Search Results

Search found 320 results on 13 pages for 'jesse welch'.

Page 1/13 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12  | Next Page >

  • Guest (and occasional co-host) on Jesse Liberty's Yet Another Podcast

    - by Jon Galloway
    I was a recent guest on Jesse Liberty's Yet Another Podcast talking about the latest Visual Studio, ASP.NET and Azure releases. Download / Listen: Yet Another Podcast #75–Jon Galloway on ASP.NET/ MVC/ Azure Co-hosted shows: Jesse's been inviting me to co-host shows and I told him I'd show up when I was available. It's a nice change to be a drive-by co-host on a show (compared with the work that goes into organizing / editing / typing show notes for Herding Code shows). My main focus is on Herding Code, but it's nice to pop in and talk to Jesse's excellent guests when it works out. Some shows I've co-hosted over the past year: Yet Another Podcast #76–Glenn Block on Node.js & Technology in China Yet Another Podcast  #73 - Adam Kinney on developing for Windows 8 with HTML5 Yet Another Podcast #64 - John Papa & Javascript Yet Another Podcast #60 - Steve Sanderson and John Papa on Knockout.js Yet Another Podcast #54–Damian Edwards on ASP.NET Yet Another Podcast #53–Scott Hanselman on Blogging Yet Another Podcast #52–Peter Torr on Windows Phone Multitasking Yet Another Podcast #51–Shawn Wildermuth: //build, Xaml Programming & Beyond And some more on the way that haven't been released yet. Some of these I'm pretty quiet, on others I get wacky and hassle the guests because, hey, not my podcast so not my problem. Show notes from the ASP.NET / MVC / Azure show: What was just released Visual Studio 2012 Web Developer features ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms Strongly Typed data controls Data access via command methods Similar Binding syntax to ASP.NET MVC Some context: Damian Edwards and WebFormsMVP Two questions from Jesse: Q: Are you making this harder or more complicated for Web Forms developers? Short answer: Nothing's removed, it's just a new option History of SqlDataSource, ObjectDataSource Q: If I'm using some MVC patterns, why not just move to MVC? Short answer: This works really well in hybrid applications, doesn't require a rewrite Allows sharing models, validation, other code between Web Forms and MVC ASP.NET MVC Adaptive Rendering (oh, also, this is in Web Forms 4.5 as well) Display Modes Mobile project template using jQuery Mobile OAuth login to allow Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc. login Jon (and friends') MVC 4 book on the way: Professional ASP.NET MVC 4 Windows 8 development Jesse and Jon announce they're working on a new book: Pro Windows 8 Development with XAML and C# Jon and Jesse agree that it's nice to be able to write Windows 8 applications using the same skills they picked up for Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone development. Compare / contrast ASP.NET MVC and Windows 8 development Q: Does ASP.NET and HTML5 development overlap? Jon thinks they overlap in the MVC world because you're writing HTML views without controls Jon describes how his web development career moved from a preoccupation with server code to a focus on user interaction, which occurs in the browser Jon mentions his NDC Oslo presentation on Learning To Love HTML as Beautiful Code Q: How do you apply C# / XAML or HTML5 skills to Windows 8 development? Q: If I'm a XAML programmer, what's the learning curve on getting up to speed on ASP.NET MVC? Jon describes the difference in application lifecycle and state management Jon says it's nice that web development is really interactive compared to application development Q: Can you learn MVC by reading a book? Or is it a lot bigger than that? What is Azure, and why would I use it? Jon describes the traditional Azure platform mode and how Azure Web Sites fits in Q: Why wouldn't Jesse host his blog on Azure Web Sites? Domain names on Azure Web Sites File hosting options Q: Is Azure just another host? How is it different from any of the other shared hosting options? A: Azure gives you the ability to scale up or down whenever you want A: Other services are available if or when you want them

    Read the article

  • Welch's Juices-up Its Inventory Management with Oracle Supply Chain

    - by [email protected]
    Supply & Demand Chain Executive published recently a great success story about Welch's implementation of "Take Supply Chain and G.SI to work with Oracle Process Manufacturing". The company says it's been able to improve operational control, inventory accuracy, visibility and order fulfillment by automating its processes across three production/warehousing locations nationwide. Improving warehouse and inventory management operations creates efficiencies across a high-velocity nationwide supply chain Welch's production facilities were collecting more information than ever before on the flow of materials and inventory, but the company needed an effective and accurate method to organize and manage these data.   Article found at: http://www.sdcexec.com/publication/article.jsp?pubId=1&id=12256&pageNum=2     

    Read the article

  • Welch's Juices-up Its Inventory Management with Oracle Supply Chain

    - by [email protected]
    Supply & Demand Chain Executive published recently a great success story about Welch's implementation of "Take Supply Chain and G.SI to work with Oracle Process Manufacturing". The company says it's been able to improve operational control, inventory accuracy, visibility and order fulfillment by automating its processes across three production/warehousing locations nationwide. Improving warehouse and inventory management operations creates efficiencies across a high-velocity nationwide supply chain Welch's production facilities were collecting more information than ever before on the flow of materials and inventory, but the company needed an effective and accurate method to organize and manage these data.   Article found at: http://www.sdcexec.com/publication/article.jsp?pubId=1&id=12256&pageNum=2     

    Read the article

  • Welch's Juices-up Its Inventory Management with Oracle Supply Chain

    - by [email protected]
    Supply & Demand Chain Executive published recently a great success story about Welch's implementation of "Take Supply Chain and G.SI to work with Oracle Process Manufacturing". The company says it's been able to improve operational control, inventory accuracy, visibility and order fulfillment by automating its processes across three production/warehousing locations nationwide. Improving warehouse and inventory management operations creates efficiencies across a high-velocity nationwide supply chain Welch's production facilities were collecting more information than ever before on the flow of materials and inventory, but the company needed an effective and accurate method to organize and manage these data.   Article found at: http://www.sdcexec.com/publication/article.jsp?pubId=1&id=12256&pageNum=2     

    Read the article

  • Silverlight TV 16: Tim Heuer and Jesse Liberty Talk about Silverlight 4 RC at MIX 10

      While at MIX10, John catches up with Jesse Liberty and Tim Heuer to discuss their favorite features in Silverlight 4 on this episode of Silverlight TV. Along with calling out and discussing why they're each impressed with their favorite features, Jesse, Tim, and John also discuss the impact of the announcements made at MIX regarding development for WP7 and Silverlight at the Day 1 keynote. You can also check out the 60+ page whitepaper that covers the full feature list of all the new features...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.

    Read the article

  • Jesse Liberty at the Montreal User Group, take 3

    This is our last attempt to get Jesse Liberty at the Montreal User Group (and there wont be any take 4 as this is the very last meeting of the season), so we cross fingers that everything will be fine this time! RunAtServer Consulting is the proud sponsor of this event. What: Silverlight 4, MVVM and Test-Driven Development When: June 16, 2010 at 6:15pm. Where: Microsoft Montreal office at 2000 McGill College, 4th floor, Montreal, QC, H3A 3H3. Price: Free for members of the User...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.

