geeks with blogs - Page 101

T-SQL in SQL Azure

- by kaleidoscope

The following table summarizes the Transact-SQL support provided by SQL Azure Database at PDC 2009: Transact-SQL Features Supported Transact-SQL Features Unsupported Constants Constraints Cursors Index management and rebuilding indexes Local temporary tables Reserved keywords Stored procedures Statistics management Transactions Triggers Tables, joins, and table variables Transact-SQL language elements such as Create/drop databases Create/alter/drop tables Create/alter/drop users and logins User-defined functions Views, including sys.synonyms view Common Language Runtime (CLR) Database file placement Database mirroring Distributed queries Distributed transactions Filegroup management Global temporary tables Spatial data and indexes SQL Server configuration options SQL Server Service Broker System tables Trace Flags Amit, S

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Android - Switching Activities with a Tab Layout

- by Bill Osuch

This post is based on the Tab Layout tutorial on the Android developers site, with some modifications. I wanted to get rid of the icons (they take up too much screen real estate), and modify the fonts on the tabs. First, create a new Android project, with an Activity called TabWidget. Then, create two additional Activities called TabOne and TabTwo. Throw a simple TextView on each one with a message identifying the tab, like this: public class TabTwo extends Activity { @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); TextView tv = new TextView(this); tv.setText("This is tab 2"); setContentView(tv); } } And don't forget to add them to your AndroidManifest.xml file: <activity android:name=".TabOne"></activity> <activity android:name=".TabTwo"></activity> Now we'll create the tab layout - open the res/layout/main.xml file and insert the following: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <TabHost xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:id="@android:id/tabhost" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent"> <LinearLayout android:orientation="vertical" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent"> <TabWidget android:id="@android:id/tabs" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" /> <FrameLayout android:id="@android:id/tabcontent" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" /> </LinearLayout> </TabHost> Finally, we'll create the code needed to populate the TabHost. Make sure your TabWidget class extends TabActivity rather than Activity, and add code to grab the TabHost and create an Intent to launch a new Activity: TabHost tabHost = getTabHost(); // The activity TabHost TabHost.TabSpec spec; // Reusable TabSpec for each tab Intent intent; // Reusable Intent for each tab // Create an Intent to launch an Activity for the tab (to be reused) intent = new Intent().setClass(this, TabOne.class); Add the first tab to the layout: // Initialize a TabSpec for each tab and add it to the TabHost spec = tabHost.newTabSpec("tabOne"); spec.setContent(intent); spec.setIndicator("Tab One"); tabHost.addTab(spec); It's pretty tall as-is, so we'll shorten it: // Squish the tab a little bit horizontally tabHost.getTabWidget().getChildAt(0).getLayoutParams().height = 40; But the text is a little small, so let's increase the font size: // Bump the text size up LinearLayout ll = (LinearLayout) tabHost.getChildAt(0); android.widget.TabWidget tw = (android.widget.TabWidget) ll.getChildAt(0); RelativeLayout rllf = (RelativeLayout) tw.getChildAt(0); TextView lf = (TextView) rllf.getChildAt(1); lf.setTextSize(20); Do the same for the second tab, and you wind up with this: @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); TabHost tabHost = getTabHost(); // The activity TabHost TabHost.TabSpec spec; // Reusable TabSpec for each tab Intent intent; // Reusable Intent for each tab // Create an Intent to launch an Activity for the tab (to be reused) intent = new Intent().setClass(this, TabOne.class); // Initialize a TabSpec for each tab and add it to the TabHost spec = tabHost.newTabSpec("tabOne"); spec.setContent(intent); spec.setIndicator("Tab One"); tabHost.addTab(spec); // Squish the tab a little bit horizontally tabHost.getTabWidget().getChildAt(0).getLayoutParams().height = 40; // Bump the text size up LinearLayout ll = (LinearLayout) tabHost.getChildAt(0); android.widget.TabWidget tw = (android.widget.TabWidget) ll.getChildAt(0); RelativeLayout rllf = (RelativeLayout) tw.getChildAt(0); TextView lf = (TextView) rllf.getChildAt(1); lf.setTextSize(20); // Do the same for the other tabs intent = new Intent().setClass(this, TabTwo.class); spec = tabHost.newTabSpec("tabTwo"); spec.setContent(intent); spec.setIndicator("Tab Two"); tabHost.addTab(spec); tabHost.getTabWidget().getChildAt(1).getLayoutParams().height = 40; RelativeLayout rlrf = (RelativeLayout) tw.getChildAt(1); TextView rf = (TextView) rlrf.getChildAt(1); rf.setTextSize(20); tabHost.setCurrentTab(0); } Save and fire up the emulator, and you should be able to switch back and forth between your tabs!

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Securing ClickOnce hosted with Amazon S3 Storage

- by saifkhan

Well, since my post on hosting ClickOnce with Amazon S3 Storage, I've received quite a few emails asking how to secure the deployment. At the time of this post I regret to say that there is no way to secure your ClickOnce deployment hosted with Amazon S3. The S3 storage is secured by ACL meaning that a username and password will have to be provided before access. The Amazon CloudFront, which sits on top of S3, allows you to apply security settings to your CloudFront distribution by Applying an encryption to the URL. Restricting by IP. The problem with the CloudFront is that the encryption of the URL is mandatory. ClickOnce does not provide a way to pass the "Amazon Public Key" to the CloudFront URL (you probably can if you start editing the XML and HTML files ClickOnce generate but that defeats the porpose of ClickOnce all together). What would be nice is if Amazon can allow users to restrict by IP addresses or IP Blocks. I'd sent them an email and received a response that this is something they are looking into...I won't hold my breadth though. Alternative I suggest you look at Rack Space Cloud hosting http://www.rackspacecloud.com they have very competitive pricing and recently started hosting Windows Virtual Servers. What you can do is rent a virtual server, setup IIS to host your ClickOnce applications. You can then use IIS security setting to restrict what IP/Blocks can access your ClickOnce payloads. Note: You don't really need Windows Server to host ClickOnce. Any web server can do. If you are familiar with Linux you can run that VM with rackspace for half the price of Windows. I hope you found this information helpful.

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Welcome to the Oracle Retail International Blog

- by sarah.taylor(at)oracle.com

Welcome to the first post of the new Oracle Retail International Blog. Retail is an international business and today's successful retailers view themselves in the context of a global market. A niche fashion business in Tokyo will learn marketing strategies from the luxury brands of Milan, an independent grocer in Oslo will source the same global brands as a supermarket in Oklahoma, and every retailer in the world will measure their multi-channel operation against the international e-commerce giant Amazon. Why? Because today's customer is a global customer with unparalleled expectations on choice, price and service. Today's consumers have access to more information on retail than ever before. Technology allows people to shop from their home, their office or from the phone in their pocket, wherever they are and at whatever time suits them. Customers are using the web to search for products and promotions. They are also using the web to develop their voice in commenting on products and services that have delighted or disappointed. In an information rich industry, this customer element creates a new world of data. The best retailers are developing eagle eyes for reading customer activity and turning it into profitable decisions. Ultimately, whether you choose to compete or shop on price, service, product innovation, excellent operations or all of the above - the international world of retail has become an inspiration for all - retailer and consumer alike. Retail as an industry is growing and diversifying at a faster rate than ever before. Yet it is still the customer who picks the winners and the losers on the retail field. Economic circumstances transform the rules, but it is still the customer who dictates the game, the pace, the price, and the perception of the brand. Wise retailers never rest on their laurels. They are always shopping for ideas on how to improve and differentiate the offer at every touch point to meet the customer's needs better than anyone else and to gain each customer's loyalty at a time when loyalty can be cheap. With this blog, I hope that we might provide a hub for discussion around what unifies retail and how technology supports both the retailer and customer experience. Despite the competitive nature of this market, we hope that this will provide an opportunity to share experiences and lessons learnt with a view that knowledge can only help this industry to grow and develop. At Oracle we've been supporting retailers for many years. Many of us have worked within retail organisations all over the world, myself included. With this in mind, I don't feel it is too bold a statement to say that Oracle understands retail. We wouldn't be so heavily integrated in some of the biggest and most well-known names in retail if we didn't. With this blog, we intend to create a community of international retailers that can exchange ideas and experiences, debate collective challenges and drive a better understanding of this continually evolving industry. Events such as the World Retail Congress and NRF's Big Show bring enormous value to the retail industry providing platforms for discussion and learning but they happen once a year. We wanted to create a platform for discussion on a different level and that like retail, is always on. We hope not only to bring commitment to being not only the infrastructure that brings all of their systems together within a retail business, but an infrastructure that supports the industry internationally to grow and flourish through creating a platform for networking, discussion, creativity, vision and strategy. Please feel free to ask questions or comment using the comments functionality. You might also want to visit our other Oracle Retail social media sites: Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/oracleretail YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/oracleretail Twitter - http://twitter.com/#!/oracleretailInsight-Driven Retailing Blog - http://blogs.oracle.com/retail/

