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Articles indexed Friday June 15 2012

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  • Configuration setting of HttpWebRequest.Timeout value

    - by Michael Freidgeim
    I wanted to set in configuration on client HttpWebRequest.Timeout.I was surprised, that MS doesn’t provide it as a part of .Net configuration.(Answer in http://forums.silverlight.net/post/77818.aspx thread: “Unfortunately specifying the timeout is not supported in current version. We may support it in the future release.”) I added it to appSettings section of app.config and read it in the method of My HttpWebRequestHelper class  //The Method property can be set to any of the HTTP 1.1 protocol verbs: GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, or OPTIONS.        public static HttpWebRequest PrepareWebRequest(string sUrl, string Method, CookieContainer cntnrCookies)        {            HttpWebRequest webRequest = WebRequest.Create(sUrl) as HttpWebRequest;            webRequest.Method = Method;            webRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";            webRequest.CookieContainer = cntnrCookies; webRequest.Timeout = ConfigurationExtensions.GetAppSetting("HttpWebRequest.Timeout", 100000);//default 100sec-http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckh/archive/2005/02/01/365127.aspx)            /*                //try to change - from http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/ClientTicket_MSNP9.asp                                  webRequest.AllowAutoRedirect = false;                       webRequest.Pipelined = false;                        webRequest.KeepAlive = false;                        webRequest.ProtocolVersion = new Version(1,0);//protocol 1.0 works better that 1.1 ??            */            //MNF 26/5/2005 Some web servers expect UserAgent to be specified            //so let's say it's IE6            webRequest.UserAgent = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)";            DebugOutputHelper.PrintHttpWebRequest(webRequest, TraceOutputHelper.LineWithTrace(""));            return webRequest;        }Related link:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/387247/i-need-help-setting-net-httpwebrequest-timeoutv

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  • A Guided Tour of Complexity

    - by JoshReuben
    I just re-read Complexity – A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell , protégé of Douglas Hofstadter ( author of “Gödel, Escher, Bach”) http://www.amazon.com/Complexity-Guided-Tour-Melanie-Mitchell/dp/0199798109/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339744329&sr=8-1 here are some notes and links:   Evolved from Cybernetics, General Systems Theory, Synergetics some interesting transdisciplinary fields to investigate: Chaos Theory - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory – small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible. System Dynamics / Cybernetics - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Dynamics – study of how feedback changes system behavior Network Theory - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_theory – leverage Graph Theory to analyze symmetric  / asymmetric relations between discrete objects Algebraic Topology - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_topology – leverage abstract algebra to analyze topological spaces There are limits to deterministic systems & to computation. Chaos Theory definitely applies to training an ANN (artificial neural network) – different weights will emerge depending upon the random selection of the training set. In recursive Non-Linear systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_system – output is not directly inferable from input. E.g. a Logistic map: Xt+1 = R Xt(1-Xt) Different types of bifurcations, attractor states and oscillations may occur – e.g. a Lorenz Attractor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_system Feigenbaum Constants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feigenbaum_constants express ratios in a bifurcation diagram for a non-linear map – the convergent limit of R (the rate of period-doubling bifurcations) is 4.6692016 Maxwell’s Demon - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon - the Second Law of Thermodynamics has only a statistical certainty – the universe (and thus information) tends towards entropy. While any computation can theoretically be done without expending energy, with finite memory, the act of erasing memory is permanent and increases entropy. Life & thought is a counter-example to the universe’s tendency towards entropy. Leo Szilard and later Claude Shannon came up with the Information Theory of Entropy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) whereby Shannon entropy quantifies the expected value of a message’s information in bits in order to determine channel capacity and leverage Coding Theory (compression analysis). Ludwig Boltzmann came up with Statistical Mechanics - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanics – whereby our Newtonian perception of continuous reality is a probabilistic and statistical aggregate of many discrete quantum microstates. This is relevant for Quantum Information Theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_information and the Physics of Information - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_information. Hilbert’s Problems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert's_problems pondered whether mathematics is complete, consistent, and decidable (the Decision Problem – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entscheidungsproblem – is there always an algorithm that can determine whether a statement is true).  Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems  proved that mathematics cannot be both complete and consistent (e.g. “This statement is not provable”). Turing through the use of Turing Machines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine symbol processors that can prove mathematical statements) and Universal Turing Machines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine Turing Machines that can emulate other any Turing Machine via accepting programs as well as data as input symbols) that computation is limited by demonstrating the Halting Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem (is is not possible to know when a program will complete – you cannot build an infinite loop detector). You may be used to thinking of 1 / 2 / 3 dimensional systems, but Fractal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal systems are defined by self-similarity & have non-integer Hausdorff Dimensions !!!  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fractals_by_Hausdorff_dimension – the fractal dimension quantifies the number of copies of a self similar object at each level of detail – eg Koch Snowflake - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_snowflake Definitions of complexity: size, Shannon entropy, Algorithmic Information Content (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_information_theory - size of shortest program that can generate a description of an object) Logical depth (amount of info processed), thermodynamic depth (resources required). Complexity is statistical and fractal. John Von Neumann’s other machine was the Self-Reproducing Automaton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine  . Cellular Automata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton are alternative form of Universal Turing machine to traditional Von Neumann machines where grid cells are locally synchronized with their neighbors according to a rule. Conway’s Game of Life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life demonstrates various emergent constructs such as “Glider Guns” and “Spaceships”. Cellular Automatons are not practical because logical ops require a large number of cells – wasteful & inefficient. There are no compilers or general program languages available for Cellular Automatons (as far as I am aware). Random Boolean Networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_network are extensions of cellular automata where nodes are connected at random (not to spatial neighbors) and each node has its own rule –> they demonstrate the emergence of complex  & self organized behavior. Stephen Wolfram’s (creator of Mathematica, so give him the benefit of the doubt) New Kind of Science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science proposes the universe may be a discrete Finite State Automata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine whereby reality emerges from simple rules. I am 2/3 through this book. It is feasible that the universe is quantum discrete at the plank scale and that it computes itself – Digital Physics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics – a simulated reality? Anyway, all behavior is supposedly derived from simple algorithmic rules & falls into 4 patterns: uniform , nested / cyclical, random (Rule 30 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30) & mixed (Rule 110 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110 localized structures – it is this that is interesting). interaction between colliding propagating signal inputs is then information processing. Wolfram proposes the Principle of Computational Equivalence - http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrincipleofComputationalEquivalence.html - all processes that are not obviously simple can be viewed as computations of equivalent sophistication. Meaning in information may emerge from analogy & conceptual slippages – see the CopyCat program: http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/rgoldsto/courses/concepts/copycat.pdf Scale Free Networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network have a distribution governed by a Power Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law - much more common than Normal Distribution). They are characterized by hubs (resilience to random deletion of nodes), heterogeneity of degree values, self similarity, & small world structure. They grow via preferential attachment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment – tipping points triggered by positive feedback loops. 2 theories of cascading system failures in complex systems are Self-Organized Criticality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality and Highly Optimized Tolerance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_optimized_tolerance. Computational Mechanics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_mechanics – use of computational methods to study phenomena governed by the principles of mechanics. This book is a great intuition pump, but does not cover the more mathematical subject of Computational Complexity Theory – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theory I am currently reading this book on this subject: http://www.amazon.com/Computational-Complexity-Christos-H-Papadimitriou/dp/0201530821/ref=pd_sim_b_1   stay tuned for that review!