    Read the article

  • Jesse Liberty at the Montreal User Group, take 3

    - by pluginbaby
    This is our last attempt to get Jesse Liberty at the Montreal User Group (and there won’t be any take 4 as this is the very last meeting of the season), so we cross fingers that everything will be fine this time! RunAtServer Consulting is the proud sponsor of this event. What: Silverlight 4, MVVM and Test-Driven Development When: June 16, 2010 at 6:15pm. Where: Microsoft Montreal office at 2000 McGill College, 4th floor, Montreal, QC, H3A 3H3. Price: Free for members of the User Group, 5$ for anyone else.

    Read the article

  • github like workflow on private server over ssh

    - by Jesse
    I have an server (available via ssh) on the internet that my friend and I use for working on projects together. We have started using git for source control. Our setup currently is as follows: Friend created repository on server with git init named project.friend.git I cloned project.friend.git on server to project.jesse.git I then cloned project.jesse.git on server to my local machine using git clone jesse@server:/git_repos/project.jesse.git I work on my local machine and commit to the local machine. When I want to push my changes to the project.jesse.git on server I use git push origin master. My friend is working on project.friend.git. When I want to get his changes I do pull jesse@server:/git_repos/project.friend.git. Everything seems to be working fine, however, I am now getting the following error when I do git push origin master: localpc:project.jesse jesse$ git push origin master Counting objects: 100, done. Delta compression using up to 2 threads. Compressing objects: 100% (76/76), done. Writing objects: 100% (76/76), 15.98 KiB, done. Total 76 (delta 50), reused 0 (delta 0) warning: updating the current branch warning: Updating the currently checked out branch may cause confusion, warning: as the index and work tree do not reflect changes that are in HEAD. warning: As a result, you may see the changes you just pushed into it warning: reverted when you run 'git diff' over there, and you may want warning: to run 'git reset --hard' before starting to work to recover. warning: warning: You can set 'receive.denyCurrentBranch' configuration variable to warning: 'refuse' in the remote repository to forbid pushing into its warning: current branch. warning: To allow pushing into the current branch, you can set it to 'ignore'; warning: but this is not recommended unless you arranged to update its work warning: tree to match what you pushed in some other way. warning: warning: To squelch this message, you can set it to 'warn'. warning: warning: Note that the default will change in a future version of git warning: to refuse updating the current branch unless you have the warning: configuration variable set to either 'ignore' or 'warn'. To jesse@server:/git_repos/project.jesse.git c455cb7..e9ec677 master -> master Is this warning anything I need to be worried about? Like I said, everything seems to be working. My friend is able to pull my changes in from my branch. I have the clone on the server so he can access it since he does not have access to my local machine. Is there something that could be done better? Thanks!

    Read the article

  • Silverlight Cream for January 30, 2011 - 2 -- #1038

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Max Paulousky, Renuka Prasad, Ollie Riches, Jesse Liberty(-2-, -3-, -4-, -5-), Medusa M, John Papa, Beth Massi, and Joost van Schaik. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Stop What You Are Doing And Learn About Reactive Programming" Jesse Liberty WP7: "Windows Phone Looping Selector for Digits " Max Paulousky Lightswitch: "How To Send HTML Email from a LightSwitch Application" Beth Massi Shoutouts: Shawn Wildermuch has niether GooNews for users of his cool WP7 app or or for the WP7 Marketplace in general: R.I.P. GooNews From SilverlightCream.com: Windows Phone Looping Selector for Digits Max Paulousky expanded on the Looping selector for some customization allowing him to display width/height metric measurement selectors... great job, Max! WP7 – How to Create a Simple Checked Listbox In Windows Phone 7 Renuka Prasad has the code for a nicely-working checked Listbox for WP7 on his blog... the post is the code... WP7Contrib: Network Connectivity Push Model Ollie Riches had a post last week that I'm just catching up to... about the 'push model' for network connectivity they produced in WP7 Contrib. Using the Camera in Windows Phone 7 Jesse Liberty has a bunch of posts up... I'm just going to bite the bullet and catch up! ... this 'From Scratch post 24 is all about the camera in your WP7 dev travails... and he makes it look so darned easy :) Linq and Fluent Programming Jesse Liberty's next post is 'From Scratch 25 and is all about Linq and Fluent Programming which started with a discussion at Codemash with Bill Wagner... wanna get a handle on fluent programming? ... check this out. Stop What You Are Doing And Learn About Reactive Programming Another item you might want to get your head around is Reactive Programming, or Rx... Jesse Liberty has a great post up discussing this, as his 'From Scratch post 26... good external links, and lots of commentary as well. Rx–Reactive Programming for Windows Phone Jesse Liberty's 'From Scratch 27 follows the previous on about Rx by taking the Rx show to the WP7 development arena. Want a solid Rx example... here ya go! Reactive Extensions–Observable Sequences are First Class Objects Finally catching up with Jesse Liberty (for now), I find this 'From Scratch number 28 which is again on Rx and WP7 dev, expanding on the example from the previous post by harnessing the power of Rx Localizing Silverlight applications Medusa M has a nice post up at dotnetslackers on localization in Silverlight. If you haven't had to do localization before, it can get to be a pain... understanding an article like this will get you part of the way to being pain-free. Silverlight TV 59: What Goes Into Baking Silverlight? Very cool presentation for those of you interested in the bits ... John Papa's Silverlight TV number 59 is up and he's chatting with Andy Rivas about the process followed getting the bits to us. How To Send HTML Email from a LightSwitch Application Beth Massi's latest Lightswitch post is on sending HTML Email via SMTP from Lightswitch, and then follows that up with sending Email via Outlook automation. ViewModel driven animations using the Visual State Manager, DataStateBehavior and Expression Blend After some good user feedback, Joost van Schaik decided to make some modifications to his WP7 app, and got involved in a Page Title collapse animation driven from the ViewModel. Check out the nice write-up, video, external links, and source... all good! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

    Read the article

  • Corrupted 7z file

    - by KI4JGT
    I recently wanted to try out Fedora. So I transfered all my files to it via USB. Then I got frustrated with it, placed all my files in a 7z archive and then copied them back to the drive. Now, every time I try to open the archive, "an error occurred while loading the archive" Thanks for your help [edit] There is no password on the archive. ls -alF file.7z -rw-r--r-- 1 jesse jesse 2422670837 Nov 3 22:58 file.7z 7z t file.7z 7-Zip [64] 9.20 Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov 2010-11-18 p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,4 CPUs) Processing archive: jesse.7z Error: Can not open file as archive $ 7z l file.7z | head -15 7-Zip [64] 9.20 Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov 2010-11-18 p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,4 CPUs) Error: jesse.7z: Can not open file as archive Errors: 1

    Read the article

  • How do I get Unity working again after installing the wrong video driver?

