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  • Autojump in 12.04 doesn't work

    - by hnasarat
    https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/autojump I installed with apt-get, checked out the man page and added . /usr/share/autojump/autojump.sh to my .bashrc, like it says. When I cd around the filesystem, nothing gets added to ~/.local/share/autojump. I then tried adding . /usr/share/autojump/autojump.bash, but that didn't work either. autojump -a ~/Dropbox properly creates a file ~/.local/share/autojump/autojump.txt, but running j Drop < TAB > doesn't autocomplete to j ~/Dropbox/ as it should. However, j < TAB > does autocomplete to j ~/Dropbox. I know my bash-completion is working since it works for git, dd, and others. I know there's a newer version in the repositories set for Quantal. Perhaps that would work? I don't know how to install that version though. I've used autojump with mac homebrew (and it installed without any issue), so I know there is missing functionality. In general I'm really annoyed that I can't get this working...I've spent hours on it! Needless to say, help would be very appreciated.

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  • If the bug is 5+ years old, then is it a feature?

    - by Job
    Allow me to add details: I work at an institutional place with many coders, testers, QA analysts, product owners, etc. and here is something that bugs me: We have been able to sell crappy (albeit pretty functional) software for over a decade. It has many features and the product is competitive, but there are a some serious bugs out there, as well as thousands of "paper cuts" - little annoyances that clients need to get used to. It pains me to look at some of the things because I firmly believe that if computers do not help to make our lives easier, then we should not use them. I have confidence in my colleagues - they are smart, able, and can improve things when the focus is on doing that. But, it can be difficult to file bugs against some old functionality without seeing them closed or forgotten. "It worked like that for ions" is a typical answer. Also, when QA does regression, they tend to look for anything that is different as much as anything that does not seem right. So, a fix to an old problem can be written up as a bug, because "it has been like that before even my time". The young coder in me thinks: rewrite this freaking thing! As someone who had the opportunity to be close to sales, clients, I want to give a benefit of a doubt to this approach. I am interested in your opinion/experience as well. Please try to consider risk, cost-to-benefit, and other non-technical factors.

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  • What differences should I know? I just upgraded to 13.10 from 10.10 [on hold]

    - by test
    I ran Ubuntu 10.10 for a long time because I liked the menu style. The change in GUI with the upgrades drove me nuts but I finally gave in and downloaded Saucy Salamander 13.10 x64. It's a fresh install running as a virtual machine guest in VMWare Workstation 9 on a Windows 7 x64 host. Well it looks like all those icons are still there on the side which I would be OK with if there were some way to bring back my menus. I have no organized way of accessing things now, or do I? That is the purpose for this question, maybe there is some functionality I just can't find but is there. Also all my fine tuning was gone. I used to be able to change DPI but that's gone. I went ahead and installed Unity Tweak Tool via sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool but I couldn't find an icon for it after I installed it.. because again no menu. So I did a search for it and found it there. I've changed the font and which side the window buttons appear on which is good enough for now. Anyway... any suggestions you may have for me I'm game. I'm a Windows 7 user primarily but I use Ubuntu every once in a while. I really liked the old style where everything was categorized like for Applications there was Accessories, Games, Graphics, Internet, Office, Sound & Video, Wine.

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  • c++ accumulate with move instead of copy [migrated]

    - by user74399
    I have the following code auto adder = [](string& s1, const string& s2)->string&& { if (!s1.empty()) s1 += " "; s1 += s2; return move(s1); }; string test; test.reserve(wordArray.size() * 10); string words = accumulate(wordArray.begin(), wordArray.end(), move(test), adder); What I would like here is to avoid string copying. Unfortunately this is not accomplished by the vs2012 implementation of accumulate. Internally accumulate calls another function _Accumulate and the rvalue functionality gets lost in the process. It I instead call the _Accumulate function like so string words = Accumulate(wordArray.begin(), wordArray.end(), move(test), adder); I get the intended performance gain. Must the std library be rewritten to take rvalue arguments into consideration? Is there some other way I may use accumulate to accomplish what I want without cheating to much?

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  • How to Edit or Add a New Row in jqGrid

    - by Paul
    My jqGrid that does a great job of pulling data from my database, but I'm having trouble understanding how the Add New Row functionality works. Right now, I'm able to edit inline data, but I'm not able to create a new row using the Modal Box. I'm missing that extra logic that says, "If this is a new row, post this to the server side URL" instead of modifying existing data. (Right now, hitting Submit only clears the form and reloads the grid data.) The documentation states that Add New Row is: jQuery("#editgrid").jqGrid('editGridRow',"new",{height:280,reloadAfterSubmit:false}); but I'm not sure how to use that correctly. I've spent alot of time studying the Demos, but they seem to all use an external button to fire the new row command, rather than using the Modal Form, which I want to do. My complete code is here: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>jqGrid</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="../css/ui-lightness/jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="../css/ui.jqgrid.css" /> <script src="jquery-1.3.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="../js/i18n/grid.locale-en.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="jquery.jqGrid.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <h2>My Grid Data</h2> <table id="list" class="scroll"></table> <div id="pager" class="scroll c1"></div> <script type="text/javascript"> var lastSelectedId; jQuery('#list').jqGrid({ url:'grid.php', datatype: 'json', mtype: 'POST', colNames:['ID','Name', 'Price', 'Promotion'], colModel:[ {name:'product_id',index:'product_id', width:25,editable:false}, {name:'name',index:'name', width:50,editable:true, edittype:'text',editoptions:{size:30,maxlength:50}}, {name:'price',index:'price', width:50, align:'right',formatter:'currency', editable:true}, {name:'on_promotion',index:'on_promotion', width:50, formatter:'checkbox',editable:true, edittype:'checkbox'}], rowNum:10, rowList:[5,10,20,30], pager: $('#pager'), sortname: 'product_id', viewrecords: true, sortorder: "desc", caption:"Database", width:500, height:150, onSelectRow: function(id){ if(id && id!==lastSelectedId){ $('#list').restoreRow(lastSelectedId); $('#list').editRow(id,true,null,onSaveSuccess); lastSelectedId=id; }}, editurl:'grid.php?action=save'}) .jqGrid('navGrid','#pager', {refreshicon: 'ui-icon-refresh',view:true}, {height:280,reloadAfterSubmit:true}, {height:280,reloadAfterSubmit:true}, {reloadAfterSubmit:true}) .jqGrid('editGridRow',"new",{height:280,reloadAfterSubmit:false}); function onSaveSuccess(xhr) {response = xhr.responseText; if(response == 1) return true; return false;} </script></body></html> If it makes it easier, I'd be willing to scrap the inline editing functionality and do editing and posting via modal boxes. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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  • "Unable to read data from the transport connection: net_io_connectionclosed." - Windows Vista Busine

    - by John DaCosta
    Unable to test sending email from .NET code in Windows Vista Business. I am writing code which I will migrate to an SSIS Package once it its proven. The code is to send an error message via email to a list of recipients. The code is below, however I am getting an exception when I execute the code. I created a simple class to do the mailing... the design could be better, I am testing functionality before implementing more robust functionality, methods, etc. namespace LabDemos { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Mailer m = new Mailer(); m.test(); } } } namespace LabDemos { class MyMailer { List<string> _to = new List<string>(); List<string> _cc = new List<string>(); List<string> _bcc = new List<string>(); String _msgFrom = ""; String _msgSubject = ""; String _msgBody = ""; public void test(){ //create the mail message MailMessage mail = new MailMessage(); //set the addresses mail.From = new MailAddress("[email protected]"); //set the content mail.Subject = "This is an email"; mail.Body = "this is a sample body"; mail.IsBodyHtml = false; //send the message SmtpClient smtp = new SmtpClient(); smtp.Host = "emailservername"; smtp.Port = 25; smtp.UseDefaultCredentials = true; smtp.Send(mail); } } Exception Message Inner Exception {"Unable to read data from the transport connection: net_io_connectionclosed."} Stack Trace " at System.Net.Mail.SmtpReplyReaderFactory.ProcessRead(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 read, Boolean readLine)\r\n at System.Net.Mail.SmtpReplyReaderFactory.ReadLines(SmtpReplyReader caller, Boolean oneLine)\r\n at System.Net.Mail.SmtpReplyReaderFactory.ReadLine(SmtpReplyReader caller)\r\n at System.Net.Mail.SmtpConnection.GetConnection(String host, Int32 port)\r\n at System.Net.Mail.SmtpTransport.GetConnection(String host, Int32 port)\r\n at System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient.GetConnection()\r\n at System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient.Send(MailMessage message)" Outer Exception System.Net.Mail.SmtpException was unhandled Message="Failure sending mail." Source="System" StackTrace: at System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient.Send(MailMessage message) at LabDemos.Mailer.test() in C:\Users\username\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\LabDemos\LabDemos\Mailer.cs:line 40 at LabDemos.Program.Main(String[] args) in C:\Users\username\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\LabDemos\LabDemos\Program.cs:line 48 at System.AppDomain._nExecuteAssembly(Assembly assembly, String[] args) at System.AppDomain.nExecuteAssembly(Assembly assembly, String[] args) at System.Runtime.Hosting.ManifestRunner.Run(Boolean checkAptModel) at System.Runtime.Hosting.ManifestRunner.ExecuteAsAssembly() at System.Runtime.Hosting.ApplicationActivator.CreateInstance(ActivationContext activationContext, String[] activationCustomData) at System.Runtime.Hosting.ApplicationActivator.CreateInstance(ActivationContext activationContext) at System.Activator.CreateInstance(ActivationContext activationContext) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.HostingProcess.HostProc.RunUsersAssemblyDebugInZone() at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart_Context(Object state) at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state) at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart() InnerException: System.IO.IOException Message="Unable to read data from the transport connection: net_io_connectionclosed." Source="System" StackTrace: at System.Net.Mail.SmtpReplyReaderFactory.ProcessRead(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 read, Boolean readLine) at System.Net.Mail.SmtpReplyReaderFactory.ReadLines(SmtpReplyReader caller, Boolean oneLine) at System.Net.Mail.SmtpReplyReaderFactory.ReadLine(SmtpReplyReader caller) at System.Net.Mail.SmtpConnection.GetConnection(String host, Int32 port) at System.Net.Mail.SmtpTransport.GetConnection(String host, Int32 port) at System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient.GetConnection() at System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient.Send(MailMessage message) InnerException:

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  • How can I dynamically change auto complete entries in a C# combobox or textbox?