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  • The new Internet Explorer 7 Tax

    - by TATWORTH
    An Australian online retailer, Kogan, has just announced a 6.8% tax (really a surcharge) on users of IE7. (I wonder how IE6 users would be treated?)To avoid the surcharge, all users have to do is switch to more up to date IE or switch to an alternative browser such as Chrome, Firefox, Opera or Safari.One has to admire the pluck of such a retailer. More details at http://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/

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  • BizTalk: mapping with Xslt

    - by Leonid Ganeline
    BizTalk Map Editor (Mapper) is a good editor, especially in the last 2010 version of the BizTalk. But still sometimes it cannot do the tasks easily. It is time for the Xslt code, It is time to remember that the maps are executed by the Xslt engine.  Right-click the Mapper Grid (a field between the source and target schemas) and choose Properties /Custom XSLT Path.  Input here a name of the file with Xslt code. Only this code will be executed, forget the picture in the Mapper, all those links and functoids.  Let’s see the real-life example. There are two source Addresses. One is on the top level and the second is inside the Member_Address record with MaxOccurs=* . The target address is placed inside the Locator record with MaxOccurs=*. The requirement is to map all source address to the one target address structure. The source Xml document looks like: The result Xml should be like this: Try to do this mapping with the Mapper and you will spent good amount of time and the result map would be tricky. If we use the Xslt code, the mapping will be simple and unambiguous, like this: Simple, elegant.

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  • Network Solutions Gold VIP Program

    - by GGBlogger
    Today I received an email advising me “Congratulations! You have been selected for the Network Solutions Gold VIP Program” Now I get a bunch of messages from Network Solutions because a long time ago I chose them as my registrar. I usually just save these to my Outlook Network Solutions folder and move on. This time my wife was in the room and I chuckled and said something about “Network Solutions has made me a Gold VIP member.” She said “So what does that mean?” Prompted by that I scrolled down the page to look at my “perks". Let’s see – Special pricing, 1 year free Web Forwarding, 1 hour of free support… etc etc until I hit “Enrollment in SafeRenew* SafeRenew* simplifies your renewal process. It protects your domain name registrations and corresponding services in the event you forget or are unable to renew on time. I’m thinking “Now ain’t that neat” I don’t use auto renew anyway and never have. Then I continued reading: Beginning June 24th, 2012 your domains* (that’s 10 days away) will automatically renew. To ensure continuation of service, please be certain you have a valid credit card on file. If you do not wish for your services to be automatically renewed, please click here to log into account manager and opt out of the SafeRenew™ service. Whoa Network Solutions is going to start spending my money without so much as a by your leave sir!!! I don’t bloody think so and how truly magnanimous of them I can “click here” to opt out of what I didn’t opt in for. Talk about furious! I still am. Now the kicker is: if my wife hadn’t been curious and if I’d had a working credit card on file I wouldn’t have know this until one of my unwanted domain names auto renewed. Of course I was told “Oh – we’d have refunded your money” to which I say bull. In my view Networks Solutions is guilty of a crime of some sort. They DO NOT have a right to spend my money without asking!!!!! So watch out folks.

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  • AT&T - Customer service hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

    - by AreYouSerious
    Okay, I'm a separated 2 time Iraq war veteran, living in Germany Supporting the military. About a year and a hald ago I bought an iPhone 4 off a guy from Craigslist. I thought the phone was unlocked, but when I got to Germany I realized it was not. I called AT&T and they told me that due to the contract with Apple they could not unlock any iPhone period. After the lawsuit with Apple, they started unlocking iPhones. So Today I called up their customer support and asked if they could unlock my phone. They said that they would only do it if I were a previous customer, could provide the information from the person that I had bought it from, or if I bought one at cost.-note, it has a baseband that is not able to be "unlocked" by software.Hello I already own the device, and a year and a half ago I bought it off someone that couldn't afford it... so no, I don't have the at&t account information from him. Just another example of why I won't ever use AT&T again. and I still have this iPhone that I have to jail break, and can't use a a phone. STAY AWAY FROM AT&T. They don't know the meaning of customer service!

