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• Corsair Hackers Reboot

  It wasn't easy for me to attend but it was absolutely worth to go. The Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM) organised another get-together for any open source enthusiast here on the island. Strangely named "Corsair Hackers Reboot" but it stands for a positive cause: "Corsair Hackers Reboot Event A collaborative activity involving LUGM, UoM Computer Club, Fortune Way Shopping Mall and several geeks from around the island, striving to put FOSS into homes & offices. The public is invited to discover and explore Free Software & Open Source." And it was a good opportunity for me and the kids to visit the east coast of Mauritius, too. Perfect timing It couldn't have been better... Why? Well, for two important reasons (in terms of IT): End of support for Microsoft Windows XP - 08.04.2014 Release of Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support - 17.04.2014 Quite funnily, those two IT dates weren't the initial reasons and only during the weeks of preparations we put those together. And therefore it was even more positive to promote the use of Linux and open source software in general to a broader audience. Getting there ... Thanks to the new motor way M3 and all the additional road work which has been completed recently it was very simple to get across the island in a very quick and relaxed manner. Compared to my trips in the early days of living in Mauritius (and riding on a scooter) it was very smooth and within less than an hour we hit Centrale de Flacq. Well, being in the city doesn't necessarily mean that one has arrived at the destination. But thanks to modern technology I had a quick look on Google Maps, and we finally managed to get a parking behind the huge bus terminal in Flacq. From there it was just a short walk to Fortune Way. The children were trying to count the number of buses... Well, lots and lots of buses - really impressive actually. What was presented? There were different areas set up. Right at the entrance one's attention was directly drawn towards the elevated hacker's stage. Similar to rock stars performing their gig there was bunch of computers, laptops and networking equipment in order to cater the right working conditions for coding/programming challenge(s) on the one hand and for the pen-testing or system hacking competition on the other hand. Personally, I was very impresses that actually Nitin took care of the pen-testing competition. He hardly started one year back with Linux in general, and Kali Linux specifically. Seeing his personal development from absolute newbie to a decent Linux system administrator within such a short period of time, is really impressive. His passion to open source software made him a living. Next, clock-wise seen, was the Kid's Corner with face-painting as the main attraction. Additionally, there were numerous paper print outs to colour. Plus a decent workstation with the educational suite GCompris. Of course, my little ones were into that. They already know GCompris since a while as they are allowed to use it on an IGEL thin client terminal here at home. To simplify my life, I set up GCompris as full-screen guest session on the server, and they can pass the login screen without any further obstacles. And because it's a thin client hooked up to a XDMCP remote session I don't have to worry about the hardware on their desk, too. The next section was the main attraction of the event: BYOD - Bring Your Own Device Well, compared to the usual context of BYOD the corsairs had a completely different intention. Here, you could bring your own laptop and a team of knowledgeable experts - read: geeks and so on - offered to fully convert your system on any Linux distribution of your choice. And even though I came later, I was told that the USB pen drives had been in permanent use. From being prepared via dd command over launching LiveCD session to finally installing a fresh Linux system on bare metal. Most interestingly, I did a similar job already a couple of months ago, while upgrading an existing Windows XP system to Xubuntu 13.10. So far, the female owner is very happy and enjoys her system almost every evening to go shopping online, checking mails, and reading latest news from the Anime world. Back to the Hackers event, Ish told me that they managed approximately 20 conversion during the day. Furthermore, Ajay and others gladly assisted some visitors with some tricky issues and by the end of the day you can call is a success. While I was around, there was a elderly male visitor that got a full-fledged system conversion to a Linux system running completely in French language. A little bit more to the centre it was Yasir's turn to demonstrate his Arduino hardware that he hooked up with an experimental electrical circuit board connected to an LCD matrix display. That's the real spirit of hacking, and he showed some minor adjustments on the fly while demo'ing the system. Also, very interesting there was a thermal sensor around. Personally, I think that platforms like the Arduino as well as the Raspberry Pi have a great potential at a very affordable price in order to bring a better understanding of electronics as well as computer programming to a broader audience. It would be great to see more of those experiments during future activities. And last but not least there were a small number of vendors. Amongst them was Emtel - once again as sponsor of the general internet connectivity - and another hardware supplier from Riche Terre shopping mall. They had a good collection of Android related gimmicks, like a autonomous web cam that can convert any TV with HDMI connector into an online video chat system given WiFi. It's actually kind of awesome to have a Skype or Google hangout video session on the big screen rather than on the laptop. Some pictures of the event LUGM: Great conversations on Linux, open source and free software during the Corsair Hackers Reboot LUGM: Educational workstation running GCompris suite attracted the youngest attendees of the day. Of course, face painting had to be done prior to hacking... LUGM: Nadim demoing some Linux specifics to interested visitors. Everyone was pretty busy during the whole day LUGM: The hacking competition, here pen-testing a wireless connection and access point between multiple machines LUGM: Well prepared workstations to be able to 'upgrade' visitors' machines to any Linux operating system Final thoughts Gratefully, during the preparations of the event I was invited to leave some comments or suggestions, and the team of the LUGM did a great job. The outdoor banner was a eye-catcher, the various flyers and posters for the event were clearly written and as far as I understood from the quick chats I had with Ish, Nadim, Nitin, Ajay, and of course others all were very happy about the event execution. Great job, LUGM! And I'm already looking forward to the next Corsair Hackers Reboot event ... Crossing fingers: Very soon and hopefully this year again :) Update: In the media The event had been announced in local media, too. L'Express: Salon informatique: Hacking Challenge à Flacq

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• Silverlight Cream Monday WP7 App Review # 1

  - by Dave Campbell

  I'm going to try something here... if it seems useful, I'll continue, if it doesn't, I'll stop... so give me feedback! There are *lots* of Apps in the WP7 Marketplace, and heaven help me, but the Marketplace sucks for finding stuff. I won't rehash what's already been said in the blogs, but I agree with one and all. I went out last Saturday to find 2 apps that I knew were released, and couldn't do so on my device. Even in the Zune app, it took quite a while to find them... ok, I'll back off a bit, because I just found out I can do 'Search' now if I know the name... I didn't think that was working before. So my thought is on Monday (like today), I will post a review of 5 apps/games I either use or have played with on my device. These are strictly my opinions, you understand, but hey... it's better than a poke in the eye with an iPhone! A few disclaimers:     Feel free to write me about your app and tell me about it. While it would be very cool to receive a whole bunch of xap files to review, at this point, for technical reasons, I'm unable to side-load my device. Since I plan on only doing this one day a week, and only 5, I may never get caught up, so if you send me some info, be patient. Re: games ... remember I'm old... I'm from the era of Colossal Cave and Zork. Duke-Nukem 2D and Captain Comic were awesome. I don't own an XBOX or any other game system, so take game reviews from my perspective -- who knows, it may be refreshing :) I won't pay for an app or game just to try it. If you expect me to test-drive your app, it's going to have to have a Free Trial. In this Issue:   Jingo! is the first app I bought, just to see what the experience was like. It's very much like a game we used to play in school in the Army in 1971 on paper we passed around. Sort of a cross between hangman and Mastermind, you try to figure out the hidden word in 5 tries. You get really good at 5-letter words after a while. I like this because you have to think, and you're not pressured by a clock Jingo! is by James Furdell and is $1.99 I reviewed René Schulte's Pictures Lab a while back, and have not changed my mind. This is an excellent app for playing with any photo on your device... one you've just taken, one you've synced from your PC, or one you've saved from email. I like this because you can get some cool effects for your photos, and it just works. Pictures Lab is by Schulte Software Development and is $1.99 Since I work as a consultant, and from home, I wanted something I could track my time with. I've test-driven all the contenders I could find so far on the phone, and so far I like ONTRACK! the best. If asked, I have some suggestions, but it's probably just the way I work or think. What I do like is I can tap a project to start/stop/restart a counter, and at the end of the day it shows me how much time I've been working. If there's a way to make an adjustment in case you forget to tap the counter, I don't know how to do it, and that's my biggest complaint. I like this because you can get a daily readout which you can also email as a spreadsheet. The daily results display is very good. ONTRACK! is by Qmino and is $2.99 Remember Item 4 above... I've been playing guitar for 48 years... obviously since before the invention of 'tuners', so I'm not as dependent upon these as some folks are. I've tried some in the past and have always felt I can do just as good by ear (I have perfect relative pitch). So, I gave this app by András Velvárt a dance just to see how it works, and it is surprisingly good. If you're used to one of the stage tuners this may take a little getting used to, but it does the job. The difference with this one is there is no real 'null' point inside which you can think your guitar is in tune. The soundwave stays visible on the device, and if it's moving to the right, your string is flat, if it's moving to the left, your string is sharp. Getting it exact might be tricky, but it is exact! If you need to rely on a tuner, this is a good choice in my opinion, exactly because of the sensitivity.. tune up with this and you're dead-on. Guitar Tuner is by Kinabalu Innovation Limited and is $0.99 Popper 2 is the WP7 version of a wildly popular game by Bill Reiss named Dr. Popper. You can get a trial, or you can now get a free lite version of the game. Popper 2 is a fast-paced bubble breaker game. I find it something fun to play when I just want to buzz out, but maybe the best review is that my daughter didn't want to give my phone back when I showed it to her, and always wants to grab my phone to play 'that game'. A fun distraction with great graphics and a great price Popper 2 is by Blue Rose Systems, LLC and is $1.29 Let me know what you think of the idea of doing reviews, or the layout/whatever, and 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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• Scripting Part 1

  - by rbishop

  Dynamic Scripting is a large topic, so let me get a couple of things out of the way first. If you aren't familiar with JavaScript, I can suggest CodeAcademy's JavaScript series. There are also many other websites and books that cover JavaScript from every possible angle.The second thing we need to deal with is JavaScript as a programming language versus a JavaScript environment running in a web browser. Many books, tutorials, and websites completely blur these two together but they are in fact completely separate. What does this really mean in relation to DRM? Since DRM isn't a web browser, there are no document, window, history, screen, or location objects. There are no events like mousedown or click. Trying to call alert('hello!') in DRM will just cause an error. Those concepts are all related to an HTML document (web page) and are part of the Browser Object Model or Document Object Model. DRM has its own object model that exposes DRM-related objects. In practice, feel free to use those sorts of tutorials or practice within your browser; Many of the concepts are directly translatable to writing scripts in DRM. Just don't try to call document.getElementById in your property definition!I think learning by example tends to work the best, so let's try getting a list of all the unique property values for a given node and its children. var uniqueValues = {}; var childEnumerator = node.GetChildEnumerator(); while(childEnumerator.MoveNext()) { var propValue = childEnumerator.GetCurrent().PropValue("Custom.testpropstr1"); print(propValue); if(propValue != null && propValue != '' && !uniqueValues[propValue]) uniqueValues[propValue] = true; } var result = ''; for(var value in uniqueValues){ result += "Found value " + value + ","; } return result;  Now lets break this down piece by piece. var uniqueValues = {}; This declares a variable and initializes it as a new empty Object. You could also have written var uniqueValues = new Object(); Why use an object here? JavaScript objects can also function as a list of keys and we'll use that later to store each property value as a key on the object. var childEnumerator = node.GetChildEnumerator(); while(childEnumerator.MoveNext()) { This gets an enumerator for the node's children. The enumerator allows us to loop through the children one by one. If we wanted to get a filtered list of children, we would instead use ChildrenWith(). When we reach the end of the child list, the enumerator will return false for MoveNext() and that will stop the loop. var propValue = childEnumerator.GetCurrent().PropValue("Custom.testpropstr1"); print(propValue); if(propValue != null && propValue != '' && !uniqueValues[propValue]) uniqueValues[propValue] = true; } This gets the node the enumerator is currently pointing at, then calls PropValue() on it to get the value of a property. We then make sure the prop value isn't null or the empty string, then we make sure the value doesn't already exist as a key. Assuming it doesn't we add it as a key with a value (true in this case because it makes checking for an existing value faster when the value exists). A quick word on the print() function. When viewing the prop grid, running an export, or performing normal DRM operations it does nothing. If you have a lot of print() calls with complicated arguments it can slow your script down slightly, but otherwise has no effect. But when using the script editor, all the output of print() will be shown in the Warnings area. This gives you an extremely useful debugging tool to see what exactly a script is doing. var result = ''; for(var value in uniqueValues){ result += "Found value " + value + ","; } return result; Now we build a string by looping through all the keys in uniqueValues and adding that value to our string. The last step is to simply return the result. Hopefully this small example demonstrates some of the core Dynamic Scripting concepts. Next time, we can try checking for node references in other hierarchies to see if they are using duplicate property values.

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• Can't get LWJGL lighting to work

  - by Zarkonnen

  I'm trying to enable lighting in lwjgl according to the method described by NeHe and this post. However, no matter what I try, all faces of my shapes always receive the same amount of light, or, in the case of a spinning shape, the amount of lighting seems to oscillate. All faces are lit up by the same amount, which changes as the pyramid rotates. Concrete example (apologies for the length): Note how all panels are always the same brightness, but the brightness varies with the pyramid's rotation. This is using lwjgl 2.8.3 on Mac OS X. package com; import com.zarkonnen.lwjgltest.Main; import org.lwjgl.opengl.Display; import org.lwjgl.opengl.DisplayMode; import org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11; import org.newdawn.slick.opengl.Texture; import org.newdawn.slick.opengl.TextureLoader; import org.lwjgl.util.glu.*; import org.lwjgl.input.Keyboard; import java.nio.FloatBuffer; import java.nio.ByteBuffer; import java.nio.ByteOrder; /** * * @author penguin */ public class main { public static void main(String[] args) { try { Display.setDisplayMode(new DisplayMode(800, 600)); Display.setTitle("3D Pyramid"); Display.create(); } catch (Exception e) { } initGL(); float rtri = 0.0f; Texture texture = null; try { texture = TextureLoader.getTexture("png", Main.class.getResourceAsStream("tex.png")); } catch (Exception ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); } while (!Display.isCloseRequested()) { // Draw a Triangle :D GL11.glClear(GL11.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL11.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); GL11.glLoadIdentity(); GL11.glTranslatef(0.0f, 0.0f, -10.0f); GL11.glRotatef(rtri, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); texture.bind(); GL11.glBegin(GL11.GL_TRIANGLES); GL11.glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f); GL11.glVertex3f(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); GL11.glTexCoord2f(-1.0f, -1.0f); GL11.glVertex3f(-1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f); GL11.glTexCoord2f(1.0f, -1.0f); GL11.glVertex3f(1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f); GL11.glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f); GL11.glVertex3f(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); GL11.glTexCoord2f(-1.0f, -1.0f); GL11.glVertex3f(1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f); GL11.glTexCoord2f(1.0f, -1.0f); GL11.glVertex3f(1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f); GL11.glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f); GL11.glVertex3f(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); GL11.glTexCoord2f(-1.0f, -1.0f); GL11.glVertex3f(-1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f); GL11.glTexCoord2f(1.0f, -1.0f); GL11.glVertex3f(1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f); GL11.glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f); GL11.glVertex3f(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); GL11.glTexCoord2f(-1.0f, -1.0f); GL11.glVertex3f(-1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f); GL11.glTexCoord2f(1.0f, -1.0f); GL11.glVertex3f(-1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f); GL11.glEnd(); GL11.glBegin(GL11.GL_QUADS); GL11.glVertex3f(1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f); GL11.glVertex3f(1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f); GL11.glVertex3f(-1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f); GL11.glVertex3f(-1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f); GL11.glEnd(); Display.update(); rtri += 0.05f; // Exit-Key = ESC boolean exitPressed = Keyboard.isKeyDown(Keyboard.KEY_ESCAPE); if (exitPressed) { System.out.println("Escape was pressed!"); Display.destroy(); } } Display.destroy(); } private static void initGL() { GL11.glEnable(GL11.GL_LIGHTING); GL11.glMatrixMode(GL11.GL_PROJECTION); GL11.glLoadIdentity(); GLU.gluPerspective(45.0f, ((float) 800) / ((float) 600), 0.1f, 100.0f); GL11.glMatrixMode(GL11.GL_MODELVIEW); GL11.glLoadIdentity(); GL11.glEnable(GL11.GL_TEXTURE_2D); GL11.glShadeModel(GL11.GL_SMOOTH); GL11.glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); GL11.glClearDepth(1.0f); GL11.glEnable(GL11.GL_DEPTH_TEST); GL11.glDepthFunc(GL11.GL_LEQUAL); GL11.glHint(GL11.GL_PERSPECTIVE_CORRECTION_HINT, GL11.GL_NICEST); float lightAmbient[] = {0.5f, 0.5f, 0.5f, 1.0f}; // Ambient Light Values float lightDiffuse[] = {1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f}; // Diffuse Light Values float lightPosition[] = {0.0f, 0.0f, 2.0f, 1.0f}; // Light Position ByteBuffer temp = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(16); temp.order(ByteOrder.nativeOrder()); GL11.glLight(GL11.GL_LIGHT1, GL11.GL_AMBIENT, (FloatBuffer) temp.asFloatBuffer().put(lightAmbient).flip()); // Setup The Ambient Light GL11.glLight(GL11.GL_LIGHT1, GL11.GL_DIFFUSE, (FloatBuffer) temp.asFloatBuffer().put(lightDiffuse).flip()); // Setup The Diffuse Light GL11.glLight(GL11.GL_LIGHT1, GL11.GL_POSITION, (FloatBuffer) temp.asFloatBuffer().put(lightPosition).flip()); // Position The Light GL11.glEnable(GL11.GL_LIGHT1); // Enable Light One } }

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• CD/DVD drive not mounted when inserted with Disc of any kind