    - by Sam Hopkins
    I have a combobox in C# and I want to use auto complete suggestions with it, however I want to be able to change the auto complete entries as the user types, because the possible valid entries are far too numerous to populate the AutoCompleteStringCollection at startup. As an example, suppose I'm letting the user type in a name. I have a list of possible first names ("Joe", "John") and a list of surnames ("Bloggs", "Smith"), but if I have a thousand of each, then that would be a million possible strings - too many to put in the auto complete entries. So initially I want to have just the first names as suggestions ("Joe", "John") , and then once the user has typed the first name, ("Joe"), I want to remove the existing auto complete entries and replace them with a new set consisting of the chosen first name followed by the possible surnames ("Joe Bloggs", "Joe Smith"). In order to do this, I tried the following code: void InitializeComboBox() { ComboName.AutoCompleteMode = AutoCompleteMode.SuggestAppend; ComboName.AutoCompleteSource = AutoCompleteSource.CustomSource; ComboName.AutoCompleteCustomSource = new AutoCompleteStringCollection(); ComboName.TextChanged += new EventHandler( ComboName_TextChanged ); } void ComboName_TextChanged( object sender, EventArgs e ) { string text = this.ComboName.Text; string[] suggestions = GetNameSuggestions( text ); this.ComboQuery.AutoCompleteCustomSource.Clear(); this.ComboQuery.AutoCompleteCustomSource.AddRange( suggestions ); } However, this does not work properly. It seems that the call to Clear() causes the auto complete mechanism to "turn off" until the next character appears in the combo box, but of course when the next character appears the above code calls Clear() again, so the user never actually sees the auto complete functionality. It also causes the entire contents of the combo box to become selected, so between every keypress you have to deselect the existing text, which makes it unusable. If I remove the call to Clear() then the auto complete works, but it seems that then the AddRange() call has no effect, because the new suggestions that I add do not appear in the auto complete dropdown. I have been searching for a solution to this, and seen various things suggested, but I cannot get any of them to work - either the auto complete functionality appears disabled, or new strings do not appear. Here is a list of things I have tried: Calling BeginUpdate() before changing the strings and EndUpdate() afterwards. Calling Remove() on all the existing strings instead of Clear(). Clearing the text from the combobox while I update the strings, and adding it back afterwards. Setting the AutoCompleteMode to "None" while I change the strings, and setting it back to "SuggestAppend" afterwards. Hooking the TextUpdate or KeyPress event instead of TextChanged. Replacing the existing AutoCompleteCustomSource with a new AutoCompleteStringCollection each time. None of these helped, even in various combinations. Spence suggested that I try overriding the ComboBox function that gets the list of strings to use in auto complete. Using a reflector I found a couple of methods in the ComboBox class that look promising - GetStringsForAutoComplete() and SetAutoComplete(), but they are both private so I can't access them from a derived class. I couldn't take that any further. I tried replacing the ComboBox with a TextBox, because the auto complete interface is the same, and I found that the behaviour is slightly different. With the TextBox it appears to work better, in that the Append part of the auto complete works properly, but the Suggest part doesn't - the suggestion box briefly flashes to life but then immediately disappears. So I thought "Okay, I'll

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  • multiple-inheritance substitution

    - by Luigi
    I want to write a module (framework specific), that would wrap and extend Facebook PHP-sdk (https://github.com/facebook/php-sdk/). My problem is - how to organize classes, in a nice way. So getting into details - Facebook PHP-sdk consists of two classes: BaseFacebook - abstract class with all the stuff sdk does Facebook - extends BaseFacebook, and implements parent abstract persistance-related methods with default session usage Now I have some functionality to add: Facebook class substitution, integrated with framework session class shorthand methods, that run api calls, I use mostly (through BaseFacebook::api()), authorization methods, so i don't have to rewrite this logic every time, configuration, sucked up from framework classes, insted of passed as params caching, integrated with framework cache module I know something has gone very wrong, because I have too much inheritance that doesn't look very normal.Wrapping everything in one "complex extension" class also seems too much. I think I should have few working togheter classes - but i get into problems like: if cache class doesn't really extend and override BaseFacebook::api() method - shorthand and authentication classes won't be able to use the caching. Maybe some kind of a pattern would be right in here? How would you organize these classes and their dependencies? EDIT 04.07.2012 Bits of code, related to the topic: This is how the base class of Facebook PHP-sdk: abstract class BaseFacebook { // ... some methods public function api(/* polymorphic */) { // ... method, that makes api calls } public function getUser() { // ... tries to get user id from session } // ... other methods abstract protected function setPersistentData($key, $value); abstract protected function getPersistentData($key, $default = false); // ... few more abstract methods } Normaly Facebook class extends it, and impelements those abstract methods. I replaced it with my substitude - Facebook_Session class: class Facebook_Session extends BaseFacebook { protected function setPersistentData($key, $value) { // ... method body } protected function getPersistentData($key, $default = false) { // ... method body } // ... implementation of other abstract functions from BaseFacebook } Ok, then I extend this more with shorthand methods and configuration variables: class Facebook_Custom extends Facebook_Session { public funtion __construct() { // ... call parent's constructor with parameters from framework config } public function api_batch() { // ... a wrapper for parent's api() method return $this->api('/?batch=' . json_encode($calls), 'POST'); } public function redirect_to_auth_dialog() { // method body } // ... more methods like this, for common queries / authorization } I'm not sure, if this isn't too much for a single class ( authorization / shorthand methods / configuration). Then there comes another extending layer - cache: class Facebook_Cache extends Facebook_Custom { public function api() { $cache_file_identifier = $this->getUser(); if(/* cache_file_identifier is not null and found a valid file with cached query result */) { // return the result } else { try { // call Facebook_Custom::api, cache and return the result } catch(FacebookApiException $e) { // if Access Token is expired force refreshing it parent::redirect_to_auth_dialog(); } } } // .. some other stuff related to caching } Now this pretty much works. New instance of Facebook_Cache gives me all the functionality. Shorthand methods from Facebook_Custom use caching, because Facebook_Cache overwrited api() method. But here is what is bothering me: I think it's too much inheritance. It's all very tight coupled - like look how i had to specify 'Facebook_Custom::api' instead of 'parent:api', to avoid api() method loop on Facebook_Cache class extending. Overall mess and ugliness. So again, this works but I'm just asking about patterns / ways of doing this in a cleaner and smarter way.

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  • How can I read the verbose output from a Cmdlet in C# using Exchange Powershell

    - by mrkeith
    Environment: Exchange 2007 sp3 (2003 sp2 mixed mode) Visual Studio 2008, .Net 3.5 Hello, I'm working with an Exchange powershell move-mailbox cmdlet and have noted when I do so from the Exchange Management shell (using the Verbose switch) there is a ton of real-time information provided. To provide a little context, I'm attempting to create a UI application that moves mailboxes similarly to the Exchange Management Console but desire to support an input file and specific server/database destinations for each entry (and threading). Here's roughly what I have at present but I'm not sure if there is an event I need to register for or what... And to be clear, I desire to get this information in real-time so I may update my UI to reflect what's occurring in the move sequence for the appropriate user (pretty much like the native functionality offered in the Management Console). And in case you are wondering, the reason why I'm not content with the Management Console functionality is, I have an algorithm which I'm using to balance users depending on storage limit, Blackberry use, journaling, exception mailbox size etc which demands user be mapped to specific locations... and I do not desire to create many/several move groups for each common destination or to hunt for lists of users individually through the management console UI. I can not seem to find any good documentation or examples of how to tie into reading the verbose messages that are provided within the console using C# (I see value in being able to read this kind of information in many different scenarios). I've explored the Invoke and InvokeAsync methods and the StateChanged & DataReady events but none of these seem to provide the information (verbose comments) that I'm after. Any direction or examples that can be provided will be very appreciated! A code sample which is little more than how I would ordinarily call any other powershell command follows: // config to use ExMgmt shell, create runspace and open it RunspaceConfiguration rsConfig = RunspaceConfiguration.Create(); PSSnapInException snapInException = null; PSSnapInInfo info = rsConfig.AddPSSnapIn("Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Admin", out snapInException); if (snapInException != null) throw snapInException; Runspace runspace = RunspaceFactory.CreateRunspace(rsConfig); try { runspace.Open(); // create a pipeline and feed script text Pipeline pipeline = runspace.CreatePipeline(); string targetDatabase = @"myServer\myStorageGroup\myDB"; string mbxOwner = "[email protected]"; Command myMoveMailbox = new Command("Move-Mailbox", false, false); myMoveMailbox.Parameters.Add("Identity", mbxOwner); myMoveMailbox.Parameters.Add("TargetDatabase", targetDatabase); myMoveMailbox.Parameters.Add("Verbose"); myMoveMailbox.Parameters.Add("ValidateOnly"); myMoveMailbox.Parameters.Add("Confirm", false); pipeline.Commands.Add(myMoveMailbox); System.Collections.ObjectModel.Collection output = null; // these next few lines that are commented out are where I've tried // registering for events and calling asynchronously but this doesn't // seem to get me anywhere closer // //pipeline.StateChanged += new EventHandler(pipeline_StateChanged); //pipeline.Output.DataReady += new EventHandler(Output_DataReady); //pipeline.InvokeAsync(); //pipeline.Input.Close(); //return; tried these variations that are commented out but none seem to be useful output = pipeline.Invoke(); // Check for errors in the pipeline and throw an exception if necessary if (pipeline.Error != null && pipeline.Error.Count 0) { StringBuilder pipelineError = new StringBuilder(); pipelineError.AppendFormat("Error calling Test() Cmdlet. "); foreach (object item in pipeline.Error.ReadToEnd()) pipelineError.AppendFormat("{0}\n", item.ToString()); throw new Exception(pipelineError.ToString()); } foreach (PSObject psObject in output) { // blah, blah, blah // this is normally where I would read details about a particular PS command // but really pertains to a command once it finishes and has nothing to do with // the verbose messages that I'm after... since this part of the methods pertains // to the after-effects of a command having run, I'm suspecting I need to look to // the asynch invoke method but am not certain or knowing how. } } finally { runspace.Close(); } Thanks! Keith

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  • Should we develop a custom membership provider in this case?