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Web Camps by Microsoft

- by Shaun

Just knew from Wang Tao that Microsoft will launch the Web Camp event in many cities to share their technologies and experience on web application building. The topics of this Web Camps would focus on ASP.NET, jQuery and Entity Frameworks and how to build a cool web application based on them which I’m very interesting. And another reason is that, it’s FREE. Please have the detail information and register at http://www.webcamps.ms/, which is built on Windows Azure. And the speaker in Beijing would be Scott Hanselam and James Senior – WOW! 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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Testing Workflows – Test-After

- by Timothy Klenke

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TimothyK/archive/2014/05/30/testing-workflows-ndash-test-after.aspxIn this post I’m going to outline a few common methods that can be used to increase the coverage of of your test suite. This won’t be yet another post on why you should be doing testing; there are plenty of those types of posts already out there. Assuming you know you should be testing, then comes the problem of how do I actual fit that into my day job. When the opportunity to automate testing comes do you take it, or do you even recognize it? There are a lot of ways (workflows) to go about creating automated tests, just like there are many workflows to writing a program. When writing a program you can do it from a top-down approach where you write the main skeleton of the algorithm and call out to dummy stub functions, or a bottom-up approach where the low level functionality is fully implement before it is quickly wired together at the end. Both approaches are perfectly valid under certain contexts. Each approach you are skilled at applying is another tool in your tool belt. The more vectors of attack you have on a problem – the better. So here is a short, incomplete list of some of the workflows that can be applied to increasing the amount of automation in your testing and level of quality in general. Think of each workflow as an opportunity that is available for you to take. Test workflows basically fall into 2 categories: test first or test after. Test first is the best approach. However, this post isn’t about the one and only best approach. I want to focus more on the lesser known, less ideal approaches that still provide an opportunity for adding tests. In this post I’ll enumerate some test-after workflows. In my next post I’ll cover test-first. Bug Reporting When someone calls you up or forwards you a email with a vague description of a bug its usually standard procedure to create or verify a reproduction plan for the bug via manual testing and log that in a bug tracking system. This can be problematic. Often reproduction plans when written down might skip a step that seemed obvious to the tester at the time or they might be missing some crucial environment setting. Instead of data entry into a bug tracking system, try opening up the test project and adding a failing unit test to prove the bug. The test project guarantees that all aspects of the environment are setup properly and no steps are missing. The language in the test project is much more precise than the English that goes into a bug tracking system. This workflow can easily be extended for Enhancement Requests as well as Bug Reporting. Exploratory Testing Exploratory testing comes in when you aren’t sure how the system will behave in a new scenario. The scenario wasn’t planned for in the initial system requirements and there isn’t an existing test for it. By definition the system behaviour is “undefined”. So write a new unit test to define that behaviour. Add assertions to the tests to confirm your assumptions. The new test becomes part of the living system specification that is kept up to date with the test suite. Examples This workflow is especially good when developing APIs. When you are finally done your production API then comes the job of writing documentation on how to consume the API. Good documentation will also include code examples. Don’t let these code examples merely exist in some accompanying manual; implement them in a test suite. Example tests and documentation do not have to be created after the production API is complete. It is best to write the example code (tests) as you go just before the production code. Smoke Tests Every system has a typical use case. This represents the basic, core functionality of the system. If this fails after an upgrade the end users will be hosed and they will be scratching their heads as to how it could be possible that an update got released with this core functionality broken. The tests for this core functionality are referred to as “smoke tests”. It is a good idea to have them automated and run with each build in order to avoid extreme embarrassment and angry customers. Coverage Analysis Code coverage analysis is a tool that reports how much of the production code base is exercised by the test suite. In Visual Studio this can be found under the Test main menu item. The tool will report a total number for the code coverage, which can be anywhere between 0 and 100%. Coverage Analysis shouldn’t be used strictly for numbers reporting. Companies shouldn’t set minimum coverage targets that mandate that all projects must have at least 80% or 100% test coverage. These arbitrary requirements just invite gaming of the coverage analysis, which makes the numbers useless. The analysis tool will break down the coverage by the various classes and methods in projects. Instead of focusing on the total number, drill down into this view and see which classes have high or low coverage. It you are surprised by a low number on a class this is an opportunity to add tests. When drilling through the classes there will be generally two types of reaction to a surprising low test coverage number. The first reaction type is a recognition that there is low hanging fruit to be picked. There may be some classes or methods that aren’t being tested, which could easy be. The other reaction type is “OMG”. This were you find a critical piece of code that isn’t under test. In both cases, go and add the missing tests. Test Refactoring The general theme of this post up to this point has been how to add more and more tests to a test suite. I’ll step back from that a bit and remind that every line of code is a liability. Each line of code has to be read and maintained, which costs money. This is true regardless whether the code is production code or test code. Remember that the primary goal of the test suite is that it be easy to read so that people can easily determine the specifications of the system. Make sure that adding more and more tests doesn’t interfere with this primary goal. Perform code reviews on the test suite as often as on production code. Hold the test code up to the same high readability standards as the production code. If the tests are hard to read then change them. Look to remove duplication. Duplicate setup code between two or more test methods that can be moved to a shared function. Entire test methods can be removed if it is found that the scenario it tests is covered by other tests. Its OK to delete a test that isn’t pulling its own weight anymore. Remember to only start refactoring when all the test are green. Don’t refactor the tests and the production code at the same time. An automated test suite can be thought of as a double entry book keeping system. The unchanging, passing production code serves as the tests for the test suite while refactoring the tests. As with all refactoring, it is best to fit this into your regular work rather than asking for time later to get it done. Fit this into the standard red-green-refactor cycle. The refactor step no only applies to production code but also the tests, but not at the same time. Perhaps the cycle should be called red-green-refactor production-refactor tests (not quite as catchy). That about covers most of the test-after workflows I can think of. In my next post I’ll get into test-first workflows.