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  • TechEd 2012 - last session

    - by Stefan Barrett
    Nearly over. For last session attending a talk on c++ apps in windows metro. When I came to TechEd I didn't think I would attend so many sessions on c++, but somehow this has proved more interesting this year. While .net 4.5 is interesting, been playing with it for a while now, so not a ton of surprises. Of course, i still want it at work, but who knows how long that will take - so will just have to use it at home. Once I get the licensing sorted out. So expensive. I've been pleasantly surprised with windows 8, and will be trying that out, and at least that is covered on technet. While the weather has not always been perfect during TechEd's, this is the worst I've seen it so far - it's wet outside. Next years conference in new Orleans should be interesting, well out of the conference itself that is. I do like conferences where it's held within the city itself, unlike Orlando where there isn't really anything here.

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  • Salt and hash a password in .NET

    - by Jon Canning
    I endeavoured to follow the CrackStation rules: Salted Password Hashing - Doing it Right    public class SaltedHash     {         public string Hash { get; private set; }         public string Salt { get; private set; }         public SaltedHash(string password)         {             var saltBytes = new byte[32];             new RNGCryptoServiceProvider().GetNonZeroBytes(saltBytes);             Salt = ConvertToBase64String(saltBytes);             var passwordAndSaltBytes = Concat(password, saltBytes);             Hash = ComputeHash(passwordAndSaltBytes);         }         static string ConvertToBase64String(byte[] bytes)         {             return Convert.ToBase64String(bytes);         }         static string ComputeHash(byte[] bytes)         {             return ConvertToBase64String(SHA256.Create().ComputeHash(bytes));         }         static byte[] Concat(string password, byte[] saltBytes)         {             var passwordBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(password);             return passwordBytes.Concat(saltBytes).ToArray();         }         public static bool Verify(string salt, string hash, string password)         {             var saltBytes = Convert.FromBase64String(salt);             var passwordAndSaltBytes = Concat(password, saltBytes);             var hashAttempt = ComputeHash(passwordAndSaltBytes);             return hash == hashAttempt;         }     }

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  • Nerdstock 2012: A photo review of Microsoft TechEd North America 2012

    - by The Un-T Guy
    Not only could I not fathom that I would ever be attending a tech event of the magnitude of TechEd, neither could any of my co-workers.  As the least technical person in the history of Information Technology ever, I felt as though I were walking into the belly of the beast, fearing I’d not be allowed out until I could write SSIS packages, program in Visual Basic, or at least arm wrestle a DBA.  Most of my fears were unrealized.   But I made it.  I was here.  I even got to wear the Mark of the Geek neck package with schedule, eyeglass cleaners, name badge (company name obfuscated so they don’t fire me), and a pen.  The name  badge was seemingly the key element, as every vendor in the place wanted to scan it to capture name, email address, and numbers to show their bosses back home.  It also let me eat the food and drink the coffee so that’s a fair trade.   A recurring theme throughout the presentations and vendor demos was “the Cloud” and BYOD (bring your own device).  The below was a common site throughout the week, as attendees from all over the world brought their own devices and were able to (seemingly) seamlessly connect to the Worldwide Innerwebs.  Apparently proof that Microsoft and the event organizers were practicing what they were preaching.   “Cavernous” is one way to describe the downstairs facility itself.  “Freaking cavernous” might be more accurate.  Work sessions were held in classrooms on the second and third floors but the real action was happening downstairs.  Microsoft bookstore, blogger hub (shoutout to Geekswithblogs.net), The Wall (sans Pink Floyd, sadly), couches, recharging stations…   …a game zone with pool and air hockey tables, pinball machines, foosball…   …vintage video games…           …and a even giant chess board.  Looked like this guy was opening with the Kaspersky parry.   The blend of technology and fantasy even went so far as to bring childhood favorites to life.  Assuming, of course, your childhood was pre-video games (like mine) and you were stuck with electric football and Rock ‘em Sock ‘em robots:   And, lest the “combatants” become unruly or – God forbid – afternoon snacks were late, Orange County’s finest was on the scene to keep the peace.  On a high-tech mode of transport, of course.   She wasn’t the only one to think this was a swell way to transition from one concourse to the next.  Given the level of support provided by the entire Orange County Convention Center staff, I knew they had to have some secret.   Here’s one entrance to the vendor zone/”Technical Learning Center.”  Couldn’t help but think of them as the remora attached to the Whale Shark that is Microsoft…   …or perhaps planets orbiting the sun. Microsoft is just that huge and it seemed like every vendor in the industry looks forward to partnering with the tech behemoth.   Aside from the free stuff from the vendors, probably the most popular place in the house was the dining area.  Amazing spreads every day, multiple times a day.  While no attendance numbers were available at press time, literally thousands of attendees were fed, and fed well, every day.  And lest you think my post from earlier in the week exaggerated about the backpacks…   …or that I’m exaggerating about the lunch crowds.  This represents only about between 25-30% of the lunch crowd – it was all my camera could capture at once.  No one went away hungry.   The only thing missing was a a vat of Red Bull but apparently organizers went old school, with probably 100 urns of the original energy drink – coffee – all around the venue.   Of course, following lunch and afternoon sessions, some preferred the even older school method of re-energizing.  There were rumors that Microsoft was serving graham crackers and milk in this area.  But they were only rumors.   Cannot overstate the wonderful service provided by the Orange County Convention Center staff.  Coffee, soft drinks, juice, and water were available always.  Buffet meals were delicious with a wide range of healthy options available, in addition to hundreds (at least) special meal requests supported every day.  Ever tried to keep up with an estimated 9,000 hungry and thirsty IT-ers?  These folks did.  Kudos to all of the staff and many thanks!   And while I occasionally poke fun at the Whale Shark, if nothing else this experience convinced me of one thing:  Microsoft knows how to put on a professional event.  Hundreds of informative, professionally delivered sessions, covering a wide range of topics set at varying levels of expertise (some that even I was able to follow), social activities, vendor partnerships…they brought everything you could ask for to inform, educate, and inspire an entire IT industry.   So as I depart the belly of the beast, I can both take pride in the fact that I survived the week and marvel at the brilliance surrounding me.  The IT industry – or at least the segment associated with Microsoft – is in good, professional hands.  And what won’t fit in their hands can be toted in the Microsoft provided backpacks.  Win-win.   Until New Orleans…

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  • TechEd 2012 - last day

    - by Stefan Barrett
    Miss when TechEd was 5 days long!, it's Thursday already and we are on the last day. The snacks haven't appeared, but more developer sessions have. Having access to online schedule is very important, since the new sessions are usually the more interesting ones. On the whole, I think the wifi network has been worse this year - more blank spots, and more areas where performance is bad. I do think its funny that I get better reception on my iPad than my phones (iPad & Nokia/Microsoft). There seems to be less areas for people to plug in their own laptops this year - I do wonder, since more and more people have smart phones, and since most of the attendees are from America, perhaps they are not using the wifi - but rather their own phone provider. If I was in Japan, I would probably do the same. About to attend a session on F#, something which is probably going to be important for me over the next year.