    - by Allen
    I'll be adding a bounty to this, probably 200, more if you guys think its appropriate. I wont accept an answer until I can add a bounty so feel free to go ahead and answer now Summary Long story short, we've been tasked with gutting the authentication and authorization parts of a fairly old and bloated asp.net application that previously had all of these components written from scratch. Since our application isn't a typical one, and none of us have experience in asp.net's built in membership provider stuff, we're not sure if we should roll our own authentication and authorization again or if we should try to work within the asp.net membership provider mindset and develop our own membership provider. Our Application We have a fairly old asp.net application that gets installed at customer locations to service clients on a LAN. Admins create users (users do not sign up) and depending on the install, we may have the software integrated with LDAP. Currently, the LDAP integration bulk-imports the users to our database and when they login, it authenticates against LDAP so we dont have to manage their passwords. Nothing amazing there. Admins can assign users to 1 group and they can change the authorization of that group to manage access to various parts of the software. Groups are maintained by Admins (web based UI) and as said earlier, granted / denied permissions to certain functionality within the application. All this was completely written from the ground up without using any of the built in .net authorization or authentication. We literally have IsLoggedIn() methods that check for login and redirect to our login page if they aren't. Our Rewrite We've been tasked to integrate more tightly with LDAP, they want us to tie groups in our application to groups (or whatever types of containers that LDAP uses) in LDAP so that when a customer opt's to use our LDAP integration, they dont have to manage their users in LDAP AND in our application. The new way, they will simply create users in LDAP, add them to Groups in LDAP and our application will see that they belong to the appropriate LDAP group and authenticate and authorize them. In addition, we've been granted the go ahead to completely rip out the User authentication and authorization code and completely re-do it. Our Problem The problem is that none of us have any experience with asp.net membership provider functionality. The little bit of exposure I have to it makes me worry that it was not intended to be used for an application such as ours. Though, developing our own ASP.NET Membership Provider and Role Manager sounds like it would be a great experience and most likely the appropriate thing to do. Basically, I'm looking for advice, should we be using the ASP.NET Membership provider & Role Management API or should we continue to roll our own? I know this decision will be influenced by our requirements so I'm going over them below Our Requirements Just a quick n dirty list Maintain the ability to have a db of users and authenticate them and give admins (only, not users) the ability to CRUD users Allow the site to integrate with LDAP, when this is chosen, they don't want any users stored in the DB, only the relationship between Groups as they exist in our app / db and the Groups/Containers as they exist in LDAP. .net 3.5 is being used (mix of asp.net webforms and asp.net mvc) Has to work in ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC (shouldn't be a problem I'm guessing) This can't be user centric, administrators need to be the only ones that CRUD (or import via ldap) users and groups We have to be able to Auth via LDAP when its configured to do so I always try to monitor my questions closely so feel free to ask for more info. Also, as a general summary of what I'm looking for in an answer is just. "You should/shouldn't use xyz, here's why". Links regarding asp.net membership provider and role management stuff are very welcome, most of the stuff I'm finding is 5+ years old. Edit: Added some stuff to "Our Rewrite"

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  • C#: Inheritence, Overriding, and Hiding

    - by Rosarch
    I'm having difficulty with an architectural decision for my C# XNA game. The basic entity in the world, such as a tree, zombie, or the player, is represented as a GameObject. Each GameObject is composed of at least a GameObjectController, GameObjectModel, and GameObjectView. These three are enough for simple entities, like inanimate trees or rocks. However, as I try to keep the functionality as factored out as possible, the inheritance begins to feel unwieldy. Syntactically, I'm not even sure how best to accomplish my goals. Here is the GameObjectController: public class GameObjectController { protected GameObjectModel model; protected GameObjectView view; public GameObjectController(GameObjectManager gameObjectManager) { this.gameObjectManager = gameObjectManager; model = new GameObjectModel(this); view = new GameObjectView(this); } public GameObjectManager GameObjectManager { get { return gameObjectManager; } } public virtual GameObjectView View { get { return view; } } public virtual GameObjectModel Model { get { return model; } } public virtual void Update(long tick) { } } I want to specify that each subclass of GameObjectController will have accessible at least a GameObjectView and GameObjectModel. If subclasses are fine using those classes, but perhaps are overriding for a more sophisticated Update() method, I don't want them to have to duplicate the code to produce those dependencies. So, the GameObjectController constructor sets those objects up. However, some objects do want to override the model and view. This is where the trouble comes in. Some objects need to fight, so they are CombatantGameObjects: public class CombatantGameObject : GameObjectController { protected new readonly CombatantGameModel model; public new virtual CombatantGameModel Model { get { return model; } } protected readonly CombatEngine combatEngine; public CombatantGameObject(GameObjectManager gameObjectManager, CombatEngine combatEngine) : base(gameObjectManager) { model = new CombatantGameModel(this); this.combatEngine = combatEngine; } public override void Update(long tick) { if (model.Health <= 0) { gameObjectManager.RemoveFromWorld(this); } base.Update(tick); } } Still pretty simple. Is my use of new to hide instance variables correct? Note that I'm assigning CombatantObjectController.model here, even though GameObjectController.Model was already set. And, combatants don't need any special view functionality, so they leave GameObjectController.View alone. Then I get down to the PlayerController, at which a bug is found. public class PlayerController : CombatantGameObject { private readonly IInputReader inputReader; private new readonly PlayerModel model; public new PlayerModel Model { get { return model; } } private float lastInventoryIndexAt; private float lastThrowAt; public PlayerController(GameObjectManager gameObjectManager, IInputReader inputReader, CombatEngine combatEngine) : base(gameObjectManager, combatEngine) { this.inputReader = inputReader; model = new PlayerModel(this); Model.Health = Constants.PLAYER_HEALTH; } public override void Update(long tick) { if (Model.Health <= 0) { gameObjectManager.RemoveFromWorld(this); for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { Debug.WriteLine("YOU DEAD SON!!!"); } return; } UpdateFromInput(tick); // .... } } The first time that this line is executed, I get a null reference exception: model.Body.ApplyImpulse(movementImpulse, model.Position); model.Position looks at model.Body, which is null. This is a function that initializes GameObjects before they are deployed into the world: public void Initialize(GameObjectController controller, IDictionary<string, string> data, WorldState worldState) { controller.View.read(data); controller.View.createSpriteAnimations(data, _assets); controller.Model.read(data); SetUpPhysics(controller, worldState, controller.Model.BoundingCircleRadius, Single.Parse(data["x"]), Single.Parse(data["y"]), bool.Parse(data["isBullet"])); } Every object is passed as a GameObjectController. Does that mean that if the object is really a PlayerController, controller.Model will refer to the base's GameObjectModel and not the PlayerController's overriden PlayerObjectModel?

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  • ngGrid reusable filter AngularJS

    - by wootscootinboogie
    I have a business requirement that I filter a boolean value in my ngGrid. The filter has three states: only true, only false and both. Filtering like this seems to be a common enough use case that I should refactor that functionality out of my code for re use (possibly in a directive/filter?). I'd like to know how I can go about pulling out the customFilter function in my controller and make it so that I can pass the filter a property name on which to filter, and a value for selectedFilterOption. The code currently works, but I feel like this is a good chance to get better at angular :). So how can I pull out my filtering used here and make it a reusable piece of functionality? app.controller('DocumentController',function($scope,DocumentService) { $scope.filterOptions = { filterText: '', useExternalFilter: false }; $scope.totalServerItems =0; $scope.pagingOptions ={ pageSizes: [5,10,100], pageSize: 5, currentPage: 1 } //filter! $scope.dropdownOptions = [{ name: 'Show all' },{ name: 'Show active' },{ name: 'Show trash' }]; //default choice for filtering is 'show active' $scope.selectedFilterOption = $scope.dropdownOptions[1]; //three stage bool filter $scope.customFilter = function(data){ var tempData = []; angular.forEach(data,function(item){ if($scope.selectedFilterOption.name === 'Show all'){ tempData.push(item); } else if($scope.selectedFilterOption.name ==='Show active' && !item.markedForDelete){ tempData.push(item); } else if($scope.selectedFilterOption.name ==='Show trash' && item.markedForDelete){ tempData.push(item); } }); return tempData; } //grabbing data $scope.getPagedDataAsync = function(pageSize, page, filterValue, searchText){ var data; if(searchText){ var ft = searchText.toLowerCase(); DocumentService.get('filterableData.json').success(function(largeLoad){ //filter the data when searching data = $scope.customFilter(largeLoad).filter(function(item){ return JSON.stringify(item).toLowerCase().indexOf(ft) != -1; }) $scope.setPagingData($scope.customFilter(data),page,pageSize); }) } else{ DocumentService.get('filterableData.json').success(function(largeLoad){ var testLargeLoad = $scope.customFilter(largeLoad); //filter the data on initial page load when no search text has been entered $scope.setPagingData(testLargeLoad,page,pageSize); }) } }; //paging $scope.setPagingData = function(data, page, pageSize){ var pagedData = data.slice((page -1) * pageSize, page * pageSize); //filter the data for paging $scope.myData = $scope.customFilter(pagedData); $scope.myData = pagedData; $scope.totalServerItems = data.length; if(!$scope.$$phase){ $scope.$apply(); } } //watch for filter option change, set the data property of gridOptions to the newly filtered data $scope.$watch('selectedFilterOption',function(){ var data = $scope.customFilter($scope.myData); $scope.myData = data; $scope.getPagedDataAsync($scope.pagingOptions.pageSize, $scope.pagingOptions.currentPage); $scope.setPagingData($scope.myData,$scope.pagingOptions.currentPage,$scope.pagingOptions.pageSize); }) $scope.$watch('pagingOptions',function(newVal, oldVal){ if(newVal !== oldVal && newVal.currentPage !== oldVal.currentPage){ $scope.getPagedDataAsync($scope.pagingOptions.pageSize,$scope.pagingOptions.currentPage,$scope.filterOptions.filterText); } },true) $scope.message ="This is a message"; $scope.gridOptions = { data: 'myData', enablePaging: true, showFooter:true, totalServerItems: 'totalServerItems', pagingOptions: $scope.pagingOptions, filterOptions: $scope.filterOptions, showFilter: true, enableCellEdit: true, showColumnMenu: true, enableColumnReordering: true, enablePinning: true, showGroupPanel: true, groupsCollapsedByDefault: true, enableColumnResize: true } //get the data on page load $scope.getPagedDataAsync($scope.pagingOptions.pageSize, $scope.pagingOptions.currentPage); }); HTML

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  • Problem with memset after an instance of a user defined class is created and a file is opened

    - by Liberalkid
    I'm having a weird problem with memset, that was something to do with a class I'm creating before it and a file I'm opening in the constructor. The class I'm working with normally reads in an array and transforms it into another array, but that's not important. The class I'm working with is: #include <vector> #include <algorithm> using namespace std; class PreProcess { public: PreProcess(char* fileName,char* outFileName); void SortedOrder(); private: vector< vector<double > > matrix; void SortRow(vector<double> &row); char* newFileName; vector< pair<double,int> > rowSorted; }; The other functions aren't important, because I've stopped calling them and the problem persists. Essentially I've narrowed it down to my constructor: PreProcess::PreProcess(char* fileName,char* outFileName):newFileName(outFileName){ ifstream input(fileName); input.close(); //this statement is inconsequential } I also read in the file in my constructor, but I've found that the problem persists if I don't read in the matrix and just open the file. Essentially I've narrowed it down to if I comment out those two lines the memset works properly, otherwise it doesn't. Now to the context of the problem I'm having with it: I wrote my own simple wrapper class for matrices. It doesn't have much functionality, I just need 2D arrays in the next part of my project and having a class handle everything makes more sense to me. The header file: #include <iostream> using namespace std; class Matrix{ public: Matrix(int r,int c); int &operator()(int i,int j) {//I know I should check my bounds here return matrix[i*columns+j]; } ~Matrix(); const void Display(); private: int *matrix; const int rows; const int columns; }; Driver: #include "Matrix.h" #include <string> using namespace std; Matrix::Matrix(int r,int c):rows(r),columns(c) { matrix=new int[rows*columns]; memset(matrix,0,sizeof(matrix)); } const void Matrix::Display(){ for(int i=0;i<rows;i++){ for(int j=0;j<columns;j++) cout << (*this)(i,j) << " "; cout << endl; } } Matrix::~Matrix() { delete matrix; } My main program runs: PreProcess test1(argv[1],argv[2]); //test1.SortedOrder(); Matrix test(10,10); test.Display(); And when I run this with the input line uncommented I get: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 -1371727776 32698 -1 0 0 0 0 0 6332656 0 -1 -1 0 0 6332672 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 -1371732704 32698 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 I really don't have a clue what's going on in memory to cause this, on a side note if I replace memset with: for(int i=0;i<rows*columns;i++) *(matrix+i) &= 0x0; Then it works perfectly, it also works if I don't open the file. If it helps I'm running GCC 64-bit version 4.2.4 on Ubuntu.I assume there's some functionality of memset that I'm not properly understanding.