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Silverlight Cream for February 17, 2011 -- #1048

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Oren Gal, Andrea Boschin(-2-), Kevin Hoffman, Rudi Grobler(-2-, -3-), Michael Crump, Yochay Kiriaty, Peter Kuhn, Loek van den Ouweland, Jeremy Likness, Jesse Liberty, and WindowsPhoneGeek. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Multiple page printing in Silverlight4 - Part 2 - preview before printing" Oren Gal WP7: "Windows Phone 7 Tombstoning with MVVM and Sterling" Jeremy Likness XNA: "XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 4 - Animation (frame-based)" Peter Kuhn From SilverlightCream.com: Multiple page printing in Silverlight4 - Part 2 - preview before printing Oren Gal has part 2 of his Printing with Silverlight 4 series up, and this time he's putting up a preview... how cool is that? Inject ApplicationServices with MEF reloaded: supporting recomposition Andrea Boschin revisited his Inject ApplicationServices with MEF post because of feedback, and took it from the realm of an interesting example to a useful solution. Windows Phone 7 - Part #5: Panorama and Pivot controls Andrea Boschin also has part 5 of his WP7 series up at SilverlightShow... want a good demo of both the panorama and the pivot controls... here it is all in one tutorial WP7 for iPhone and Android Developers - Introduction to C# This should be good.. a 12-part series on SilverlightShow by Kevin Hoffman on porting your iPhone/Android app to WP7... this first part an intro to C# Balls of Steel Rudi Grobler discusses the upcoming (?) release of 'Duke Nukem Forever', and has a 'soundboard' for WP7 to celebrate the event... get your Duke Nukem on with these sounds! Moonlight 4 (Preview) is here Rudi Grobler also has a post up about the release of Moonlight by Novel for Silverlight 4!... explanation and links on his post. WP7 Podcasts Rudi Grobler highlights two WP7 Podcasts that are putting out good material... check them out if you haven't already. Having Fun with Coding4Fun’s Windows Phone 7 Controls Michael Crump takes a look at his WP7 app and uses the Coding4Fun project toolset while doing so... getting the tools, setting them up, and consuming them. Windows Phone Silverlight Application Faster Load Time Yochay Kiriaty has a good long discussion up about how to get faster load time out of your WP7 apps... good useful external links throughout. XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 4 - Animation (frame-based) Peter Kuhn's part 4 of his XNA for Silverlight devs is up at Silverlightshow and is a great tutorial on frame-based animation. Windows Phone SoundEffect clipping Loek van den Ouweland has some good information about soudn clips on WP7... the solutions aren't always code solutions.... good to know info. Windows Phone 7 Tombstoning with MVVM and Sterling Jeremy Likness is discussing Tombstoning via MVVM and Sterling... read on how Sterling gives you a leg up on the Tombstone express. Video: Reactive Phone Programming For Windows Phone 7 Fitting in nicely with his podcast on Reactive Programming, Jesse Liberty releases a video on Reactive Programming for WP7. Talking about Data Binding in WP7 | Coding4fun TextBoxBinding helper in depth WindowsPhoneGeek's latest post walks through WP7 databinding in detail with lots of good external links, then follows up with a discussion of the Coding4Fun Binding Helpers 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

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The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'bam_Metadata_GetConfigurationXml'

- by Andy Morrison

We were seeing this exception on two servers when we tried to access the BAM Portal... after having to reconfigure the BAM Portal and Tools for reasons unrelated to the error: --- Log Name: Application Source: Bam Web Service Date: 2/18/2011 10:24:07 AM Event ID: 1534 Task Category: None Level: Error Keywords: Classic User: N/A Computer: yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy Description: Current User: yy\yyyyyyyy EXCEPTION: Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Management.BamManagerException: Encountered error while executing command on SQL Server "yyyyyyyyyyyyyyy". ---> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'bam_Metadata_GetConfigurationXml', database 'BAMPrimaryImport', schema 'dbo'. at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection) at System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.ThrowExceptionAndWarning(TdsParserStateObject stateObj) at System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.Run(RunBehavior runBehavior, SqlCommand cmdHandler, SqlDataReader dataStream, BulkCopySimpleResultSet bulkCopyHandler, TdsParserStateObject stateObj) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataReader.ConsumeMetaData() at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataReader.get_MetaData() at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.FinishExecuteReader(SqlDataReader ds, RunBehavior runBehavior, String resetOptionsString) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteReaderTds(CommandBehavior cmdBehavior, RunBehavior runBehavior, Boolean returnStream, Boolean async) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteReader(CommandBehavior cmdBehavior, RunBehavior runBehavior, Boolean returnStream, String method, DbAsyncResult result) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteReader(CommandBehavior cmdBehavior, RunBehavior runBehavior, Boolean returnStream, String method) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior behavior, String method) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior behavior) at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Management.SqlHelper.ExecuteQuery(String cmdText, CommandType cmdType, Transaction transaction) --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Management.SqlHelper.ExecuteQuery(String cmdText, CommandType cmdType, Transaction transaction) at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Management.BamConfigurationManager.GetConfigurationXmlFromPrimaryImportDb() at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Management.BamConfigurationManager..ctor(String piServer, String piDatabase, Int32 sqlHelperCmdTimeout, Boolean validateServerNames) at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Management.BamManager..ctor(String primaryImportServer, String primaryImportDatabase, Int32 sqlCmdTimeout, Boolean validateServerNames) at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Management.BamManager..ctor(String primaryImportServer, String primaryImportDatabase) at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.WebServices.Utilities.FetchBamManager() at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.WebServices.Management.BamManagementService.GetViewSummaryForCurrentUser() EXCEPTION: Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Management.BamManagerException: Encountered error while executing command on SQL Server "yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy". ---> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'bam_Metadata_GetConfigurationXml', database 'BAMPrimaryImport', schema 'dbo'. at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection) at System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.ThrowExceptionAndWarning(TdsParserStateObject stateObj) at System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.Run(RunBehavior runBehavior, SqlCommand cmdHandler, SqlDataReader dataStream, BulkCopySimpleResultSet bulkCopyHandler, TdsParserStateObject stateObj) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataReader.ConsumeMetaData() at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlDataReader.get_MetaData() at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.FinishExecuteReader(SqlDataReader ds, RunBehavior runBehavior, String resetOptionsString) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteReaderTds(CommandBehavior cmdBehavior, RunBehavior runBehavior, Boolean returnStream, Boolean async) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteReader(CommandBehavior cmdBehavior, RunBehavior runBehavior, Boolean returnStream, String method, DbAsyncResult result) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteReader(CommandBehavior cmdBehavior, RunBehavior runBehavior, Boolean returnStream, String method) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior behavior, String method) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior behavior) at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Management.SqlHelper.ExecuteQuery(String cmdText, CommandType cmdType, Transaction transaction) --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Management.SqlHelper.ExecuteQuery(String cmdText, CommandType cmdType, Transaction transaction) at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Management.BamConfigurationManager.GetConfigurationXmlFromPrimaryImportDb() at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Management.BamConfigurationManager..ctor(String piServer, String piDatabase, Int32 sqlHelperCmdTimeout, Boolean validateServerNames) at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Management.BamManager..ctor(String primaryImportServer, String primaryImportDatabase, Int32 sqlCmdTimeout, Boolean validateServerNames) at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.Management.BamManager..ctor(String primaryImportServer, String primaryImportDatabase) at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.WebServices.Utilities.FetchBamManager() at Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.WebServices.Management.BamManagementService.GetViewSummaryForCurrentUser() --- We reconfigured the BAM Portal and Tools multiple times, trying to fix this issue, but kept getting the exception. The fix was to add the BizTalk Server Administrators and BizTalk Application Users to the BAM_ManagementWS role in the BAMPrimaryImport database. (Note that these two groups do not appear to be added to this role in a "clean" configuration. Thanks go to Ed at http://talentedmonkeys.wordpress.com/ for figuring out a solution.

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How to use Azure storage for uploading and displaying pictures.