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  • Windows Azure Evolution – TFS Integration (WAWS Part 2)

    - by Shaun
    So this is the fourth blog post about the new features of Windows Azure and the second part of Windows Azure Web Sites. But this is not just focus on the WAWS since the function I’m going to introduce is available in both Windows Azure Web Sites and Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. hosted service). In the previous post I talked about the Windows Azure Web Sites and how to use its gallery to build a WordPress personal blog without coding. Besides the gallery we can create an empty web site and upload our website from vary approaches. And one of the highlighted feature here is that, we can make our web site integrated with a source control service, such as TFS and Git, so that it will be deployed automatically once a new commit or build available.   Create New Empty Web Site In the developer portal when creating a new web site, we can select QUICK CREATE item. This will create an empty web site with only one shared instance without any database associated. Let’s specify the URL, region and subscription and click OK. After a few seconds our website will be ready. And now we can click the BROWSE button to open this empty website. As you can see there is a welcome page available in my website even thought I didn’t upload or deploy anything. This means even though the website will be charged even before anything was deployed, similar as the cloud service (hosted service). It is because once we created a website, Windows Azure platform had arranged a hosting process (w3wp.exe) in the group of virtual machines.   Create Project in TFS Preview Service and Setup Link Currently the Windows Azure Web Sites can integrate with TFS and Git as its deployment source, and it only support the Microsoft TFS Preview Service for now. I will not deep into how to use the TFS preview service in this post but once we click into the website we had just created and then clicked the “Set up TFS publishing”, there will be a dialog helping us to connect to this service. If you don’t have an account you can click the link shown below to request one. Assuming we have already had an account of TFS service then we need to create a new project firstly. Go to your TFS service website and create a new project, giving the project name, description and the process template. Then, back to the developer portal and clicked the “Set up TFS publishing” link. In the popping up window I will provide my TFS service URL and click the “Authorize now” link. Click “Accept” button to allow my windows azure to connect to my TFS service. Then it will be back to the developer portal and list all projects in my account. Just select the one I had just created and click OK. Then our website is linking to the TFS project I specified and finally it will show similar like this below. This means the web site had been linked to the TFS successfully.   Work with TFS Preview Service in VS2010 In the figure above there are some links to guide us how to connect to the TFS server through Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 RC. If you are using Visual Studio 2012 RC, you don’t need any extension. But if you are using Visual Studio 2010 you must have SP1 and KB2581206 installed. To connect to my TFS service just open the Visual Studio and in the Team Explorer, we can add a new TFS server and paste the URL of my TFS service from the developer portal. And select the project I had just created, then it will be listed in my Team Explorer. Now let’s start to build our website. Since the website we are going to build will be deployed to WAWS, it’s NOT a cloud service, NOT a web role. So in this case we need to create a normal ASP.NET web application. For example, an ASP.NET MVC 3 web application. Next, right click on the solution and select “Add Solution to Source Control”, select the project I had just created. Then check my code in. Once the check-in finished we can see that there is a build running in the TFS server. And if we back to the developer portal, we will see in our web site deployment page there’s a deployment running. In fact, once we linked our web site to our TFS then it will create a new build definition in our TFS project. It will be triggered by each check-in and deploy to the web site we linked automatically. So that when our code had been compiled it will be published to our web site from our TFS server. Once the build and deployment finished we can see it’s now active on our developer portal. Now we can see the web site that created from my Visual Studio and deployed by my TFS.   Continue Deployment through VS and TFS A big benefit when using TFS publishing is the continue deployment. Now if I changed some code in my Visual Studio, for example update some text on the home page and check in my changes, then it will trigger an new build and deploy to my WAWS automatically. And even more, if we wanted to rollback to a previous version we can just select an existing deployment listed in the portal and click REDEPLOY at the bottom.   Q&A: Can Web Site use Storage work with a Worker Role? Stacy asked a question in my previous post, which was “can a web site use Windows Azure Storage and furthermore working with a worker role”. Since the web site is deployed on the windows azure virtual machines in data center, it must be able to use all windows azure features such as the storage, SQL databases, CDN, etc.. But since when using web site we normally have a standard ASP.NET web application, PHP website or NodeJS, the windows azure SDK was not referenced by default. But we can add them by ourselves. In our sample project let’s right click on my MVC project and clicked the “Manage NuGet packages”. And in the dialog I will search windows azure packages and select the “Windows Azure Storage” to install. Then we will have the assemblies to access windows azure storage such as tables, queues and blobs. Since I have a storage account already, let’s have a quick demo, just to list all blobs in a container. The code would be like this. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Web; 5: using System.Web.Mvc; 6: using Microsoft.WindowsAzure; 7: using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient; 8:  9: namespace WAASTFSDemo.Controllers 10: { 11: public class HomeController : Controller 12: { 13: public ActionResult Index() 14: { 15: ViewBag.Message = "Welcome to Windows Azure!"; 16:  17: var credentials = new StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey("[STORAGE_ACCOUNT]", "[STORAGE_KEY]"); 18: var account = new CloudStorageAccount(credentials, false); 19: var client = account.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 20: var container = client.GetContainerReference("shared"); 21: ViewBag.Blobs = container.ListBlobs().Select(b => b.Uri.AbsoluteUri); 22:  23: return View(); 24: } 25:  26: public ActionResult About() 27: { 28: return View(); 29: } 30: } 31: } 1: @{ 2: ViewBag.Title = "Home Page"; 3: } 4:  5: <h2>@ViewBag.Message</h2> 6: <p> 7: To learn more about ASP.NET MVC visit <a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC Website">http://asp.net/mvc</a>. 8: </p> 9: <div> 10: <ul> 11: @foreach (var blob in ViewBag.Blobs) 12: { 13: <li>@blob</li> 14: } 15: </ul> 16: </div> And then just check in the code, it will be deployed to my web site. Finally we can see the blobs in my storage.   This is just an example but it proves that web sites can connect to storage, table, blob and queue as well. So the answer to Stacy should be “yes”. The web site can use queue storage to work with worker role.   Summary In this post I demonstrated how to integrate with TFS from Windows Azure Web Sites. You can see our website can be built, uploaded and deployed automatically by TFS service. All we need to do is to provide the TFS name and select the project. Not only the Windows Azure Web Site, in this upgrade the Windows Azure Cloud Services (hosted service) can be published through TFS as well. Very similar as what we have shown below. But currently, only Microsoft TFS Service Preview can be integrated with Windows Azure. But I think in the future we can link the TFS in our enterprise and some 3rd party TFS such as CodePlex to Windows Azure.   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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  • TechEd 2012: Office, SharePoint And More Office