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  • What's the right way to do mutable data structures (e.g., skip lists, splay trees) in F#?

    - by dan
    What's a good way to implement mutable data structures in F#? The reason I’m asking is because I want to go back and implement the data structures I learned about in the algorithms class I took this semester (skip lists, splay trees, fusion trees, y-fast tries, van Emde Boas trees, etc.), which was a pure theory course with no coding whatsoever, and I figure I might as well try to learn F# while I’m doing it. I know that I “should” use finger trees to get splay tree functionality in a functional language, and that I should do something with laziness to get skip-list functionality, etc. , but I want to get the basics nailed down before I try playing with purely functional implementations. There are lots of examples of how to do functional data structures in F#, but there isn’t much on how to do mutable data structures, so I started by fixing up the doubly linked list here into something that allows inserts and deletes anywhere. My plan is to turn this into a skip list, and then use a similar structure (discriminated union of a record) for the tree structures I want to implement. Before I start on something more substantial, is there a better way to do mutable structures like this in F#? Should I just use records and not bother with the discriminated union? Should I use a class instead? Is this question "not even wrong"? Should I be doing the mutable structures in C#, and not dip into F# until I want to compare them to their purely functional counterparts? And, if a DU of records is what I want, could I have written the code below better or more idiomatically? It seems like there's a lot of redundancy here, but I'm not sure how to get rid of it. module DoublyLinkedList = type 'a ll = | None | Node of 'a ll_node and 'a ll_node = { mutable Prev: 'a ll; Element : 'a ; mutable Next: 'a ll; } let insert x l = match l with | None -> Node({ Prev=None; Element=x; Next=None }) | Node(node) -> match node.Prev with | None -> let new_node = { Prev=None; Element=x; Next=Node(node)} node.Prev <- Node(new_node) Node(new_node) | Node(prev_node) -> let new_node = { Prev=node.Prev; Element=x; Next=Node(node)} node.Prev <- Node(new_node) prev_node.Next <- Node(new_node) Node(prev_node) let rec nth n l = match n, l with | _,None -> None | _,Node(node) when n > 0 -> nth (n-1) node.Next | _,Node(node) when n < 0 -> nth (n+1) node.Prev | _,Node(node) -> Node(node) //hopefully only when n = 0 :-) let rec printLinkedList head = match head with | None -> () | Node(x) -> let prev = match x.Prev with | None -> "-" | Node(y) -> y.Element.ToString() let cur = x.Element.ToString() let next = match x.Next with | None -> "-" | Node(y) -> y.Element.ToString() printfn "%s, <- %s -> %s" prev cur next printLinkedList x.Next

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  • Exception thrown while accessing HTML DataTable in backing bean

    - by Denzil
    Hi folks, I am building a simple application in JSF with the CrUD functionality. I am trying to implement edit functionality using the tomahawk component .I am unable to retrieve the selected row in my backing bean. Here's my JSP file snip: <t:dataTable id="data" binding="#{selectOneRowList.dataTable}" styleClass="scrollerTable" headerClass="standardTable_Header" footerClass="standardTable_Header" rowClasses="standardTable_Row1,standardTable_Row2" columnClasses="standardTable_Column,standardTable_ColumnCentered,standardTable_Column" var="car" value="#{selectOneRowList.list}" sortColumn="#{selectOneRowList.sortColumn}" sortAscending="#{selectOneRowList.sortAscending}" preserveDataModel="false" preserveSort="true" preserveRowStates="true" rows="10" > <h:column> <f:facet name="header"> <h:outputText value="Select"/> </f:facet> <t:selectOneRow groupName="selection" id="hugo" value="#{selectOneRowList.selectedRowIndex}" onchange="submit();" immediate="true" valueChangeListener="#{selectOneRowList.processRowSelection}"/> </h:column> <h:column> <f:facet name="header"> </f:facet> <h:outputText value="#{car.id}" /> </h:column> <h:column> <f:facet name="header"> <h:outputText value="Cars" /> </f:facet> <h:outputText value="#{car.type}" /> </h:column> <t:column sortable="true"> <f:facet name="header"> <h:outputText value="Color" /> </f:facet> <h:outputText value="#{car.color}" /> </t:column> </t:dataTable> Here's my backing bean SelectOneRowList.java : public void editCar(ActionEvent event) { System.out.println("Row number ## " + _selectedRowIndex.toString() + " selected!"); System.out.println("Datatable ::"+ dataTable); System.out.println("Row Count ::" + dataTable.getRowCount()); dataItem = (SimpleCar) getDataTable().getRowData(); //selectedCar = (SimpleCar) _list.get(Integer.parseInt(_selectedRowIndex.toString())); selectedCar = (SimpleCar) dataTable.getRowData(); System.out.println(dataTable.getRowData()); } My DTO{Data Transfer Object} which is SimpleCar.java contains the variables ID, type, color and their respective setters/getters. The dataItem variable is of type "SimpleCar". The dataTable is of type HTMLDataTable. I am able to get the the first 3 SOP's but the 4th SOP isn't printed. I receive the following exception on the server : javax.faces.el.EvaluationException: Exception while invoking expression #{selectOneRowList.editCar} org.apache.myfaces.el.MethodBindingImpl.invoke(MethodBindingImpl.java:156) javax.faces.component.UICommand.broadcast(UICommand.java:89) javax.faces.component.UIViewRoot._broadcastForPhase(UIViewRoot.java:97) javax.faces.component.UIViewRoot.processApplication(UIViewRoot.java:171) org.apache.myfaces.lifecycle.InvokeApplicationExecutor.execute(InvokeApplicationExecutor.java:32) org.apache.myfaces.lifecycle.LifecycleImpl.executePhase(LifecycleImpl.java:95) org.apache.myfaces.lifecycle.LifecycleImpl.execute(LifecycleImpl.java:70) javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet.service(FacesServlet.java:139) org.apache.myfaces.webapp.filter.ExtensionsFilter.doFilter(ExtensionsFilter.java:341) On click of the edit button the editCar method in my backing bean is invoked. I need to get the data of the selected row in my backing bean. Why is the exception occurring ? The above example is taken from the tomawhawk examples WAR distributed on the website. I have gone through many links including the ones on BalusC but none of them have helped. Regards,

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  • Why can't my program display this dialog box, while another program can?