- by Magnus Karlsson

Basic set up of Azure storage for local development and production. This is a somewhat completion of the following guide from http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/how-to-guides/blob-storage/ that also involves a practical example that I believe is commonly used, i.e. upload and present an image from a user. First we set up for local storage and then we configure for them to work on a web role. Steps: 1. Configure connection string locally. 2. Configure model, controllers and razor views. 1. Setup connectionsstring 1.1 Right click your web role and choose “Properties”. 1.2 Click Settings. 1.3 Add setting. 1.4 Name your setting. This will be the name of the connectionstring. 1.5 Click the ellipsis to the right. (the ellipsis appear when you mark the area. 1.6 The following window appears- Select “Windows Azure storage emulator” and click ok. Now we have a connection string to use. To be able to use it we need to make sure we have windows azure tools for storage. 2.1 Click Tools –> Library Package manager –> Manage Nuget packages for solution. 2.2 This is what it looks like after it has been added. Now on to what the code should look like. 3.1 First we need a view which collects images to upload. Here Index.cshtml. 1: @model List<string> 2: 3: @{ 4: ViewBag.Title = "Index"; 5: } 6: 7: <h2>Index</h2> 8: <form action="@Url.Action("Upload")" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> 9: 10: <label for="file">Filename:</label> 11: <input type="file" name="file" id="file1" /> 12: <br /> 13: <label for="file">Filename:</label> 14: <input type="file" name="file" id="file2" /> 15: <br /> 16: <label for="file">Filename:</label> 17: <input type="file" name="file" id="file3" /> 18: <br /> 19: <label for="file">Filename:</label> 20: <input type="file" name="file" id="file4" /> 21: <br /> 22: <input type="submit" value="Submit" /> 23: 24: </form> 25: 26: @foreach (var item in Model) { 27: 28: <img src="@item" alt="Alternate text"/> 29: } 3.2 We need a controller to receive the post. Notice the “containername” string I send to the blobhandler. I use this as a folder for the pictures for each user. If this is not a requirement you could just call it container or anything with small characters directly when creating the container. 1: public ActionResult Upload(IEnumerable<HttpPostedFileBase> file) 2: { 3: BlobHandler bh = new BlobHandler("containername"); 4: bh.Upload(file); 5: var blobUris=bh.GetBlobs(); 6: 7: return RedirectToAction("Index",blobUris); 8: } 3.3 The handler model. I’ll let the comments speak for themselves. 1: public class BlobHandler 2: { 3: // Retrieve storage account from connection string. 4: CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse( 5: CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("StorageConnectionString")); 6: 7: private string imageDirecoryUrl; 8: 9: /// <summary> 10: /// Receives the users Id for where the pictures are and creates 11: /// a blob storage with that name if it does not exist. 12: /// </summary> 13: /// <param name="imageDirecoryUrl"></param> 14: public BlobHandler(string imageDirecoryUrl) 15: { 16: this.imageDirecoryUrl = imageDirecoryUrl; 17: // Create the blob client. 18: CloudBlobClient blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 19: 20: // Retrieve a reference to a container. 21: CloudBlobContainer container = blobClient.GetContainerReference(imageDirecoryUrl); 22: 23: // Create the container if it doesn't already exist. 24: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 25: 26: //Make available to everyone 27: container.SetPermissions( 28: new BlobContainerPermissions 29: { 30: PublicAccess = BlobContainerPublicAccessType.Blob 31: }); 32: } 33: 34: public void Upload(IEnumerable<HttpPostedFileBase> file) 35: { 36: // Create the blob client. 37: CloudBlobClient blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 38: 39: // Retrieve a reference to a container. 40: CloudBlobContainer container = blobClient.GetContainerReference(imageDirecoryUrl); 41: 42: if (file != null) 43: { 44: foreach (var f in file) 45: { 46: if (f != null) 47: { 48: CloudBlockBlob blockBlob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(f.FileName); 49: blockBlob.UploadFromStream(f.InputStream); 50: } 51: } 52: } 53: } 54: 55: public List<string> GetBlobs() 56: { 57: // Create the blob client. 58: CloudBlobClient blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 59: 60: // Retrieve reference to a previously created container. 61: CloudBlobContainer container = blobClient.GetContainerReference(imageDirecoryUrl); 62: 63: List<string> blobs = new List<string>(); 64: 65: // Loop over blobs within the container and output the URI to each of them 66: foreach (var blobItem in container.ListBlobs()) 67: blobs.Add(blobItem.Uri.ToString()); 68: 69: return blobs; 70: } 71: } 3.4 So, when the files have been uploaded we will get them to present them to out user in the index page. Pretty straight forward. In this example we only present the image by sending the Uri’s to the view. A better way would be to save them up in a view model containing URI, metadata, alternate text, and other relevant information but for this example this is all we need. 4. Now press F5 in your solution to try it out. You can see the storage emulator UI here: 4.1 If you get any exceptions or errors I suggest to first check if the service Is running correctly. I had problem with this and they seemed related to the installation and a reboot fixed my problems. 5. Set up for Cloud storage. To do this we need to add configuration for cloud just as we did for local in step one. 5.1 We need our keys to do this. Go to the windows Azure menagement portal, select storage icon to the right and click “Manage keys”. (Image from a different blog post though). 5.2 Do as in step 1.but replace step 1.6 with: 1.6 Choose “Manually entered credentials”. Enter your account name. 1.7 Paste your Account Key from step 5.1. and click ok. 5.3. Save, publish and run! Please feel free to ask any questions using the comments form at the bottom of this page. I will get back to you to help you solve any questions. Our consultancy agency also provides services in the Nordic regions if you would like any further support.

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SAB BizTalk Archiving Pipeline Component - Codeplex

- by Stuart Brierley

In an effort to give a little more to the BizTalk development community, I have created my first Codeplex project. The SAB BizTalk Archiving Pipeline Component was written using Visual Studio 2010 with BizTalk Server 2010 intended as the target platform. It is currently at version 0.1, meaning that I have not yet completed all the intended functionality and have so far carried out a limited number of tests. It does however archive files within the bounds of the functionailty so far implemented and seems to be stable in use. It is based on a recent evolution of a basic archiving component that I wrote in the past, and it is my hope that it will continue to evolve in the coming months. This work was inspired by some old posts by Gilles Zunino and Jeff Lynch. You can download the documentation, source code or component dll from Codeplex, but to give you a taste here is the first section of the documentation to whet your appetite: SAB BizTalk Archiving Pipeline Component The SAB BizTalk Archiving Pipeline Component has been developed to allow custom piplelines to be created that can archive messages at any stage of pipeline processing. It works in both receive and send pipelines and will archive messages to file based on the configuration applied to the component in the BizTalk Administration Console. The Archiving Pipeline Component has been coded for use with BizTalk Server 2010. Use with other versions of BizTalk has not been tested. The Archiving Pipeline component is supplied as a dll file that should be placed in the BizTalk Server Pipeline Components folder. It can then be used when developing custom pipelines to be deployed as a part of your BizTalk Server applications. This version of the component allows you to use a number of generic messaging macros and also a small number that are specific to the FILE adapter. It is intended to extend these macros to cover context properties from other adapters in future releases. Archive Pipeline Parameters As with all pipeline components, the following parameters can be set when creating your custom pipeline and at runtime via the administration console. Enabled: Enables and disables the archive process. True; messages will be archived. False; messages will be passed to the next stage in the pipeline without performing any processing. File Name: The file name of the archived message. Allows the component to build the archive filename at run-time; based on the values entered, the permitted macros and data extracted from the message context properties. e.g. %FileReceivedFileName%-%InterchangeSequenceNumber% File Mask: The extension to be added to the File Name following all Macro processing. e.g. .xml File Path: The path on which the archived message should be saved. Allows the component to build the archive directory at run-time; based on the values entered, permitted macros and data extracted from the message context properties. e.g. C:\Archive\%ReceivePortName%\%Year%\%Month%\%Day%\ \\ArchiveShare\%ReceivePortName%\%Date%\ Overwrite: Enables and disables existing file overwrites. True; any existing file with the same File Path/Name combination (following macro replacement) will be overwritten. False; any existing file with the same File Path/Name combination (following macro replacement) will not be overwritten. The current message will be archived with a GUID appended to the File Name.