    - by Tim Murphy
    I haven’t spent any time looking at Office 365 up to this point.  I met Donovan Follette on the flight down from Chicago.  I also got to spend some time discussing the product offerings with him at the TechExpo and that sealed my decision to attend this session. The main actor of his presentation is the BCS – Business Connectivity Services. He explained that while this feature has existed in on-site SharePoint it is a valuable new addition to Office 365 SharePoint Online.  If you aren’t familiar with the BCS, it allows you to leverage non-SharePoint enterprise data source from SharePoint.  The greatest benefactor is the end users who can leverage the data using a variety of Office products and more.  The one thing I haven’t shaken my skepticism of is the use of SharePoint Designer which Donovan used to create a WCF service.  It is mostly my tendency to try to create solutions that can be managed through the whole application life cycle.  It the past migrating through test environments has been near impossible with anything other than content created by SharePiont Designer. There is a lot of end user power here.  The biggest consideration I think you need to examine when reaching from you enterprise LOB data stores out to an online service and back is that you are going to take a performance hit.  This means that you have to be very aware of how you configure these integrated self serve solutions.  As a rule make sure you are using the right tool for the right situation. I appreciated that he showed both no code and code solutions for the consumer of the LOB data.  I came out of this session much better informed about the possibilities around this product. del.icio.us Tags: Office 365,SharePoint Online,TechEd,TechEd 2012

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  • TechEd 2012: Day 3 &ndash; Build Me A Solution

    - by Tim Murphy
    While digesting my lunch it was time to digest some TFS Build information. While much of my time is spent wearing my developer’s hat I am still a jack of all trades and automated builds are an important aspect of any project.  Because of this I was looking forward to finding out what new features are available in the latest release of Team Foundation Server. The first feature that caught my attention is the TFS Admin Client.  After being used to dealing with NAnt in the past it is nice to see a build a configuration GUI that is so flexible and well thought out.  The bonus is that it the tools that are incorporated in Visual Studio 2012 are just as feature rich.  Life is good. Since automated builds are the hub of your development process in a continuous integration shop I was really interested in the process related options. The biggest value add that I noticed was merge gated check-ins.  Merge or batch gated check-ins are an interesting concept.  If the build breaks with all the changes then TFS will run separate builds for each of the check-ins.  This ability to identify the actual offending check-in can save a lot of time and gray hair. The safari of TFS Build that was this session was packed with attractions.  How do you set it up builds, what are the different flavors of builds, how does the system report how the build went?  I would suggest anyone who is responsible for build automation spend some serious time with TFS 2012 and VS2012. del.icio.us Tags: Team Foundation Server 2012,TFS,Build,TechEd,TechEd 2012,Visual Studio 2012

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  • Using Table-Valued Parameters in SQL Server