    - by nonoitall
    I'm trying to write a wrapper for Winamp input plugins and have hit a bit of a snag. I'd like my wrapper to be able to display a plugin's configuration dialog, which is (or should be) achieved by calling the plugin's Config(HWND hwndParent) function. For most plugins, this works fine and my program is able to display the plugin's configuration dialog. However, 64th Note (a plugin for playing USF files) is giving me problems. Winamp can display its configuration dialog just fine, but whenever I try to display it from my wrapper, the dialog gets destroyed before it ever shows itself. Thankfully, 64th Note is open source, so I took a look at its innards to try and get an idea of what's going wrong. I've trimmed off the irrelevant bits and am left with this: Config function in the plugin (should show configuration dialog): void Config(HWND hwndParent) { DialogBox(slave, (const char *) IDD_CONFIG_WINDOW, NULL, configDlgProc); } (Slave is the plugin DLL's HINSTANCE handle.) The proc for the dialog is as follows (I have stripped out all the functionality, since it doesn't appear to have an influence on this problem): BOOL CALLBACK configDlgProc(HWND hDlg, UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam) { return 0; } The template for IDD_CONFIG_WINDOW is as follows: IDD_CONFIG_WINDOW DIALOGEX 0, 0, 269, 149 STYLE DS_SETFONT | DS_MODALFRAME | WS_POPUP | WS_CAPTION | WS_SYSMENU CAPTION "64th Note configuration" FONT 8, "MS Sans Serif", 0, 0, 0x0 BEGIN DEFPUSHBUTTON "OK",IDOK,212,38,50,14 CONTROL "Play Forever",IDC_NOLENGTH,"Button",BS_AUTORADIOBUTTON,7,7,55,8 CONTROL "Always Use Default Length",IDC_SETLEN,"Button",BS_AUTORADIOBUTTON,7,17,101,8 CONTROL "Default Length",IDC_DEFLEN,"Button",BS_AUTORADIOBUTTON,7,29,63,8 EDITTEXT IDC_DEFLENVAL,71,28,38,12,ES_AUTOHSCROLL EDITTEXT IDC_DEFFADEVAL,71,42,38,12,ES_AUTOHSCROLL CONTROL "Detect Silence",IDC_DETSIL,"Button",BS_AUTOCHECKBOX | WS_TABSTOP,7,56,63,8 EDITTEXT IDC_DETSILVAL,71,56,38,12,ES_AUTOHSCROLL CONTROL "Slider2",IDC_PRISLIDER,"msctls_trackbar32",TBS_AUTOTICKS | WS_TABSTOP,74,90,108,11 EDITTEXT IDC_TITLEFMT,7,127,255,15,ES_AUTOHSCROLL CONTROL "Default to file name on missing field",IDC_FNONMISSINGTAG, "Button",BS_AUTOCHECKBOX | WS_TABSTOP,50,114,124,8 CONTROL "Use Recompiler CPU",IDC_RECOMPILER,"Button",BS_AUTOCHECKBOX | WS_TABSTOP,145,7,83,8 CONTROL "Round Frequency",IDC_ROUNDFREQ,"Button",BS_AUTOCHECKBOX | WS_TABSTOP,145,16,73,8 CONTROL "Seek Backwards",IDC_BACKWARDS,"Button",BS_AUTOCHECKBOX | WS_TABSTOP,145,26,70,8 CONTROL "Fast Seek",IDC_FASTSEEK,"Button",BS_AUTOCHECKBOX | WS_TABSTOP,145,35,48,8 CONTROL "RSP Sections",IDC_SECTIONS,"Button",BS_AUTOCHECKBOX | WS_TABSTOP,145,45,60,8 CONTROL "Soft Amplify",IDC_SOFTAMP,"Button",BS_AUTOCHECKBOX | WS_TABSTOP,145,54,53,8 CONTROL "Audio HLE",IDC_AUDIOHLE,"Button",BS_AUTOCHECKBOX | WS_TABSTOP,145,63,50,8 CONTROL "Auto Audio HLE",IDC_AUTOAUDIOHLE,"Button",BS_AUTOCHECKBOX | WS_TABSTOP,145,72,64,8 CONTROL "Display Errors",IDC_DISPERROR,"Button",BS_AUTOCHECKBOX | WS_TABSTOP,145,81,58,8 EDITTEXT IDC_RELVOL,211,104,28,12,ES_AUTOHSCROLL PUSHBUTTON "Cancel",IDCANCEL,212,54,50,14 PUSHBUTTON "Help",IDHELPBUTTON,212,71,50,14 LTEXT "Title format:",IDC_STATIC,7,113,38,8 LTEXT "seconds",IDC_STATIC,112,29,28,8 LTEXT "Default Fade",IDC_STATIC,19,43,42,8 LTEXT "seconds",IDC_STATIC,112,43,28,8 LTEXT "seconds",IDC_STATIC,112,57,28,8 CTEXT "CPU Thread Priority",IDC_STATIC,7,91,63,8 CTEXT "Look ma, I'm data!",IDC_CPUPRI,75,104,108,8 LTEXT "Relative Volume",IDC_STATIC,199,94,52,8 LTEXT "Fade Type",IDC_STATIC,7,75,35,8 COMBOBOX IDC_FADETYPE,45,72,87,74,CBS_DROPDOWNLIST | WS_TABSTOP END Naturally, without any substance in the proc function, the dialog doesn't have any functionality, but it still displays in Winamp when the Config function is invoked. However, it does not appear when I invoke it from my wrapper program. When I monitored the messages sent to the dialog in its proc function, I saw that WM_DESTROY and WM_NCDESTROY were sent within the first few messages, though I have no clue as to why. If I change the Config function so that it displays the plugin's About dialog instead of its configuration dialog, both Winamp and my wrapper will display the About dialog, which suggests that there is something unique to the configuration dialog template that's causing the problem. The modified Config function reads like so: void Config(HWND hwndParent) { DialogBox(slave, (const char *) IDD_ABOUTBOX, NULL, configDlgProc); } The template for the About dialog is as follows: IDD_ABOUTBOX DIALOGEX 0, 0, 152, 151 STYLE DS_SETFONT | DS_MODALFRAME | WS_POPUP | WS_CAPTION | WS_SYSMENU CAPTION "About 64th Note" FONT 8, "MS Sans Serif", 0, 0, 0x1 BEGIN LTEXT "64th Note v1.2 beta 3\nBased on Project 64 1.6 by Zilmar and Jabo\nAudio HLE by Azimer\nPSF concept and tagging by Neill Corlett\nPlayer by hcs, Josh W, dr0\nhttp://hcs64.com/usf",IDC_STATIC,7,94,138,50 CONTROL 110,IDC_STATIC,"Static",SS_BITMAP,26,7,95,86,WS_EX_DLGMODALFRAME END Like I said, my wrapper displays the About dialog just fine, as does Winamp. Why can Winamp display the Config dialog, while my wrapper cannot?

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  • Break a class in twain, or impose an interface for restricted access?

    - by bedwyr
    What's the best way of partitioning a class when its functionality needs to be externally accessed in different ways by different classes? Hopefully the following example will make the question clear :) I have a Java class which accesses a single location in a directory allowing external classes to perform read/write operations to it. Read operations return usage stats on the directory (e.g. available disk space, number of writes, etc.); write operations, obviously, allow external classes to write data to the disk. These methods always work on the same location, and receive their configuration (e.g. which directory to use, min disk space, etc.) from an external source (passed to the constructor). This class looks something like this: public class DiskHandler { public DiskHandler(String dir, int minSpace) { ... } public void writeToDisk(String contents, String filename) { int space = getAvailableSpace(); ... } public void getAvailableSpace() { ... } } There's quite a bit more going on, but this will do to suffice. This class needs to be accessed differently by two external classes. One class needs access to the read operations; the other needs access to both read and write operations. public class DiskWriter { DiskHandler diskHandler; public DiskWriter() { diskHandler = new DiskHandler(...); } public void doSomething() { diskHandler.writeToDisk(...); } } public class DiskReader { DiskHandler diskHandler; public DiskReader() { diskHandler = new DiskHandler(...); } public void doSomething() { int space = diskHandler.getAvailableSpace(...); } } At this point, both classes share the same class, but the class which should only read has access to the write methods. Solution 1 I could break this class into two. One class would handle read operations, and the other would handle writes: // NEW "UTILITY" CLASSES public class WriterUtil { private ReaderUtil diskReader; public WriterUtil(String dir, int minSpace) { ... diskReader = new ReaderUtil(dir, minSpace); } public void writeToDisk(String contents, String filename) { int = diskReader.getAvailableSpace(); ... } } public class ReaderUtil { public ReaderUtil(String dir, int minSpace) { ... } public void getAvailableSpace() { ... } } // MODIFIED EXTERNALLY-ACCESSING CLASSES public class DiskWriter { WriterUtil diskWriter; public DiskWriter() { diskWriter = new WriterUtil(...); } public void doSomething() { diskWriter.writeToDisk(...); } } public class DiskReader { ReaderUtil diskReader; public DiskReader() { diskReader = new ReaderUtil(...); } public void doSomething() { int space = diskReader.getAvailableSpace(...); } } This solution prevents classes from having access to methods they should not, but it also breaks encapsulation. The original DiskHandler class was completely self-contained and only needed config parameters via a single constructor. By breaking apart the functionality into read/write classes, they both are concerned with the directory and both need to be instantiated with their respective values. In essence, I don't really care to duplicate the concerns. Solution 2 I could implement an interface which only provisions read operations, and use this when a class only needs access to those methods. The interface might look something like this: public interface Readable { int getAvailableSpace(); } The Reader class would instantiate the object like this: Readable diskReader; public DiskReader() { diskReader = new DiskHandler(...); } This solution seems brittle, and prone to confusion in the future. It doesn't guarantee developers will use the correct interface in the future. Any changes to the implementation of the DiskHandler could also need to update the interface as well as the accessing classes. I like it better than the previous solution, but not by much. Frankly, neither of these solutions seems perfect, but I'm not sure if one should be preferred over the other. I really don't want to break the original class up, but I also don't know if the interface buys me much in the long run. Are there other solutions I'm missing?

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  • What does a WinForm application need to be designed for usability, and be robust, clean, and profess

    - by msorens
    One of the principal problems impeding productivity in software implementation is the classic conundrum of “reinventing the wheel”. Of late I am a .NET developer and even the wonderful wizardry of .NET and Visual Studio covers only a portion of this challenging issue. Below I present my initial thoughts both on what is available and what should be available from .NET on a WinForm, focusing on good usability. That is, aspects of an application exposed to the user and making the user experience easier and/or better. (I do include a couple items not visible to the user because I feel strongly about them, such as diagnostics.) I invite you to contribute to these lists. LIST A: Components provided by .NET These are substantially complete components provided by .NET, i.e. those requiring at most trivial coding to use. “About” dialog -- add it with a couple clicks then customize. Persist settings across invocations -- .NET has the support; just use a few lines of code to glue them together. Migrate settings with a new version -- a powerful one, available with one line of code. Tooltips (and infotips) -- .NET includes just plain text tooltips; third-party libraries provide richer ones. Diagnostic support -- TraceSources, TraceListeners, and more are built-in. Internationalization -- support for tailoring your app to languages other than your own. LIST B: Components not provided by .NET These are not supplied at all by .NET or supplied only as rudimentary elements requiring substantial work to be realized. Splash screen -- a small window present during program startup with your logo, loading messages, etc. Tip of the day -- a mini-tutorial presented one bit at a time each time the user starts your app. Check for available updates -- facility to query a server to see if the user is running the latest version of your app, then provide a simple way to upgrade if a new version is found. Maximize to multiple monitors -- the canonical window allows you to maximize to a single monitor only; in my apps I allow maximizing across multiple monitors with a click. Taskbar notifier -- flash the taskbar when your backgrounded app has new info for the user. Options dialogs -- multi-page dialogs letting the user customize the app settings to his/her own preferences. Progress indicator -- for long running operations give the user feedback on how far there is left to go. Memory gauge -- an indicator (either absolute or percentage) of how much memory is used by your app. LIST C: Stylistic and/or tiny bits of functionality This list includes bits of functionality that are too tiny to merit being called a component, along with stylistic concerns (that admittedly do overlap with the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines). Design a form for resizing -- unless you are restricting your form to be a fixed size, use anchors and docking so that it does what is reasonable when enlarged or shrunk by the user. Set tab order on a form -- repeated tab presses by the user should advance from field to field in a logical order rather than the default order in which you added fields. Adjust controls to be aware of operating modes -- When starting a background operation with, for example, a “Go” button, disable that “Go” button until the operation completes. Provide access keys for all menu items (per UXGuide). Provide shortcut keys for commonly used menu items (per UXGuide). Set up some (global or important or common) shortcut keys without associating to menu items. Allow some menu items to be invoked with or without modifier keys (shift, control, alt) where the modifier key is useful to vary the operation slightly. Hook up Escape and Enter on child forms to do what is reasonable. Decorate any library classes with documentation-comments and attributes -- this allows Visual Studio to leverage them for Intellisense and property descriptions. Spell check your code! What else would you include?

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  • How to cope with developing against a poor 3rd party API/application?