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MIA

- by Robert May

So, I’ve been missing in action on this blog for quite some time. I need to rectify that. Part of the reason I’ve been absent is because I haven’t be able to talk about what I’m working on. A former client watches my blog rather closely, and although we accomplished many good things together, their culture is such that they really don’t like people to freely express their thoughts (you’ll note my blog posts stopped rather abruptly). I learned some really important lessons about Agile in the last 3 years, and I think its worthwhile to talk about them. Sometimes things worked really well, sometimes, they failed failed. Sometimes that failure was me, sometimes it wasn’t. I understand Agile better now, and hopefully, what I have to say will guide others through this process and help others understand Agile better. One thing that I’ve learned is that MANY companies that say they are doing Agile are NOT really doing Agile. To often, they pick the things they like and don’t follow the process long enough to know what rules they can break, and which ones they shouldn’t. This is probably the primary reason why Agile fails. So, expect more posts, especially as I’m flying coast to coast. :)

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ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: MVC 2 Strongly Typed HTML Helper and Enhanced Validation Sample

- by mbridge

In lue of the off the official release of ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM, I decided I would put together a quick sample of the enhanced HTML.Helpers and validation controls. I am going to use my sample event site where I will have a form so a user can search for information about a certain events. So when the Search page loads the Search action is fired return my strongly typed model. to the view. 1: [HttpGet] 2: public ViewResult Search(): public ViewResult Search() 3: { 4: IList<EventsModel> result = _eventsService.GetEventList(); 5: var viewModel = new EventSearchModel 6: { 7: EventList = new SelectList(result, "EventCode","EventName","Select Event") 8: }; 9: return View(viewModel); 10: } Nothing special here, although I did want to show how to load up a strongly typed drop down list because that hung me up for a little bit. So to that, I am going to pass back a SelectList to the view and my HTML helper should no how to load this. So lets take a look at the mark up for the view. 1: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" 2: Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<EventsSample.Models.EventSearchModel>" %> 3: 4: <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> 5: Search 6: </asp:Content> 7: 8: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> 9: 10: <h2>Search for Events</h2> 11: 12: <% using (Html.BeginForm("Search","Events")) {%> 13: <%= Html.ValidationSummary(true) %> 14: 15: <fieldset> 16: <legend>Fields</legend> 17: 18: <div class="editor-label"> 19: <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.EventNumber) %> 20: </div> 21: <div class="editor-field"> 22: <%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.EventNumber) %> 23: <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.EventNumber) %> 24: </div> 25: 26: <div class="editor-label"> 27: <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %> 28: </div> 29: <div class="editor-field"> 30: <%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %> 31: <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %> 32: </div> 33: 34: <div class="editor-label"> 35: <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.EventName) %> 36: </div> 37: <div class="editor-field"> 38: <%= Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.EventName, Model.EventList,"Select Event") %> 39: <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.EventName) %> 40: </div> 41: 42: <p> 43: <input type="submit" value="Save" /> 44: </p> 45: </fieldset> 46: 47: <% } %> 48: 49: <div> 50: <%= Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index") %> 51: </div> 52: 53: </asp:Content> A nice feature is the scaffolding that MVC has to generate code. I simply right clicked inside my Search() action, inside the EventsController and selected “Add View” and then I selected my strongly typed object that I wanted to pass to the view and also selected that I wanted the content type be “Edit”. With that the aspx page was completely generated, although I did have to go back in and change the textbox for the Event Names to a drop down list of the names to select from. The new feature with MVC 2 are the strongly typed HTML helpers. So now, my textboxes, drop down list, and validation helpers are all strongly typed to my model. This features gives you the benefits of intellisense and also makes it easier to debug. “The Gu” has a great post about the feature in case you want more details. The DropDownListFor function to generate the drop down list was a little tricky for me. You first need to use a Lanbda expression to pass in the property you want the selected value assigned to in your model, and then you need to pass in the list directly from the model. Validations To validate the form, you can use the strongly type validation HTML helpers which will inspect your model and return errors if the validation fails. The definitions of these rules are set directly on the Model itself so lets take a look. 1: using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations; 2: using System.Web.Mvc; 3: 4: namespace EventsSample.Models 5: { 6: public class EventSearchModel 7: { 8: [Required(ErrorMessage = "Please enter the event number.")] 9: [RegularExpression(@"\w{6}", 10: ErrorMessage = "The Event Number must be 6 letters and/or numbers.")] 11: public string EventNumber { get; set; } 12: 13: [Required(ErrorMessage = "Please enter the guest's last name.")] 14: [RegularExpression(@"^[A-Za-zÀ-ÖØ-öø-ÿ1-9 '\-\.]{1,22}$", 15: ErrorMessage = "The gueest's last name must 1 to 20 characters.")] 16: public string GuestLastName { get; set; } 17: 18: public string EventName { get; set; } 19: public SelectList EventList { get; set; } 20: } 21: } Pretty cool! Okay, the only thing left to do is perform the validation in the POST action. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public ViewResult Search(EventSearchModel eventSearchModel) 3: { 4: if (ModelState.IsValid) return View("SearchResults"); 5: else 6: { 7: IList<EventsModel> result = _eventsService.GetEventList(); 8: eventSearchModel.EventList = new SelectList(result, "EVentCode","EventName"); 9: 10: return View(eventSearchModel); 11: } 12: } 13: } If the form entries are valid, here I am simply displaying the SearchResult, but in a real world sample I would also go out get the results first. You get the idea though. In my case, when the form is not valid, I also had to reload my SelectList with the event names before I loaded the page again. Remember this is MVC, no _VieState here :) So that’s it. Now my form is validating the data and when it fails it looks like this.

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So you want a French Site?

- by juanlarios

I thought I would write a quick write up of how to create a french site in SharePoint 2007. I'm not talking about a Variation but just a plain French Site from the ground up. There were some gotchas that I felt were worth blogging about. First: go to Microsoft Telnet Article and follow the install instructions. Make sure that when you get to the download page that you select "French" as part of the drop down and you download and install the right language pack. I noticed that if you did not click the "change" button enven though I selected the 'french' language pack, it reverted back to the english language pack. Second: You will notice a couple of things. When you go to central admin you will see the following: Now you can pick between french site or english. You will get this if you install other language packs and they will be listed in the drop down. You will notice that you now have french headings and frech listings of sites. You see "Publishing" as a heading because I have a custom site definition that I deployed as a french site. Third: As you start navigating around and trying to create document libraries or sites you will start getting errors. Errors like the following: "Cannot make a cache safe URL for "SelectorControls.js", file not found. Please verify that the file exists under the layouts directory. " Troubleshoot issues with Windows SharePoint Services. Once you resolve the issue with this "js" file, you will find that there are other js files that are missing. The only problem is that if you are not fluent in French or the language you are trying to deploy, Well, you'll have a tough time understanding error messages as they will all be in the new language you are trying to deploy. So let's just talk about what happened when you installed the language pack. In the 12 Hive: 12/Template you will now see a 1033 folder and a 1036 folder. The 1036 folder is the folder that was created and added as part of the language pack. What the above error is saying is that now that it's looking at the 1036 folder, well, it's missing some files. The nice thing is that these files are included in the 1033 folder (which is the English Language Pack). Simply copy and paste the controls from the one folder to the other. There will be more than one conflict so you will have to move serveral controls over. Can't remember how many but simply add them as error messages come up. I had to add some navigation controls and some content selectors. Now that's all that you need to install the Frech Language pack anc reate site collections that are entirely in a another language. Do not mistake this with Variations, where you can have multiple language sites. For those of you doing a little bit extra with this, let me share what I was doing extra and what I needed to get it working for me. I had had a custom site definition which was obviously not showing up in my selection of french sites. I was under the impression that all sites in English would show up in french and that the sites were simply routed to a new Resource file for french content. And that is the case but there is a little extra that needs to be done if you have a custom site definition deployed: First: Under hive 12/Template/1033/XML there is a listing of site definition files that are deployed to the English side of things. If you navigate to 12/Template/1036/XML and open one of the site definitions you will see that they are similar and reference the existing site definitions installed on the server, except that they have some french added to descriptions and names. Simply copy the xml file of your custom template to the 1036 folder to have it show up as a selection when you select French as the dropdown entry when create a site colleciton. You can go ahead and change the description and name to suit the language it's under. Second: As part of my site definition, I packaed up several list templates, that were saved as STP files. When you navigate to the list template listing, well, the templates are for English sites, not French so I cannot create document libraries based on the template. What now? well here comes KWIzCom to the rescue! They seem to have put out a "STP language converter" where you can take a site template or list template and convert it to any target language you are after. It's a free download, Use it and you're good to go. One thing I will mention is that when I convereted the English documents I whent ahead and converted them to French-Canadien. And it didn't work! so I finally figured out that the French Version it was expecting in the french site was "French-France". Don't know why that is, it's just what needs to be done to get that working. When I did that, I was able to use the List templates that I created in the English site for the French Site. Hope it helps , good luck!