  - by Cisco Sán

  I just noticed that if a insert a CD or a DVD of any kind, the Drive will start spinning but it will not show the mounted disc. Before it used to ask me what to do with the media inserted. Now it doesn't even do that. I ran in the terminal this code: eject -n and it displays this: " eject: device is `/dev/sr0'" what can I do to get the functionality back on my drive. also ran this command: sudo mount -o ro,unhide,uid=1000 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom but in return i get this: " mount: mount point /mnt/cdrom does not exist" Running Ubuntu 11.10 HERE IS THE HISTORY UNTIL NOW thanks Waltinator: I ran the 'dmesg' but don't know what I'm looking for. Im a newbie on this. The same thing with the 'ls -rlt /var/log' command. Should I create the directory for the mount? at this point really don't know what to do. – Cisco Sán 7 hours ago Here are 3 lines from my dmesg after I successfully inserted a CD: [ 4804.416018] wlan0: no IPv6 routers present [ 8214.125450] ISdit ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 3 [ 8214.136556] ISO 9660 Extensions: RRIP_1991A The first line is a previous event, my wireless going online. The next 2 lines are a good result. The number in square brackets is "seconds since boot", the rest of the line is usually helpful. And no, you should NOT create the mount point. Let's try to get the automatic mounting to work. – waltinator 7 hours ago ok this are my last 3 lines on the 'dmesg' [ 18.130819] init: plymouth-stop pre-start process (1396) terminated with status 1 [ 28.780011] wlan0: no IPv6 routers present [ 505.632119] CE: hpet increased min_delta_ns to 20113 nsec – Cisco Sán 6 hours ago It looks like your CD/DVD drive is not connected to the data bus, and not causing an interrupt when you insert a platter. – waltinator 6 hours ago Try dmesg | grep -A8 CD-ROM which should show you what the system thought was available when it came up. – waltinator 6 hours ago here is my printout [0.774351] scsi 0:0:0:0: CD-ROM HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GSA-T40N A100 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 [0.778117] sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 24x/24x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray [0.778122] cdrom: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20 [0.778282] sr 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0 [0.778340] sr 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 5 [0.780416] Freeing unused kernel memory: 984k freed [0.780732] Write protecting the kernel read-only data: 10240k [0.780986] Freeing unused kernel memory: 20k freed [0.786331] Freeing unused kernel memory: 1400k freed [0.804912] udevd[90]: starting version 173 [0.874178] r8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver 2.3LK-NAPI loaded [0.874208] r8169 0000:02:00.0: PCI INT A - GSI 16 (level, low) - IRQ 16 OK, your system sees the drive. Can you open and close the tray with eject and eject -t? Run udevadm monitor while you insert a CD (type ^C when done) and see if you get "change" and "add" messages. – waltinator 6 hours ago ok, "eject" works perfectly "eject -t" does nothing. this is the message for "udevadm monitor": KERNEL[13771.009267] change /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.1/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/block/sr0 (block) UDEV [13773.878887] change /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.1/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0 /block/sr0 (block) – Cisco Sán 6 hours ago sudo hwinfo --cdrom (the hwinfo package is installable through Software Center) describes my CD-ROM, try it. – waltinator 4 hours ago My read out from the "sudo hwinfo --cdrom" are the following: hal.1: read hal dataprocess 2753: arguments to dbus_move_error() were incorrect, assertion "(dest) == NULL || !dbus_error_is_set ((dest))" failed in file ../../dbus/dbus-errors.c line 280. This is normally a bug in some application using the D-Bus library. libhal.c 3483 : Error unsubscribing to signals, error=The name org.freedesktop.Hal was not provided by any .service files 22: SCSI 00.0: 10602 CD-ROM (DVD) [Created at block.247] Unique ID: KD9E.JgkxTS4hgl2 Parent ID: 3p2J.gdUMCD83e+E SysFS ID: /class/block/sr0 SysFS BusID: 0:0:0:0 SysFS Device Link: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1f.1/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0 Hardware Class: cdrom Model: "HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GSA-T40N" Vendor: "HL-DT-ST" Device: "DVD+-RW GSA-T40N" Revision: "A100" Driver: "ata_piix", "sr" Driver Modules: "ata_piix" Device File: /dev/sr0 (/dev/sg0) Device Files: /dev/sr0, /dev/scd0, /dev/disk/by-id/ata-HL-DT-ST_DVD+_-RW_GSA-T40N_K048BJ74257, /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:1f.1-scsi-0:0:0:0, /dev/cdrom, /dev/cdrw, /dev/dvd, /dev/dvdrw Device Number: block 11:0 (char 21:0) Features: DVD Config Status: cfg=new, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown Attached to: #17 (IDE interface) Drive Speed: 31 Volume ID: "Movie" Publisher: "INTERVIDEO" Creation date: "20050424162207000" Thanks for the help. To Castro, hope this is what you meant and sorry for the comments..

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center : Using Operational Profiles to Install Packages and other Content

  - by LeonShaner

  Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides numerous ways to deploy content, such as through OS Update Profiles, or as part of an OS Provisioning plan or combinations of those and other "Install Software" capabilities of Deployment Plans.  This short "how-to" blog will highlight an alternative way to deploy content using Operational Profiles. Usually we think of Operational Profiles as a way to execute a simple "one-time" script to perform a basic system administration function, which can optionally be based on user input; however, Operational Profiles can be much more powerful than that.  There is often more to performing an action than merely running a script -- sometimes configuration files, packages, binaries, and other scripts, etc. are needed to perform the action, and sometimes the user would like to leave such content on the system for later use. For shell scripts and other content written to be generic enough to work on any flavor of UNIX, converting the same scripts and configuration files into Solaris 10 SVR4 package, Solaris 11 IPS package, and/or a Linux RPM's might be seen as three times the work, for little appreciable gain.   That is where using an Operational Profile to deploy simple scripts and other generic content can be very helpful.  The approach is so powerful, that pretty much any kind of content can be deployed using an Operational Profile, provided the files involved are not overly large, and it is not necessary to convert the content into UNIX variant-specific formats. The basic formula for deploying content with an Operational Profile is as follows: Begin with a traditional script header, which is a UNIX shell script that will be responsible for decoding and extracting content, copying files into the right places, and executing any other scripts and commands needed to install and configure that content. Include steps to make the script platform-aware, to do the right thing for a given UNIX variant, or a "sorry" message if the operator has somehow tried to run the Operational Profile on a system where the script is not designed to run.  Ops Center can constrain execution by target type, so such checks at this level are an added safeguard, but also useful with the generic target type of "Operating System" where the admin wants the script to "do the right thing," whatever the UNIX variant. Include helpful output to show script progress, and any other informational messages that can help the admin determine what has gone wrong in the case of a problem in script execution.  Such messages will be shown in the job execution log. Include necessary "clean up" steps for normal and error exit conditions Set non-zero exit codes when appropriate -- a non-zero exit code will cause an Operational Profile job to be marked failed, which is the admin's cue to look into the job details for diagnostic messages in the output from the script. That first bullet deserves some explanation.  If Operational Profiles are usually simple "one-time" scripts and binary content is not allowed, then how does the actual content, packages, binaries, and other scripts get delivered along with the script?  More specifically, how does one include such content without needing to first create some kind of traditional package?   All that is required is to simply encode the content and append it to the end of the Operational Profile.  The header portion of the Operational Profile will need to contain the commands to decode the embedded content that has been appended to the bottom of the script.  The header code can do whatever else is needed, and finally clean up any intermediate files that were created during the decoding and extraction of the content. One way to encode binary and other content for inclusion in a script is to use the "uuencode" utility to convert the content into simple base64 ASCII text -- a form that is suitable to be appended to an Operational Profile.   The behavior of the "uudecode" utility is such that it will skip over any parts of the input that do not fit the uuencoded "begin" and "end" clauses.  For that reason, your header script will be skipped over, and uudecode will find your embedded content, that you will uuencode and paste at the end of the Operational Profile.  You can have as many "begin" / "end" clauses as you need -- just separate each embedded file by an empty line between "begin" and "end" clauses. Example:  Install SUNWsneep and set the system serial number Script:  deploySUNWsneep.sh ( <- right-click / save to download) Highlights: #!/bin/sh # Required variables: OC_SERIAL="$OC_SERIAL" # The user-supplied serial number for the asset ... Above is a good practice, showing right up front what kind of input the Operational Profile will require.   The right-hand side where $OC_SERIAL appears in this example will be filled in by Ops Center based on the user input at deployment time. The script goes on to restrict the use of the program to the intended OS type (Solaris 10 or older, in this example, but other content might be suitable for Solaris 11, or Linux -- it depends on the content and the script that will handle it). A temporary working directory is created, and then we have the command that decodes the embedded content from "self" which in scripting terms is $0 (a variable that expands to the name of the currently executing script): # Pass myself through uudecode, which will extract content to the current dir uudecode $0 At that point, whatever content was appended in uuencoded form at the end of the script has been written out to the current directory.  In this example that yields a file, SUNWsneep.7.0.zip, which the rest of the script proceeds to unzip, and pkgadd, followed by running "/opt/SUNWsneep/bin/sneep -s $OC_SERIAL" which is the command that stores the system serial for future use by other programs such as Explorer.   Don't get hung up on the example having used a pkgadd command.  The content started as a zip file and it could have been a tar.gz, or any other file.  This approach simply decodes the file.  The header portion of the script has to make sense of the file and do the right thing (e.g. it's up to you). The script goes on to clean up after itself, whether or not the above was successful.  Errors are echo'd by the script and a non-zero exit code is set where appropriate. Second to last, we have: # just in case, exit explicitly, so that uuencoded content will not cause error OPCleanUP exit # The rest of the script is ignored, except by uudecode # # UUencoded content follows # # e.g. for each file needed, #  $ uuencode -m {source} {source} > {target}.uu5 # then paste the {target}.uu5 files below # they will be extracted into the workding dir at $TDIR # The commentary above also describes how to encode the content. Finally we have the uuencoded content: begin-base64 444 SUNWsneep.7.0.zip UEsDBBQAAAAIAPsRy0Di3vnukAAAAMcAAAAKABUAcmVhZG1lLnR4dFVUCQADOqnVT7up ... VXgAAFBLBQYAAAAAAgACAJEAAADTNwEAAAA= ==== That last line of "====" is the base64 uuencode equivalent of a blank line, followed by "end" and as mentioned you can have as many begin/end clauses as you need.  Just separate each embedded file by a blank line after each ==== and before each begin-base64. Deploying the example Operational Profile looks like this (where I have pasted the system serial number into the required field): The job succeeded, but here is an example of the kind of diagnostic messages that the example script produces, and how Ops Center displays them in the job details: This same general approach could be used to deploy Explorer, and other useful utilities and scripts. Please let us know what you think?  Until next time...\Leon-- Leon Shaner | Senior IT/Product ArchitectSystems Management | Ops Center Engineering @ Oracle The views expressed on this [blog; Web site] are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle. For more information, please go to Oracle Enterprise Manager  web page or  follow us at :  Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter

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• Goodbye my beloved Nexus One, hello Windows Phone 7

  - by George Clingerman

  Last night my wife’s Nexus One finally bit the dust. You may not know but I’ve been nursing her Nexus One one along for quite a while after her screen shattered. I was able to replace it on my own (go me!) but little quirks have been popping up and the phone was quickly deteriorating. Lately it’s been the power button. Wifey would often have to press the power button several times to get her phone to turn on and last night it just wouldn’t wake up again. I took it apart and tried my best to see if I could somehow make it live once again but no luck this time. It was finally ready to retire. We looked at first for a replacement phone for her but she wasn’t really seeing anything she liked. So I decided to make the ultimate sacrifice and offer up my much loved Nexus One and I would then get a new Windows Phone 7 device. I love T-Mobile for my service so my choices were immediately limited to basically just a single phone. The HTC HD7. I read reviews and they were all over the board from people loving to people hating the phone but I decided, hey, why not, let’s take this plunge. And I did. I’ve only had the phone for about two days now so below is my list of first reaction pros/cons. These are basically things I’ve missed or things I’ve noticed that I really like about my new Windows Phone. Cons: * No Google Talk – I used this a LOT on my Nexus. I’ve found an application called “Flory” but it’s just an ok substitute, not the same as the full featured GTalk I had on my Nexus. * Seesmic is limited– I loved the way Seesmic worked on my Nexus. It was my mobile twitter client of choice. Everything about it worked really well. On Windows Phone 7 it’s just ok. I don’t get notification of new tweets, it’s several clicks to even see a new tweet. It’s definitely got some more development before it has the same features as it did on my Nexus. * Buttons don’t give great feedback – I’d read this on the reviews about the HTC HD7 and I’m finding it true myself. Pressing the buttons on the side of the phone and the power button on the top is finicky and I have to be looking at my phone to make sure I actually got them to press. * Web browsing is slow – I’m not sure what’s up with this, I’m connected to my wireless network at my house but it’s noticeably slower on my WP7 device than my Nexus. I even switched back to verify and it’s definitely true. Retrieving tweets, hitting up the XNA forums and just general web activities are all much slower on my WP7. I can’t think of any reason this would be true but it almost seems like it’s not using my wireless for everything.   Pros: * It’s pretty – the phone is really gorgeous. I loved the form of my Nexus One by the HTC HD7 is just as pretty, maybe even prettier! It’s got a nice large, bright screen. It feels good in my hand. And it even has a little kickstand to set the phone up for movie watching. Definitely a gorgeous phone. * LIVE integration – I lost a lot of nice integration with Google services but I gained a lot of integration with LIVE services that I also use. Now I can see when I get new GMail messages AND Hotmail messages. And having the Xbox LIVE integration is admittedly cool as well. * Tile notification rock – The Windows Phone 7 commercials are TRYING to get this message out but they’re doing a really poor job of this. Tile notifications really do save you from your phone. I have a whole little mini-informational dashboard at a glance. I unlock my phone and at a glace I can see new IMs, new mail messages, software updates etc. All just letting me know in the tiles I have arranged. That’s pretty cool. * The interface works really well – I feel super hip and cool swiping and sliding things around on my Windows Phone 7. Everything works that way and it’s great and fast and really good looking. I’m all about me feeling cool. * I’m gaming more – I had gotten a few games on my Nexus One but there really weren’t a lot of good developers flocking to the service. Just browsing through the Windows Phone 7 marketplace I’m already seeing a ton of games I want to try and buy. And I sat down and bet Pixel Man 0 just yesterday on my phone. I’m already gaming more than I did on my Nexus One. * Netflix integration is fantastic - It works just like it does on my Xbox 360 and I love having this feature on my phone. * It’s basically a Zune – I’ve been taking my Zune to work and listening to music off of that while I code. I no longer need to take it with me, now I just sync songs onto my phone and it’s my new Zune. I freaking love that. One less device to carry around.   All in all my cons have really little to do with the phone (just the buttons and the web browsing) and more to do with the applications needing to catch up a bit to what I’m used to. And the Pros are things that ARE phone specific so I’m seeing that as a good sign that I’m going to be very happy with my Windows Phone 7. So Wifey is happy having her Nexus One again, I’m happy with my new Windows Phone 7. Life is good. Now I just need to make a game to pay for it….