    - by Jesse
    I work with stored procedures in SQL Server pretty frequently and have often found myself with a need to pass in a list of values at run-time. Quite often this list contains a set of ids on which the stored procedure needs to operate the size and contents of which are not known at design time. In the past I’ve taken the collection of ids (which are usually integers), converted them to a string representation where each value is separated by a comma and passed that string into a VARCHAR parameter of a stored procedure. The body of the stored procedure would then need to parse that string into a table variable which could be easily consumed with set-based logic within the rest of the stored procedure. This approach works pretty well but the VARCHAR variable has always felt like an un-wanted “middle man” in this scenario. Of course, I could use a BULK INSERT operation to load the list of ids into a temporary table that the stored procedure could use, but that approach seems heavy-handed in situations where the list of values is usually going to contain only a few dozen values. Fortunately SQL Server 2008 introduced the concept of table-valued parameters which effectively eliminates the need for the clumsy middle man VARCHAR parameter. Example: Customer Transaction Summary Report Let’s say we have a report that can summarize the the transactions that we’ve conducted with customers over a period of time. The report returns a pretty simple dataset containing one row per customer with some key metrics about how much business that customer has conducted over the date range for which the report is being run. Sometimes the report is run for a single customer, sometimes it’s run for all customers, and sometimes it’s run for a handful of customers (i.e. a salesman runs it for the customers that fall into his sales territory). This report can be invoked from a website on-demand, or it can be scheduled for periodic delivery to certain users via SQL Server Reporting Services. Because the report can be created from different places and the query to generate the report is complex it’s been packed into a stored procedure that accepts three parameters: @startDate – The beginning of the date range for which the report should be run. @endDate – The end of the date range for which the report should be run. @customerIds – The customer Ids for which the report should be run. Obviously, the @startDate and @endDate parameters are DATETIME variables. The @customerIds parameter, however, needs to contain a list of the identity values (primary key) from the Customers table representing the customers that were selected for this particular run of the report. In prior versions of SQL Server we might have made this parameter a VARCHAR variable, but with SQL Server 2008 we can make it into a table-valued parameter. Defining And Using The Table Type In order to use a table-valued parameter, we first need to tell SQL Server about what the table will look like. We do this by creating a user defined type. For the purposes of this stored procedure we need a very simple type to model a table variable with a single integer column. We can create a generic type called ‘IntegerListTableType’ like this: CREATE TYPE IntegerListTableType AS TABLE (Value INT NOT NULL) Once defined, we can use this new type to define the @customerIds parameter in the signature of our stored procedure. The parameter list for the stored procedure definition might look like: 1: CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.rpt_CustomerTransactionSummary 2: @starDate datetime, 3: @endDate datetime, 4: @customerIds IntegerListTableTableType READONLY   Note the ‘READONLY’ statement following the declaration of the @customerIds parameter. SQL Server requires any table-valued parameter be marked as ‘READONLY’ and no DML (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE) statements can be performed on a table-valued parameter within the routine in which it’s used. Aside from the DML restriction, however, you can do pretty much anything with a table-valued parameter as you could with a normal TABLE variable. With the user defined type and stored procedure defined as above, we could invoke like this: 1: DECLARE @cusomterIdList IntegerListTableType 2: INSERT @customerIdList VALUES (1) 3: INSERT @customerIdList VALUES (2) 4: INSERT @customerIdList VALUES (3) 5:  6: EXEC dbo.rpt_CustomerTransationSummary 7: @startDate = '2012-05-01', 8: @endDate = '2012-06-01' 9: @customerIds = @customerIdList   Note that we can simply declare a variable of type ‘IntegerListTableType’ just like any other normal variable and insert values into it just like a TABLE variable. We could also populate the variable with a SELECT … INTO or INSERT … SELECT statement if desired. Using The Table-Valued Parameter With ADO .NET Invoking a stored procedure with a table-valued parameter from ADO .NET is as simple as building a DataTable and passing it in as the Value of a SqlParameter. Here’s some example code for how we would construct the SqlParameter for the @customerIds parameter in our stored procedure: 1: var customerIdsParameter = new SqlParameter(); 2: customerIdParameter.Direction = ParameterDirection.Input; 3: customerIdParameter.TypeName = "IntegerListTableType"; 4: customerIdParameter.Value = selectedCustomerIds.ToIntegerListDataTable("Value");   All we’re doing here is new’ing up an instance of SqlParameter, setting the pamameters direction, specifying the name of the User Defined Type that this parameter uses, and setting its value. We’re assuming here that we have an IEnumerable<int> variable called ‘selectedCustomerIds’ containing all of the customer Ids for which the report should be run. The ‘ToIntegerListDataTable’ method is an extension method of the IEnumerable<int> type that looks like this: 1: public static DataTable ToIntegerListDataTable(this IEnumerable<int> intValues, string columnName) 2: { 3: var intergerListDataTable = new DataTable(); 4: intergerListDataTable.Columns.Add(columnName); 5: foreach(var intValue in intValues) 6: { 7: var nextRow = intergerListDataTable.NewRow(); 8: nextRow[columnName] = intValue; 9: intergerListDataTable.Rows.Add(nextRow); 10: } 11:  12: return intergerListDataTable; 13: }   Since the ‘IntegerListTableType’ has a single int column called ‘Value’, we pass that in for the ‘columnName’ parameter to the extension method. The method creates a new single-columned DataTable using the provided column name then iterates over the items in the IEnumerable<int> instance adding one row for each value. We can then use this SqlParameter instance when invoking the stored procedure just like we would use any other parameter. Advanced Functionality Using passing a list of integers into a stored procedure is a very simple usage scenario for the table-valued parameters feature, but I’ve found that it covers the majority of situations where I’ve needed to pass a collection of data for use in a query at run-time. I should note that BULK INSERT feature still makes sense for passing large amounts of data to SQL Server for processing. MSDN seems to suggest that 1000 rows of data is the tipping point where the overhead of a BULK INSERT operation can pay dividends. I should also note here that table-valued parameters can be used to deal with more complex data structures than single-columned tables of integers. A User Defined Type that backs a table-valued parameter can use things like identities and computed columns. That said, using some of these more advanced features might require the use the SqlDataRecord and SqlMetaData classes instead of a simple DataTable. Erland Sommarskog has a great article on his website that describes when and how to use these classes for table-valued parameters. What About Reporting Services? Earlier in the post I referenced the fact that our example stored procedure would be called from both a web application and a SQL Server Reporting Services report. Unfortunately, using table-valued parameters from SSRS reports can be a bit tricky and warrants its own blog post which I’ll be putting together and posting sometime in the near future.

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  • TechEd 2012 - day 3

    - by Stefan Barrett
    The content has got more useful for me as a developer, and I've now seen 2 things which I think will make a big difference: Fake in vs2012 - allows me to stub or fake out libraries making unit testing easier/possible. C++ AMP & auto - auto might get me to start using c++ again (it makes code like for each much nicer/easier to write), while AMP is something I want to play with (moves the processing onto the GPU) The food got a little better, while there was less sign of the snacks.

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  • TFS Rant *WARNING* negative opinions are being expressed.