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ASP.NET MVC 3 Arrived

- by Shaun

The Gu and the Haack had just announced the ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM had been released yesterday. You can download the intall file, release note and source code here. As the Gu said with the ASP.NET MVC 3 there are some other productions released as well NuGet IIS Express 7.5 SQL Server CE 4 Web Deploy & Web Farm Framework 2.0 Orchard 1.0 WebMatrix 1.0 The Orchard is a CMS and blogging system which build from ASP.NET MVC 3 with the new Razor view engine which can be found here and here. 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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Printing problem in Silverlight 4.0 RC - loading images in code behind

- by Jacek Ciereszko

Few days ago I faced a problem with printing in new Silverlight 4 RC. When you try to dynamically load image (in code behind) and print it, it doesn't work. Paper sheet is blank. Problem XAML file: <Image x:Name="image" Stretch="None" /> XAML.cs: image.Source = new BitmapImage(new Uri(imageUri, UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute)); Print: var pd = new PrintDocument(); pd.PrintPage += (s, args) => { args.PageVisual = image; }; pd.Print(); Result: Blank paper. Solution What you need to do, is forced Silverlight engine to load that image before printing start. To accomplish that I proposed simply checking PixelWith value. Your code will ask about PixelWidth of image so it will have to be loaded. XAML.cs: BitmapImage bImage = new BitmapImage(new Uri(imageUri, UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute)); image.Source = bImage; InitControl(imageUri, movieUri, isLeft); int w = bImage.PixelWidth; int h = bImage.PixelHeight; DONE! Jacek Ciereszko

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OData where art thou?

- by Brian

Douglas Purdy explains. I think the best part will be the governmental aspect. All public record should be available in a way that’s easy to query IMHO. From the article: Many of us at Microsoft believe the OData protocol can help usher in a more open and programmable Web by creating a common funnel to expose rich data, thereby creating a world of customized consumer mash-ups; a world where government data is transparent and accessible to any citizen; a world where you can ask a question and know, “There’s a feed for that.” Do check out www.odata.org, and while you’re at it, check out codename Dallas. For all those government IT workers out there, consider the savings. No need to pay someone to format the data for a specific department or constituent. Just put it online and point them there.

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SPRoleAssignment Crazy Caviats

- by MOSSLover

I’m not sure if this bug exists on any other environment, but here are a few issues I ran into when trying to use SPRoleAssignment and SPGroup: When trying to use Web.Groups[“GroupName”] it basically told me the group did not exist, so I had to change the code to use Web.SiteGroups[“GroupName”]. I could not add the Role Assignment to the Web and run a Web.Update() without adding an additional Web.AllowUnsafeUpdates= true; , however on my virtual machine I could do a Web.Update() without the extra piece of code. I kept receiving an error in my browser stating that I should hit the back button and update my permissions. So after fixing those two issues I was able to copy the permissions from a page item into a Site for my migration. Hopefully, one of you can learn from my error messages if you have any issues in the future. Technorati Tags: SPRoleAssignment,MOSS,SPGroup

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Access Log Files

- by Matt Watson

Some of the simplest things in life make all the difference. For a software developer who is trying to solve an application problem, being able to access log files, windows event viewer, and other details is priceless. But ironically enough, most developers aren't even given access to them. Developers have to escalate the issue to their manager or a system admin to retrieve the needed information. Some companies create workarounds to solve the problem or use third party solutions.Home grown solution to access log filesSome companies roll their own solution to try and solve the problem. These solutions can be great but are not always real time, and don't account for the windows event viewer, config files, server health, and other information that is needed to fix bugs.VPN or FTP access to log file foldersCreate programs to collect log files and move them to a centralized serverModify code to write log files to a centralized placeExpensive solution to access log filesSome companies buy expensive solutions like Splunk or other log management tools. But in a lot of cases that is overkill when all the developers need is the ability to just look at log files, not do analytics on them.There has to be a better solution to access log filesStackify recently came up with a perfect solution to the problem. Their software gives developers remote visibility to all the production servers without allowing them to remote desktop in to the machines. They can get real time access to log files, windows event viewer, config files, and other things that developers need. This allows the entire development team to be more involved in the process of solving application defects.Check out their product to learn morehttp://www.Stackify.com

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Why Is Faulty Behaviour In The .NET Framework Not Fixed?