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• From Pocket to Instapaper

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  Some time ago I’ve described the issues that I’ve had since a new version of Read It Later, named Pocket, was introduced.I’ve waited with hope for a new upgrade, but I had a huge disappointment with the latest version 16 June 2012. It didn’t fixed any of the two major problems, that I  experienced since new Pocket was introduced-  1. iPad app still didn’t show many of the saved links. 2. ability to rename articles on iPad still wasn’t restored.I’ve posted the message into their forum. They did not show my comment on their forum( I would name it censorship, not moderation), but a few days ago I’ve received an email, recommending “try logging out of the app on your iPad, and back in again.” Their suggestion helped,  but I don’t understand, why it is not posted as a recommendation on their support site.So I decided to try InstAPaper on my iPad, Previously I’ve used it for Kindle. I never considered it before on iPad, because there were no free demo and I was very satisfied with RIL free and then RIL Pro. Currently InstAPaper cost $3, so the price is not an issue.I’ve checked that it has most of features that I am using(e.g. renaming, folders) and I am quite happy with it now. Actually I am using Pocket (or RIL free) for old bookmarks( I have 1000+ stored on my iPad) and for new bookmarks I am using InstAPaper.Having a solid experience with RIL/Pocket I’ve created a list of suggestions to Marco Arment to implement.1. Some pages stored in InstAPaper have removed essential sections of the text. E.g in many blogs comments are not stored in  InstAPaper. Some pages lost almost all of important links (e.g. http://www.lib.rus.ec/a/32416 -sorry, in Russian). RIL/Pocket has 2 modes to store offline- Web view and Article view. Web View includes all links/images of the original page, but it’s very reliable. Article view suppose to strip unrelated information, but often corrupts the content. I prefer to use offline Web view.InstAPaper should also support offline Web view, in case if stripped view removes important part of content.2.  Black full screen Saving on iPad Safari is very annoying. After user pressed a bookmark, the saving has some delay and then for a few seconds prevents from reading the text.Would be better to show as message on the top part(as in Pocket ). I am surprised, that  a full screen popup was  implemented recently as a desired feature. 3.There are no comments allowed on http://blog.instapaper.com/. I would prefer to post some of these notes as comments on http://blog.instapaper.com/ rather than write them in my blog and then send link to Marco.(I found recommendation how to add support of comments on tumblr at http://www.tumblr.com/help, but then realized that Marko was the lead developer ofTumblr.)4. Also there is no support forum. I understand that maintenance of the forum ican be a hassle, but stackexchange fSome time ago I’ve described the issues that I’ve had since a new version of Read It Later, named Pocket, was introduced.I’ve waited with hope for a new upgrade, but I had a huge disappointment with the latest version 16 June 2012. It didn’t fixed any of the two major problems, that I  experienced since new Pocket was introduced- orums can be referred on  http://www.instapaper.com/main/support page, i.e.http://webapps.stackexchange.com/search?q=Instapaper  or http://apple.stackexchange.com/search?q=Instapaper 5. Tags are more convenient than folders. i.e. an ability for the same article to have more than one tag. Also creating of new folders is not supported offline, which is an annoying limitation.6. I would like to have a narrow list - additionally to existing list modes have a subject only list or subject+site list to show more list items on a screen.7. Limit of 500 offline articles sounds quite big, but my RIL list exceeded 1000, so it could be a issue in the future.8. Search button on iPad version is visible, but doesn’t work- it forces to buy Premium subscription. I think, that it’s not correct. If the button in a paid version is visible and enabled, it should  provide  a working functionality, e.g. search in article names only. And leave full-text search for the premium support.9..Copy URL is an important operation and deserves to be in a first level of Action menu, rather than in Share sub-menu.I’ve also have comment re post http://www.marco.org/2011/04/28/removed-instapaper-free. Marco Arment  explained, why he doesn’t provide free version of Instapaper.  I believe that he is loosing essential part of his customers. When I decided which of iPad application to choose, I’ve selected RIL, because I was able to play with free version, and I liked it. I didn’t have a chance to compare RIL and InstAPaper on iPad, so I’ve bought  RIL pro. For a user there is no point to pay even $3 , if there are similar free product, that user can try and see, is it suitable for him/her.I’ve also played with Readability. It doesn’t have folders or tags(which is very important for me), but nicely supports full text search

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• Think before you animate

  - by David Paquette

  Animations are becoming more and more common in our applications.  With technologies like WPF, Silverlight and jQuery, animations are becoming easier for developers to use (and abuse).  When used properly, animation can augment the user experience.  When used improperly, animation can degrade the user experience.  Sometimes, the differences can be very subtle. I have recently made use of animations in a few projects and I very quickly realized how easy it is to abuse animation techniques.  Here are a few things I have learned along the way. 1) Don’t animate for the sake of animating We’ve all seen the PowerPoint slides with annoying slide transitions that animate 20 different ways.  It’s distracting and tacky.  The same holds true for your application.  While animations are fun and becoming easy to implement, resist the urge to use the technology just because you think the technology is amazing.   2) Animations should (and do) have meaning I recently built a simple Windows Phone 7 (WP7) application, Steeped (download it here).  The application has 2 pages.  The first page lists a number of tea types.  When the user taps on one of the tea types, the application navigates to the second page with information about that tea type and some options for the user to choose from.       One of the last things I did before submitting Steeped to the marketplace was add a page transition between the 2 pages.  I choose the Slide / Fade Out transition.  When the user selects a tea type, the main page slides to the left and fades out.  At the same time, the details page slides in from the right and fades in.  I tested it and thought it looked great so I submitted the app.  A few days later, I asked a friend to try the app.  He selected a tea type, and I was a little surprised by how he used the app.  When he wanted to navigate back to the main page, instead of pressing the back button on the phone, he tried to use a swiping gesture.  Of course, the swiping gesture did nothing because I had not implemented that feature.  After thinking about it for a while, I realized that the page transition I had chosen implied a particular behaviour.  As a user, if an action I perform causes an item (in this case the page) to move, then my expectation is that I should be able to move it back.  I have since added logic to handle the swipe gesture and I think the app flows much better now. When using animation, it pays to ask yourself:  What story does this animation tell my users?   3) Watch the replay Some animations might seem great initially but can get annoying over time.  When you use an animation in your application, make sure you try using it over and over again to make sure it doesn’t get annoying.  When I add an animation, I try watch it at least 25 times in a row.  After watching the animation repeatedly, I can make a more informed decision whether or not I should keep the animation.  Often, I end up shortening the length of the animations.   4) Don’t get in the users way An animation should never slow the user down.  When implemented properly, an animation can give a perceived bump in performance.  A good example of this is a the page transitions in most of the built in apps on WP7.  Obviously, these page animations don’t make the phone any faster, but they do provide a more responsive user experience.  Why?  Because most of the animations begin as soon as the user has performed some action.  The destination page might not be fully loaded yet, but the system responded immediately to user action, giving the impression that the system is more responsive.  If the user did not see anything happen until after the destination page was fully loaded, the application would feel clumsy and slow.  Also, it is important to make sure the animation does not degrade the performance (or perceived performance) of the application.   Jut a few things to consider when using animations.  As is the case with many technologies, we often learn how to misuse it before we learn how to use it effectively.

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• I Clobbered a Leopard with a Window Last Night

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I’ve had my 15” Mac Book Pro for a little over a year now, and its hands-down the best laptop I’ve ever owned…hardware wise. And I tried, I really really tried, to like OSX. I even bought Parallels so I could run Windows 7 and all my development tools while still trying to live in an OSX world. But in the end, I missed Windows too much. There were just too many shortcomings with OSX that kept me from being productive. For one thing, Office for Mac is *not* Office for Windows. The applications are written by different teams, and Excel on the Mac is just different enough to be painful. The VM experience was adequate, but my MBP would heat up like crazy when running it and the experience trying to get Windows apps to interact with an OSX file system was awkward. And I found I was in the VM more than I thought I’d be. iMovie is not as easy to use for doing simple movie editing as Windows Movie Maker. There’s no free blog editing software for OSX that’s on par with Windows Live Writer. And really, all I was using OSX for was Twitter (which I can use a Windows client for) and web browsing (also something Windows can provide obviously). So I had to ask myself – why am I forcing myself to use an operating system I don’t like, on a laptop that can support Windows 7? And so I paved my MBP and am happily running Windows 7 on it…and its fantastic! All the good stuff with the hardware is still there with the goodness of Win 7. Happy happy. I did run into some snags doing this though, and that’s really what this blog post is about – things to be aware of if you want to install Win 7 directly on your MBP metal. First, Ensure You Have Your Original Mac Install Disk This was a warning my buddy Dylan, who’s been running Win 7 on his MBP for a while now, gave me early on. The reason you need that original disk is that the hardware drivers you need are all located there. Apparently you can’t easily download them, so make sure you have them ahead of time. Second, Forget BootCamp The only reason you need BootCamp is if you still want the option to boot into OSX. If you don’t, then you don’t need BootCamp. In fact, you don’t even need BootCamp to install Win 7. What you *will* need though is a DVD with Win 7 burnt on it. Apple doesn’t support bootable USB drives. Well, actually they do for Mac Book Airs which don’t come with optical drives…but to get it working you’ll need to edit a system file of BootCamp so your make of MBP is included in an XML document, and even then you *still* are using BootCamp meaning you’ll be making an OSX partition. So don’t worry about BootCamp, just burn a Windows 7 disc, put it into the DVD drive, and restart your MBP. Third, Know The Secret Commands So after putting in the Windows 7 DVD and restarting your MBP, you’ll want to hold down the ‘C’ key during boot up. This tells the MBP that it should boot from the DVD drive instead of the hard drive. Interestingly, it appears you don’t have to do this if its the Mac OSX install disc (more on that in a second), but regardless – hold down C and Windows will start the install process. Next up is the partition process. You’ll notice that there’s a partition called ETI or something like that. This has to do with the drive format that Apple uses and how they partition their system drives. What I did – I blew it away! At first I didn’t, but I was told I couldn’t install Windows on the remaining space due to the different drive format. Blowing away the ETI partition (and all other partitions) allowed me to continue the Windows install. *REMEMBER –  No warranty is provided or implied, just telling you what I did and how I got it to work. Ok, so now Windows is installed and I’m rebooting. Everything looks good, but I need drivers! So I put in the OSX install DVD and run the BootCamp assistant which installs all the Windows drivers I need. Fantastic! Oh, I need to restart – no problem. OH NO, PROBLEM! I left the OSX install DVD in the drive and now the MBP wants to boot from the drive and install OSX! I’m not holding down the C key, what the heck?! Ok, well there must be a way to eject this disk…hmm…no physical button on the side…the eject button doesn’t seem to work on the keyboard…no little pin hole to insert something to force the disc out…well what the…?! It turns out, if you want to eject a disc at boot up, you need (and I kid you not) to plug a mouse into the laptop and hold down the right-click button while its booting. This ejected the disc for me. Seriously. Finally, Things You Should Be Aware Of Once you have Windows up and running there’s a few things you need to be aware of, mainly new keyboard shortcuts. For instance, on the Mac keyboard there is no Home, End, PageUp or PageDown. There’s also no obvious way to do something like select large amounts of text (like you would by holding Shift-Home at the end of a line of text for instance). So here’s some shortcuts you need to know: Home – fn + left arrow End – fn + right arrow Select a line of text as you would with the Home key – Shift + fn + left arrow Select a line of text as you would with the End key – Shift + fn + right arrow Page Up – fn + up arrow Page Down – fn + down arrow Also, you’ll notice that the awesome Mac track pad doesn’t respond to taps as clicks. No fear, this is just a setting that needs to be altered in the BootCamp control panel (that controls the Mac Hardware-specific settings within Windows, you can access it easily from the system tray icon) One other thing, battery life seems a bit lower than with OSX, but then again I’m also doing more than Twitter or web browsing on this thing now. Conclusion My laptop runs awesome now that I have Windows 7 on there. It’s obviously up to individual taste, but for me I just didn’t see benefits to living in an OSX world when everything I needed lived in Windows. And also, I finally am back to an operating system that doesn’t require me to eject a USB drive before physically removing it! It’s 2012 folks, how has this not been fixed?! D

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• SharePoint 2010 Diagnostic Studio Remote Diag

  - by juanlarios

  I have had some time this week to try out some tools that I have been meaning to try out. This week I am trying out the SP 2010 Diagnostic Studio. I installed it successfully and tried it on my development evironment. I was able to build a report and a snapshot of the environment. I decided to turn my attention to my Employer's intranet environment. This would allow me to analyze it and measure it against benchmarks. I didn't want to install the Diagnostic studio on the Production Envorinment, lucky for me, the Diagnostic studio can be run remotely, well...kind of. Issue My development environment is a stand alone, full installation of SharePoint 2010 Server. It has Office 2010, SQL 2008 Enterprise, a DC...well you get the point, it's jammed packed! But more importantly it's a stand alone, self contained VM environment. Well Microsoft has instructions as to how to connect remotely with Diagnostic Studio here. The deciving part of this is that the SP2010DS prompts you for credentails. So I thought I was getting the right account to run the reports. I tried all the Power Shell commands in the link above but I still ended up getting the following errors: 06/28/2011 12:50:18    Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client cannot process the request...If the SPN exists, but CredSSP cannot use Kerberos to validate the identity of the target computer and you still want to allow the delegation of the user credentials to the target computer, use gpedit.msc and look at the following policy: Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Credentials Delegation -> Allow Fresh Credentials with NTLM-only Server Authentication.  Verify that it is enabled and configured with an SPN appropriate for the target computer. For example, for a target computer name "myserver.domain.com", the SPN can be one of the following: WSMAN/myserver.domain.com or WSMAN/*.domain.com. Try the request again after these changes. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic. 06/28/2011 12:54:47    Access to the path '\\<targetserver>\C$\Users\<account logging in>\AppData\Local\Temp' is denied. You might also get an error message like this: The WinRM client cannot process the request. A computer policy does not allow the delegation of the user credentials to the target computer. Explanation After looking at the event logs on the target environment, I noticed that there were a several Security Exceptions. After looking at the specifics around who was denied access, I was able to see the account that was being denied access, it was the client machine administrator account. Well of course that was never going to work!!! After some quick Googling, the last error message above will lead you to edit the Local Group Policy on the client server. And although there are instructions from microsoft around doing this, it really will not work in this scenario. Notice the Description and how it only applices to authentication mentioned? Resolution I can tell you what I did, but I wish there was a better way but I simply don't know if it's duable any other way. Because my development environment had it's own DC, I didn't really want to mess with Kerberos authentication. I would also not be smart to connect that server to the domain, considering it has it's own DC. I ended up installing SharePoint 2010 Diagnostic Studio on another Windows 7 Dev environment I have, and connected the machien to the domain. I ran all the necesary remote credentials commands mentioned here. Those commands add the group policy for you! Once I did this I was able to authenticate properly and I was able to get the reports. Conclusion   You can run SharePoint 2010 Diagnostic Studio Remotely but it will require some specific scenarions. A couple of things I should mention is that as far as I understand, SP2010 DS, will install agents on your target environment to run tests and retrieve the data. I was a Farm Administrator, and also a Server Admin on SharePoint Server. I am not 100% sure if you need all those permissions but I that's just what I have to my internal intranet.   I deally I would like to have a machine that I can have SharePoint 2010 DIagnostic Studio installed and I can run that against client environments. It appears that I will not be able to do that, unless I enable Kerberos on my Windows 7 Machine now. If you have it installed in the same way I would like to have it, please let me know, I'll keep trying to get what I'm after. Hope this helps someone out there doing the same.

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• Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in NetBeans IDE

  - by Geertjan

  When you need to connect to Amazon Web Services, NetBeans IDE gives you a nice start. You can drag and drop the "itemSearch" service into a Java source file and then various Amazon files are generated for you. From there, you need to do a little bit of work because the request to Amazon needs to be signed before it can be used. Here are some references and places that got me started: http://associates-amazon.s3.amazonaws.com/signed-requests/helper/index.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSGettingStartedGuide/AWSCredentials.html https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/flex/advertising/api/sign-in.html You definitely need to sign up to the Amazon Associates program and also register/create an Access Key ID, which will also get you a Secret Key, as well. Here's a simple Main class that I created that hooks into the generated RestConnection/RestResponse code created by NetBeans IDE: public static void main(String[] args) {    try {        String searchIndex = "Books";        String keywords = "Romeo and Juliet";        RestResponse result = AmazonAssociatesService.itemSearch(searchIndex, keywords);        String dataAsString = result.getDataAsString();        int start = dataAsString.indexOf("<Author>")+8;        int end = dataAsString.indexOf("</Author>");        System.out.println(dataAsString.substring(start,end));    } catch (Exception ex) {        ex.printStackTrace();    }} Then I deleted the generated properties file and the authenticator and changed the generated AmazonAssociatesService.java file to the following: public class AmazonAssociatesService {    private static void sleep(long millis) {        try {            Thread.sleep(millis);        } catch (Throwable th) {        }    }    public static RestResponse itemSearch(String searchIndex, String keywords) throws IOException {        SignedRequestsHelper helper;        RestConnection conn = null;        Map queryMap = new HashMap();        queryMap.put("Service", "AWSECommerceService");        queryMap.put("AssociateTag", "myAssociateTag");        queryMap.put("AWSAccessKeyId", "myAccessKeyId");        queryMap.put("Operation", "ItemSearch");        queryMap.put("SearchIndex", searchIndex);        queryMap.put("Keywords", keywords);        try {            helper = SignedRequestsHelper.getInstance(                    "ecs.amazonaws.com",                    "myAccessKeyId",                    "mySecretKey");            String sign = helper.sign(queryMap);            conn = new RestConnection(sign);        } catch (IllegalArgumentException | UnsupportedEncodingException | NoSuchAlgorithmException | InvalidKeyException ex) {        }        sleep(1000);        return conn.get(null);    }} Finally, I copied this class into my application, which you can see is referred to above: http://code.google.com/p/amazon-product-advertising-api-sample/source/browse/src/com/amazon/advertising/api/sample/SignedRequestsHelper.java Here's the completed app, mostly generated via the drag/drop shown at the start, but slightly edited as shown above: That's all, now everything works as you'd expect.