    - by Jesse
    First off I did something stupid. I downloaded a Nvidia driver even though I have an integrated chipset. After installation my unity was still working. However, when I restarted my computer I got an error message saying that I can't run unity. I uninstalled the Nvidia driver. I restarted my computer. Unity still does not work. In the terminal I type "unity" and everything looks okay until I get three error messages that say this: Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0". followed by: Compiz (opengl) - Fatal: glXCreateContext failed Compiz (bailer) - Info: Ensuring a shell for your session jesse@jesse-PC:~$ Cannot register the panel shell: there is already one running.

    Read the article

  • How to find out which python script is using resources?

    - by Jesse the Wind Wanderer
    Can someone tell me how to find out which python script is using lots of system resources? I can see with the 'top' command that a process called "python" is always near the top of the list. 2603 jesse 20 0 159m 27m 13m S 6 1.4 1:47.74 python Can someone tell me how to find this specific python script's name? I could go through the arduous process of disabling startup apps/processes until I finally found the one that starts this python process but there must be a better way of determining what exactly this python process is, yes? Doing a ps -AH doesn't yield anything useful. ps -AH 1 ? 00:00:00 init ... 1325 ? 00:00:00 lightdm 1382 tty7 00:01:57 Xorg 2265 ? 00:00:00 lightdm 2510 ? 00:00:00 gnome-session 2546 ? 00:00:00 ssh-agent 2560 ? 00:00:02 gnome-settings- 2582 ? 00:00:01 syndaemon 2578 ? 00:00:49 compiz 3009 ? 00:00:00 sh 3010 ? 00:00:01 gtk-window-deco 2590 ? 00:00:00 nm-applet 2591 ? 00:00:00 bluetooth-apple 2592 ? 00:00:00 indicator-ubunt 2593 ? 00:00:00 gnome-fallback- 2600 ? 00:00:05 nautilus 2601 ? 00:00:00 everpad 2603 ? 00:02:24 python

    Read the article

  • Silverlight Cream for February 23, 2011 -- #1051

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Ian T. Lackey, Kevin Hoffman, Kunal Chowdhury, Jesse Liberty(-2-), Page Brooks, Deborah Kurata(-2-), and Paul Sheriff. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Building a Radar Control in Silverlight–Part 2" Page Brooks WP7: "Reactive Drag and Drop Part 2" Jesse Liberty Expression Blend: "Simple RadioButtonList and / or CheckBoxList in Silverlight Using a Behavior" Ian T. Lackey Shoutouts: Kunal Chowdhury delivered a full day session on Silverlight at the Microsoft Imagine Cup Championship event in Mumbai... you can Download Microsoft Imagine Cup Session PPT on Silverlight Dennis Doomen has appeared in my blog any number of times... he's looking for some assistance: Get me on stage on the Developer Days 2011 Steve Wortham posted An Interview with Jeff Wilcox From SilverlightCream.com: Simple RadioButtonList and / or CheckBoxList in Silverlight Using a Behavior Ian T. Lackey bemoans the lack of a RadioButtonList or CheckBoxList, and jumps into Blend to show us how to make one using a behavior... and the code is available too! WP7 for iPhone and Android Developers - Introduction to XAML and Silverlight Continuing his series at SilvelightShow for iPhone and Android devs, Kevin Hoffman has part 2 up getting into the UI with an intro to XAML and Silverlight. Day 1: Working with Telerik Silverlight RadControls Kunal Chowdhury kicked my tires that I had missed his Telerik control series... He's detailing his experience getting up to speed with the Silverlight RadControls. Day 1 is intro, what there is, installing, stuff like that. Part 2 continues: Day 2: Working with BusyIndicator of Telerik Silverlight RadControls, followed (so far) by part 3: Day 3: Working with Masked TextBox of Telerik Silverlight RadControls Reactive Drag and Drop Part 2 Jesse Liberty has his 7th part about Rx up ... and the 2nd part of Reactive Drag and Drop, and oh yeah... it's for WP7 as well! Yet Another Podcast #25–Glenn Block / WCF Next Jesse Liberty has Glenn Block on stage for his Yet Another Podcast number 25... talking WCF with Glenn. Building a Radar Control in Silverlight–Part 2 Page Brooks has part 2 of his 'radar' control for Silverlight up... I don't know where I'd use this, but it's darned cool... and the live demo is amazing. Silverlight Charting: Setting Colors Deborah Kurata is looking at the charting controls now, and how to set colors. She begins with a previous post on charts and adds color definitions to that post. Silverlight Charting: Setting the Tooltip Deborah Kurata next gets into formatting the tooltip you can get when the user hovers over a chart to make it make more sense to your user 'Content' is NOT 'Text' in XAML Paul Sheriff discusses the Content property of XAML controls and how it can be pretty much any other XAML you want it to be, then goes on to show some nice examples. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

    Read the article

  • Windows 8 language missing

    - by Jesse Hayward
    I have recently installed windows 8 however i have found that when i try to look through the languages i cannot find the english version so i am now stuck trying to read french until i find out how to do it. I have tried the normal way of going through the language options clicking on the add language options, then looking for english, however this does not find english, If soemone could please link me to a download or try to find a solution this would be great Regards Jesse hayward

    Read the article

  • Why does VIM say there is trailing whitespace on this command?

    - by Jesse Atkinson
    I am trying to write a beautify CSS command in vim that sorts and alphabetizes all of the CSS properties as well as checks to see if there is not a space after the colon and inserts one. Here is my code: nnoremap <leader>S :g#\({\n\)\@<=#.,/}/sort | %s/:\(\S\)/: \1/g<CR> :command! SortCSSBraceContents :g#\({\n\)\@<=#.,/}/sort | %s/:\(\S\)/: \1/g These work independently. However, I am trying to pipe them into one command. On save VIM says: Error detected while processing /var/home/jesse-atkinson/.vimrc: line 196: E488: Trailing characters Any ideas?