    - by wsanville
    I'm a web developer, and my organization has recently started to use a proprietary ASP.NET CMS for our web sites. I was excited to get started using the CMS, thinking it would bring a lot of value to our end users and be fun to work with, since my skills are a good match for the types of projects we're using it for. That was about a year ago. Since then, we've ran into all kinds of issues, from blatant bugs in the product, to nasty edge cases in the APIs, to extremely poor documentation for developers. On about a weekly basis, we are forced to pursue workarounds and rewrite some of the out of the box functionality, and even find some of the basic features unusable. In many cases, since this is a closed source application (and obfuscated of course), there's nothing we can do as developers to solve these issues. So my question is, how does one attempt to develop a good application in such a scenario? The application mostly works when using the the exact out of the box behavior, or using one of the company's starter sites. However, my attempts to use the underlying APIs to implement slightly different, yet reasonable behavior has proved to be extremely time consuming (not to mention just as buggy), given the lack of good information about the APIs. I've given this a lot of thought, and my conflicting viewpoints are the following: Strongly advise against any customization to the CMS, as development time will rise exponentially, or even have an extremely high chance of failing. While this is accurate, I do not want to give the impression that I am not willing to code my own solutions to problems and take the initiative to implement something difficult or complex. I don't want to be perceived as someone who is not motivated, lazy, or not knowledgeable to do anything complex, because this is simply not the case. I love coding my own solutions, trying new/difficult things, I just dislike the vendor app we're using. Continue on the path I'm on now, which is hacking my way past all issues I encounter and try my best to deliver an application that meets the needs and specs exactly. My goals are to make it as seamless and easy to use as possible to the end user, even when integrating the CMS with our other applications internally. The problem I'm finding with this approach is it is very time consuming. I open support cases with the vendor on a regular basis to solve issues and to gain knowledge of their APIs, but this is extremely time consuming, and in some cases it leads to dead ends. I post on the vendors forums on a regular basis but have become frustrated as most of my posts get 0 replies. So, what would you, a reasonable developer, do in this case? How can I make the best of the situation? And just for fun, here are some of the code smells and anti-patterns I've dealt with using the product (aside from their own code blatantly failing): Use of StringBuilder to concatenate a giant string that is hard coded and does not change. They use it to concatenate their Javascript and write it out into the body tags of their pages. Methods that accept object or Microsoft.VisualBasic.Collection as the parameters. In the case of the VB Collection, the data is not a list of any kind, it's used instead of making a class. Methods that return a Hashtable of VB Collections Method names of the form MethodName_v45, MethodName_v20, etc... Multiple classes with the same name in different namespaces with different functionality/behavior. Intellisense that reads "Note: this parameter is non functional" Complete lack of coding standards, API is filled with magic numbers and magic strings. Properties with a getter of type object that accepts totally different things, like enum or strings, and throw exceptions at runtime when you pass in something not supported. And much, much, more...

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  • Associating an Object with other Objects and Properties of those Objects

    - by alzoid
    I am looking for some help with designing some functionality in my application. I already have something similar designed but this problem is a little different. Background: In my application we have different Modules. Data in each module can be associated to other modules. Each Module is represented by an Object in our application. Module 1 can be associated with Module 2 and Module 3. Currently I use a factory to provide the proper DAO for getting and saving this data. It looks something like this: class Module1Factory { public static Module1BridgeDAO createModule1BridgeDAO(int moduleid) { switch (moduleId) { case Module.Module2Id: return new Module1_Module2DAO(); case Module.Module3Id: return new Module1_Module3DAO(); default: return null; } } } Module1_Module2 and Module1_Module3 implement the same BridgeModule interface. In the database I have a Table for every module (Module1, Module2, Module3). I also have a bridge table for each module (they are many to many) Module1_Module2, Module1_Module3 etc. The DAO basically handles all code needed to manage the association and retrieve its own instance data for the calling module. Now when we add new modules that associate with Module1 we simply implement the ModuleBridge interface and provide the common functionality. New Development We are adding a new module that will have the ability to be associated with other Modules as well as specific properties of that module. The module is basically providing the user the ability to add their custom forms to our other modules. That way they can collect additional information along with what we provide. I want to start associating my Form module with other modules and their properties. Ie if Module1 has a property Category, I want to associate an instance From data with that property. There are many Forms. If a users creates an instance of Module2, they may always want to also have certain form(s) attached to that Module2 instance. If they create an instance of Module2 and select Category 1, then I may want additional Form(s) created. I prototyped something like this: Form FormLayout (contains the labels and gui controls) FormModule (associates a form with all instances of a module) Form Instance (create an instance of a form to be filled out) As I thought about it I was thinking about making a new FormModule table/class/dao for each Module and Property that I add. So I might have: FormModule1 FormModule1Property1 FormModule1Property2 FormModule1Property3 FormModule1Property4 FormModule2 FormModule3 FormModule3Property1 Then as I did previously, I would use a factory to get the proper DAO for dealing with all of these. I would hand it an array of ids representing different modules and properties and it would return all of the DAOs that I need to call getForms(). Which in turn would return all of the forms for that particular bridge. Some points This will be for a new module so I dont need to expand on the factory code I provided. I just wanted to show an example of what I have done in the past. The new module can be associated with: Other Modules (ie globally for any instance of that module data), Other module properties (ie only if the Module instance has a certian value in one of its properties) I want to make it easy for developers to add associations with other modules and properties easily Can any one suggest any design patterns or strategy's for achieving this? If anything is unclear please let me know. Thank you, Al

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  • Ajax using Rails

    - by Steve
    Hi, I have a favourite and un-favourite functionality in my application and I am using jQuery. This functionality works partially. The page gets loaded, and when I click the 'favourite' button(it is inside add_favourite_div element), it sends a XHR request and the post is set as favourite. Then a new div called "remove_favourite_div" replaces its place.Now when I click the remove favourite(which is part of remove_favourite_div), it sends a normal http request inside of xhr. The structure when the page gets loaded first time <div id="favourite"> <div id="add_favourite_div"> <form method="post" id="add_favourite" action="/viewpost/add_favourite"> <div style="margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt; display: inline;"> <input type="hidden" value="w873BgYHLxQmadUalzMRUC+1ql4AtP3U7f78dT8x9ho=" name="authenticity_token"> </div> <input type="hidden" value="3" name="Favourite[post_id]" id="Favourite_place_id"> <input type="hidden" value="2" name="Favourite[user_id]" id="Favourite_user_id"> <input type="submit" value="Favourite" name="commit"><br> </form> </div> </div> DOM after clicking on the unfavourite button <div id="favourite"> <div id="remove_favourite_div"> <form method="post" id="remove_favourite" action="/viewpost/remove_favourite"> <div style="margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt; display: inline;"> <input type="hidden" value="w873BgYHLxQmadUalzMRUC+1ql4AtP3U7f78dT8x9ho=" name="authenticity_token"> </div> <input type="hidden" value="3" name="Favourite[post_id]" id="Favourite_place_id"> <input type="hidden" value="2" name="Favourite[user_id]" id="Favourite_user_id"> <input type="submit" value="UnFavourite" name="commit"><br> </form> </div> </div> In my application.js, I have two functions to trigger the xhr request $("#add_favourite").submit(function(){ alert("add favourite"); action = $(this).attr("action") $.post(action,$(this).serialize(),null,"script"); return false; }); $("#remove_favourite").submit(function(){ alert("remove favourite"); action = $(this).attr("action"); $.post(action,$(this).serialize(),null,"script"); return false; }); Here, when the post is initially not a favourite, favourite button is displayed and when i clicked on the button, $("#add_favourite").submit gets called and unfavourite form is displayed correctly, but now when I click on the un-favourite button, $("#remove_favourite").submit does not get called. The whole scenario is true in both ways, I mean favourite-Unfavourite and Unfavourite-favourite Can someone please help me to solve this Thanks

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  • mapping rect in small image to larger image (in order to do a copyPixels operation)

    - by skinnyTOD
    Hi all - this is (I think) a relatively simple math question but I've spent a day banging my head against it and have only the dents and no solution... I'm coding in actionscript 3 - the functionality is: large image loaded at runtime. The bitmapData is stored and a smaller version is created to display on the available screen area (I may end up just scaling the large image since it is in memory anyway). The user can create a rectangle hotspot on the smaller image (the functionality will be more complex: multiple rects with transparency: example a donut shape with hole, etc) 3 When the user clicks on the hotspot, the rect of the hotspot is mapped to the larger image and a new bitmap "callout" is created, using the larger bitmap data. The reason for this is so the "callout" will be better quality than just scaling up the area of the hotspot. The image below shows where I am at so far- the blue rect is the clicked hotspot. In the upper left is the "callout" - copied from the larger image. I have the aspect ratio right but I am not mapping to the larger image correctly. Ugly code below... Sorry this post is so long - I just figured I ought to provide as much info as possible. Thanks for any tips! --trace of my data values *source BitmapDada 1152 864 scaled to rect 800 600 scaled BitmapData 800 600 selection BitmapData 58 56 scaled selection 83 80 ratio 1.44 before (x=544, y=237, w=58, h=56) (x=544, y=237, w=225.04, h=217.28) * Image here: http://i795.photobucket.com/albums/yy237/skinnyTOD/exampleST.jpg public function onExpandCallout(event:MouseEvent):void{ if (maskBitmapData.getPixel32(event.localX, event.localY) != 0){ var maskClone:BitmapData = maskBitmapData.clone(); //amount to scale callout - this will vary/can be changed by user var scale:Number =150 //scale percentage var normalizedScale :Number = scale/=100; var w:Number = maskBitmapData.width*normalizedScale; var h:Number = maskBitmapData.height*normalizedScale; var ratio:Number = (sourceBD.width /targetRect.width); //creat bmpd of the scaled size to copy source into var scaledBitmapData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(maskBitmapData.width * ratio, maskBitmapData.height * ratio, true, 0xFFFFFFFF); trace("source BitmapDada " + sourceBD.width, sourceBD.height); trace("scaled to rect " + targetRect.width, targetRect.height); trace("scaled BitmapData", bkgnImageSprite.width, bkgnImageSprite.height); trace("selection BitmapData", maskBitmapData.width, maskBitmapData.height); trace("scaled selection", scaledBitmapData.width, scaledBitmapData.height); trace("ratio", ratio); var scaledBitmap:Bitmap = new Bitmap(scaledBitmapData); var scaleW:Number = sourceBD.width / scaledBitmapData.width; var scaleH:Number = sourceBD.height / scaledBitmapData.height; var scaleMatrix:Matrix = new Matrix(); scaleMatrix.scale(ratio,ratio); var sRect:Rectangle = maskSprite.getBounds(bkgnImageSprite); var sR:Rectangle = sRect.clone(); var ss:Sprite = new Sprite(); ss.graphics.lineStyle(8, 0x0000FF); //ss.graphics.beginFill(0x000000, 1); ss.graphics.drawRect(sRect.x, sRect.y, sRect.width, sRect.height); //ss.graphics.endFill(); this.addChild(ss); trace("before " + sRect); w = uint(sRect.width * scaleW); h = uint(sRect.height * scaleH); sRect.inflate(maskBitmapData.width * ratio, maskBitmapData.height * ratio); sRect.offset(maskBitmapData.width * ratio, maskBitmapData.height * ratio); trace(sRect); scaledBitmapData.copyPixels(sourceBD, sRect, new Point()); addChild(scaledBitmap); scaledBitmap.x = offsetPt.x; scaledBitmap.y = offsetPt.y; } }

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  • Differences Between NHibernate and Entity Framework