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• A Patent for Workload Management Based on Service Level Objectives

  - by jsavit

  I'm very pleased to announce that after a tiny :-) wait of about 5 years, my patent application for a workload manager was finally approved. Background Many operating systems have a resource manager which lets you control machine resources. For example, Solaris provides controls for CPU with several options: shares for proportional CPU allocation. If you have twice as many shares as me, and we are competing for CPU, you'll get about twice as many CPU cycles), dedicated CPU allocation in which a number of CPUs are exclusively dedicated to an application's use. You can say that a zone or project "owns" 8 CPUs on a 32 CPU machine, for example. And, capped CPU in which you specify the upper bound, or cap, of how much CPU an application gets. For example, you can throttle an application to 0.125 of a CPU. (This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list of Solaris RM controls.) Workload management Useful as that is (and tragic that some other operating systems have little resource management and isolation, and frighten people into running only 1 app per OS instance - and wastefully size every server for the peak workload it might experience) that's not really workload management. With resource management one controls the resources, and hope that's enough to meet application service objectives. In fact, we hold resource distribution constant, see if that was good enough, and adjust resource distribution if that didn't meet service level objectives. Here's an example of what happens today: Let's try 30% dedicated CPU. Not enough? Let's try 80% Oh, that's too much, and we're achieving much better response time than the objective, but other workloads are starving. Let's back that off and try again. It's not the process I object to - it's that we to often do this manually. Worse, we sometimes identify and adjust the wrong resource and fiddle with that to no useful result. Back in my days as a customer managing large systems, one of my users would call me up to beg for a "CPU boost": Me: "it won't make any difference - there's plenty of spare CPU to be had, and your application is completely I/O bound." User: "Please do it anyway." Me: "oh, all right, but it won't do you any good." (I did, because he was a friend, but it didn't help.) Prior art There are some operating environments that take a stab about workload management (rather than resource management) but I find them lacking. I know of one that uses synthetic "service units" composed of the sum of CPU, I/O and memory allocations multiplied by weighting factors. A workload is set to make a target rate of service units consumed per second. But this seems to be missing a key point: what is the relationship between artificial 'service units' and actually meeting a throughput or response time objective? What if I get plenty of one of the components (so am getting enough service units), but not enough of the resource whose needed to remove the bottleneck? Actual workload management That's not really the answer either. What is needed is to specify a workload's service levels in terms of externally visible metrics that are meaningful to a business, such as response times or transactions per second, and have the workload manager figure out which resources are not being adequately provided, and then adjust it as needed. If an application is not meeting its service level objectives and the reason is that it's not getting enough CPU cycles, adjust its CPU resource accordingly. If the reason is that the application isn't getting enough RAM to keep its working set in memory, then adjust its RAM assignment appropriately so it stops swapping. Simple idea, but that's a task we keep dumping on system administrators. In other words - don't hold the number of CPU shares constant and watch the achievement of service level vary. Instead, hold the service level constant, and dynamically adjust the number of CPU shares (or amount of other resources like RAM or I/O bandwidth) in order to meet the objective. Instrumenting non-instrumented applications There's one little problem here: how do I measure application performance in a way relating to a service level. I don't want to do it based on internal resources like number of CPU seconds it received per minute - We need to make resource decisions based on externally visible and meaningful measures of performance, not synthetic items or internal resource counters. If I have a way of marking the beginning and end of a transaction, I can then measure whether or not the application is meeting an objective based on it. If I can observe the delay factors for an application, I can see which resource shortages are slowing an application enough to keep it from meeting its objectives. I can then adjust resource allocations to relieve those shortages. Fortunately, Solaris provides facilities for both marking application progress and determining what factors cause application latency. The Solaris DTrace facility let's me introspect on application behavior: in particular I can see events like "receive a web hit" and "respond to that web hit" so I can get transaction rate and response time. DTrace (and tools like prstat) let me see where latency is being added to an application, so I know which resource to adjust. Summary After a delay of a mere few years, I am the proud creator of a patent (advice to anyone interested in going through the process: don't hold your breath!). The fundamental idea is fairly simple: instead of holding resource constant and suffering variable levels of success meeting service level objectives, properly characterise the service level objective in meaningful terms, instrument the application to see if it's meeting the objective, and then have a workload manager change resource allocations to remove delays preventing service level attainment. I've done it by hand for a long time - I think that's what a computer should do for me.

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• Performance triage

  - by Dave

  Folks often ask me how to approach a suspected performance issue. My personal strategy is informed by the fact that I work on concurrency issues. (When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, but I'll try to keep this general). A good starting point is to ask yourself if the observed performance matches your expectations. Expectations might be derived from known system performance limits, prototypes, and other software or environments that are comparable to your particular system-under-test. Some simple comparisons and microbenchmarks can be useful at this stage. It's also useful to write some very simple programs to validate some of the reported or expected system limits. Can that disk controller really tolerate and sustain 500 reads per second? To reduce the number of confounding factors it's better to try to answer that question with a very simple targeted program. And finally, nothing beats having familiarity with the technologies that underlying your particular layer. On the topic of confounding factors, as our technology stacks become deeper and less transparent, we often find our own technology working against us in some unexpected way to choke performance rather than simply running into some fundamental system limit. A good example is the warm-up time needed by just-in-time compilers in Java Virtual Machines. I won't delve too far into that particular hole except to say that it's rare to find good benchmarks and methodology for java code. Another example is power management on x86. Power management is great, but it can take a while for the CPUs to throttle up from low(er) frequencies to full throttle. And while I love "turbo" mode, it makes benchmarking applications with multiple threads a chore as you have to remember to turn it off and then back on otherwise short single-threaded runs may look abnormally fast compared to runs with higher thread counts. In general for performance characterization I disable turbo mode and fix the power governor at "performance" state. Another source of complexity is the scheduler, which I've discussed in prior blog entries. Lets say I have a running application and I want to better understand its behavior and performance. We'll presume it's warmed up, is under load, and is an execution mode representative of what we think the norm would be. It should be in steady-state, if a steady-state mode even exists. On Solaris the very first thing I'll do is take a set of "pstack" samples. Pstack briefly stops the process and walks each of the stacks, reporting symbolic information (if available) for each frame. For Java, pstack has been augmented to understand java frames, and even report inlining. A few pstack samples can provide powerful insight into what's actually going on inside the program. You'll be able to see calling patterns, which threads are blocked on what system calls or synchronization constructs, memory allocation, etc. If your code is CPU-bound then you'll get a good sense where the cycles are being spent. (I should caution that normal C/C++ inlining can diffuse an otherwise "hot" method into other methods. This is a rare instance where pstack sampling might not immediately point to the key problem). At this point you'll need to reconcile what you're seeing with pstack and your mental model of what you think the program should be doing. They're often rather different. And generally if there's a key performance issue, you'll spot it with a moderate number of samples. I'll also use OS-level observability tools to lock for the existence of bottlenecks where threads contend for locks; other situations where threads are blocked; and the distribution of threads over the system. On Solaris some good tools are mpstat and too a lesser degree, vmstat. Try running "mpstat -a 5" in one window while the application program runs concurrently. One key measure is the voluntary context switch rate "vctx" or "csw" which reflects threads descheduling themselves. It's also good to look at the user; system; and idle CPU percentages. This can give a broad but useful understanding if your threads are mostly parked or mostly running. For instance if your program makes heavy use of malloc/free, then it might be the case you're contending on the central malloc lock in the default allocator. In that case you'd see malloc calling lock in the stack traces, observe a high csw/vctx rate as threads block for the malloc lock, and your "usr" time would be less than expected. Solaris dtrace is a wonderful and invaluable performance tool as well, but in a sense you have to frame and articulate a meaningful and specific question to get a useful answer, so I tend not to use it for first-order screening of problems. It's also most effective for OS and software-level performance issues as opposed to HW-level issues. For that reason I recommend mpstat & pstack as my the 1st step in performance triage. If some other OS-level issue is evident then it's good to switch to dtrace to drill more deeply into the problem. Only after I've ruled out OS-level issues do I switch to using hardware performance counters to look for architectural impediments.

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• c# display DB table structure

  - by user3529643

  I have a question. My code is the following : public partial class Form1 : Form { public OleDbConnection datCon; public string MyDataFile; public ArrayList tblArray; public ArrayList fldArray; public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); lvData.Clear(); lvData.View = View.Details; lvData.LabelEdit = false; lvData.FullRowSelect = true; lvData.GridLines = true; } private void DataConnection() { MyDataFile = Application.StartupPath + @"\studenti.mdb"; string MyCon = @"provider=microsoft.jet.oledb.4.0;data source=" + MyDataFile; try { datCon = new OleDbConnection(MyCon); } catch (Exception ex) { MessageBox.Show(ex.Message); } FillTreeView(); } private void GetTables(OleDbConnection cnn) { try { cnn.Open(); DataTable schTable = cnn.GetOleDbSchemaTable(OleDbSchemaGuid.Tables, new Object[] { null, null, null, "TABLE" }); tblArray = new ArrayList(); foreach (DataRow datrow in schTable.Rows) { tblArray.Add(datrow["TABLE_NAME"].ToString()); } cnn.Close(); } catch (Exception ex) { MessageBox.Show(ex.Message); } } private void GetFields(OleDbConnection cnn, string tabNode) { string tabName; try { tabName = tabNode; cnn.Open(); DataTable schTable = cnn.GetOleDbSchemaTable(OleDbSchemaGuid.Columns, new Object[] { null, null, tabName }); fldArray = new ArrayList(); foreach (DataRow datRow in schTable.Rows) { fldArray.Add(datRow["COLUMN_NAME"].ToString()); } cnn.Close(); } catch (Exception ex) { MessageBox.Show(ex.Message); } } private void FillTreeView() { tvData.Nodes.Clear(); tvData.Nodes.Add("Database"); tvData.Nodes[0].Tag = "RootDB"; GetTables(datCon); // add table node for (int i = 0; i < tblArray.Count; i++) { tvData.Nodes[0].Nodes.Add(tblArray[i].ToString()); tvData.Nodes[0].Nodes[i].Tag = "Tables"; } // add field node for (int i = 0; i < tblArray.Count; i++) { GetFields(datCon, tblArray[i].ToString()); for (int j = 0; j < fldArray.Count; j++) { tvData.Nodes[0].Nodes[i].Nodes.Add(fldArray[j].ToString()); tvData.Nodes[0].Nodes[i].Nodes[j].Tag = "Fields"; } } this.tvData.ContextMenuStrip = contextMenuStrip1; contextMenuStrip1.ItemClicked +=contextMenuStrip1_ItemClicked; } public void FillListView(OleDbConnection cnn, string tabName) { OleDbCommand cmdRead; OleDbDataReader datReader; string strField; lblTableName.Text = tabName; strField = "SELECT * FROM [" + tabName + "]"; // Initi cmdRead obiect cmdRead = new OleDbCommand(strField, cnn); cnn.Open(); datReader = cmdRead.ExecuteReader(); // fill ListView while (datReader.Read()) { ListViewItem objListItem = new ListViewItem(datReader.GetValue(0).ToString()); for (int c = 1; c < datReader.FieldCount; c++) { objListItem.SubItems.Add(datReader.GetValue(c).ToString()); } lvData.Items.Add(objListItem); } datReader.Close(); cnn.Close(); } private void ViewToolStripMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { DataConnection(); } public void tvData_AfterExpand(object sender, System.Windows.Forms.TreeViewEventArgs e) { string tabName; int fldCount; if (e.Node.Tag.ToString() == "Tables") { fldCount = e.Node.GetNodeCount(false); //column headers. int n = lvData.Width; double wid = n / fldCount; // width columnn for (int c = 0; c < fldCount; c++) { lvData.Columns.Add(e.Node.Nodes[c].Text, (int)wid, HorizontalAlignment.Left); } // gett table name tabName = e.Node.Text; FillListView(datCon, tabName); } } public void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { //TO DO?? } } I have a treeview populated with tables (nodes) from my database, and a listview which is populated with the data from my tables when I click on a table. As you can see I have a button1 on my form. When I click it I want it to display to me the structure of the table I selected in my treeview (a treeview node). Not too many details, just the name of the columns in my table, type of columns, primary keys. I've tried to follow many tutorials but I can t seem to manage it.

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• SOA Implementation Challenges

  Why do companies think that if they put up a web service that they are doing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)? Unfortunately, the IT and business world love to run on the latest hype or buzz words of which very few even understand the meaning. One of the largest issues companies have today as they consider going down the path of SOA, is the lack of knowledge regarding the architectural style and the over usage of the term SOA. So how do we solve this issue?I am sure most of you are thinking by now that you know what SOA is because you developed a few web services.  Isn’t that SOA, right? No, that is not SOA, but instead Just Another Web Service (JAWS). For us to better understand what SOA is let’s look at a few definitions.Douglas K. Bary defines service-oriented architecture as a collection of services. These services are enabled to communicate with each other in order to pass data or coordinating some activity with other services.If you look at this definition closely you will notice that Bary states that services communicate with each other. Let us compare this statement with my first statement regarding companies that claim to be doing SOA when they have just a collection of web services. In order for these web services to for an SOA application they need to be interdependent on one another forming some sort of architectural hierarchy. Just because a company has a few web services does not mean that they are all interconnected.SearchSOA from TechTarget.com states that SOA defines how two computing entities work collectively to enable one entity to perform a unit of work on behalf of another. Once again, just because a company has a few web services does not guarantee that they are even working together let alone if they are performing work for each other.SearchSOA also points out service interactions should be self-contained and loosely-coupled so that all interactions operate independent of each other.Of all the definitions regarding SOA Thomas Erl’s seems to shed the most light on this concept. He states that “SOA establishes an architectural model that aims to enhance the efficiency, agility, and productivity of an enterprise by positioning services as the primary means through which solution logic is represented in support of the realization of the strategic goals associated with service-oriented computing.” (Erl, 2011) Once again this definition proves that a collection of web services does not mean that a company is doing SOA. However, it does mean that a company has a collection of web services, and that is it.In order for a company to start to go down the path of SOA, they must take  a hard look at their existing business process while abstracting away any technology so that they can define what is they really want to accomplish. Once a company has done this, they can begin to factor out common sub business process like credit card process, user authentication or system notifications in to small components that can be built independent of each other and then reassembled to form new and dynamic services that are loosely coupled and agile in that they can change as a business grows.Another key pitfall of companies doing SOA is the fact that they let vendors drive their architecture. Why do companies do this? Vendors’ do not hold your company’s success as their top priority; in fact they hold their own success as their top priority by selling you as much stuff as you are willing to buy. In my experience companies tend to strive for the maximum amount of benefits with a minimal amount of cost. Does anyone else see any conflicts between this and the driving force behind vendors.Mike Kavis recommends in an article written in CIO.com that companies need to figure out what they need before they talk to a vendor or at least have some idea of what they need. It is important to thoroughly evaluate each vendor and watch them perform a live demo of their system so that you as the company fully understand what kind of product or service the vendor is actually offering. In addition, do research on each vendor that you are considering, check out blog posts, online reviews, and any information you can find on the vendor through various search engines.Finally he recommends companies to verify any recommendations supplied by a vendor. From personal experience this is very important. I can remember when the company I worked for purchased a $200,000 add-on to their phone system that never actually worked as it was intended. In fact, just after my departure from the company started the process of attempting to get their money back from the vendor. This potentially could have been avoided if the company had done the research before selecting this vendor to ensure that their product and vendor would live up to their claims. I know that some SOA vendor offer free training regarding SOA because they know that there are a lot of misconceptions about the topic. Superficially this is a great thing for companies to take part in especially if the company is starting to implement SOA architecture and are still unsure about some topics or are looking for some guidance regarding the topic. However beware that some companies will focus on their product line only regarding the training. As an example, InfoWorld.com claims that companies providing deep seminars disguised as training, focusing more about ESBs and SOA governance technology, and less on how to approach and solve the architectural issues of the attendees.In short, it is important to remember that we as software professionals are responsible for guiding a business’s technology sections should be well informed and fully understand any new concepts that may be considered for implementation. As I have demonstrated already a company that has a few web services does not mean that they are doing SOA.  Additionally, we must not let the new buzz word of the day drive our technology, but instead our technology decisions should be driven from research and proven experience. Finally, it is important to rely on vendors when necessary, however, always take what they say with a grain of salt while cross checking any claims that they may make because we have to live with the aftermath of a system after the vendors are gone.   References: Barry, D. K. (2011). Service-oriented architecture (SOA) definition. Retrieved 12 12, 2011, from Service-Architecture.com: http://www.service-architecture.com/web-services/articles/service-oriented_architecture_soa_definition.html Connell, B. (2003, 9). service-oriented architecture (SOA). Retrieved 12 12, 2011, from SearchSOA: http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/definition/service-oriented-architecture Erl, T. (2011, 12 12). Service-Oriented Architecture. Retrieved 12 12, 2011, from WhatIsSOA: http://www.whatissoa.com/p10.php InfoWorld. (2008, 6 1). Should you get your SOA knowledge from SOA vendors? . Retrieved 12 12, 2011, from InfoWorld.com: http://www.infoworld.com/d/architecture/should-you-get-your-soa-knowledge-soa-vendors-453 Kavis, M. (2008, 6 18). Top 10 Reasons Why People are Making SOA Fail. Retrieved 12 13, 2011, from CIO.com: http://www.cio.com/article/438413/Top_10_Reasons_Why_People_are_Making_SOA_Fail?page=5&taxonomyId=3016  

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• Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 2 of 3&ndash;Setup)