    Read the article

  • Making a Case For The Command Line

    - by Jesse Taber
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2013/06/30/making-a-case-for-the-command-line.aspxI have had an idea percolating in the back of my mind for over a year now that I’ve just recently started to implement. This idea relates to building out “internal tools” to ease the maintenance and on-going support of a software system. The system that I currently work on is (mostly) web-based, so we traditionally we have built these internal tools in the form of pages within the app that are only accessible by our developers and support personnel. These pages allow us to perform tasks within the system that, for one reason or another, we don’t want to let our end users perform (e.g. mass create/update/delete operations on data, flipping switches that turn paid modules of the system on or off, etc). When we try to build new tools like this we often struggle with the level of effort required to build them. Effort Required Creating a whole new page in an existing web application can be a fairly large undertaking. You need to create the page and ensure it will have a layout that is consistent with the other pages in the app. You need to decide what types of input controls need to go onto the page. You need to ensure that everything uses the same style as the rest of the site. You need to figure out what the text on the page should say. Then, when you figure out that you forgot about an input that should really be present you might have to go back and re-work the entire thing. Oh, and in addition to all of that, you still have to, you know, write the code that actually performs the task. Everything other than the code that performs the task at hand is just overhead. We don’t need a fancy date picker control in a nicely styled page for the vast majority of our internal tools. We don’t even really need a page, for that matter. We just need a way to issue a command to the application and have it, in turn, execute the code that we’ve written to accomplish a given task. All we really need is a simple console application! Plumbing Problems A former co-worker of mine, John Sonmez, always advocated the Unix philosophy for building internal tools: start with something that runs at the command line, and then build a UI on top of that if you need to. John’s idea has a lot of merit, and we tried building out some internal tools as simple Console applications. Unfortunately, this was often easier said that done. Doing a “File –> New Project” to build out a tool for a mature system can be pretty daunting because that new project is totally empty.  In our case, the web application code had a lot of of “plumbing” built in: it managed authentication and authorization, it handled database connection management for our multi-tenanted architecture, it managed all of the context that needs to follow a user around the application such as their timezone and regional/language settings. In addition, the configuration file for the web application  (a web.config in our case because this is an ASP .NET application) is large and would need to be reproduced into a similar configuration file for a Console application. While most of these problems are could be solved pretty easily with some refactoring of the codebase, building Console applications for internal tools still potentially suffers from one pretty big drawback: you’d have to execute them on a machine with network access to all of the needed resources. Obviously, our web servers can easily communicate the the database servers and can publish messages to our service bus, but the same is not true for all of our developer and support personnel workstations. We could have everyone run these tools remotely via RDP or SSH, but that’s a bit cumbersome and certainly a lot less convenient than having the tools built into the web application that is so easily accessible. Mix and Match So we need a way to build tools that are easily accessible via the web application but also don’t require the overhead of creating a user interface. This is where my idea comes into play: why not just build a command line interface into the web application? If it’s part of the web application we get all of the plumbing that comes along with that code, and we’re executing everything on the web servers which means we’ll have access to any external resources that we might need. Rather than having to incur the overhead of creating a brand new page for each tool that we want to build, we can create one new page that simply accepts a command in text form and executes it as a request on the web server. In this way, we can focus on writing the code to accomplish the task. If the tool ends up being heavily used, then (and only then) should we consider spending the time to build a better user experience around it. To be clear, I’m not trying to downplay the importance of building great user experiences into your system; we should all strive to provide the best UX possible to our end users. I’m only advocating this sort of bare-bones interface for internal consumption by the technical staff that builds and supports the software. This command line interface should be the “back end” to a highly polished and eye-pleasing public face. Implementation As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this is an idea that I’ve had for awhile but have only recently started building out. I’ve outlined some general guidelines and design goals for this effort as follows: Text in, text out: In the interest of keeping things as simple as possible, I want this interface to be purely text-based. Users will submit commands as plain text, and the application will provide responses in plain text. Obviously this text will be “wrapped” within the context of HTTP requests and responses, but I don’t want to have to think about HTML or CSS when taking input from the user or displaying responses back to the user. Task-oriented code only: After building the initial “harness” for this interface, the only code that should need to be written to create a new internal tool should be code that is expressly needed to accomplish the task that the tool is intended to support. If we want to encourage and enable ourselves to build good tooling, we need to lower the barriers to entry as much as possible. Built-in documentation: One of the great things about most command line utilities is the ‘help’ switch that provides usage guidelines and details about the arguments that the utility accepts. Our web-based command line utility should allow us to build the documentation for these tools directly into the code of the tools themselves. I finally started trying to implement this idea when I heard about a fantastic open-source library called CLAP (Command Line Auto Parser) that lets me meet the guidelines outlined above. CLAP lets you define classes with public methods that can be easily invoked from the command line. Here’s a quick example of the code that would be needed to create a new tool to do something within your system: 1: public class CustomerTools 2: { 3: [Verb] 4: public void UpdateName(int customerId, string firstName, string lastName) 5: { 6: //invoke internal services/domain objects/hwatever to perform update 7: } 8: } This is just a regular class with a single public method (though you could have as many methods as you want). The method is decorated with the ‘Verb’ attribute that tells the CLAP library that it is a method that can be invoked from the command line. Here is how you would invoke that code: Parser.Run(args, new CustomerTools()); Note that ‘args’ is just a string[] that would normally be passed passed in from the static Main method of a Console application. Also, CLAP allows you to pass in multiple classes that define [Verb] methods so you can opt to organize the code that CLAP will invoke in any way that you like. You can invoke this code from a command line application like this: SomeExe UpdateName -customerId:123 -firstName:Jesse -lastName:Taber ‘SomeExe’ in this example just represents the name of .exe that is would be created from our Console application. CLAP then interprets the arguments passed in order to find the method that should be invoked and automatically parses out the parameters that need to be passed in. After a quick spike, I’ve found that invoking the ‘Parser’ class can be done from within the context of a web application just as easily as it can from within the ‘Main’ method entry point of a Console application. There are, however, a few sticking points that I’m working around: Splitting arguments into the ‘args’ array like the command line: When you invoke a standard .NET console application you get the arguments that were passed in by the user split into a handy array (this is the ‘args’ parameter referenced above). Generally speaking they get split by whitespace, but it’s also clever enough to handle things like ignoring whitespace in a phrase that is surrounded by quotes. We’ll need to re-create this logic within our web application so that we can give the ‘args’ value to CLAP just like a console application would. Providing a response to the user: If you were writing a console application, you might just use Console.WriteLine to provide responses to the user as to the progress and eventual outcome of the command. We can’t use Console.WriteLine within a web application, so I’ll need to find another way to provide feedback to the user. Preferably this approach would allow me to use the same handler classes from both a Console application and a web application, so some kind of strategy pattern will likely emerge from this effort. Submitting files: Often an internal tool needs to support doing some kind of operation in bulk, and the easiest way to submit the data needed to support the bulk operation is in a file. Getting the file uploaded and available to the CLAP handler classes will take a little bit of effort. Mimicking the console experience: This isn’t really a requirement so much as a “nice to have”. To start out, the command-line interface in the web application will probably be a single ‘textarea’ control with a button to submit the contents to a handler that will pass it along to CLAP to be parsed and run. I think it would be interesting to use some javascript and CSS trickery to change that page into something with more of a “shell” interface look and feel. I’ll be blogging more about this effort in the future and will include some code snippets (or maybe even a full blown example app) as I progress. I also think that I’ll probably end up either submitting some pull requests to the CLAP project or possibly forking/wrapping it into a more web-friendly package and open sourcing that.