- by Alois Kraus

Here is the scenario: You have a Windows Form Application that calls a method via Invoke or BeginInvoke which throws exceptions. Now you want to find out where the error did occur and how the method has been called. Here is the output we do get when we call Begin/EndInvoke or simply Invoke The actual code that was executed was like this: private void cInvoke_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { InvokingFunction(CallMode.Invoke); } [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.NoInlining)] void InvokingFunction(CallMode mode) { switch (mode) { case CallMode.Invoke: this.Invoke(new MethodInvoker(GenerateError)); The faulting method is called GenerateError which does throw a NotImplementedException exception and wraps it in a NotSupportedException. [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.NoInlining)] void GenerateError() { F1(); } private void F1() { try { F2(); } catch (Exception ex) { throw new NotSupportedException("Outer Exception", ex); } } private void F2() { throw new NotImplementedException("Inner Exception"); } It is clear that the method F2 and F1 did actually throw these exceptions but we do not see them in the call stack. If we directly call the InvokingFunction and catch and print the exception we can find out very easily how we did get into this situation. We see methods F1,F2,GenerateError and InvokingFunction directly in the stack trace and we see that actually two exceptions did occur. Here is for comparison what we get from Invoke/EndInvoke System.NotImplementedException: Inner Exception StackTrace: at System.Windows.Forms.Control.MarshaledInvoke(Control caller, Delegate method, Object[] args, Boolean synchronous) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.Invoke(Delegate method, Object[] args) at WindowsFormsApplication1.AppForm.InvokingFunction(CallMode mode) at WindowsFormsApplication1.AppForm.cInvoke_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnClick(EventArgs e) at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnClick(EventArgs e) The exception message is kept but the stack starts running from our Invoke call and not from the faulting method F2. We have therefore no clue where this exception did occur! The stack starts running at the method MarshaledInvoke because the exception is rethrown with the throw catchedException which resets the stack trace. That is bad but things are even worse because if previously lets say 5 exceptions did occur .NET will return only the first (innermost) exception. That does mean that we do not only loose the original call stack but all other exceptions and all data contained therein as well. It is a pity that MS does know about this and simply closes this issue as not important. Programmers will play a lot more around with threads than before thanks to TPL, PLINQ that do come with .NET 4. Multithreading is hyped quit a lot in the press and everybody wants to use threads. But if the .NET Framework makes it nearly impossible to track down the easiest UI multithreading issue I have a problem with that. The problem has been reported but obviously not been solved. .NET 4 Beta 2 did not have changed that dreaded GetBaseException call in MarshaledInvoke to return only the innermost exception of the complete exception stack. It is really time to fix this. WPF on the other hand does the right thing and wraps the exceptions inside a TargetInvocationException which makes much more sense. But Not everybody uses WPF for its daily work and Windows forms applications will still be used for a long time. Below is the code to repro the issues shown and how the exceptions can be rendered in a meaningful way. The default Exception.ToString implementation generates a hard to interpret stack if several nested exceptions did occur. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Drawing; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Windows.Forms; using System.Threading; using System.Globalization; using System.Runtime.CompilerServices; namespace WindowsFormsApplication1 { public partial class AppForm : Form { enum CallMode { Direct = 0, BeginInvoke = 1, Invoke = 2 }; public AppForm() { InitializeComponent(); Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = CultureInfo.InvariantCulture; Application.ThreadException += new System.Threading.ThreadExceptionEventHandler(Application_ThreadException); } void Application_ThreadException(object sender, System.Threading.ThreadExceptionEventArgs e) { cOutput.Text = PrintException(e.Exception, 0, null).ToString(); } private void cDirectUnhandled_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { InvokingFunction(CallMode.Direct); } private void cDirectCall_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { try { InvokingFunction(CallMode.Direct); } catch (Exception ex) { cOutput.Text = PrintException(ex, 0, null).ToString(); } } private void cInvoke_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { InvokingFunction(CallMode.Invoke); } private void cBeginInvokeCall_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { InvokingFunction(CallMode.BeginInvoke); } [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.NoInlining)] void InvokingFunction(CallMode mode) { switch (mode) { case CallMode.Direct: GenerateError(); break; case CallMode.Invoke: this.Invoke(new MethodInvoker(GenerateError)); break; case CallMode.BeginInvoke: IAsyncResult res = this.BeginInvoke(new MethodInvoker(GenerateError)); this.EndInvoke(res); break; } } [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.NoInlining)] void GenerateError() { F1(); } private void F1() { try { F2(); } catch (Exception ex) { throw new NotSupportedException("Outer Exception", ex); } } private void F2() { throw new NotImplementedException("Inner Exception"); } StringBuilder PrintException(Exception ex, int identLevel, StringBuilder sb) { StringBuilder builtStr = sb; if( builtStr == null ) builtStr = new StringBuilder(); if( ex == null ) return builtStr; WriteLine(builtStr, String.Format("{0}: {1}", ex.GetType().FullName, ex.Message), identLevel); WriteLine(builtStr, String.Format("StackTrace: {0}", ShortenStack(ex.StackTrace)), identLevel + 1); builtStr.AppendLine(); return PrintException(ex.InnerException, ++identLevel, builtStr); } void WriteLine(StringBuilder sb, string msg, int identLevel) { foreach (string trimmedLine in SplitToLines(msg) .Select( (line) => line.Trim()) ) { for (int i = 0; i < identLevel; i++) sb.Append('\t'); sb.Append(trimmedLine); sb.AppendLine(); } } string ShortenStack(string stack) { int nonAppFrames = 0; // Skip stack frames not part of our app but include two foreign frames and skip the rest // If our stack frame is encountered reset counter to 0 return SplitToLines(stack) .Where((line) => { nonAppFrames = line.Contains("WindowsFormsApplication1") ? 0 : nonAppFrames + 1; return nonAppFrames < 3; }) .Select((line) => line) .Aggregate("", (current, line) => current + line + Environment.NewLine); } static char[] NewLines = Environment.NewLine.ToCharArray(); string[] SplitToLines(string str) { return str.Split(NewLines, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); } } }

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Searching for the Perfect Developer’s Laptop.

- by mbcrump

I have been in the market for a new computer for several months. I set out with a budget of around $1200. I knew up front that the machine would be used for developing applications and maybe some light gaming. I kept switching between buying a laptop or a desktop but the laptop won because: With a Laptop, I can carry it everywhere and with a desktop I can’t. I searched for about 2 weeks and narrowed it down to a list of must-have’s : i7 Processor (I wasn’t going to settle for an i5 or AMD. I wanted a true Quad-core machine, not 2 dual-core fused together). 15.6” monitor SSD 128GB or Larger. – It’s almost 2011 and I don’t want an old standard HDD in this machine. 8GB of DDR3 Ram. – The more the better, right? 1GB Video Card (Prefer NVidia) – I might want to play games with this. HDMI Port – Almost a standard on new Machines. This would be used when I am on the road and want to stream Netflix to the HDTV in the Hotel room. Webcam Built-in – This would be to video chat with the wife and kids if I am on the road. 6-Cell Battery. – I’ve read that an i7 in a laptop really kills the battery. A 6-cell or 9-cell is even better. That is a pretty long list for a budget of around $1200. I searched around the internet and could not buy this machine prebuilt for under $1200. That was even with coupons and my company’s 10% Dell discount. The only way that I would get a machine like this was to buy a prebuilt and replace parts. I chose the Lenovo Y560 on Newegg to start as my base. Below is a top-down picture of it. Part 1: The Hardware The Specs for this machine: Color : GrayOperating System : Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bitCPU Type : Intel Core i7-740QM(1.73GHz)Screen : 15.6" WXGAMemory Size : 4GB DDR3Hard Disk : 500GBOptical Drive : DVD±R/RWGraphics Card : ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730Video Memory : 1GBCommunication : Gigabit LAN and WLANCard slot : 1 x Express Card/34Battery Life : Up to 3.5 hoursDimensions : 15.20" x 10.00" x 0.80" - 1.30"Weight : 5.95 lbs. This computer met most of the requirements above except that it didn’t come with an SSD or have 8GB of DDR3 Memory. So, I needed to start shopping except this time for an SSD. I asked around on twitter and other hardware forums and everyone pointed me to the Crucial C300 SSD. After checking prices of the drive, it was going to cost an extra $275 bucks and I was going from a spacious 500GB drive to 128GB. After watching some of the SSD videos on YouTube I started feeling better. Below is a pic of the Crucial C300 SSD. The second thing that I needed to upgrade was the RAM. It came with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, but it was slow. I decided to buy the Crucial 8GB (4GB x 2) Kit from Newegg. This RAM cost an extra $120 and had a CAS Latency of 7. In the end this machine delivered everything that I wanted and it cost around $1300. You are probably saying, well your budget was $1200. I have spare parts that I’m planning on selling on eBay or Anandtech. =) If you are interested then shoot me an email and I will give you a great deal mbcrump[at]gmail[dot]com. 500GB Laptop 7200RPM HDD 4GB of DDR3 RAM (2GB x 2) faceVision HD 720p Camera – Unopened In the end my Windows Experience Rating of the SSD was 7.7 and the CPU 7.1. The max that you can get is a 7.9. Part 2: The Software I’m very lucky that I get a lot of software for free. When choosing a laptop, the OS really doesn’t matter because I would never keep the bloatware pre-installed or Windows 7 Home Premium on my main development machine. Matter of fact, as soon as I got the laptop, I immediately took out the old HDD without booting into it. After I got the SSD into the machine, I installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit. The BIOS was out of date, so I updated that to the latest version and started downloading drivers off of Lenovo’s site. I had to download the Wireless Networking Drivers to a USB-Key before I could get my machine on my wireless network. I also discovered that if the date on your computer is off then you cannot join the Windows 7 Homegroup until you fix it. I’m aware that most people like peeking into what programs other software developers use and I went ahead and listed my “essentials” of a fresh build. I am a big Silverlight guy, so naturally some of the software listed below is specific to Silverlight. You should also check out my master list of Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer. See a killer app that I’m missing? Feel free to leave it in the comments below. My Software Essential List. CPU-Z Dropbox Everything Search Tool Expression Encoder Update Expression Studio 4 Ultimate Foxit Reader Google Chrome Infragistics NetAdvantage Ultimate Edition Keepass Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Microsoft Security Essentials 2 Mindscape Silverlight Elements Notepad 2 (with shell extension) Precode Code Snippet Manager RealVNC Reflector ReSharper v5.1.1753.4 Silverlight 4 Toolkit Silverlight Spy Snagit 10 SyncFusion Reporting Controls for Silverlight Telerik Silverlight RadControls TweetDeck Virtual Clone Drive Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate VS KB2403277 Update to get Feature Pack 2 to work. Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit Windows Live Essentials 2011 Windows Live Writer Backup. Windows Phone Development Tools That is pretty much it, I have a new laptop and am happy with the purchase. If you have any questions then feel free to leave a comment below. Subscribe to my feed

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Veeam giveaway

- by marc dekeyser

Hey everybody! As you might have noticed an extra banned has showed up on this site from veeam. Since they have decided to sponsor this blog (thank you very much all! Would not have happened without all of you!) I’ll periodically share some news from them with all of you. They are doing a big give away if you register on there site, one of them being a surface tablet, which you all know is brilliant! Veeam is now featuring monthly prize drawings with some very exciting prizes. Entering is easy—just one entry is all that’s required for a chance to win every month until August 2013. Among the prizes, there are Microsoft Surface tablets, Apple iPads, and FREE passes to TechEd 2013 and VMworld 2013! Find out more about Veeam’s big giveaway.