  - by ToStringTheory

  Welcome to part two in my series covering the LESS CSS language.  In the first post, I covered the two major CSS precompiled languages - LESS and SASS to a small extent, iterating over some of the features that you could expect to find in them.  In this post, I will go a little further in depth into the setup and execution of using the LESS framework. Introduction It really doesn’t take too much to get LESS working in your project.  The basic workflow will be including the necessary translator in your project, defining bundles for the LESS files, add the necessary code to your layouts.cshtml file, and finally add in all your necessary styles to the LESS files!  Lets get started… New Project Just like all great experiments in Visual Studio, start up a File > New Project, and create a new MVC 4 Web Application.  The Base Package After you have the new project spun up, use the Nuget Package Manager to install the Bundle Transformer: LESS package. This will take care of installing the main translator that we will be using for LESS code (dotless which is another Nuget package), as well as the core framework for the Bundle Transformer library.  The installation will come up with some instructions in a readme file on how to modify your web.config to handle all your *.less requests through the Bundle Transformer, which passes the translating onto dotless. Where To Put These LESS Files?! This step isn’t really a requirement, however I find that I don’t like how ASP.Net MVC just has a content directory where they store CSS, content images, css images….  In my project, I went ahead and created a new directory just for styles – LESS files, CSS files, and images that are only referenced in LESS or CSS.  Ignore the MVC directory as this was my testbed for another project I was working on at the same time.  As you can see here, I have: A top level directory for images which contains only images used in a page A top level directory for scripts A top level directory for Styles A few directories for plugins I am using (Colrizr, JQueryUI, Farbtastic) Multiple *.less files for different functions (I’ll go over these in a minute) I find that this layout offers the best separation of content types.  Bring Out Your Bundles! The next thing that we need to do is add in the necessary code for the bundling of these LESS files.  Go ahead and open your BundleConfig.cs file, usually located in the /App_Start/ folder of the project.  As you will see in a minute, instead of using the method Microsoft does in the base MVC 4 project, I change things up a bit.  Define Constants The first thing I do is define constants for each of the virtual paths that will be used in the bundler: The main reason is that I hate magic strings in my program, so the fact that you first defined a virtual path in the BundleConfig file, and then used that path in the _Layout.cshtml file really irked me. Add Bundles to the BundleCollection Next, I am going to define the bundles for my styles in my AddStyleBundles method: That is all it takes to get all of my styles in play with LESS.  The CssTransformer and NullOrderer types come from the Bundle Transformer we grabbed earlier.  If we didn’t use that package, we would have to write our own function (not too hard, but why do it if it’s been done). I use the site.less file as my main hub for LESS - I will cover that more in the next section. Add Bundles To Layout.cshtml File With the constants in the BundleConfig file, instead of having to use the same magic string I defined for the bundle virtual path, I am able to do this: Notice here that besides the RenderSection magic strings (something I am working on in another side project), all of the bundles are now based on const strings.  If I need to change the virtual path, I only have to do it in one place.  Nifty! Get Started! We are now ready to roll!  As I said in the previous section, I use the site.less file as a central hub for my styles: As seen here, I have a reset.css file which is a simple CSS reset.  Next, I have created a file for managing all my color variables – colors.less: Here, you can see some of the standards I started to use, in this case for color variables.  I define all color variables with the @col prefix.  Currently, I am going for verbose variable names. The next file imported is my font.less file that defines the typeface information for the site: Simple enough.  A couple of imports for fonts from Google, and then declaring variables for use throughout LESS.  I also set up the heading sizes, margins, etc..  You can also see my current standardization for font declaration strings – @font. Next, I pull in a mixins.less file that I grabbed from the Twitter Bootstrap library that gives some useful parameterized mixins for use such as border-radius, gradient, box-shadow, etc… The common.less file is a file that just contains items that I will be defining that can be used across all my LESS files.  Kind of like my own mixins or font-helpers: Finally I have my layout.less file that contains all of my definitions for general site layout – width, main/sidebar widths, footer layout, etc: That’s it!  For the rest of my one off definitions/corrections, I am currently putting them into the site.less file beneath my original imports Note Probably my favorite side effect of using the LESS handler/translator while bundling is that it also does a CSS checkup when rendering…  See, when your web.config is set to debug, bundling will output the url to the direct less file, not the bundle, and the http handler intercepts the call, compiles the less, and returns the result.  If there is an error in your LESS code, the CSS file can be returned empty, or may have the error output as a comment on the first couple lines. If you have the web.config set to not debug, then if there is an error in your code, you will end up with the usual ASP.Net exception page (unless you catch the exception of course), with information regarding the failure of the conversion, such as brace mismatch, undefined variable, etc…  I find it nifty. Conclusion This is really just the beginning.  LESS is very powerful and exciting!  My next post will show an actual working example of why LESS is so powerful with its functions and variables…  At least I hope it will!  As for now, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions on my current practice, I would love to hear them!  Feel free to drop a comment or shoot me an email using the contact page.  In the mean time, I plan on posting the final post in this series tomorrow or the day after, with my side project, as well as a whole base ASP.Net MVC4 templated project with LESS added in it so that you can check out the layout I have in this post.  Until next time…

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• Traversing Java Object Arrays [migrated]

  - by Sundi

  Please Help. Program does not read Array rentBooks[] in the for() loop this option is selected when choosing option 2 then option 4 in the menu The Array reads perfectly when reading the items after the setBook() Method import java.io.File; import java.io.FileNotFoundException; import java.util.Scanner; import java.io.*; import java.util.Locale; import java.text.SimpleDateFormat ; class Library { protected static String Author; protected static String Title; SimpleDateFormat PublicationDate; int itemCode; int available = 1; } class Book extends Library { protected static String PublisherName; protected static String Edition; static Book[] rentBooks = new Book[5]; //Book[] rentBooks = new Book[5]; int count = 0; public Book() { String start= "start"; showBook.main(anza); } public void setBook( String Auth, String Titl, String PublishName) { this.Author = Auth; this.Title = Titl; this.PublisherName = PublishName; } public void getBook() { //System.out.println("*************BOOKS*************************"); System.out.println( "\n\nThe Author of the first Book is "+ this.Author ); System.out.println( "The Title of the book is "+ this.Title); System.out.println( "The Publisher of the book is "+ this.PublisherName ); // System.out.println( "The Edition of the book is "+ Edition ); } } class showBook{ static Book[] rentBooks = new Book[5]; static Book[] rentBooks2 = new Book[5]; static int a,b; //for ( a=0; a < 5; a++ ) //rentBooks2[a] = new Book(); public static void main(String[] args) { File file = new File("Book2.txt"); //Book libraryBooks = new Book(); int j; //initialise Array Class Objects for( j = 0; j < 5; j++) { rentBooks[j] = new Book(); } int i = 0; try{ Scanner scanner = new Scanner(file); scanner.useDelimiter(","); String loan=""; int loan2; while( scanner.hasNextLine()) { //Should the Books be Stored in An Array? // At the moment you have separate objects stored in unknown location String Author = scanner.next(); String Title = scanner.next(); String PublisherName = scanner.next(); if ( i < 4) { System.out.println(i); rentBooks[i].setBook(Author, Title, PublisherName); rentBooks[i].getBook(); // MEMBERS SHOWN i++; } public class readBook4{ public static void main(String[] args) { int number =0; System.out.println( "Please select one of the choices below " ); System.out.println( "Select option 1 to list all items in the library "); System.out.println( "Select option 2 to list the items by category"); System.out.println( "Select option 3 to choose item available in the library "); System.out.println( "Select option 7 to exit " ); InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader( System.in); BufferedReader buffer = new BufferedReader( isr); String input = ""; try { input = buffer.readLine(); number = Integer.parseInt(input); //int number = Integer.parseInt( Edition); if ( number == 1 ) { System.out.println( " \nThanks you are reading "+ input); //showStudent.main(args); showPeriodical.main(args); showDVD.main(args); // showBook.main(args); } if ( number == 2 ) { //jht.cls(); int number2; System.out.println( "Please select one of the choices below " ); System.out.println( "Select option 4 to list Books only "); System.out.println( "Select option 5 to list the Periodicals only"); System.out.println( "Select option 6 to list DVDs only"); InputStreamReader isr2 = new InputStreamReader(System.in); BufferedReader buffer2 = new BufferedReader(isr2); String input2 = ""; try { input2 = buffer2.readLine(); buffer.close(); } catch(IOException e) { System.out.println("An input error has occured"); } //System.out.println("Thanks, you are reading" + input2); number2 = Integer.parseInt(input2); if ( number2 == 4 ) { showBook.main(args); } if ( number2 == 5 ) { showPeriodical.main(args); } if ( number2 == 6 ) { showDVD.main(args); } // readBook4.main(args); } if( number == 3 ) { //showBook.main(args); showBook.availableBooks(); showDVD.availableDVD(); showPeriodical.availablePeriodical(); } if ( number == 7 ) { showStudent.main(args); } buffer.close(); } catch( IOException e ) { System.out.println( " An input error has occured "); } //System.out.println( " \nThanks you are reading "+ input); } } } //buffer.close(); scanner.close(); } catch( FileNotFoundException e) { System.out.println("File not Found"); } for ( i=0; i < 5; i++ ) rentBooks[i].getBook(); //ARRAY NOT SHOWN } }

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• Example: Communication between Activity and Service using Messaging

  - by Lance Lefebure

  I couldn't find any examples of how to send messages between an activity and a service, and spent far too many hours figuring this out. Here is an example project for others to reference. This example allows you to start or stop a service directly, and separately bind/unbind from the service. When the service is running, it increments a number at 10Hz. If the activity is bound to the service, it will display the current value. Data is transferred as an Integer and as a String so you can see how to do that two different ways. There are also buttons in the activity to send messages to the service (changes the increment-by value). Screenshot: AndroidManifest.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" package="com.exampleservice" android:versionCode="1" android:versionName="1.0"> <application android:icon="@drawable/icon" android:label="@string/app_name"> <activity android:name=".MainActivity" android:label="@string/app_name"> <intent-filter> <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" /> <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" /> </intent-filter> </activity> <service android:name=".MyService"></service> </application> <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="8" /> </manifest> res\values\strings.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <resources> <string name="app_name">ExampleService</string> <string name="service_started">Example Service started</string> <string name="service_label">Example Service Label</string> </resources> res\layout\main.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:orientation="vertical" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" > <RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/RelativeLayout01" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"> <Button android:id="@+id/btnStart" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Start Service"></Button> <Button android:id="@+id/btnStop" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Stop Service" android:layout_alignParentRight="true"></Button> </RelativeLayout> <RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/RelativeLayout02" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"> <Button android:id="@+id/btnBind" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Bind to Service"></Button> <Button android:id="@+id/btnUnbind" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Unbind from Service" android:layout_alignParentRight="true"></Button> </RelativeLayout> <TextView android:id="@+id/textStatus" android:textSize="24sp" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Status Goes Here" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/textIntValue" android:textSize="24sp" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Integer Value Goes Here" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/textStrValue" android:textSize="24sp" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="String Value Goes Here" /> <RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/RelativeLayout03" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"> <Button android:id="@+id/btnUpby1" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Increment by 1"></Button> <Button android:id="@+id/btnUpby10" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Increment by 10" android:layout_alignParentRight="true"></Button> </RelativeLayout> </LinearLayout> src\com.exampleservice\MainActivity.java: package com.exampleservice; import android.app.Activity; import android.content.ComponentName; import android.content.Context; import android.content.Intent; import android.content.ServiceConnection; import android.os.Bundle; import android.os.Handler; import android.os.IBinder; import android.os.Message; import android.os.Messenger; import android.os.RemoteException; import android.util.Log; import android.view.View; import android.view.View.OnClickListener; import android.widget.Button; import android.widget.TextView; public class MainActivity extends Activity { Button btnStart, btnStop, btnBind, btnUnbind, btnUpby1, btnUpby10; TextView textStatus, textIntValue, textStrValue; Messenger mService = null; boolean mIsBound; final Messenger mMessenger = new Messenger(new IncomingHandler()); class IncomingHandler extends Handler { @Override public void handleMessage(Message msg) { switch (msg.what) { case MyService.MSG_SET_INT_VALUE: textIntValue.setText("Int Message: " + msg.arg1); break; case MyService.MSG_SET_STRING_VALUE: String str1 = msg.getData().getString("str1"); textStrValue.setText("Str Message: " + str1); break; default: super.handleMessage(msg); } } } private ServiceConnection mConnection = new ServiceConnection() { public void onServiceConnected(ComponentName className, IBinder service) { mService = new Messenger(service); textStatus.setText("Attached."); try { Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MyService.MSG_REGISTER_CLIENT); msg.replyTo = mMessenger; mService.send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { // In this case the service has crashed before we could even do anything with it } } public void onServiceDisconnected(ComponentName className) { // This is called when the connection with the service has been unexpectedly disconnected - process crashed. mService = null; textStatus.setText("Disconnected."); } }; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); btnStart = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnStart); btnStop = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnStop); btnBind = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnBind); btnUnbind = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnUnbind); textStatus = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textStatus); textIntValue = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textIntValue); textStrValue = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textStrValue); btnUpby1 = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnUpby1); btnUpby10 = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnUpby10); btnStart.setOnClickListener(btnStartListener); btnStop.setOnClickListener(btnStopListener); btnBind.setOnClickListener(btnBindListener); btnUnbind.setOnClickListener(btnUnbindListener); btnUpby1.setOnClickListener(btnUpby1Listener); btnUpby10.setOnClickListener(btnUpby10Listener); restoreMe(savedInstanceState); CheckIfServiceIsRunning(); } @Override protected void onSaveInstanceState(Bundle outState) { super.onSaveInstanceState(outState); outState.putString("textStatus", textStatus.getText().toString()); outState.putString("textIntValue", textIntValue.getText().toString()); outState.putString("textStrValue", textStrValue.getText().toString()); } private void restoreMe(Bundle state) { if (state!=null) { textStatus.setText(state.getString("textStatus")); textIntValue.setText(state.getString("textIntValue")); textStrValue.setText(state.getString("textStrValue")); } } private void CheckIfServiceIsRunning() { //If the service is running when the activity starts, we want to automatically bind to it. if (MyService.isRunning()) { doBindService(); } } private OnClickListener btnStartListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ startService(new Intent(MainActivity.this, MyService.class)); } }; private OnClickListener btnStopListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ doUnbindService(); stopService(new Intent(MainActivity.this, MyService.class)); } }; private OnClickListener btnBindListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ doBindService(); } }; private OnClickListener btnUnbindListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ doUnbindService(); } }; private OnClickListener btnUpby1Listener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ sendMessageToService(1); } }; private OnClickListener btnUpby10Listener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ sendMessageToService(10); } }; private void sendMessageToService(int intvaluetosend) { if (mIsBound) { if (mService != null) { try { Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MyService.MSG_SET_INT_VALUE, intvaluetosend, 0); msg.replyTo = mMessenger; mService.send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { } } } } void doBindService() { bindService(new Intent(this, MyService.class), mConnection, Context.BIND_AUTO_CREATE); mIsBound = true; textStatus.setText("Binding."); } void doUnbindService() { if (mIsBound) { // If we have received the service, and hence registered with it, then now is the time to unregister. if (mService != null) { try { Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MyService.MSG_UNREGISTER_CLIENT); msg.replyTo = mMessenger; mService.send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { // There is nothing special we need to do if the service has crashed. } } // Detach our existing connection. unbindService(mConnection); mIsBound = false; textStatus.setText("Unbinding."); } } @Override protected void onDestroy() { super.onDestroy(); try { doUnbindService(); } catch (Throwable t) { Log.e("MainActivity", "Failed to unbind from the service", t); } } } src\com.exampleservice\MyService.java: package com.exampleservice; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Timer; import java.util.TimerTask; import android.app.Notification; import android.app.NotificationManager; import android.app.PendingIntent; import android.app.Service; import android.content.Intent; import android.os.Bundle; import android.os.Handler; import android.os.IBinder; import android.os.Message; import android.os.Messenger; import android.os.RemoteException; import android.util.Log; public class MyService extends Service { private NotificationManager nm; private Timer timer = new Timer(); private int counter = 0, incrementby = 1; private static boolean isRunning = false; ArrayList<Messenger> mClients = new ArrayList<Messenger>(); // Keeps track of all current registered clients. int mValue = 0; // Holds last value set by a client. static final int MSG_REGISTER_CLIENT = 1; static final int MSG_UNREGISTER_CLIENT = 2; static final int MSG_SET_INT_VALUE = 3; static final int MSG_SET_STRING_VALUE = 4; final Messenger mMessenger = new Messenger(new IncomingHandler()); // Target we publish for clients to send messages to IncomingHandler. @Override public IBinder onBind(Intent intent) { return mMessenger.getBinder(); } class IncomingHandler extends Handler { // Handler of incoming messages from clients. @Override public void handleMessage(Message msg) { switch (msg.what) { case MSG_REGISTER_CLIENT: mClients.add(msg.replyTo); break; case MSG_UNREGISTER_CLIENT: mClients.remove(msg.replyTo); break; case MSG_SET_INT_VALUE: incrementby = msg.arg1; break; default: super.handleMessage(msg); } } } private void sendMessageToUI(int intvaluetosend) { for (int i=mClients.size()-1; i>=0; i--) { try { // Send data as an Integer mClients.get(i).send(Message.obtain(null, MSG_SET_INT_VALUE, intvaluetosend, 0)); //Send data as a String Bundle b = new Bundle(); b.putString("str1", "ab" + intvaluetosend + "cd"); Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MSG_SET_STRING_VALUE); msg.setData(b); mClients.get(i).send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { // The client is dead. Remove it from the list; we are going through the list from back to front so this is safe to do inside the loop. mClients.remove(i); } } } @Override public void onCreate() { super.onCreate(); Log.i("MyService", "Service Started."); showNotification(); timer.scheduleAtFixedRate(new TimerTask(){ public void run() {onTimerTick();}}, 0, 100L); isRunning = true; } private void showNotification() { nm = (NotificationManager)getSystemService(NOTIFICATION_SERVICE); // In this sample, we'll use the same text for the ticker and the expanded notification CharSequence text = getText(R.string.service_started); // Set the icon, scrolling text and timestamp Notification notification = new Notification(R.drawable.icon, text, System.currentTimeMillis()); // The PendingIntent to launch our activity if the user selects this notification PendingIntent contentIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(this, 0, new Intent(this, MainActivity.class), 0); // Set the info for the views that show in the notification panel. notification.setLatestEventInfo(this, getText(R.string.service_label), text, contentIntent); // Send the notification. // We use a layout id because it is a unique number. We use it later to cancel. nm.notify(R.string.service_started, notification); } @Override public int onStartCommand(Intent intent, int flags, int startId) { Log.i("MyService", "Received start id " + startId + ": " + intent); return START_STICKY; // run until explicitly stopped. } public static boolean isRunning() { return isRunning; } private void onTimerTick() { Log.i("TimerTick", "Timer doing work." + counter); try { counter += incrementby; sendMessageToUI(counter); } catch (Throwable t) { //you should always ultimately catch all exceptions in timer tasks. Log.e("TimerTick", "Timer Tick Failed.", t); } } @Override public void onDestroy() { super.onDestroy(); if (timer != null) {timer.cancel();} counter=0; nm.cancel(R.string.service_started); // Cancel the persistent notification. Log.i("MyService", "Service Stopped."); isRunning = false; } }

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• Need some help on how to replay the last game of a java maze game