    Read the article

  • Silverlight Cream for December 16, 2010 -- #1011

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: John Papa, Tim Heuer, Jeff Blankenburg(-2-, -3-), Jesse Liberty, Jay Kimble, Wei-Meng Lee, Paul Sheriff, Mike Snow(-2-, -3-), Samuel Jack, James Ashley, and Peter Kuhn. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Animation Texture Creator" Peter Kuhn WP7: "dows Phone from Scratch #13 — Custom Behaviors Part II: ActionTrigger" Jesse Liberty Shoutouts: Awesome blog post by Jesse Liberty about writing in general: Ten Requirements For Tutorials, Videos, Demos and White Papers That Don’t Suck From SilverlightCream.com: 1000 Silverlight Cream Posts and Counting! John Papa has Silverlight TV number 55 up and it's an inverview he did with me the day before the Firestarter in December... thanks John... great job in making me not look stooopid :) Silverlight service release today - 4.0.51204 Tim Heuer announced a service release of Silverlight ... check out his blog for the updates and near the bottom is a link to the developer runtime. What I Learned In WP7 – Issue #3 Jeff Blankenburg has been pushing out tips ... number 3 consisted of 3 good pieces of info for WP7 devs including more info about fonts and a good site for free audio files What I Learned In WP7 – Issue #4 In number 4, Jeff Blankenburg talks about where to get some nice free WP7 icons, and a link to a cool article on getting all sorts of device info What I Learned In WP7 – Issue #5 Number 5 finds Jeff Blankenburg giving up the XAP for a CodeMash sessiondata app... or wait for it to appear in the Marketplace next week. Windows Phone from Scratch #13 — Custom Behaviors Part II: ActionTrigger Wow... Jesse Liberty is up to number 13 in his Windows Phone from scratch series... this time it's part 2 of his Custom Behaviors post, and ActionTriggers specifically. Solving the Storage Problem in WP7 (for CF Developers) Jay Kimble has released his WP7 dropbox client to the wild ... this is cool for loading files at run-time... opens up some ideas for me at least. Building Location Service Apps in Windows Phone 7 Wei-Meng Lee has a big informative post on location services in WP7... getting a Bing Maps API key, getting the data, navigating and manipulating the map, adding pushpins... good stuff Using Xml Files on Windows Phone Paul Sheriff is discussing XML files as a database for your WP7 apps via LINQ to XML. Sample code included. ABC–Win7 App Mike Snow has been busy with Tips of the Day ... he published a children's app for tracing their ABC's and discusses some of the code bits involved. Win7 Mobile Application Bar – AG_E_PARSER_BAD_PROPERTY_VALUE Mike Snow's next post is about the infamous AG_E_PARSER_BAD_PROPERTY_VALUE error or worse in WP7 ... how he got it, and how he fixed it... could save you some hair... Forward Navigation on the Windows Phone Mike Snow's latest post is about forward navigation on the WP7 ... oh wait... there isn't any... check out the post. Day 2 of my “3 days to Build a Windows Phone 7 Game” challenge Samuel Jack details about 9 hours in day 2 of his quest to build an XNA app for WP7 from a cold start. Windows Phone 7 Side Loading James Ashley has a really complete write-up on side-loading apps onto your WP7 device. Don't get excited... this isn't a hack... this is instructions for side-loading using the Microsoft-approved methos, which means a registered device. Animation Texture Creator Remember Peter Kuhn's post the other day about an Animation Texture Creator? ... well today he has some added tweaks and the source code! ... thanks Peter! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

    Read the article

  • Silverlight Cream for March 10, 2011 -- #1058

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Ian T. Lackey, Peter Kuhn, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), Jesse Liberty(-2-), Martin Krüger, John Papa, Jeremy Likness, Karl Shifflett, and Colin Eberhardt. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight TV 65: 3D Graphics" John Papa WP7: "Developing a Windows Phone 7 Jump List Control" Colin Eberhardt Shoutouts: Telerik announced a special sale on their RadControls for WP7... check it out: RadControls for Windows Phone 7 - on Sale from March 16th at a Special Promo Price! From SilverlightCream.com: Prism BootStrapper Load ModuleCatalog Ansyc Ian T. Lackey has a post up about reading the module catalog for Prism from an XML file asynchronously... fun stuff... this is how we kick-started our app... XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 6 - Input (accelerometer) Peter Kuhn has Part 6 of his XNA for Silverlight devs up at SilverlightShow. This post is on the use of the accelerometer... some great diagrams and explanations of it's use along with some code to play with... including a 'problems and pitfalls' section, and some good external links. Getting Started with Unit Testing in Silverlight for WP7 WindowsPhoneGeek has an introduction to Unit Testing in general, and then moves into Unit Testing in Silverlight for WP7, providing 3 options with links to the materials and code demonstrating the concepts. Using DockPanel in WP7 Responding to reader's questions, WindowsPhoneGeek's next post is on the DockPanel from the Silverlight Toolkit, and using it in WP7... defined declaratively and in code. Reactive Extensions–More About Chaining Jesse Liberty has post number 10 on Rx up and is a follow-on to the last one on Chaining. This time he exercises the chaining aspect of SelectMany. Yet Another Podcast #26–Walt Ritscher In his next post, Jesse Liberty has his 26th 'Yet Another Podcast' up and is chatting with my friend Walt Ritscher. If you don't know who Walt is, check out the links Jesse has on the post... I'm sure you've crossed paths. How to: Create A half square from a regular polygon (triangle) Martin Krüger demonstrates the exact placement of a half-square (isosceles right triangle), formed with a regular polygon in Blend... this is much more involved than I've made it sound... check out his post. Silverlight TV 65: 3D Graphics John Papa has Silverlight TV number 65 up and it's all about the 3D graphics stuff we saw at the Firestarter. John is talking with Danny Riddel, the CEO of Archetype, the company that built the awesome 3D demo we all gushed over. Jounce Part 12: Providing History-Based Back Navigation Jeremy Likness has part 12 of his Jounce exploration up... and discussing the stack of navigated pages that Jounce retains and providing a 'go back' functionality... and provides a good example of using it all. Prism 4 Region Navigation with Silverlight Frame Navigation and Unity Karl Shifflett has a post for all us Prism afficianados... Prism, Unity, and the Silverlight Frame Navigation framework. Some great external links for 'required reading' too. Developing a Windows Phone 7 Jump List Control Colin Eberhardt has an awesome tutorial up for creating a JumpList control for WP7... what a bunch of effort... this is a step-by-step description of designing the control he built and blogged about a while back... and it's still cool! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