    - by ryanabr
    It has happened several times now where I end up installing TFS "over the shoulder" of the system admin guy whose job it will be to "own" the server when I am gone. TFS is challenging enough to stand up when doing it myself on a completely open platform, but at these locations, networks are locked down, machines are locked down, and the unexpected always seems to pop up. I personally have the tolerance for these things as a software developer, but as we are installing I have to listen to all of 'colorful' remarks being made about: "why is it like this" or "this is a piece of crap". Generally the issues center around SharePoint integration. TFS on it's own is straightforward, but the last flavor in everyone's mouth is the SharePoint piece. As a product I like SharePoint, but installation is a nightmare. In this particular case, we are going to use WSS since the customer would like this separate from their corp SharePoint 2010 installations since there dev team is really small (1 developer) and it is being used as a VSS replacement, more than a full blown ALM tool. The server where it is being installed as a Cisco Security Agent on it that seems to block 'suspicious' activity, and as far as I can tell is preventing WSS from installing properly. The most confounding thing we can find no meaningful log entries to help diagnose the issue. it didn't help matters that when we tried to contact Microsoft for support, because we mentioned TFS in the list of things that we were trying to install, that after waiting 2 hours that we got a TFS support person NOT the SharePoint person that we really needed, so after another 2 hours the SharePoint support that we did get managed to corrupt the registry sufficiently with his 'tools' that we ended up starting over from scratch the next day anyway after going home at midnight. My point to this is: The System Administrator who is going to own this, now thinks it is a piece of crap because SharePoint wouldn't install properly. Perception is everything.  Everyone today is conditioned that software installs and works in a very simple matter. When looking at the different options to install TFS with the different "modes" there is inconsistency in the information being presented which leads to choices that causes headaches and this bad perception before the product is even installed. I am highlighting this because I love TFS as a product, but I HATE installing it, and would like it to install as simply and elegantly as the product operates once it is installed.

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  • TechEd 2012: Day 3 &ndash; Morning TFS

    - by Tim Murphy
    My morning sessions for day three were dominated by Team Foundation Server.  This has been a hot topic for our clients lately, so this topic really stuck a chord. The speaker for the first session was from Boeing.  It was nice to hear how how a company mixes both agile and waterfall project management.   The approaches that he presented were very pragmatic.  For their needs reporting is the crucial part of their decision to use TFS.  This was interesting since this is probably the last aspect that most shops would think about. The challenge of getting users to adopt TFS was brought up by the audience.  As with the other discussion point he took a very level headed stance.  The approach he was prescribing was to eat the elephant a bite at a time instead of all at once.  If you try to convert you entire shop at once the culture shock will most likely kill the effort. Another key point he reminded us of is that you need to make sure that standards and compliance are taken into account when you setup TFS.  If you don’t implement a tool and processes around it that comply with the standards bodies that govern your business you are in for a world of hurt. Ultimately the reason they chose TFS was because it was the first tool that incorporated all the ALM features that they needed. Reduced licensing cost because of all the different tools they would need to buy to complete the same tasks.  They got to this point by doing an industry evaluation.  Although TFS came out on top he said that it still has a big gap is in the Java area.  Of course in this market there are vendors helping to close that gap. The second session was on how continuous feedback in agile is a new focus in VS2012.  The problems they intended to address included cycle time and average time to repair, root cause analysis. The speakers fired features at us as if they were firing a machine gun.  I will just say that I am looking forward to digging into the product after seeing this presentation.  Beyond that I will simply list some of the key features that caught my attention. Feature – Ability to link documents into tasks as artifacts Web access portal PowerPoint storyboards Exploratory testing Request feedback (allows users to record notes, screen shots and video/audio) See you after the second half. del.icio.us Tags: TechEd,TechEd 2012,TFS,Team Foundation Server

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  • Why I&rsquo;m *NOT* Attending MOSOConf

    - by D'Arcy Lussier
    It’s my daughter’s birthday on Saturday, she turns 10! Lot’s of party planning to do this week! What, you thought this was going to be a rant post? Hope everyone has a fantastic time at MOSOConf and congrats to the organizers for putting on another fantastic event! Btw, if you’re looking to get even more mobile and web development goodness, come check out Prairie IT Pro & Dev Con in Regina this October – we just announced our current session/speaker line-up and we’ll be adding more sessions over the summer! Click the image below to visit the event site!

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  • The Agile Engineering Rules of Test Code

    - by Malcolm Anderson
    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-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Lots of test code gets written, a lot of it is waste, some of it is well engineered waste.Companies hire Agile Engineering Coaches because agile engineering is easy to do wrong.Very easy.So here's a quick tool you can use for self coaching.It's what I call, "The Agile Engineering Rules of Test Code" and it's going to act as a sort of table of contents for some future posts.The Agile Engineering Rules of Test Code Malcolm Anderson   Test code is not throw away code Test code is production code   8 questions to determine the quality of your test code Does the test code have appropriate comments?Is the test code executed as part of the build?Every Time?Is the test code getting refactored?Does everyone use the same test code?Can the test code be described as “Well Maintained”?Can a bright six year old tell you why any particular test failed?Are the tests independent and infinitely repeatable?

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  • Backpacks and Booth Paint: TechEd 2012