  - by Marty

  Hello, I am working on creating a Java maze game for a project. The maze is displayed on the console as standard output not in an applet. I have created most of hte code I need, however I am stuck at one problem and that is I need a user to be able to replay the last game i.e redraw the maze with the users moves but without any input from the user. I am not sure on what course of action to take, i was thinking about copying each users move or the position of each move into another array, as you can see i have 2 variables which hold the position of the player, plyrX and plyrY do you think copying these values into a new array after each move would solve my problem and how would i go about this? I have updated my code, apologies about the textIO.java class not being present, not sure how to resolve that exept post a link to TextIO.java [TextIO.java][1] My code below is updated with a new array of type char to hold values from the original maze (read in from text file and displayed using unicode characters) and also to new variables c_plyrX and c_plyrY which I am thinking should hold the values of plyrX and plyrY and copy them into the new array. When I try to call the replayGame(); method from the menu the maze loads for a second then the console exits so im not sure what I am doing wrong Thanks public class MazeGame { //unicode characters that will define the maze walls, //pathways, and in game characters. final static char WALL = '\u2588'; //wall final static char PATH = '\u2591'; //pathway final static char PLAYER = '\u25EF'; //player final static char ENTRANCE = 'E'; //entrance final static char EXIT = '\u2716'; //exit //declaring member variables which will hold the maze co-ordinates //X = rows, Y = columns static int entX = 0; //entrance X co-ordinate static int entY = 1; //entrance y co-ordinate static int plyrX = 0; static int plyrY = 1; static int exitX = 24; //exit X co-ordinate static int exitY = 37; //exit Y co-ordinate //static member variables which hold maze values //used so values can be accessed from different methods static int rows; //rows variable static int cols; //columns variable static char[][] maze; //defines 2 dimensional array to hold the maze //variables that hold player movement values static char dir; //direction static int spaces; //amount of spaces user can travel //variable to hold amount of moves the user has taken; static int movesTaken = 0; //new array to hold player moves for replaying game static char[][] mazeCopy; static int c_plyrX; static int c_plyrY; /** userMenu method for displaying the user menu which will provide various options for * the user to choose such as play a maze game, get instructions, etc. */ public static void userMenu(){ TextIO.putln("Maze Game"); TextIO.putln("*********"); TextIO.putln("Choose an option."); TextIO.putln(""); TextIO.putln("1. Play the Maze Game."); TextIO.putln("2. View Instructions."); TextIO.putln("3. Replay the last game."); TextIO.putln("4. Exit the Maze Game."); TextIO.putln(""); int option; //variable for holding users option TextIO.put("Type your choice: "); option = TextIO.getlnInt(); //gets users option //switch statement for processing menu options switch(option){ case 1: playMazeGame(); case 2: instructions(); case 3: if (c_plyrX == plyrX && c_plyrY == plyrY)replayGame(); else { TextIO.putln("Option not available yet, you need to play a game first."); TextIO.putln(); userMenu(); } case 4: System.exit(0); //exits the user out of the console default: TextIO.put("Option must be 1, 2, 3 or 4"); } } //end of userMenu /**main method, will call the userMenu and get the users choice and call * the relevant method to execute the users choice. */ public static void main(String[]args){ userMenu(); //calls the userMenu method } //end of main method /**instructions method, displays instructions on how to play * the game to the user/ */ public static void instructions(){ TextIO.putln("To beat the Maze Game you have to move your character"); TextIO.putln("through the maze and reach the exit in as few moves as possible."); TextIO.putln(""); TextIO.putln("Your characer is displayed as a " + PLAYER); TextIO.putln("The maze exit is displayed as a " + EXIT); TextIO.putln("Reach the exit and you have won escaped the maze."); TextIO.putln("To control your character type the direction you want to go"); TextIO.putln("and how many spaces you want to move"); TextIO.putln("for example 'D3' will move your character"); TextIO.putln("down 3 spaces."); TextIO.putln("Remember you can't walk through walls!"); boolean insOption; //boolean variable TextIO.putln(""); TextIO.put("Do you want to play the Maze Game now? (Y or N) "); insOption = TextIO.getlnBoolean(); if (insOption == true)playMazeGame(); else userMenu(); } //end of instructions method /**playMazeGame method, calls the loadMaze method and the charMove method * to start playing the Maze Game. */ public static void playMazeGame(){ loadMaze(); plyrMoves(); } //end of playMazeGame method /**loadMaze method, loads the 39x25 maze from the MazeGame.txt text file * and inserts values from the text file into the maze array and * displays the maze on screen using the unicode block characters. * plyrX and plyrY variables are set at their staring co ordinates so that when * a game is completed and the user selects to play a new game * the player character will always be at position 01. */ public static void loadMaze(){ plyrX = 0; plyrY = 1; TextIO.readFile("MazeGame.txt"); //now reads from the external MazeGame.txt file rows = TextIO.getInt(); //gets the number of rows from text file to create X dimensions cols = TextIO.getlnInt(); //gets number of columns from text file to create Y dimensions maze = new char[rows][cols]; //creates maze array of base type char with specified dimnensions //loop to process the array and read in values from the text file. for (int i = 0; i<rows; i++){ for (int j = 0; j<cols; j++){ maze[i][j] = TextIO.getChar(); } TextIO.getln(); } //end for loop TextIO.readStandardInput(); //closes MazeGame.txt file and reads from //standard input. //loop to process the array values and display as unicode characters for (int i = 0; i<rows; i++){ for (int j = 0; j<cols; j++){ if (i == plyrX && j == plyrY){ plyrX = i; plyrY = j; TextIO.put(PLAYER); //puts the player character at player co-ords } else{ if (maze[i][j] == '0') TextIO.putf("%c",WALL); //puts wall block if (maze[i][j] == '1') TextIO.putf("%c",PATH); //puts path block if (maze[i][j] == '2') { entX = i; entY = j; TextIO.putf("%c",ENTRANCE); //puts entrance character } if (maze[i][j] == '3') { exitX = i; //holds value of exit exitY = j; //co-ordinates TextIO.putf("%c",EXIT); //puts exit character } } } TextIO.putln(); } //end for loop } //end of loadMaze method /**redrawMaze method, method for redrawing the maze after each move. * */ public static void redrawMaze(){ TextIO.readFile("MazeGame.txt"); //now reads from the external MazeGame.txt file rows = TextIO.getInt(); //gets the number of rows from text file to create X dimensions cols = TextIO.getlnInt(); //gets number of columns from text file to create Y dimensions maze = new char[rows][cols]; //creates maze array of base type char with specified dimnensions //loop to process the array and read in values from the text file. for (int i = 0; i<rows; i++){ for (int j = 0; j<cols; j++){ maze[i][j] = TextIO.getChar(); } TextIO.getln(); } //end for loop TextIO.readStandardInput(); //closes MazeGame.txt file and reads from //standard input. //loop to process the array values and display as unicode characters for (int i = 0; i<rows; i++){ for (int j = 0; j<cols; j++){ if (i == plyrX && j == plyrY){ plyrX = i; plyrY = j; TextIO.put(PLAYER); //puts the player character at player co-ords } else{ if (maze[i][j] == '0') TextIO.putf("%c",WALL); //puts wall block if (maze[i][j] == '1') TextIO.putf("%c",PATH); //puts path block if (maze[i][j] == '2') { entX = i; entY = j; TextIO.putf("%c",ENTRANCE); //puts entrance character } if (maze[i][j] == '3') { exitX = i; //holds value of exit exitY = j; //co-ordinates TextIO.putf("%c",EXIT); //puts exit character } } } TextIO.putln(); } //end for loop } //end redrawMaze method /**replay game method * */ public static void replayGame(){ c_plyrX = plyrX; c_plyrY = plyrY; TextIO.readFile("MazeGame.txt"); //now reads from the external MazeGame.txt file rows = TextIO.getInt(); //gets the number of rows from text file to create X dimensions cols = TextIO.getlnInt(); //gets number of columns from text file to create Y dimensions mazeCopy = new char[rows][cols]; //creates maze array of base type char with specified dimnensions //loop to process the array and read in values from the text file. for (int i = 0; i<rows; i++){ for (int j = 0; j<cols; j++){ mazeCopy[i][j] = TextIO.getChar(); } TextIO.getln(); } //end for loop TextIO.readStandardInput(); //closes MazeGame.txt file and reads from //standard input. //loop to process the array values and display as unicode characters for (int i = 0; i<rows; i++){ for (int j = 0; j<cols; j++){ if (i == c_plyrX && j == c_plyrY){ c_plyrX = i; c_plyrY = j; TextIO.put(PLAYER); //puts the player character at player co-ords } else{ if (mazeCopy[i][j] == '0') TextIO.putf("%c",WALL); //puts wall block if (mazeCopy[i][j] == '1') TextIO.putf("%c",PATH); //puts path block if (mazeCopy[i][j] == '2') { entX = i; entY = j; TextIO.putf("%c",ENTRANCE); //puts entrance character } if (mazeCopy[i][j] == '3') { exitX = i; //holds value of exit exitY = j; //co-ordinates TextIO.putf("%c",EXIT); //puts exit character } } } TextIO.putln(); } //end for loop } //end replayGame method /**plyrMoves method, method for moving the players character * around the maze. */ public static void plyrMoves(){ int nplyrX = plyrX; int nplyrY = plyrY; int pMoves; direction(); //UP if (dir == 'U' || dir == 'u'){ nplyrX = plyrX; nplyrY = plyrY; for(pMoves = 0; pMoves <= spaces; pMoves++){ if (maze[nplyrX][nplyrY] == '0'){ TextIO.putln("Invalid move, try again."); } else if (pMoves != spaces){ nplyrX =plyrX + 1; } else { plyrX = plyrX-spaces; c_plyrX = plyrX; movesTaken++; } } }//end UP if //DOWN if (dir == 'D' || dir == 'd'){ nplyrX = plyrX; nplyrY = plyrY; for (pMoves = 0; pMoves <= spaces; pMoves ++){ if (maze[nplyrX][nplyrY] == '0'){ TextIO.putln("Invalid move, try again"); } else if (pMoves != spaces){ nplyrX = plyrX+1; } else{ plyrX = plyrX+spaces; c_plyrX = plyrX; movesTaken++; } } } //end DOWN if //LEFT if (dir == 'L' || dir =='l'){ nplyrX = plyrX; nplyrY = plyrY; for (pMoves = 0; pMoves <= spaces; pMoves++){ if (maze[nplyrX][nplyrY] == '0'){ TextIO.putln("Invalid move, try again"); } else if (pMoves != spaces){ nplyrY = plyrY + 1; } else{ plyrY = plyrY-spaces; c_plyrY = plyrY; movesTaken++; } } } //end LEFT if //RIGHT if (dir == 'R' || dir == 'r'){ nplyrX = plyrX; nplyrY = plyrY; for (pMoves = 0; pMoves <= spaces; pMoves++){ if (maze[nplyrX][nplyrY] == '0'){ TextIO.putln("Invalid move, try again."); } else if (pMoves != spaces){ nplyrY += 1; } else{ plyrY = plyrY+spaces; c_plyrY = plyrY; movesTaken++; } } } //end RIGHT if //prints message if player escapes from the maze. if (maze[plyrX][plyrY] == '3'){ TextIO.putln("****Congratulations****"); TextIO.putln(); TextIO.putln("You have escaped from the maze."); TextIO.putln(); userMenu(); } else{ movesTaken++; redrawMaze(); plyrMoves(); } } //end of plyrMoves method /**direction, method * */ public static char direction(){ TextIO.putln("Enter the direction you wish to move in and the distance"); TextIO.putln("i.e D3 = move down 3 spaces"); TextIO.putln("U - Up, D - Down, L - Left, R - Right: "); dir = TextIO.getChar(); if (dir =='U' || dir == 'D' || dir == 'L' || dir == 'R' || dir == 'u' || dir == 'd' || dir == 'l' || dir == 'r'){ spacesMoved(); } else{ loadMaze(); TextIO.putln("Invalid direction!"); TextIO.put("Direction must be one of U, D, L or R"); direction(); } return dir; //returns the value of dir (direction) } //end direction method /**spaces method, gets the amount of spaces the user wants to move * */ public static int spacesMoved(){ TextIO.putln(" "); spaces = TextIO.getlnInt(); if (spaces <= 0){ loadMaze(); TextIO.put("Invalid amount of spaces, try again"); spacesMoved(); } return spaces; } //end spacesMoved method } //end of MazeGame class

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• Passing data between android ListActivities in Java

  - by Will Janes

  I am new to Android! I am having a problem getting this code to work... Basically I Go from one list activity to another and pass the text from a list item through the intent of the activity to the new list view, then retrieve that text in the new list activity and then preform a http request based on value of that list item. Log Cat 04-05 17:47:32.370: E/AndroidRuntime(30135): FATAL EXCEPTION: main 04-05 17:47:32.370: E/AndroidRuntime(30135): java.lang.ClassCastException:android.widget.LinearLayout 04-05 17:47:32.370: E/AndroidRuntime(30135): at com.thickcrustdesigns.ufood.CatogPage$1.onItemClick(CatogPage.java:66) 04-05 17:47:32.370: E/AndroidRuntime(30135): at android.widget.AdapterView.performItemClick(AdapterView.java:284) 04-05 17:47:32.370: E/AndroidRuntime(30135): at android.widget.ListView.performItemClick(ListView.java:3731) 04-05 17:47:32.370: E/AndroidRuntime(30135): at android.widget.AbsListView$PerformClick.run(AbsListView.java:1959) 04-05 17:47:32.370: E/AndroidRuntime(30135): at android.os.Handler.handleCallback(Handler.java:587) 04-05 17:47:32.370: E/AndroidRuntime(30135): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:92) 04-05 17:47:32.370: E/AndroidRuntime(30135): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:130) 04-05 17:47:32.370: E/AndroidRuntime(30135): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:3691) 04-05 17:47:32.370: E/AndroidRuntime(30135): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) 04-05 17:47:32.370: E/AndroidRuntime(30135): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:507) 04-05 17:47:32.370: E/AndroidRuntime(30135): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:907) 04-05 17:47:32.370: E/AndroidRuntime(30135): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:665) 04-05 17:47:32.370: E/AndroidRuntime(30135): at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) ListActivity 1 package com.thickcrustdesigns.ufood; import java.util.ArrayList; import org.apache.http.NameValuePair; import org.apache.http.message.BasicNameValuePair; import org.json.JSONException; import org.json.JSONObject; import android.app.ListActivity; import android.content.Intent; import android.os.Bundle; import android.view.View; import android.widget.AdapterView; import android.widget.AdapterView.OnItemClickListener; import android.widget.Button; import android.widget.ListView; import android.widget.TextView; public class CatogPage extends ListActivity { ListView listView1; Button btn_bk; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.definition_main); btn_bk = (Button) findViewById(R.id.btn_bk); listView1 = (ListView) findViewById(android.R.id.list); ArrayList<NameValuePair> nvp = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>(); nvp.add(new BasicNameValuePair("request", "categories")); ArrayList<JSONObject> jsondefs = Request.fetchData(this, nvp); String[] defs = new String[jsondefs.size()]; for (int i = 0; i < jsondefs.size(); i++) { try { defs[i] = jsondefs.get(i).getString("Name"); } catch (JSONException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } } uFoodAdapter adapter = new uFoodAdapter(this, R.layout.definition_list, defs); listView1.setAdapter(adapter); ListView lv = getListView(); lv.setOnItemClickListener(new OnItemClickListener() { @Override public void onItemClick(AdapterView<?> parent, View view, int position, long id) { TextView tv = (TextView) view; String p = tv.getText().toString(); Intent i = new Intent(getApplicationContext(), Results.class); i.putExtra("category", p); startActivity(i); } }); btn_bk.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View arg0) { Intent i = new Intent(getApplicationContext(), UFoodAppActivity.class); startActivity(i); } }); } } **ListActivity 2** package com.thickcrustdesigns.ufood; import java.util.ArrayList; import org.apache.http.NameValuePair; import org.apache.http.message.BasicNameValuePair; import org.json.JSONException; import org.json.JSONObject; import android.app.ListActivity; import android.os.Bundle; import android.widget.ListView; public class Results extends ListActivity { ListView listView1; enum Category { Chicken, Beef, Chinese, Cocktails, Curry, Deserts, Fish, ForOne { public String toString() { return "For One"; } }, Lamb, LightBites { public String toString() { return "Light Bites"; } }, Pasta, Pork, Vegetarian } @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); this.setContentView(R.layout.definition_main); listView1 = (ListView) findViewById(android.R.id.list); Bundle data = getIntent().getExtras(); String category = data.getString("category"); Category cat = Category.valueOf(category); String value = null; switch (cat) { case Chicken: value = "Chicken"; break; case Beef: value = "Beef"; break; case Chinese: value = "Chinese"; break; case Cocktails: value = "Cocktails"; break; case Curry: value = "Curry"; break; case Deserts: value = "Deserts"; break; case Fish: value = "Fish"; break; case ForOne: value = "ForOne"; break; case Lamb: value = "Lamb"; break; case LightBites: value = "LightBites"; break; case Pasta: value = "Pasta"; break; case Pork: value = "Pork"; break; case Vegetarian: value = "Vegetarian"; } ArrayList<NameValuePair> nvp = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>(); nvp.add(new BasicNameValuePair("request", "category")); nvp.add(new BasicNameValuePair("cat", value)); ArrayList<JSONObject> jsondefs = Request.fetchData(this, nvp); String[] defs = new String[jsondefs.size()]; for (int i = 0; i < jsondefs.size(); i++) { try { defs[i] = jsondefs.get(i).getString("Name"); } catch (JSONException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } } uFoodAdapter adapter = new uFoodAdapter(this, R.layout.definition_list, defs); listView1.setAdapter(adapter); } } Request package com.thickcrustdesigns.ufood; import java.io.BufferedReader; import java.io.InputStream; import java.io.InputStreamReader; import java.util.ArrayList; import org.apache.http.HttpEntity; import org.apache.http.HttpResponse; import org.apache.http.NameValuePair; import org.apache.http.client.HttpClient; import org.apache.http.client.entity.UrlEncodedFormEntity; import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpPost; import org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient; import org.json.JSONArray; import org.json.JSONObject; import android.content.Context; import android.util.Log; import android.widget.Toast; public class Request { @SuppressWarnings("null") public static ArrayList<JSONObject> fetchData(Context context, ArrayList<NameValuePair> nvp) { ArrayList<JSONObject> listItems = new ArrayList<JSONObject>(); InputStream is = null; try { HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient(); HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost( "http://co350-11d.projects02.glos.ac.uk/php/database.php"); httppost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nvp)); HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httppost); HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity(); is = entity.getContent(); } catch (Exception e) { Log.e("log_tag", "Error in http connection" + e.toString()); } // convert response to string String result = ""; try { BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader( is, "iso-8859-1"), 8); InputStream stream = null; StringBuilder sb = null; while ((result = reader.readLine()) != null) { sb.append(result + "\n"); } stream.close(); result = sb.toString(); } catch (Exception e) { Log.e("log_tag", "Error converting result " + e.toString()); } try { JSONArray jArray = new JSONArray(result); for (int i = 0; i < jArray.length(); i++) { JSONObject jo = jArray.getJSONObject(i); listItems.add(jo); } } catch (Exception e) { Toast.makeText(context.getApplicationContext(), "None Found!", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show(); } return listItems; } } Any help would be grateful! Many Thanks EDIT Sorry very tired so missed out my 2nd ListActivity package com.thickcrustdesigns.ufood; import java.util.ArrayList; import org.apache.http.NameValuePair; import org.apache.http.message.BasicNameValuePair; import org.json.JSONException; import org.json.JSONObject; import android.app.ListActivity; import android.os.Bundle; import android.widget.ListView; public class Results extends ListActivity { ListView listView1; enum Category { Chicken, Beef, Chinese, Cocktails, Curry, Deserts, Fish, ForOne { public String toString() { return "For One"; } }, Lamb, LightBites { public String toString() { return "Light Bites"; } }, Pasta, Pork, Vegetarian } @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); this.setContentView(R.layout.definition_main); listView1 = (ListView) findViewById(android.R.id.list); Bundle data = getIntent().getExtras(); String category = data.getString("category"); Category cat = Category.valueOf(category); String value = null; switch (cat) { case Chicken: value = "Chicken"; break; case Beef: value = "Beef"; break; case Chinese: value = "Chinese"; break; case Cocktails: value = "Cocktails"; break; case Curry: value = "Curry"; break; case Deserts: value = "Deserts"; break; case Fish: value = "Fish"; break; case ForOne: value = "ForOne"; break; case Lamb: value = "Lamb"; break; case LightBites: value = "LightBites"; break; case Pasta: value = "Pasta"; break; case Pork: value = "Pork"; break; case Vegetarian: value = "Vegetarian"; } ArrayList<NameValuePair> nvp = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>(); nvp.add(new BasicNameValuePair("request", "category")); nvp.add(new BasicNameValuePair("cat", value)); ArrayList<JSONObject> jsondefs = Request.fetchData(this, nvp); String[] defs = new String[jsondefs.size()]; for (int i = 0; i < jsondefs.size(); i++) { try { defs[i] = jsondefs.get(i).getString("Name"); } catch (JSONException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } } uFoodAdapter adapter = new uFoodAdapter(this, R.layout.definition_list, defs); listView1.setAdapter(adapter); } } Sorry again! Cheers guys!