    Read the article

  • Silverlight Cream for February 21, 2011 -- #1049

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Rob Eisenberg(-2-), Gill Cleeren, Colin Eberhardt, Alex van Beek, Ishai Hachlili, Ollie Riches, Kevin Dockx, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), Jesse Liberty(-2-), and John Papa. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight 4: Creating useful base classes for your views and viewmodels with PRISM 4" Alex van Beek WP7: "Google Sky on Windows Phone 7" Colin Eberhardt Shoutouts: My friends at SilverlightShow have their top 5 for last week posted: SilverlightShow for Feb 14 - 20, 2011 From SilverlightCream.com: Rob Eisenberg MVVMs Us with Caliburn.Micro! Rob Eisenberg chats with Carl and Richard on .NET Rocks episode 638 about Caliburn.Micro which takes Convention-over-Configuration further, utilizing naming conventions to handle a large number of data binding, validation and other action-based characteristics in your app. Two Caliburn Releases in One Day! Rob Eisenberg also announced that release candidates for both Caliburn 2.0 and Caliburn.Micro 1.0 are now available. Check out the docs and get the bits. Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 6) Gill Cleeren has Part 6 of his series on getting ready for the Silverlight Exam up at SilverlightShow.... this time out, Gill is discussing app startup, localization, and using resource dictionaries, just to name a few things. Google Sky on Windows Phone 7 Colin Eberhardt has a very cool WP7 app described where he's using Google Sky as the tile source for Bing Maps, and then has a list of 110 Messier Objects.. interesting astronomical objects that you can look at... all with source! Silverlight 4: Creating useful base classes for your views and viewmodels with PRISM 4 Alex van Beek has some Prism4/Unity MVVM goodness up with this discussion of a login module using View and ViewModel base classes. Windows Phone 7 and WCF REST – Authentication Solutions Ishai Hachlili sent me this link to his post about WCF REST web service and authentication for WP7, and he offers up 2 solutions... from the looks of this, I'm also putting his blog on my watch list WP7Contrib: Isolated Storage Cache Provider Ollie Riches has a complete explanation and code example of using the IsolatedStorageCacheProvider in their WP7Contrib library. Using a ChannelFactory in Silverlight, part two: binary cows & new-born calves Kevin Dockx follows-up his post on Channel Factories with this part 2, expanding the knowledge-base into usin parameters and custom binding with binary encoding, both from reader suggestions. All about UriMapping in WP7 WindowsPhoneGeek has a post up about URI mappings in WP7 ... what it is, how to enable it in code behind or XAML, then using it either with a hyperlink button or via the NavigationService class... all with code. Passing WP7 Memory Consumption requirements with the Coding4Fun MemoryCounter tool WindowsPhoneGeek's latest is a tutorial on the use of the Memory Counter control from the Coding4Fun toolkit and WP7 Memory consumption. Getting Started With Linq Jesse Liberty gets into LINQ in his Episode 33 of his WP7 'From Scratch' series... looks like a good LINQ starting point, and he's going to be doing a series on it. Linq with Objects In his second post on LINQ, Jesse Liberty is looking at creating a Linq query against a collection of objects... always good stuff, Jesse! Silverlight TV Silverlight TV 62: The Silverlight 5 Triad Unplugged John Papa is joined by Sam George, Larry Olson, and Vijay Devetha (the Silverlight Triad) on this Silverlight TV episode 62 to discuss how the team works together, and hey... they're hiring! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

    Read the article

  • Remote Desktop to Server 2008R2 fails from one particular Win7 client

    - by Jesse McGrew
    I have a VPS running Windows Web Server 2008 R2. I'm able to connect using Remote Desktop from my home PC (Windows 7), personal laptop (Windows 7), and work laptop (Windows XP). However, I cannot connect from my work PC (Windows 7). I receive the error "The logon attempt failed" in the RDP client, and the server event log shows "An account failed to log on" with this explanation: Subject: Security ID: NULL SID Account Name: - Account Domain: - Logon ID: 0x0 Logon Type: 3 Account For Which Logon Failed: Security ID: NULL SID Account Name: username Account Domain: hostname Failure Information: Failure Reason: Unknown user name or bad password. Status: 0xc000006d Sub Status: 0xc0000064 Process Information: Caller Process ID: 0x0 Caller Process Name: - Network Information: Workstation Name: JESSE-PC Source Network Address: - Source Port: - Detailed Authentication Information: Logon Process: NtLmSsp Authentication Package: NTLM Transited Services: - Package Name (NTLM only): - Key Length: 0 I can connect from the offending work PC if I start up Windows XP Mode and use the RDP client inside that. The server is part of a domain but my account is local, so I'm logging in using a username of the form hostname\username. None of the clients are part of a domain. The server uses a self-signed certificate, and connecting from home I get a warning about that, but connecting from work I just get the logon error.

    Read the article

  • Remote Desktop to Server 2008 fails from one particular Win7 client

    - by Jesse McGrew
    I have a VPS running Windows Web Server 2008 R2. I'm able to connect using Remote Desktop from my home PC (Windows 7), personal laptop (Windows 7), and work laptop (Windows XP). However, I cannot connect from my work PC (Windows 7). I receive the error "The logon attempt failed" in the RDP client, and the server event log shows "An account failed to log on" with this explanation: Subject: Security ID: NULL SID Account Name: - Account Domain: - Logon ID: 0x0 Logon Type: 3 Account For Which Logon Failed: Security ID: NULL SID Account Name: username Account Domain: hostname Failure Information: Failure Reason: Unknown user name or bad password. Status: 0xc000006d Sub Status: 0xc0000064 Process Information: Caller Process ID: 0x0 Caller Process Name: - Network Information: Workstation Name: JESSE-PC Source Network Address: - Source Port: - Detailed Authentication Information: Logon Process: NtLmSsp Authentication Package: NTLM Transited Services: - Package Name (NTLM only): - Key Length: 0 I can connect from the offending work PC if I start up Windows XP Mode and use the RDP client inside that. The server is part of a domain but my account is local, so I'm logging in using a username of the form hostname\username. None of the clients are part of a domain. The server uses a self-signed certificate, and connecting from home I get a warning about that, but connecting from work I just get the logon error.