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Bridging The Gap Between Developers And Testers With VS 2010

- by Vincent Grondin

On January 29th Etienne Tremblay and I presented infront of roughly 120 people in Ottawa a 7 hours "sketch" on how VS 2010 and TFS 2010 can help both devs and testers in their respective work. The presentation focused on how a testers' work can positively influence a developers' work and vice versa. The format was quite unusual as I said it's a "sketch" where Etienne and I "ignore" the audience and we do as if we were at work and the audience is sort of "spying" on us. In all I'm quite pleased with the content we presented and the format sure was alot of fun to render and I think the audience liked it too... The good news for you people reading this post is that it got RECORDED and it's now available for download in quick 25 to 35 minutes format on the dev teach web site: http://www.devteach.com/ALM-TFS2010-Bridgingthegap.aspx There where 2 cameras, one filming us and one capturing the screen for our demos. We switch from one to another in an intersting flow and Jean-René Roy made sure he kept all our goofs and didn't edit those funny "oups moments" where we screw-up in the scenario... Mostly educative but hilarious at times !!! I encourage you all to download and watch the 13 episodes... Follow a day at work for a tester and a developper using VS 2010 and TFS 2010 to improve their chemistry ! Thanks to Jean-René Roy for all the work he's put into this event and to Microsoft and Pyxis for sponsoring the event.

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Bridging the gap between developers and testers with VS 2010

- by Etienne Tremblay

Hey everyone, I know it’s been an eternity since I blogged but I have so much to do that I unfortunately need to prioritize. Vincent Grondin and I did a 7h presentation on the new developer and tester tools available in the VS 2010 suite. It was a blast. We did it in front of an audience (around 120) and it was taped. We did it as a play and really didn’t look at the crowd at all we were training each other on the technology. It is now available for anyone that would like to watch it at this location: http://www.devteach.com/ALM-TFS2010-Bridgingthegap.aspx What we covered in the full day event was Migration to TFS 2010 (10h00) 1-Migration of VSS to TFS (20 min.) 2-Automating the Build (Something you can't do with VSS) ( 20 Min.) 3-User story (Real application context for this presentation) (20 min.) 10h00 Pause Manuel Tests by Dev ( 11h30) 4-Adding a tester to the team (Into to MTM) (20 min.) 5-Define tests (what is a white bug) (20 min.) 6-Fix the bug and show Intellitrace and Play back the test (20 min.) 12h15 Lunch Manuel testing for maintenance (13h30) 7- Implement new Feature (web service) and Identify bug with MTM and branch for a production fix and also add a new Build script (20 min.) 8- Fix bug in production branch, Playback tests, merge the change in main branch (20 min.) Manuel testing with the lab manager (14h30) 9- Intro to Lab manager and environment (20 min.) 10- Change build script to deploy to lab and test with web service in lab environment. (20 min.) 15h15 Pause Automate UI test with CodeUI (15h30) 11- Reducing the effort of testing the UI (20 min.) 12- Repeating testing to make sure the application is working properly (20 min.) 13- Automate Coded UI with the Lab environment (20 min.) 16h30 Conclusions As you can see lots of stuff!! Enjoy the show and let us know how you like it Cheers, ET Technorati Tags: VS 2010,Testing Tools,ALM,Training

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Mounting a Microsoft Azure CloudDrive in a VMRole

- by SeanBarlow

Mounting a Drive in a VMRole is a little more complicated then a web or worker. The Web and Worker roles offer OnStart and OnStop events, which you can use to mount or unmount your drives. The VMRole does not have these same events so you have to provide another way for the drives to be mounted or unmounted. The problem I have run into is what if you have multiple drives and you only want to mount certain drives. How do you let your user mount the drive. I am not going to go into details on what kind of GUI to present to the user. I have done this in a simple WPF application as well as a console application. We are going to need to get the storage account details. One thing to note when you are mounting cloud drives you cannot use https and have to use http. We force the use of http by using false when we create the CloudStorageAccount. StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey credentials = new StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey("AccountName", "AccountKey"); CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = new CloudStorageAccount(credentials, false); Next we need to get a reference to the container. var blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); var container = blobClient.GetContainerReference("ContainerName"); Now we need to get a list of the drives in the container var drives = container.ListBlobs(); Now that we have a list of the drives in the container we can let the user choose which drive they want to mount. I am just selecting the 1st drive in the list for the example and getting the Uri of the drive. var driveUri = drives.First().Uri; Now that we have the Uri we need to get the reference to the drive. var drive = new CloudDrive(driveUri, storageAccount.Credentials); Now all that is left is to mount the drive. var driveLetter = drive.Mount(0, DriveMountOptions.None); To unmount the drive all you have to do is call unmount on the drive. drive.Unmount(); You do need to make sure you unount the drives when you are done with them. I have run into issues with the drives being locked until the VMRole is rebooted. I have also managed to have a drive be permanently locked and I was forced to delete it and upload it again. I have been unable to reproduce the permanent lock but I am still trying. The CloudDrive class provides a handy method to retrieve all the mounted drives in the Role. foreach (var drive in CloudDrive.GetMountedDrives()) { var mountedDrive = Account.CreateCloudDrive(drive.Value.PathAndQuery); mountedDrive.Unmount(); }

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FIX: Visual Studio Post Build Event Returns –1 when it should not.

- by ChrisD

I had written a Console Application that I run as part of my post build for other projects.. The Console application logs a series of messages to the console as it executes. I use the Environment.ExitCode value to specify an error or success condition. When the application executes without issue, the ExitCode is 0, when there is a problem its –1. As part of my logging, I log the value of the exit code right before the application terminates. When I run this executable from the command line, it behaves as it should; error scenarios return –1 and success scenarios return 0. When I run the same command line as part of the post-build event, Visual Studio reports the exit code as –1, even when the application reports the exit code as 0. A snippet of the build output follows: Verbose: Exiting with ExitCode=0 C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Microsoft.Common.targets(3397,13): error MSB3073: The command ""MGC.exe" "-TargetPath=C:\TFS\Solutions\Research\Source\Framework\Services\Identity\STS\_STSBuilder\bin\Debug\_STSBuilder.dll" C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Microsoft.Common.targets(3397,13): error MSB3073: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Microsoft.Common.targets(3397,13): error MSB3073: " exited with code -1. The Application returns a 0 exit code. But visual studio is reporting an error. Why? The answer is in the way I format my log messages. Apparently Visual Studio watches the messages that get streamed to the the output console. If those messages match a pattern used by visual studio to communicate errors, Visual Studio assumes an error has occurred in the executable and returns a –1. This post details the formats used by Visual Studio to determine error conditions. In my case, the presence of the colon was tripping up Visual studio. I Replaced all occurrences of colon with an equal sign and Visual Studio once again respected the exit code of the application. Verbose= Exiting with ExitCode=0 ========== Build: 3 succeeded or up-to-date, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==========

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