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• Example: Communication between Activity and Service using Messaging

  - by Lance Lefebure

  I couldn't find any examples of how to send messages between an activity and a service, and spent far too many hours figuring this out. Here is an example project for others to reference. This example allows you to start or stop a service directly, and separately bind/unbind from the service. When the service is running, it increments a number at 10Hz. If the activity is bound to the service, it will display the current value. Data is transferred as an Integer and as a String so you can see how to do that two different ways. There are also buttons in the activity to send messages to the service (changes the increment-by value). Screenshot: AndroidManifest.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" package="com.exampleservice" android:versionCode="1" android:versionName="1.0"> <application android:icon="@drawable/icon" android:label="@string/app_name"> <activity android:name=".MainActivity" android:label="@string/app_name"> <intent-filter> <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" /> <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" /> </intent-filter> </activity> <service android:name=".MyService"></service> </application> <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="8" /> </manifest> res\values\strings.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <resources> <string name="app_name">ExampleService</string> <string name="service_started">Example Service started</string> <string name="service_label">Example Service Label</string> </resources> res\layout\main.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:orientation="vertical" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" > <RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/RelativeLayout01" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"> <Button android:id="@+id/btnStart" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Start Service"></Button> <Button android:id="@+id/btnStop" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Stop Service" android:layout_alignParentRight="true"></Button> </RelativeLayout> <RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/RelativeLayout02" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"> <Button android:id="@+id/btnBind" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Bind to Service"></Button> <Button android:id="@+id/btnUnbind" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Unbind from Service" android:layout_alignParentRight="true"></Button> </RelativeLayout> <TextView android:id="@+id/textStatus" android:textSize="24sp" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Status Goes Here" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/textIntValue" android:textSize="24sp" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Integer Value Goes Here" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/textStrValue" android:textSize="24sp" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="String Value Goes Here" /> <RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/RelativeLayout03" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"> <Button android:id="@+id/btnUpby1" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Increment by 1"></Button> <Button android:id="@+id/btnUpby10" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Increment by 10" android:layout_alignParentRight="true"></Button> </RelativeLayout> </LinearLayout> src\com.exampleservice\MainActivity.java: package com.exampleservice; import android.app.Activity; import android.content.ComponentName; import android.content.Context; import android.content.Intent; import android.content.ServiceConnection; import android.os.Bundle; import android.os.Handler; import android.os.IBinder; import android.os.Message; import android.os.Messenger; import android.os.RemoteException; import android.util.Log; import android.view.View; import android.view.View.OnClickListener; import android.widget.Button; import android.widget.TextView; public class MainActivity extends Activity { Button btnStart, btnStop, btnBind, btnUnbind, btnUpby1, btnUpby10; TextView textStatus, textIntValue, textStrValue; Messenger mService = null; boolean mIsBound; final Messenger mMessenger = new Messenger(new IncomingHandler()); class IncomingHandler extends Handler { @Override public void handleMessage(Message msg) { switch (msg.what) { case MyService.MSG_SET_INT_VALUE: textIntValue.setText("Int Message: " + msg.arg1); break; case MyService.MSG_SET_STRING_VALUE: String str1 = msg.getData().getString("str1"); textStrValue.setText("Str Message: " + str1); break; default: super.handleMessage(msg); } } } private ServiceConnection mConnection = new ServiceConnection() { public void onServiceConnected(ComponentName className, IBinder service) { mService = new Messenger(service); textStatus.setText("Attached."); try { Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MyService.MSG_REGISTER_CLIENT); msg.replyTo = mMessenger; mService.send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { // In this case the service has crashed before we could even do anything with it } } public void onServiceDisconnected(ComponentName className) { // This is called when the connection with the service has been unexpectedly disconnected - process crashed. mService = null; textStatus.setText("Disconnected."); } }; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); btnStart = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnStart); btnStop = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnStop); btnBind = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnBind); btnUnbind = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnUnbind); textStatus = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textStatus); textIntValue = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textIntValue); textStrValue = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textStrValue); btnUpby1 = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnUpby1); btnUpby10 = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnUpby10); btnStart.setOnClickListener(btnStartListener); btnStop.setOnClickListener(btnStopListener); btnBind.setOnClickListener(btnBindListener); btnUnbind.setOnClickListener(btnUnbindListener); btnUpby1.setOnClickListener(btnUpby1Listener); btnUpby10.setOnClickListener(btnUpby10Listener); restoreMe(savedInstanceState); CheckIfServiceIsRunning(); } @Override protected void onSaveInstanceState(Bundle outState) { super.onSaveInstanceState(outState); outState.putString("textStatus", textStatus.getText().toString()); outState.putString("textIntValue", textIntValue.getText().toString()); outState.putString("textStrValue", textStrValue.getText().toString()); } private void restoreMe(Bundle state) { if (state!=null) { textStatus.setText(state.getString("textStatus")); textIntValue.setText(state.getString("textIntValue")); textStrValue.setText(state.getString("textStrValue")); } } private void CheckIfServiceIsRunning() { //If the service is running when the activity starts, we want to automatically bind to it. if (MyService.isRunning()) { doBindService(); } } private OnClickListener btnStartListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ startService(new Intent(MainActivity.this, MyService.class)); } }; private OnClickListener btnStopListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ doUnbindService(); stopService(new Intent(MainActivity.this, MyService.class)); } }; private OnClickListener btnBindListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ doBindService(); } }; private OnClickListener btnUnbindListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ doUnbindService(); } }; private OnClickListener btnUpby1Listener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ sendMessageToService(1); } }; private OnClickListener btnUpby10Listener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ sendMessageToService(10); } }; private void sendMessageToService(int intvaluetosend) { if (mIsBound) { if (mService != null) { try { Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MyService.MSG_SET_INT_VALUE, intvaluetosend, 0); msg.replyTo = mMessenger; mService.send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { } } } } void doBindService() { bindService(new Intent(this, MyService.class), mConnection, Context.BIND_AUTO_CREATE); mIsBound = true; textStatus.setText("Binding."); } void doUnbindService() { if (mIsBound) { // If we have received the service, and hence registered with it, then now is the time to unregister. if (mService != null) { try { Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MyService.MSG_UNREGISTER_CLIENT); msg.replyTo = mMessenger; mService.send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { // There is nothing special we need to do if the service has crashed. } } // Detach our existing connection. unbindService(mConnection); mIsBound = false; textStatus.setText("Unbinding."); } } @Override protected void onDestroy() { super.onDestroy(); try { doUnbindService(); } catch (Throwable t) { Log.e("MainActivity", "Failed to unbind from the service", t); } } } src\com.exampleservice\MyService.java: package com.exampleservice; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Timer; import java.util.TimerTask; import android.app.Notification; import android.app.NotificationManager; import android.app.PendingIntent; import android.app.Service; import android.content.Intent; import android.os.Bundle; import android.os.Handler; import android.os.IBinder; import android.os.Message; import android.os.Messenger; import android.os.RemoteException; import android.util.Log; public class MyService extends Service { private NotificationManager nm; private Timer timer = new Timer(); private int counter = 0, incrementby = 1; private static boolean isRunning = false; ArrayList<Messenger> mClients = new ArrayList<Messenger>(); // Keeps track of all current registered clients. int mValue = 0; // Holds last value set by a client. static final int MSG_REGISTER_CLIENT = 1; static final int MSG_UNREGISTER_CLIENT = 2; static final int MSG_SET_INT_VALUE = 3; static final int MSG_SET_STRING_VALUE = 4; final Messenger mMessenger = new Messenger(new IncomingHandler()); // Target we publish for clients to send messages to IncomingHandler. @Override public IBinder onBind(Intent intent) { return mMessenger.getBinder(); } class IncomingHandler extends Handler { // Handler of incoming messages from clients. @Override public void handleMessage(Message msg) { switch (msg.what) { case MSG_REGISTER_CLIENT: mClients.add(msg.replyTo); break; case MSG_UNREGISTER_CLIENT: mClients.remove(msg.replyTo); break; case MSG_SET_INT_VALUE: incrementby = msg.arg1; break; default: super.handleMessage(msg); } } } private void sendMessageToUI(int intvaluetosend) { for (int i=mClients.size()-1; i>=0; i--) { try { // Send data as an Integer mClients.get(i).send(Message.obtain(null, MSG_SET_INT_VALUE, intvaluetosend, 0)); //Send data as a String Bundle b = new Bundle(); b.putString("str1", "ab" + intvaluetosend + "cd"); Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MSG_SET_STRING_VALUE); msg.setData(b); mClients.get(i).send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { // The client is dead. Remove it from the list; we are going through the list from back to front so this is safe to do inside the loop. mClients.remove(i); } } } @Override public void onCreate() { super.onCreate(); Log.i("MyService", "Service Started."); showNotification(); timer.scheduleAtFixedRate(new TimerTask(){ public void run() {onTimerTick();}}, 0, 100L); isRunning = true; } private void showNotification() { nm = (NotificationManager)getSystemService(NOTIFICATION_SERVICE); // In this sample, we'll use the same text for the ticker and the expanded notification CharSequence text = getText(R.string.service_started); // Set the icon, scrolling text and timestamp Notification notification = new Notification(R.drawable.icon, text, System.currentTimeMillis()); // The PendingIntent to launch our activity if the user selects this notification PendingIntent contentIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(this, 0, new Intent(this, MainActivity.class), 0); // Set the info for the views that show in the notification panel. notification.setLatestEventInfo(this, getText(R.string.service_label), text, contentIntent); // Send the notification. // We use a layout id because it is a unique number. We use it later to cancel. nm.notify(R.string.service_started, notification); } @Override public int onStartCommand(Intent intent, int flags, int startId) { Log.i("MyService", "Received start id " + startId + ": " + intent); return START_STICKY; // run until explicitly stopped. } public static boolean isRunning() { return isRunning; } private void onTimerTick() { Log.i("TimerTick", "Timer doing work." + counter); try { counter += incrementby; sendMessageToUI(counter); } catch (Throwable t) { //you should always ultimately catch all exceptions in timer tasks. Log.e("TimerTick", "Timer Tick Failed.", t); } } @Override public void onDestroy() { super.onDestroy(); if (timer != null) {timer.cancel();} counter=0; nm.cancel(R.string.service_started); // Cancel the persistent notification. Log.i("MyService", "Service Stopped."); isRunning = false; } }

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• Customize the SimpleMembership in ASP.NET MVC 4.0

  - by thangchung

  As we know, .NET 4.5 have come up to us, and come along with a lot of new interesting features as well. Visual Studio 2012 was also introduced some days ago. They made us feel very happy with cool improvement along with us. Performance when loading code editor is very good at the moment (immediate after click on the solution). I explore some of cool features at these days. Some of them like Json.NET integrated in ASP.NET MVC 4.0, improvement on asynchronous action, new lightweight theme on Visual Studio, supporting very good on mobile development, improvement on authentication… I reviewed them, and found out that in this version of .NET Microsoft was not only developed new feature that suggest from community but also focused on improvement performance of existing features or components. Besides that, they also opened source more projects, like Entity Framework, Reactive Extensions, ASP.NET Web Stack… At the moment, I feel Microsoft want to open source more and more their projects. Today, I am going to dive in deep on new SimpleMembership model. It is really good because in this security model, Microsoft actually focus on development needs. As we know, in the past, they introduce some of provider supplied for coding security like MembershipProvider, RoleProvider… I don’t need to talk but everyone that have ever used it know that they were actually hard to use, and not easy to maintain and unit testing. Why? Because every time you inherit it, you need to override all methods inside it. Some people try to abstract it by introduce more method with virtual keyword, and try to implement basic behavior, so in the subclass we only need to override the method that need for their business. But to me, it’s only the way to work around. ASP.NET team and Web Matrix knew about it, so they built the new features based on existing components on .NET framework. And one of component that comes to us is SimpleMembership and SimpleRole. They implemented the Façade pattern on the top of those, and called it is WebSecurity. In the web, we can call WebSecurity anywhere we want, and make a call to inside wrapper of it. I read a lot of them on web blog, on technical news, on MSDN as well. Matthew Osborn had an excellent article about it at his blog. Jon Galloway had an article like this at here. He analyzed why old membership provider not fixed well to ASP.NET MVC and how to get over it. Those are very good to me. It introduced to me about how to doing SimpleMembership on it, how to doing it on new ASP.NET MVC web application. But one thing, those didn’t tell me was how to doing it on existing security model (that mean we already had Users and Roles on legacy system, and how we can integrate it to this system), that’s a reason I will introduce it today. I have spent couples of hours to see what’s inside this, and try to make one example to clarify my concern. And it’s lucky that I can make it working well.The first thing, we need to create new ASP.NET MVC application on Visual Studio 2012. We need to choose Internet type for this web application. ASP.NET MVC actually creates all needs components for the basic membership and basic role. The cool feature is DoNetOpenAuth come along with it that means we can log-in using facebook, twitter or Windows Live if you want. But it’s only for LocalDb, so we need to change it to fix with existing database model on SQL Server. The next step we have to make SimpleMembership can understand which database we use and show it which column need to point to for the ID and UserName. I really like this feature because SimpleMembership on need to know about the ID and UserName, and they don’t care about rest of it. I assume that we have an existing database model like So we will point it in code like The codes for it, we put on InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute like [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class | AttributeTargets.Method, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)]     public sealed class InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute     {         private static SimpleMembershipInitializer _initializer;         private static object _initializerLock = new object();         private static bool _isInitialized;         public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)         {             // Ensure ASP.NET Simple Membership is initialized only once per app start             LazyInitializer.EnsureInitialized(ref _initializer, ref _isInitialized, ref _initializerLock);         }         private class SimpleMembershipInitializer         {             public SimpleMembershipInitializer()             {                 try                 {                     WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection("DefaultDb", "User", "Id", "UserName", autoCreateTables: true);                 }                 catch (Exception ex)                 {                     throw new InvalidOperationException("The ASP.NET Simple Membership database could not be initialized. For more information, please see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=256588", ex);                 }             }         }     }And decorating it in the AccountController as below [Authorize]     [InitializeSimpleMembership]     public class AccountController : ControllerIn this case, assuming that we need to override the ValidateUser to point this to existing User database table, and validate it. We have to add one more class like public class CustomAdminMembershipProvider : SimpleMembershipProvider     {         // TODO: will do a better way         private const string SELECT_ALL_USER_SCRIPT = "select * from [dbo].[User]private where UserName = '{0}'";         private readonly IEncrypting _encryptor;         private readonly SimpleSecurityContext _simpleSecurityContext;         public CustomAdminMembershipProvider(SimpleSecurityContext simpleSecurityContext)             : this(new Encryptor(), new SimpleSecurityContext("DefaultDb"))         {         }         public CustomAdminMembershipProvider(IEncrypting encryptor, SimpleSecurityContext simpleSecurityContext)         {             _encryptor = encryptor;             _simpleSecurityContext = simpleSecurityContext;         }         public override bool ValidateUser(string username, string password)         {             if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(username))             {                 throw new ArgumentException("Argument cannot be null or empty", "username");             }             if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(password))             {                 throw new ArgumentException("Argument cannot be null or empty", "password");             }             var hash = _encryptor.Encode(password);             using (_simpleSecurityContext)             {                 var users =                     _simpleSecurityContext.Users.SqlQuery(                         string.Format(SELECT_ALL_USER_SCRIPT, username));                 if (users == null && !users.Any())                 {                     return false;                 }                 return users.FirstOrDefault().Password == hash;             }         }     }SimpleSecurityDataContext at here public class SimpleSecurityContext : DbContext     {         public DbSet<User> Users { get; set; }         public SimpleSecurityContext(string connStringName) :             base(connStringName)         {             this.Configuration.LazyLoadingEnabled = true;             this.Configuration.ProxyCreationEnabled = false;         }         protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)         {             base.OnModelCreating(modelBuilder);                          modelBuilder.Configurations.Add(new UserMapping());         }     }And Mapping for User as below public class UserMapping : EntityMappingBase<User>     {         public UserMapping()         {             this.Property(x => x.UserName);             this.Property(x => x.DisplayName);             this.Property(x => x.Password);             this.Property(x => x.Email);             this.ToTable("User");         }     }One important thing, you need to modify the web.config to point to our customize SimpleMembership <membership defaultProvider="AdminMemberProvider" userIsOnlineTimeWindow="15">       <providers>         <clear/>         <add name="AdminMemberProvider" type="CIK.News.Web.Infras.Security.CustomAdminMembershipProvider, CIK.News.Web.Infras" />       </providers>     </membership>     <roleManager enabled="false">       <providers>         <clear />         <add name="AdminRoleProvider" type="CIK.News.Web.Infras.Security.AdminRoleProvider, CIK.News.Web.Infras" />       </providers>     </roleManager>The good thing at here is we don’t need to modify the code on AccountController. We only need to modify on SimpleMembership and Simple Role (if need). Now build all solutions, run it. We should see a screen like thisIf I login to Twitter button at the bottom of this page, we will be transfer to twitter authentication pageYou have to waiting for a moment Afterwards it will transfer you back to your admin screenYou can find all source codes at my MSDN code. I will really happy if you guys feel free to put some comments as below. It will be helpful to improvement my code in the future. Thank for all your readings. 