    Read the article

  • creating a new user Ubuntu

    - by Matt
    I am trying to new user that can sftp on a server....i did this ubuntu@ip-10-112-46-15:~$ sudo useradd jesse -p testPass ubuntu@ip-10-112-46-15:~$ sudo passwd jesse Enter new UNIX password: Retype new UNIX password: passwd: password updated successfully but when i try to login via sftp I cant get in....am i missing something like adding a group or something the answer was PasswordAuthentication yes

    Read the article

  • Silverlight Cream for April 01, 2010 -- #827

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Max Paulousky, Hassan, Viktor Larsson, Fons Sonnemans, Jim McCurdy, Scott Marlowe, Mike Taulty, Brad Abrams, Jesse Liberty, Scott Barnes, Christopher Bennage, and John Papa and Ward Bell. Shoutouts: Tim Heuer posted a survey: What tools are the minimum to get started in Silverlight?... have you responded yet? Don't want to miss this discussion: Channel 9 Live at MIX10: Bill Buxton & Erik Meijer - Perspectives on Design Bookmark this... Jesse Liberty has moved his site: Silverlight Geek I stand with Tim Heuer on this: Congratulations to latest 2nd quarter Silverlight MVPs From SilverlightCream.com: Wizards. Prototype of sketching Wizard for WPF - 1 Max Paulousky is creating a SketchFlow WPF wizard in Expression Blend... looks like good Expression Blend and SketchFlow no matter what the target is Windows Phone 7 Navigation Hassan has another WP7 Video up, and this one is on Navigation and passing data from page to page. Silverlight 4 PathListBox Viktor Larsson is blogging about the PathListBox, and definitely had a good time doing so.. lots of fun examples. CountDown Clock in Silverlight 4 Fons Sonnemans has reworked his Sivlerlight 3 FlipClock to be this Silverlight 4 CountDown Clock utilizing the Viewbox control to make it scalable. Generic class for deep clone of Silverlight and CLR objects Jim McCurdy has a Silverlight 3 and 4-tested CloneObject class that he's using for creating a deep copy of an object and all it's properties... think drag/drop or undo/redo. Animating the Fill Color of a Silverlight Ellipse Scott Marlowe has a tutorial up that animates a pass/fail indicator with a smooth transition from a red to a green state... all with code. Silverlight 4, Blend 4, MVVM, Binding, DependencyObject Mike Taulty has a great tutorial up on Blend4 and binding... he's got a somewhat contrived example going, but it certainly looks good to me :) Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Authentication and Personalization Next up in Brad Abrams' series is Authentication and Personalization. RIA Services makes this easy to do... let Brad show you! An Annotated Line of Business Application Jesse Liberty is walking through the design and delivery of his HyperVideo project with this mini tutorial. Want to understand the thought process behind the LOB app, check this out. How to hack Expression Blend Seems like there was just some discussion about some of this today and here Scott Barnes posts this hack job for Expression Blend... pretty cool actually :) d:DesignInstance in Blend 4 Christopher Bennage has a follow-on post about using d:DesignInstance in Blend 4, and this is a very nice tutorial on the subject Silverlight TV 19: Hidden Gems from MIX10, UFC's Multi-Touch App John Papa and Ward Bell front and center for Silverlight TV number 19... and check out those threads! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

    Read the article

  • Silverlight Cream for April 03, 2010 -- #829

    - by Dave Campbell
    In this Issue: Scott Marlowe, Nokola, SilverLaw, Brad Abrams, Jeff Wilcox, Jesse Liberty, Alexey Zakharov, ondrejsv, Ward Bell, and David Anson. Shoutouts: Bart Czernicki has a post up about the latest with HTML5: HTML 5 is Born Old - Quake in HTML 5 I was sent a link to shoebox360 a while back and had to sign up to see the Silverlight use, but it does work very nice. I like the panoramic carousel in the viewer: shoebox360 Jeff Handley has a post up on RIA Services - Documentation Guidance and Community Samples... the team is looking for feedback from all of us Shawn Wildermuth posted his My MIX Talks' Source Code Laurent Bugnion posted his Sample code and slides for my TechDays10 (Belgium) talks From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight to WCF Cross Domain SecurityException Scott Marlowe wrote an article about an often-encountered security exception having to do with cross-domain policies. He details the problem, the response, the solution, and yet another problem/solution associated... good stuff, Scott! Simple Functions for HTML Interop You've seen Nokola's graphic work... how about some HTML Interop from him? He's exposing the code he uses in his work. New Video: ChildWindow Styling - Silverlight 3 SilverLaw has a new video tutorial on Silerlight 3 ChildWindow Styling up - in German - but the video is language-agnostic :) Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing WCF (SOAP\WSDL) Services Brad Abrams' continuation in his RIA series is this one demonstrating exposing RIA Services as a Soap\WSDL service Silverlight 4: New parser implementation. New parser features. Jeff Wilcox has a post up highlighting some of the new features in Silverlight 4 such as a new parser implementation with new XAML features. New Video Series – Getting Started With Silverlight Jesse Liberty is starting a new video tutorial series that's going to build out to be a "complete survey of Silverlight programming". The first two are in this post and are Getting Started and Adding Controls to a Silverlight App... looks like good material, Jesse, and all the source is there for the taking as well. Silverlight layout hack: Centered content with fixed maxwidth Alexey Zakharov has a quick tip up on creating centered content with fixed maxwidth. He calls it a dirty trick... looks like code to me :) Silverlight DataForm’s autogenerated fields send empty strings to database ondrejsv points up a problem he had with the Toolkit's DataForm, and his solution to it... with code for all of us following along behind :) DevForce Extensibility With MEF InheritedExport Ward Bell has a post up describing how they got DevForce MEF'd up, and looks like a good post to get you all excited about MEF as well... lots of external links and good info. Tip: Read-only custom DependencyProperties don't exist in Silverlight, but can be closely approximated David Anson's latest Tip is about Read-only custom DependencyProperties in Silverlight -- which strictly is not possible, but he has a code example up that gets close. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