    - by The Un-T Guy
    Arriving in the parking lot of the Orange County Convention Center, I immediately knew I was in the right place. As far as the eye could see, the acres of asphalt were awash in backpacks, quirky (to be kind) outfits, and bad haircuts. This was the place. This was Microsoft Mecca v2012 for geeks and nerds, the Central Florida event of the year, a gathering of high tech professionals whose skills I both greatly respect and, frankly, fear a little. I was wholly and completely out of element, a dork in a vast sea of geek jumbo. It like was wearing dockers and a golf shirt walking into a RenFaire, but one with really crappy costumes and no turkey legs...save those attached to some of the attendees. Of course the corporate whores...errrr, vendors were in place, ready to parlay the convention's fre-nerd-ic energy into millions of dollars by convincing the big-brained and under-sexed in the crowd (i.e., virtually all of them...present company excluded, of course) that their product or service was the only thing standing between them and professional success, industry fame, and clear skin. "With KramTech 2012," they seemed to scream, "you will be THE ROCK STAR of your company's IT department!" As car shows and tattoo parlors learned long ago, Tech companies seem to believe that the best way to attract the attention of this crowd is through the hint of the promise of sex. They recruit and deploy an army of "sales reps" whose primary qualifications appear to be long hair, short skirts, high heels, and a vagina. Unlike their distant cousins in the car and body art industries, however, this sub-species of booth paint (semi-gloss decoration that adds nothing to the substance of the product) seems torn between committing to being all-out sex objects and recognition that they are in the presence of intelligent, discerning people. People who are smart enough to know exactly what these vendors are doing. Also unlike their distant car show and tattoo shop cousins, these young women (what…are there no gay tech professionals who could use some eye candy?) seem to realize that while IT remains a male-dominated field, there are ever-increasing numbers of intelligent, capable, strong professional women – women who’ve battled to make it in this field through hard work and work performance rather than a hard body and performing after work. This is not to say that all of the young female sales reps are there only because of their physical attributes. Many are competent, intelligent, and driven -- not to mention attractive. They're working hard on the front lines of delivering the next generation of technology. The distinction is pretty clear, however, between these young professionals and the booth paint. The former enthusiastically deliver credible information about the products they’re hawking. The latter are positioned in the aisles, uncomfortably avoiding eye contact as they struggle to operate the badge readers. Surprisingly, not all of the women in attendance seemed to object to the objectification of their younger sisters. One IT professional woman who came of age in the industry (mostly in IT marketing) said, “I have no problem with it. I was a ‘booth babe’ for years and it doesn’t bother me at all.” Others, however, weren’t quite so gracious. One woman I spoke with, an IT manager from Cheyenne, Wyoming, said it was demeaning and frankly, as more and more women grow into IT management positions, not a great marketing idea. “Using these young women is, to me, no different than vendors giving out t-shirts to attract attention. It’s sad because it’s still hard for a woman to be respected in the IT field and this just perpetuates the outdated notion that IT is a male-dominated field.” She went on to say that decisions by vendors to employ these young women in this “inappropriate way” could impact her purchasing decisions. “I might be swayed toward a vendor who has women on staff who are intelligent and dynamic rather than the vendors who use the ‘decoration’ girls.” So in many ways, the IT industry is no different than most other industries as it struggles to maximize performance by finding and developing talent – all of the talent, not just the 50% with a penis. Women in IT, like their brethren, struggle to find their niche in the field, to grow professionally, and reach for the brass ring, struggling to overcome obstacles as they climb the mountain of professional success in a never-ending cycle of economic uncertainty. But as (generally) well-educated and highly-trained professionals, they are probably better positioned than those in many other industries. Beside, they’ve got one other advantage over their non-IT counterparts as they attempt their ascent to the summit: They’ve already got the backpacks.

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  • O'Reilly deal of the Week on Early Release Books to 19/June/2012 23:39 PT

    - by TATWORTH
    O'Reilly are offering a 50% off deal on early release e-books at http://http://shop.oreilly.com/category/early-release.do?code=WKEARE"With Early Release ebooks, you get entire books in their earliest form — the author's raw and unedited content as he or she writes — so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles. You'll also receive updates when significant changes are made, as well as the final multiple-format ebook bundle."These are an excellent deal!

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  • Why does Django's dev server use port 8000 by default?

    - by kojiro
    (My question isn't really about Django. It's about alternative http ports. I just happen to know Django is a relatively famous application that uses 8000 by default, so it's illustrative.) I have a dev server in the wild that we occasionally need to run multiple httpd services on on different ports. When I needed to stand a third service up and we were already using ports 80 and 8080, I discovered our security team has locked port 8000 access from the Internet. I recognize that port 80 is the standard http port, and 8080 is commonly http_alt, but I'd like to make the case to our security team to open 8000 as well. In order to make that case, I hope the answer to this question can provide me with a reasonable argument for using port 8000 over 8080 in some case. Or was it just a random choice with no meaning?

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  • How to retrieve names of all private MSMQ queues - efficiently?

    - by Damian Powell
    How can I retrieve the names of all of the private MSMQ queues on the local machine, without using System.Messaging.MessageQueue.GetPrivateQueuesByMachine(".")? I'm using PowerShell so any solution using COM, WMI, or .NET is acceptable, although the latter is preferable. Note that this StackOverflow question has a solution that returns all of the queue objects. I don't want the objects (it's too slow and a little flakey when there are lots of queues), I just want their names.

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  • Apache and mod_authn_dbd DBDPrepareSQL error

    - by David Brown
    I am running Apache 2.2.17 on Suse Linux 11. I have installed the mod_authn_dbd module to allow authentication using a MySQL database. Simple digest authentication works absolutely fine using the following directive: AuthDBDUserRealmQuery "SELECT loginPassword FROM login WHERE loginUser = %s and loginRealm = %s" However, I would like to both generalize this statement and prepare it for performance and security reasons. Thus, I used the following directives instead: DBDPrepareSQL "SELECT loginPassword FROM login WHERE loginUser = %s and loginRealm = %s" digestLogin AuthDBDUserRealmQuery digestLogin These directives generate the following errors: [...] [error] (20014)Internal error: DBD: failed to prepare SQL statements: [...] [error] (20014)Internal error: DBD: failed to initialise Why does my actual SQL statement work when used directly, but not when I try to prepare it? (Note I have tried using '?' and '%%' in place of '%', to no effect.)

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  • Tracking changes to firewall configs?

    - by jmreicha
    Myself and one other indivdual will be taking over some of the daily firewall management duties soon and I'm looking for a way to track changes on our firewall configurations for auditing purposes and need some ideas on a good way to track changes the changes that are made. I don't have a lot of specific criteria but here are some of the basic things I would like to be able to do: Access to previous revisions of firewall configs Access to changes made and by whom When specific changes were made I'm wondering if some sort of revision control software would work here as a way to track the the changes? Or if some other approach would work better for managing the change control in this situation. I'm open to any and all suggestions at this point. EDIT: We are using a Checkpoint pair, one passive one active configuration. I will update again with specific model numbers when I get a chance.

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