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• Code Contracts: Unit testing contracted code

  - by DigiMortal

  Code contracts and unit tests are not replacements for each other. They both have different purpose and different nature. It does not matter if you are using code contracts or not – you still have to write tests for your code. In this posting I will show you how to unit test code with contracts. In my previous posting about code contracts I showed how to avoid ContractExceptions that are defined in code contracts runtime and that are not accessible for us in design time. This was one step further to make my randomizer testable. In this posting I will complete the mission. Problems with current code This is my current code. public class Randomizer {     public static int GetRandomFromRangeContracted(int min, int max)     {         Contract.Requires<ArgumentOutOfRangeException>(             min < max,             "Min must be less than max"         );           Contract.Ensures(             Contract.Result<int>() >= min &&             Contract.Result<int>() <= max,             "Return value is out of range"         );           var rnd = new Random();         return rnd.Next(min, max);     } } As you can see this code has some problems: randomizer class is static and cannot be instantiated. We cannot move this class between components if we need to, GetRandomFromRangeContracted() is not fully testable because we cannot currently affect random number generator output and therefore we cannot test post-contract. Now let’s solve these problems. Making randomizer testable As a first thing I made Randomizer to be class that must be instantiated. This is simple thing to do. Now let’s solve the problem with Random class. To make Randomizer testable I define IRandomGenerator interface and RandomGenerator class. The public constructor of Randomizer accepts IRandomGenerator as argument. public interface IRandomGenerator {     int Next(int min, int max); }   public class RandomGenerator : IRandomGenerator {     private Random _random = new Random();       public int Next(int min, int max)     {         return _random.Next(min, max);     } } And here is our Randomizer after total make-over. public class Randomizer {     private IRandomGenerator _generator;       private Randomizer()     {         _generator = new RandomGenerator();     }       public Randomizer(IRandomGenerator generator)     {         _generator = generator;     }       public int GetRandomFromRangeContracted(int min, int max)     {         Contract.Requires<ArgumentOutOfRangeException>(             min < max,             "Min must be less than max"         );           Contract.Ensures(             Contract.Result<int>() >= min &&             Contract.Result<int>() <= max,             "Return value is out of range"         );           return _generator.Next(min, max);     } } It seems to be inconvenient to instantiate Randomizer now but you can always use DI/IoC containers and break compiled dependencies between the components of your system. Writing tests for randomizer IRandomGenerator solved problem with testing post-condition. Now it is time to write tests for Randomizer class. Writing tests for contracted code is not easy. The main problem is still ContractException that we are not able to access. Still it is the main exception we get as soon as contracts fail. Although pre-conditions are able to throw exceptions with type we want we cannot do much when post-conditions will fail. We have to use Contract.ContractFailed event and this event is called for every contract failure. This way we find ourselves in situation where supporting well input interface makes it impossible to support output interface well and vice versa. ContractFailed is nasty hack and it works pretty weird way. Although documentation sais that ContractFailed is good choice for testing contracts it is still pretty painful. As a last chance I got tests working almost normally when I wrapped them up. Can you remember similar solution from the times of Visual Studio 2008 unit tests? Cannot understand how Microsoft was able to mess up testing again. [TestClass] public class RandomizerTest {     private Mock<IRandomGenerator> _randomMock;     private Randomizer _randomizer;     private string _lastContractError;       public TestContext TestContext { get; set; }       public RandomizerTest()     {         Contract.ContractFailed += (sender, e) =>         {             e.SetHandled();             e.SetUnwind();               throw new Exception(e.FailureKind + ": " + e.Message);         };     }       [TestInitialize()]     public void RandomizerTestInitialize()     {         _randomMock = new Mock<IRandomGenerator>();         _randomizer = new Randomizer(_randomMock.Object);         _lastContractError = string.Empty;     }       #region InputInterfaceTests     [TestMethod]     [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))]     public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_min_is_not_less_than_max()     {         try         {             _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(100, 10);         }         catch (Exception ex)         {             throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex);         }     }       [TestMethod]     [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))]     public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_min_is_equal_to_max()     {         try         {             _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(10, 10);         }         catch (Exception ex)         {             throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex);         }     }       [TestMethod]     public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_work_when_min_is_less_than_max()     {         int minValue = 10;         int maxValue = 100;         int returnValue = 50;           _randomMock.Setup(r => r.Next(minValue, maxValue))             .Returns(returnValue)             .Verifiable();           var result = _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(minValue, maxValue);           _randomMock.Verify();         Assert.AreEqual<int>(returnValue, result);     }     #endregion       #region OutputInterfaceTests     [TestMethod]     [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))]     public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_return_value_is_less_than_min()     {         int minValue = 10;         int maxValue = 100;         int returnValue = 7;           _randomMock.Setup(r => r.Next(10, 100))             .Returns(returnValue)             .Verifiable();           try         {             _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(minValue, maxValue);         }         catch (Exception ex)         {             throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex);         }           _randomMock.Verify();     }       [TestMethod]     [ExpectedException(typeof(Exception))]     public void GetRandomFromRangeContracted_should_throw_exception_when_return_value_is_more_than_max()     {         int minValue = 10;         int maxValue = 100;         int returnValue = 102;           _randomMock.Setup(r => r.Next(10, 100))             .Returns(returnValue)             .Verifiable();           try         {             _randomizer.GetRandomFromRangeContracted(minValue, maxValue);         }         catch (Exception ex)         {             throw new Exception(string.Empty, ex);         }           _randomMock.Verify();     }     #endregion        } Although these tests are pretty awful and contain hacks we are at least able now to make sure that our code works as expected. Here is the test list after running these tests. Conclusion Code contracts are very new stuff in Visual Studio world and as young technology it has some problems – like all other new bits and bytes in the world. As you saw then making our contracted code testable is easy only to the point when pre-conditions are considered. When we start dealing with post-conditions we will end up with hacked tests. I hope that future versions of code contracts will solve error handling issues the way that testing of contracted code will be easier than it is right now.

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• Using Deployment Manager

  - by Jess Nickson

  One of the teams at Red Gate has been working very hard on a new product: Deployment Manager. Deployment Manager is a free tool that lets you deploy updates to .NET apps, services and databases through a central dashboard. Deployment Manager has been out for a while, but I must admit that even though I work in the same building, until now I hadn’t even looked at it. My job at Red Gate is to develop and maintain some of our community sites, which involves carrying out regular deployments. One of the projects I have to deploy on a fairly regular basis requires me to send my changes to our build server, TeamCity. The output is a Zip file of the build. I then have to go and find this file, copy it across to the staging machine, extract it, and copy some of the sub-folders to other places. In order to keep track of what builds are running, I need to rename the folders accordingly. However, even after all that, I still need to go and update the site and its applications in IIS to point at these new builds. Oh, and then, I have to repeat the process when I deploy on production. Did I mention the multiple configuration files that then need updating as well? Manually? The whole process can take well over half an hour. I’m ready to try out a new process. Deployment Manager is designed to massively simplify the deployment processes from what could be lots of manual copying of files, managing of configuration files, and database upgrades down to a few clicks. It’s a big promise, but I decided to try out this new tool on one of the smaller ASP.NET sites at Red Gate, Format SQL (the result of a Red Gate Down Tools week). I wanted to add some new functionality, but given it was a new site with no set way of doing things, I was reluctant to have to manually copy files around servers. I decided to use this opportunity as a chance to set the site up on Deployment Manager and check out its functionality. What follows is a guide on how to get set up with Deployment Manager, a brief overview of its features, and what I thought of the experience. To follow along with the instructions that follow, you’ll first need to download Deployment Manager from Red Gate. It has a free ‘Starter Edition’ which allows you to create up to 5 projects and agents (machines you deploy to), so it’s really easy to get up and running with a fully-featured version. The Initial Set Up After installing the product and setting it up using the administration tool it provides, I launched Deployment Manager by going to the URL and port I had set it to run on. This loads up the main dashboard. The dashboard does a good job of guiding me through the process of getting started, beginning with a prompt to create some environments. 1. Setting up Environments The dashboard informed me that I needed to add new ‘Environments’, which are essentially ways of grouping the machines you want to deploy to. The environments that get added will show up on the main dashboard. I set up two such environments for this project: ‘staging’ and ‘live’.   2. Add Target Machines Once I had created the environments, I was ready to add ‘target machine’s to them, which are the actual machines that the deployment will occur on.   To enable me to deploy to a new machine, I needed to download and install an Agent on it. The ‘Add target machine’ form on the ‘Environments’ page helpfully provides a link for downloading an Agent.   Once the agent has been installed, it is just a case of copying the server key to the agent, and the agent key to the server, to link them up.   3. Run Health Check If, after adding your new target machine, the ‘Status’ flags an error, it is possible that the Agent and Server keys have not been entered correctly on both Deployment Manager and the Agent service.     You can ‘Check Health’, which will give you more information on any issues. It is probably worth running this regardless of what status the ‘Environments’ dashboard is claiming, just to be on the safe side.     4. Add Projects Going back to the main Dashboard tab at this point, I found that it was telling me that I needed to set up a new project.   I clicked the ‘project’ link to get started, gave my new project a name and clicked ‘Create’. I was then redirected to the ‘Steps’ page for the project under the Projects tab.   5. Package Steps The ‘Steps’ page was fairly empty when it first loaded.   Adding a ‘step’ allowed me to specify what packages I wanted to grab for the deployment. This part requires a NuGet package feed to be set up, which is where Deployment Manager will look for the packages. At Red Gate, we already have one set up, so I just needed to tell Deployment Manager about it. Don’t worry; there is a nice guide included on how to go about doing all of this on the ‘Package Feeds’ page in ‘Settings’, if you need any help with setting these bits up.    At Red Gate we use a build server, TeamCity, which is capable of publishing built projects to the NuGet feed we use. This makes the workflow for Format SQL relatively simple: when I commit a change to the project, the build server is configured to grab those changes, build the project, and spit out a new NuGet package to the Red Gate NuGet package feed. My ‘package step’, therefore, is set up to look for this package on our feed. The final part of package step was simply specifying which machines from what environments I wanted to be able to deploy the project to.     Format SQL Now the main Dashboard showed my new project and environment in a rather empty looking grid. Clicking on my project presented me with a nice little message telling me that I am now ready to create my first release!   Create a release Next I clicked on the ‘Create release’ button in the Projects tab. If your feeds and package step(s) were set up correctly, then Deployment Manager will automatically grab the latest version of the NuGet package that you want to deploy. As you can see here, it was able to pick up the latest build for Format SQL and all I needed to do was enter a version number and description of the release.   As you can see underneath ‘Version number’, it keeps track of what version the previous release was given. Clicking ‘Create’ created the release and redirected me to a summary of it where I could check the details before deploying.   I clicked ‘Deploy this release’ and chose the environment I wanted to deploy to and…that’s it. Deployment Manager went off and deployed it for me.   Once I clicked ‘Deploy release’, Deployment Manager started to automatically update and provide continuing feedback about the process. If any errors do arise, then I can expand the results to see where it went wrong. That’s it, I’m done! Keep in mind, if you hit errors with the deployment itself then it is possible to view the log output to try and determine where these occurred. You can keep expanding the logs to narrow down the problem. The screenshot below is not from my Format SQL deployment, but I thought I’d post one to demonstrate the logging output available. Features One of the best bits of Deployment Manager for me is the ability to very, very easily deploy the same release to multiple machines. Deploying this same release to production was just a case of selecting the deployment and choosing the ‘live’ environment as the place to deploy to. Following on from this is the fact that, as Deployment Manager keeps track of all of your releases, it is extremely easy to roll back to a previous release if anything goes pear-shaped! You can view all your previous releases and select one to re-deploy. I needed this feature more than once when differences in my production and staging machines lead to some odd behavior.     Another option is to use the TeamCity integration available. This enables you to set Deployment Manager up so that it will automatically create releases and deploy these to an environment directly from TeamCity, meaning that you can always see the latest version up and running without having to do anything. Machine Specific Deployments ‘What about custom configuration files?’ I hear you shout. Certainly, it was one of my concerns. Our setup on the staging machine is not in line with that on production. What this means is that, should we deploy the same configuration to both, one of them is going to break. Thankfully, it turns out that Deployment Manager can deal with this. Given I had environments ‘staging’ and ‘live’, and that staging used the project’s web.config file, while production (‘live’) required the config file to undergo some transformations, I simply added a web.live.config file in the project, so that it would be included as part of the NuGet package. In this file, I wrote the XML document transformations I needed and Deployment Manager took care of the rest. Another option is to set up ‘variables’ for your project, which allow you to specify key-value pairs for your configuration file, and which environment to apply them to. You’ll find Variables as a full left-hand submenu within the ‘Projects’ tab. These features will definitely be of interest if you have a large number of environments! There are still many other features that I didn’t get a chance to play around with like running PowerShell scripts for more personalised deployments. Maybe next time! Also, let’s not forget that my use case in this article is a very simple one – deploying a single package. I don’t believe that all projects will be equally as simple, but I already appreciate how much easier Deployment Manager could make my life. I look forward to the possibility of moving our other sites over to Deployment Manager in the near future.   Conclusion In this article I have described the steps involved in setting up and configuring an instance of Deployment Manager, creating a new automated deployment process, and using this to actually carry out a deployment. I’ve tried to mention some of the features I found particularly useful, such as error logging, easy release management allowing you to deploy the same release multiple times, and configuration file transformations. If I had to point out one issue, then it would be that the releases are immutable, which from a development point of view makes sense. However, this causes confusion where I have to create a new release to deploy to a newly set up environment – I cannot simply deploy an old release onto a new environment, the whole release needs to be recreated. I really liked how easy it was to get going with the product. Setting up Format SQL and making a first deployment took very little time. Especially when you compare it to how long it takes me to manually deploy the other site, as I described earlier. I liked how it let me know what I needed to do next, with little messages flagging up that I needed to ‘create environments’ or ‘add some deployment steps’ before I could continue. I found the dashboard incredibly convenient. As the number of projects and environments increase, it might become awkward to try and search them and find out what state they are in. Instead, the dashboard handily keeps track of the latest deployments of each project and lets you know what version is running on each of the environments, and when that deployment occurred. Finally, do you remember my complaint about having to rename folders so that I could keep track of what build they came from? This is yet another thing that Deployment Manager takes care of for you. Each release is put into its own directory, which takes the name of whatever version number that release has, though these can be customised if necessary. If you’d like to take a look at Deployment Manager for yourself, then you can download it here.

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