table="[dbo].[lefts]" lazy="false"> <id name="Id" column="ID" unsaved-value="0"> <generator class="identity" /> </id> <property name="Name" not-null="true" /> <set name="Rights" table="[dbo].[lefts2rights]"> <key column="leftId" /> <!-- THIS IS THE IMPORTANT BIT: I MUST USE PROPERTY-REF --> <many-to-many class="RightHandSide" column="rightProp" property-ref="OtherProp" /> </set> </class> <class name="RightHandSide" table="[dbo].[rights]" lazy="false"> <id name="Id" column="id" unsaved-value="0"> <generator class="identity" /> </id> <property name="OtherProp" column="otherProp" /> <set name="Lefts" table="[dbo].[lefts2rights]"> <!-- THIS IS THE IMPORTANT BIT: I MUST USE PROPERTY-REF --> <key column="rightProp" property-ref="OtherProp" /> <many-to-many class="LeftHandSide" column="leftId" /> </set> </class> The problem comes when I go to do a query: LeftHandSide lhs = _session.CreateCriteria<LeftHandSide>() .Add(Expression.IdEq(13)) .UniqueResult<LeftHandSide>(); works just fine. But LeftHandSide lhs = _session.CreateCriteria<LeftHandSide>() .Add(Expression.IdEq(13)) .SetFetchMode("Rights", FetchMode.Join) .UniqueResult<LeftHandSide>(); throws an exception (see below). Interestingly, RightHandSide rhs = _session.CreateCriteria<RightHandSide>() .Add(Expression.IdEq(127)) .SetFetchMode("Lefts", FetchMode.Join) .UniqueResult<RightHandSide>(); seems to be perfectly fine as well. NHibernate.Exceptions.GenericADOException Message: Error performing LoadByUniqueKey[SQL: SQL not available] Source: NHibernate StackTrace: c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Type\EntityType.cs(563,0): at NHibernate.Type.EntityType.LoadByUniqueKey(String entityName, String uniqueKeyPropertyName, Object key, ISessionImplementor session) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Type\EntityType.cs(428,0): at NHibernate.Type.EntityType.ResolveIdentifier(Object value, ISessionImplementor session, Object owner) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Type\EntityType.cs(300,0): at NHibernate.Type.EntityType.NullSafeGet(IDataReader rs, String[] names, ISessionImplementor session, Object owner) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Persister\Collection\AbstractCollectionPersister.cs(695,0): at NHibernate.Persister.Collection.AbstractCollectionPersister.ReadElement(IDataReader rs, Object owner, String[] aliases, ISessionImplementor session) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Collection\Generic\PersistentGenericSet.cs(54,0): at NHibernate.Collection.Generic.PersistentGenericSet`1.ReadFrom(IDataReader rs, ICollectionPersister role, ICollectionAliases descriptor, Object owner) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Loader\Loader.cs(706,0): at NHibernate.Loader.Loader.ReadCollectionElement(Object optionalOwner, Object optionalKey, ICollectionPersister persister, ICollectionAliases descriptor, IDataReader rs, ISessionImplementor session) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Loader\Loader.cs(385,0): at NHibernate.Loader.Loader.ReadCollectionElements(Object[] row, IDataReader resultSet, ISessionImplementor session) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Loader\Loader.cs(326,0): at NHibernate.Loader.Loader.GetRowFromResultSet(IDataReader resultSet, ISessionImplementor session, QueryParameters queryParameters, LockMode[] lockModeArray, EntityKey optionalObjectKey, IList hydratedObjects, EntityKey[] keys, Boolean returnProxies) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Loader\Loader.cs(453,0): at NHibernate.Loader.Loader.DoQuery(ISessionImplementor session, QueryParameters queryParameters, Boolean returnProxies) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Loader\Loader.cs(236,0): at NHibernate.Loader.Loader.DoQueryAndInitializeNonLazyCollections(ISessionImplementor session, QueryParameters queryParameters, Boolean returnProxies) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Loader\Loader.cs(1649,0): at NHibernate.Loader.Loader.DoList(ISessionImplementor session, QueryParameters queryParameters) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Loader\Loader.cs(1568,0): at NHibernate.Loader.Loader.ListIgnoreQueryCache(ISessionImplementor session, QueryParameters queryParameters) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Loader\Loader.cs(1562,0): at NHibernate.Loader.Loader.List(ISessionImplementor session, QueryParameters queryParameters, ISet`1 querySpaces, IType[] resultTypes) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Loader\Criteria\CriteriaLoader.cs(73,0): at NHibernate.Loader.Criteria.CriteriaLoader.List(ISessionImplementor session) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Impl\SessionImpl.cs(1936,0): at NHibernate.Impl.SessionImpl.List(CriteriaImpl criteria, IList results) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Impl\CriteriaImpl.cs(246,0): at NHibernate.Impl.CriteriaImpl.List(IList results) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Impl\CriteriaImpl.cs(237,0): at NHibernate.Impl.CriteriaImpl.List() c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Impl\CriteriaImpl.cs(398,0): at NHibernate.Impl.CriteriaImpl.UniqueResult() c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Impl\CriteriaImpl.cs(263,0): at NHibernate.Impl.CriteriaImpl.UniqueResult[T]() D:\proj\CMS3\branches\nh_auth\DomainModel2Tests\Authorization\TempTests.cs(46,0): at CMS.DomainModel.Authorization.TempTests.Test1() Inner Exception System.Collections.Generic.KeyNotFoundException Message: The given key was not present in the dictionary. Source: mscorlib StackTrace: at System.ThrowHelper.ThrowKeyNotFoundException() at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.get_Item(TKey key) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Persister\Entity\AbstractEntityPersister.cs(2047,0): at NHibernate.Persister.Entity.AbstractEntityPersister.GetAppropriateUniqueKeyLoader(String propertyName, IDictionary`2 enabledFilters) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Persister\Entity\AbstractEntityPersister.cs(2037,0): at NHibernate.Persister.Entity.AbstractEntityPersister.LoadByUniqueKey(String propertyName, Object uniqueKey, ISessionImplementor session) c:\opt\nhibernate\2.1.2\source\src\NHibernate\Type\EntityType.cs(552,0): at NHibernate.Type.EntityType.LoadByUniqueKey(String entityName, String uniqueKeyPropertyName, Object key, ISessionImplementor session) I'm using NHibernate 2.1.2 and I've been debugging into the NHibernate source, but I'm coming up empty. Any suggestions? Thanks so much!

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