    - by Ricardo Peres
    Introduction NHibernate and Entity Framework are two of the most popular O/RM frameworks on the .NET world. Although they share some functionality, there are some aspects on which they are quite different. This post will describe this differences and will hopefully help you get started with the one you know less. Mind you, this is a personal selection of features to compare, it is by no way an exhaustive list. History First, a bit of history. NHibernate is an open-source project that was first ported from Java’s venerable Hibernate framework, one of the first O/RM frameworks, but nowadays it is not tied to it, for example, it has .NET specific features, and has evolved in different ways from those of its Java counterpart. Current version is 3.3, with 3.4 on the horizon. It currently targets .NET 3.5, but can be used as well in .NET 4, it only makes no use of any of its specific functionality. You can find its home page at NHForge. Entity Framework 1 came out with .NET 3.5 and is now on its second major version, despite being version 4. Code First sits on top of it and but came separately and will also continue to be released out of line with major .NET distributions. It is currently on version 4.3.1 and version 5 will be released together with .NET Framework 4.5. All versions will target the current version of .NET, at the time of their release. Its home location is located at MSDN. Architecture In NHibernate, there is a separation between the Unit of Work and the configuration and model instances. You start off by creating a Configuration object, where you specify all global NHibernate settings such as the database and dialect to use, the batch sizes, the mappings, etc, then you build an ISessionFactory from it. The ISessionFactory holds model and metadata that is tied to a particular database and to the settings that came from the Configuration object, and, there will typically be only one instance of each in a process. Finally, you create instances of ISession from the ISessionFactory, which is the NHibernate representation of the Unit of Work and Identity Map. This is a lightweight object, it basically opens and closes a database connection as required and keeps track of the entities associated with it. ISession objects are cheap to create and dispose, because all of the model complexity is stored in the ISessionFactory and Configuration objects. As for Entity Framework, the ObjectContext/DbContext holds the configuration, model and acts as the Unit of Work, holding references to all of the known entity instances. This class is therefore not lightweight as its NHibernate counterpart and it is not uncommon to see examples where an instance is cached on a field. Mappings Both NHibernate and Entity Framework (Code First) support the use of POCOs to represent entities, no base classes are required (or even possible, in the case of NHibernate). As for mapping to and from the database, NHibernate supports three types of mappings: XML-based, which have the advantage of not tying the entity classes to a particular O/RM; the XML files can be deployed as files on the file system or as embedded resources in an assembly; Attribute-based, for keeping both the entities and database details on the same place at the expense of polluting the entity classes with NHibernate-specific attributes; Strongly-typed code-based, which allows dynamic creation of the model and strongly typing it, so that if, for example, a property name changes, the mapping will also be updated. Entity Framework can use: Attribute-based (although attributes cannot express all of the available possibilities – for example, cascading); Strongly-typed code mappings. Database Support With NHibernate you can use mostly any database you want, including: SQL Server; SQL Server Compact; SQL Server Azure; Oracle; DB2; PostgreSQL; MySQL; Sybase Adaptive Server/SQL Anywhere; Firebird; SQLLite; Informix; Any through OLE DB; Any through ODBC. Out of the box, Entity Framework only supports SQL Server, but a number of providers exist, both free and commercial, for some of the most used databases, such as Oracle and MySQL. See a list here. Inheritance Strategies Both NHibernate and Entity Framework support the three canonical inheritance strategies: Table Per Type Hierarchy (Single Table Inheritance), Table Per Type (Class Table Inheritance) and Table Per Concrete Type (Concrete Table Inheritance). Associations Regarding associations, both support one to one, one to many and many to many. However, NHibernate offers far more collection types: Bags of entities or values: unordered, possibly with duplicates; Lists of entities or values: ordered, indexed by a number column; Maps of entities or values: indexed by either an entity or any value; Sets of entities or values: unordered, no duplicates; Arrays of entities or values: indexed, immutable. Querying NHibernate exposes several querying APIs: LINQ is probably the most used nowadays, and really does not need to be introduced; Hibernate Query Language (HQL) is a database-agnostic, object-oriented SQL-alike language that exists since NHibernate’s creation and still offers the most advanced querying possibilities; well suited for dynamic queries, even if using string concatenation; Criteria API is an implementation of the Query Object pattern where you create a semi-abstract conceptual representation of the query you wish to execute by means of a class model; also a good choice for dynamic querying; Query Over offers a similar API to Criteria, but using strongly-typed LINQ expressions instead of strings; for this, although more refactor-friendlier that Criteria, it is also less suited for dynamic queries; SQL, including stored procedures, can also be used; Integration with Lucene.NET indexer is available. As for Entity Framework: LINQ to Entities is fully supported, and its implementation is considered very complete; it is the API of choice for most developers; Entity-SQL, HQL’s counterpart, is also an object-oriented, database-independent querying language that can be used for dynamic queries; SQL, of course, is also supported. Caching Both NHibernate and Entity Framework, of course, feature first-level cache. NHibernate also supports a second-level cache, that can be used among multiple ISessionFactorys, even in different processes/machines: Hashtable (in-memory); SysCache (uses ASP.NET as the cache provider); SysCache2 (same as above but with support for SQL Server SQL Dependencies); Prevalence; SharedCache; Memcached; Redis; NCache; Appfabric Caching. Out of the box, Entity Framework does not have any second-level cache mechanism, however, there are some public samples that show how we can add this. ID Generators NHibernate supports different ID generation strategies, coming from the database and otherwise: Identity (for SQL Server, MySQL, and databases who support identity columns); Sequence (for Oracle, PostgreSQL, and others who support sequences); Trigger-based; HiLo; Sequence HiLo (for databases that support sequences); Several GUID flavors, both in GUID as well as in string format; Increment (for single-user uses); Assigned (must know what you’re doing); Sequence-style (either uses an actual sequence or a single-column table); Table of ids; Pooled (similar to HiLo but stores high values in a table); Native (uses whatever mechanism the current database supports, identity or sequence). Entity Framework only supports: Identity generation; GUIDs; Assigned values. Properties NHibernate supports properties of entity types (one to one or many to one), collections (one to many or many to many) as well as scalars and enumerations. It offers a mechanism for having complex property types generated from the database, which even include support for querying. It also supports properties originated from SQL formulas. Entity Framework only supports scalars, entity types and collections. Enumerations support will come in the next version. Events and Interception NHibernate has a very rich event model, that exposes more than 20 events, either for synchronous pre-execution or asynchronous post-execution, including: Pre/Post-Load; Pre/Post-Delete; Pre/Post-Insert; Pre/Post-Update; Pre/Post-Flush. It also features interception of class instancing and SQL generation. As for Entity Framework, only two events exist: ObjectMaterialized (after loading an entity from the database); SavingChanges (before saving changes, which include deleting, inserting and updating). Tracking Changes For NHibernate as well as Entity Framework, all changes are tracked by their respective Unit of Work implementation. Entities can be attached and detached to it, Entity Framework does, however, also support self-tracking entities. Optimistic Concurrency Control NHibernate supports all of the imaginable scenarios: SQL Server’s ROWVERSION; Oracle’s ORA_ROWSCN; A column containing date and time; A column containing a version number; All/dirty columns comparison. Entity Framework is more focused on Entity Framework, so it only supports: SQL Server’s ROWVERSION; Comparing all/some columns. Batching NHibernate has full support for insertion batching, but only if the ID generator in use is not database-based (for example, it cannot be used with Identity), whereas Entity Framework has no batching at all. Cascading Both support cascading for collections and associations: when an entity is deleted, their conceptual children are also deleted. NHibernate also offers the possibility to set the foreign key column on children to NULL instead of removing them. Flushing Changes NHibernate’s ISession has a FlushMode property that can have the following values: Auto: changes are sent to the database when necessary, for example, if there are dirty instances of an entity type, and a query is performed against this entity type, or if the ISession is being disposed; Commit: changes are sent when committing the current transaction; Never: changes are only sent when explicitly calling Flush(). As for Entity Framework, changes have to be explicitly sent through a call to AcceptAllChanges()/SaveChanges(). Lazy Loading NHibernate supports lazy loading for Associated entities (one to one, many to one); Collections (one to many, many to many); Scalar properties (thing of BLOBs or CLOBs). Entity Framework only supports lazy loading for: Associated entities; Collections. Generating and Updating the Database Both NHibernate and Entity Framework Code First (with the Migrations API) allow creating the database model from the mapping and updating it if the mapping changes. Extensibility As you can guess, NHibernate is far more extensible than Entity Framework. Basically, everything can be extended, from ID generation, to LINQ to SQL transformation, HQL native SQL support, custom column types, custom association collections, SQL generation, supported databases, etc. With Entity Framework your options are more limited, at least, because practically no information exists as to what can be extended/changed. It features a provider model that can be extended to support any database. Integration With Other Microsoft APIs and Tools When it comes to integration with Microsoft technologies, it will come as no surprise that Entity Framework offers the best support. For example, the following technologies are fully supported: ASP.NET (through the EntityDataSource); ASP.NET Dynamic Data; WCF Data Services; WCF RIA Services; Visual Studio (through the integrated designer). Documentation This is another point where Entity Framework is superior: NHibernate lacks, for starters, an up to date API reference synchronized with its current version. It does have a community mailing list, blogs and wikis, although not much used. Entity Framework has a number of resources on MSDN and, of course, several forums and discussion groups exist. Conclusion Like I said, this is a personal list. I may come as a surprise to some that Entity Framework is so behind NHibernate in so many aspects, but it is true that NHibernate is much older and, due to its open-source nature, is not tied to product-specific timeframes and can thus evolve much more rapidly. I do like both, and I chose whichever is best for the job I have at hands. I am looking forward to the changes in EF5 which will add significant value to an already interesting product. So, what do you think? Did I forget anything important or is there anything else worth talking about? Looking forward for your comments!