    Read the article

  • Time Warp

    - by Jesse
    It’s no secret that daylight savings time can wreak havoc on systems that rely heavily on dates. The system I work on is centered around recording dates and times, so naturally my co-workers and I have seen our fair share of date-related bugs. From time to time, however, we come across something that we haven’t seen before. A few weeks ago the following error message started showing up in our logs: “The supplied DateTime represents an invalid time. For example, when the clock is adjusted forward, any time in the period that is skipped is invalid.” This seemed very cryptic, especially since it was coming from areas of our application that are typically only concerned with capturing date-only (no explicit time component) from the user, like reports that take a “start date” and “end date” parameter. For these types of parameters we just leave off the time component when capturing the date values, so midnight is used as a “placeholder” time. How is midnight an “invalid time”? Globalization Is Hard Over the last couple of years our software has been rolled out to users in several countries outside of the United States, including Brazil. Brazil begins and ends daylight savings time at midnight on pre-determined days of the year. On October 16, 2011 at midnight many areas in Brazil began observing daylight savings time at which time their clocks were set forward one hour. This means that at the instant it became midnight on October 16, it actually became 1:00 AM, so any time between 12:00 AM and 12:59:59 AM never actually happened. Because we store all date values in the database in UTC, always adjust any “local” dates provided by a user to UTC before using them as filters in a query. The error we saw was thrown by .NET when trying to convert the Brazilian local time of 2011-10-16 12:00 AM to UTC since that local time never actually existed. We hadn’t experienced this same issue with any of our US customers because the daylight savings time changes in the US occur at 2:00 AM which doesn’t conflict with our “placeholder” time of midnight. Detecting Invalid Times In .NET you might use code similar to the following for converting a local time to UTC: var localDate = new DateTime(2011, 10, 16); //2011-10-16 @ midnight const string timeZoneId = "E. South America Standard Time"; //Windows system timezone Id for "Brasilia" timezone. var localTimeZone = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById(timeZoneId); var convertedDate = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeToUtc(localDate, localTimeZone); The code above throws the “invalid time” exception referenced above. We could try to detect whether or not the local time is invalid with something like this: var localDate = new DateTime(2011, 10, 16); //2011-10-16 @ midnight const string timeZoneId = "E. South America Standard Time"; //Windows system timezone Id for "Brasilia" timezone. var localTimeZone = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById(timeZoneId); if (localTimeZone.IsInvalidTime(localDate)) localDate = localDate.AddHours(1); var convertedDate = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeToUtc(localDate, localTimeZone); This code works in this particular scenario, but it hardly seems robust. It also does nothing to address the issue that can arise when dealing with the ambiguous times that fall around the end of daylight savings. When we roll the clocks back an hour they record the same hour on the same day twice in a row. To continue on with our Brazil example, on February 19, 2012 at 12:00 AM, it will immediately become February 18, 2012 at 11:00 PM all over again. In this scenario, how should we interpret February 18, 2011 11:30 PM? Enter Noda Time I heard about Noda Time, the .NET port of the Java library Joda Time, a little while back and filed it away in the back of my mind under the “sounds-like-it-might-be-useful-someday” category.  Let’s see how we might deal with the issue of invalid and ambiguous local times using Noda Time (note that as of this writing the samples below will only work using the latest code available from the Noda Time repo on Google Code. The NuGet package version 0.1.0 published 2011-08-19 will incorrectly report unambiguous times as being ambiguous) : var localDateTime = new LocalDateTime(2011, 10, 16, 0, 0); const string timeZoneId = "Brazil/East"; var timezone = DateTimeZone.ForId(timeZoneId); var localDateTimeMaping = timezone.MapLocalDateTime(localDateTime); ZonedDateTime unambiguousLocalDateTime; switch (localDateTimeMaping.Type) { case ZoneLocalMapping.ResultType.Unambiguous: unambiguousLocalDateTime = localDateTimeMaping.UnambiguousMapping; break; case ZoneLocalMapping.ResultType.Ambiguous: unambiguousLocalDateTime = localDateTimeMaping.EarlierMapping; break; case ZoneLocalMapping.ResultType.Skipped: unambiguousLocalDateTime = new ZonedDateTime( localDateTimeMaping.ZoneIntervalAfterTransition.Start, timezone); break; default: throw new InvalidOperationException(string.Format("Unexpected mapping result type: {0}", localDateTimeMaping.Type)); } var convertedDateTime = unambiguousLocalDateTime.ToInstant().ToDateTimeUtc(); Let’s break this sample down: I’m using the Noda Time ‘LocalDateTime’ object to represent the local date and time. I’ve provided the year, month, day, hour, and minute (zeros for the hour and minute here represent midnight). You can think of a ‘LocalDateTime’ as an “invalidated” date and time; there is no information available about the time zone that this date and time belong to, so Noda Time can’t make any guarantees about its ambiguity. The ‘timeZoneId’ in this sample is different than the ones above. In order to use the .NET TimeZoneInfo class we need to provide Windows time zone ids. Noda Time expects an Olson (tz / zoneinfo) time zone identifier and does not currently offer any means of mapping the Windows time zones to their Olson counterparts, though project owner Jon Skeet has said that some sort of mapping will be publicly accessible at some point in the future. I’m making use of the Noda Time ‘DateTimeZone.MapLocalDateTime’ method to disambiguate the original local date time value. This method returns an instance of the Noda Time object ‘ZoneLocalMapping’ containing information about the provided local date time maps to the provided time zone.  The disambiguated local date and time value will be stored in the ‘unambiguousLocalDateTime’ variable as an instance of the Noda Time ‘ZonedDateTime’ object. An instance of this object represents a completely unambiguous point in time and is comprised of a local date and time, a time zone, and an offset from UTC. Instances of ZonedDateTime can only be created from within the Noda Time assembly (the constructor is ‘internal’) to ensure to callers that each instance represents an unambiguous point in time. The value of the ‘unambiguousLocalDateTime’ might vary depending upon the ‘ResultType’ returned by the ‘MapLocalDateTime’ method. There are three possible outcomes: If the provided local date time is unambiguous in the provided time zone I can immediately set the ‘unambiguousLocalDateTime’ variable from the ‘Unambiguous Mapping’ property of the mapping returned by the ‘MapLocalDateTime’ method. If the provided local date time is ambiguous in the provided time zone (i.e. it falls in an hour that was repeated when moving clocks backward from Daylight Savings to Standard Time), I can use the ‘EarlierMapping’ property to get the earlier of the two possible local dates to define the unambiguous local date and time that I need. I could have also opted to use the ‘LaterMapping’ property in this case, or even returned an error and asked the user to specify the proper choice. The important thing to note here is that as the programmer I’ve been forced to deal with what appears to be an ambiguous date and time. If the provided local date time represents a skipped time (i.e. it falls in an hour that was skipped when moving clocks forward from Standard Time to Daylight Savings Time),  I have access to the time intervals that fell immediately before and immediately after the point in time that caused my date to be skipped. In this case I have opted to disambiguate my local date and time by moving it forward to the beginning of the interval immediately following the skipped period. Again, I could opt to use the end of the interval immediately preceding the skipped period, or raise an error depending on the needs of the application. The point of this code is to convert a local date and time to a UTC date and time for use in a SQL Server database, so the final ‘convertedDate’  variable (typed as a plain old .NET DateTime) has its value set from a Noda Time ‘Instant’. An 'Instant’ represents a number of ticks since 1970-01-01 at midnight (Unix epoch) and can easily be converted to a .NET DateTime in the UTC time zone using the ‘ToDateTimeUtc()’ method. This sample is admittedly contrived and could certainly use some refactoring, but I think it captures the general approach needed to take a local date and time and convert it to UTC with Noda Time. At first glance it might seem that Noda Time makes this “simple” code more complicated and verbose because it forces you to explicitly deal with the local date disambiguation, but I feel that the length and complexity of the Noda Time sample is proportionate to the complexity of the problem. Using TimeZoneInfo leaves you susceptible to overlooking ambiguous and skipped times that could result in run-time errors or (even worse) run-time data corruption in the form of a local date and time being adjusted to UTC incorrectly. I should point out that this research is my first look at Noda Time and I know that I’ve only scratched the surface of its full capabilities. I also think it’s safe to say that it’s still beta software for the time being so I’m not rushing out to use it production systems just yet, but I will definitely be tinkering with it more and keeping an eye on it as it progresses.

    Read the article

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12  | Next Page >