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  • Use IIS Application Initialization for keeping ASP.NET Apps alive

    - by Rick Strahl
    I've been working quite a bit with Windows Services in the recent months, and well, it turns out that Windows Services are quite a bear to debug, deploy, update and maintain. The process of getting services set up,  debugged and updated is a major chore that has to be extensively documented and or automated specifically. On most projects when a service is built, people end up scrambling for the right 'process' to use for administration. Web app deployment and maintenance on the other hand are common and well understood today, as we are constantly dealing with Web apps. There's plenty of infrastructure and tooling built into Web Tools like Visual Studio to facilitate the process. By comparison Windows Services or anything self-hosted for that matter seems convoluted.In fact, in a recent blog post I mentioned that on a recent project I'd been using self-hosting for SignalR inside of a Windows service, because the application is in fact a 'service' that also needs to send out lots of messages via SignalR. But the reality is that it could just as well be an IIS application with a service component that runs in the background. Either way you look at it, it's either a Windows Service with a built in Web Server, or an IIS application running a Service application, neither of which follows the standard Service or Web App template.Personally I much prefer Web applications. Running inside of IIS I get all the benefits of the IIS platform including service lifetime management (crash and restart), controlled shutdowns, the whole security infrastructure including easy certificate support, hot-swapping of code and the the ability to publish directly to IIS from within Visual Studio with ease.Because of these benefits we set out to move from the self hosted service into an ASP.NET Web app instead.The Missing Link for ASP.NET as a Service: Auto-LoadingI've had moments in the past where I wanted to run a 'service like' application in ASP.NET because when you think about it, it's so much easier to control a Web application remotely. Services are locked into start/stop operations, but if you host inside of a Web app you can write your own ticket and control it from anywhere. In fact nearly 10 years ago I built a background scheduling application that ran inside of ASP.NET and it worked great and it's still running doing its job today.The tricky part for running an app as a service inside of IIS then and now, is how to get IIS and ASP.NET launched so your 'service' stays alive even after an Application Pool reset. 7 years ago I faked it by using a web monitor (my own West Wind Web Monitor app) I was running anyway to monitor my various web sites for uptime, and having the monitor ping my 'service' every 20 seconds to effectively keep ASP.NET alive or fire it back up after a reload. I used a simple scheduler class that also includes some logic for 'self-reloading'. Hacky for sure, but it worked reliably.Luckily today it's much easier and more integrated to get IIS to launch ASP.NET as soon as an Application Pool is started by using the Application Initialization Module. The Application Initialization Module basically allows you to turn on Preloading on the Application Pool and the Site/IIS App, which essentially fires a request through the IIS pipeline as soon as the Application Pool has been launched. This means that effectively your ASP.NET app becomes active immediately, Application_Start is fired making sure your app stays up and running at all times. All the other features like Application Pool recycling and auto-shutdown after idle time still work, but IIS will then always immediately re-launch the application.Getting started with Application InitializationAs of IIS 8 Application Initialization is part of the IIS feature set. For IIS 7 and 7.5 there's a separate download available via Web Platform Installer. Using IIS 8 Application Initialization is an optional install component in Windows or the Windows Server Role Manager: This is an optional component so make sure you explicitly select it.IIS Configuration for Application InitializationInitialization needs to be applied on the Application Pool as well as the IIS Application level. As of IIS 8 these settings can be made through the IIS Administration console.Start with the Application Pool:Here you need to set both the Start Automatically which is always set, and the StartMode which should be set to AlwaysRunning. Both have to be set - the Start Automatically flag is set true by default and controls the starting of the application pool itself while Always Running flag is required in order to launch the application. Without the latter flag set the site settings have no effect.Now on the Site/Application level you can specify whether the site should pre load: Set the Preload Enabled flag to true.At this point ASP.NET apps should auto-load. This is all that's needed to pre-load the site if all you want is to get your site launched automatically.If you want a little more control over the load process you can add a few more settings to your web.config file that allow you to show a static page while the App is starting up. This can be useful if startup is really slow, so rather than displaying blank screen while the user is fiddling their thumbs you can display a static HTML page instead: <system.webServer> <applicationInitialization remapManagedRequestsTo="Startup.htm" skipManagedModules="true"> <add initializationPage="ping.ashx" /> </applicationInitialization> </system.webServer>This allows you to specify a page to execute in a dry run. IIS basically fakes request and pushes it directly into the IIS pipeline without hitting the network. You specify a page and IIS will fake a request to that page in this case ping.ashx which just returns a simple OK string - ie. a fast pipeline request. This request is run immediately after Application Pool restart, and while this request is running and your app is warming up, IIS can display an alternate static page - Startup.htm above. So instead of showing users an empty loading page when clicking a link on your site you can optionally show some sort of static status page that says, "we'll be right back".  I'm not sure if that's such a brilliant idea since this can be pretty disruptive in some cases. Personally I think I prefer letting people wait, but at least get the response they were supposed to get back rather than a random page. But it's there if you need it.Note that the web.config stuff is optional. If you don't provide it IIS hits the default site link (/) and even if there's no matching request at the end of that request it'll still fire the request through the IIS pipeline. Ideally though you want to make sure that an ASP.NET endpoint is hit either with your default page, or by specify the initializationPage to ensure ASP.NET actually gets hit since it's possible for IIS fire unmanaged requests only for static pages (depending how your pipeline is configured).What about AppDomain Restarts?In addition to full Worker Process recycles at the IIS level, ASP.NET also has to deal with AppDomain shutdowns which can occur for a variety of reasons:Files are updated in the BIN folderWeb Deploy to your siteweb.config is changedHard application crashThese operations don't cause the worker process to restart, but they do cause ASP.NET to unload the current AppDomain and start up a new one. Because the features above only apply to Application Pool restarts, AppDomain restarts could also cause your 'ASP.NET service' to stop processing in the background.In order to keep the app running on AppDomain recycles, you can resort to a simple ping in the Application_End event:protected void Application_End() { var client = new WebClient(); var url = App.AdminConfiguration.MonitorHostUrl + "ping.aspx"; client.DownloadString(url); Trace.WriteLine("Application Shut Down Ping: " + url); }which fires any ASP.NET url to the current site at the very end of the pipeline shutdown which in turn ensures that the site immediately starts back up.Manual Configuration in ApplicationHost.configThe above UI corresponds to the following ApplicationHost.config settings. If you're using IIS 7, there's no UI for these flags so you'll have to manually edit them.When you install the Application Initialization component into IIS it should auto-configure the module into ApplicationHost.config. Unfortunately for me, with Mr. Murphy in his best form for me, the module registration did not occur and I had to manually add it.<globalModules> <add name="ApplicationInitializationModule" image="%windir%\System32\inetsrv\warmup.dll" /> </globalModules>Most likely you won't need ever need to add this, but if things are not working it's worth to check if the module is actually registered.Next you need to configure the ApplicationPool and the Web site. The following are the two relevant entries in ApplicationHost.config.<system.applicationHost> <applicationPools> <add name="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" autoStart="true" startMode="AlwaysRunning" managedRuntimeVersion="v4.0" managedPipelineMode="Integrated"> <processModel identityType="LocalSystem" setProfileEnvironment="true" /> </add> </applicationPools> <sites> <site name="Default Web Site" id="1"> <application path="/MPress.Workflow.WebQueueMessageManager" applicationPool="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" preloadEnabled="true"> <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="C:\Clients\…" /> </application> </site> </sites> </system.applicationHost>On the Application Pool make sure to set the autoStart and startMode flags to true and AlwaysRunning respectively. On the site make sure to set the preloadEnabled flag to true.And that's all you should need. You can still set the web.config settings described above as well.ASP.NET as a Service?In the particular application I'm working on currently, we have a queue manager that runs as standalone service that polls a database queue and picks out jobs and processes them on several threads. The service can spin up any number of threads and keep these threads alive in the background while IIS is running doing its own thing. These threads are newly created threads, so they sit completely outside of the IIS thread pool. In order for this service to work all it needs is a long running reference that keeps it alive for the life time of the application.In this particular app there are two components that run in the background on their own threads: A scheduler that runs various scheduled tasks and handles things like picking up emails to send out outside of IIS's scope and the QueueManager. Here's what this looks like in global.asax:public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication { private static ApplicationScheduler scheduler; private static ServiceLauncher launcher; protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Pings the service and ensures it stays alive scheduler = new ApplicationScheduler() { CheckFrequency = 600000 }; scheduler.Start(); launcher = new ServiceLauncher(); launcher.Start(); // register so shutdown is controlled HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(launcher); }}By keeping these objects around as static instances that are set only once on startup, they survive the lifetime of the application. The code in these classes is essentially unchanged from the Windows Service code except that I could remove the various overrides required for the Windows Service interface (OnStart,OnStop,OnResume etc.). Otherwise the behavior and operation is very similar.In this application ASP.NET serves two purposes: It acts as the host for SignalR and provides the administration interface which allows remote management of the 'service'. I can start and stop the service remotely by shutting down the ApplicationScheduler very easily. I can also very easily feed stats from the queue out directly via a couple of Web requests or (as we do now) through the SignalR service.Registering a Background Object with ASP.NETNotice also the use of the HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(). This function registers an object with ASP.NET to let it know that it's a background task that should be notified if the AppDomain shuts down. RegisterObject() requires an interface with a Stop() method that's fired and allows your code to respond to a shutdown request. Here's what the IRegisteredObject::Stop() method looks like on the launcher:public void Stop(bool immediate = false) { LogManager.Current.LogInfo("QueueManager Controller Stopped."); Controller.StopProcessing(); Controller.Dispose(); Thread.Sleep(1500); // give background threads some time HostingEnvironment.UnregisterObject(this); }Implementing IRegisterObject should help with reliability on AppDomain shutdowns. Thanks to Justin Van Patten for pointing this out to me on Twitter.RegisterObject() is not required but I would highly recommend implementing it on whatever object controls your background processing to all clean shutdowns when the AppDomain shuts down.Testing it outI'm still in the testing phase with this particular service to see if there are any side effects. But so far it doesn't look like it. With about 50 lines of code I was able to replace the Windows service startup to Web start up - everything else just worked as is. An honorable mention goes to SignalR 2.0's oWin hosting, because with the new oWin based hosting no code changes at all were required, merely a couple of configuration file settings and an assembly directive needed, to point at the SignalR startup class. Sweet!It also seems like SignalR is noticeably faster running inside of IIS compared to self-host. Startup feels faster because of the preload.Starting and Stopping the 'Service'Because the application is running as a Web Server, it's easy to have a Web interface for starting and stopping the services running inside of the service. For our queue manager the SignalR service and front monitoring app has a play and stop button for toggling the queue.If you want more administrative control and have it work more like a Windows Service you can also stop the application pool explicitly from the command line which would be equivalent to stopping and restarting a service.To start and stop from the command line you can use the IIS appCmd tool. To stop:> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd stop apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"and to start> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd start apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"Note that when you explicitly force the AppPool to stop running either in the UI (on the ApplicationPools page use Start/Stop) or via command line tools, the application pool will not auto-restart immediately. You have to manually start it back up.What's not to like?There are certainly a lot of benefits to running a background service in IIS, but… ASP.NET applications do have more overhead in terms of memory footprint and startup time is a little slower, but generally for server applications this is not a big deal. If the application is stable the service should fire up and stay running indefinitely. A lot of times this kind of service interface can simply be attached to an existing Web application, or if scalability requires be offloaded to its own Web server.Easier to work withBut the ultimate benefit here is that it's much easier to work with a Web app as opposed to a service. While developing I can simply turn off the auto-launch features and launch the service on demand through IIS simply by hitting a page on the site. If I want to shut down an IISRESET -stop will shut down the service easily enough. I can then attach a debugger anywhere I want and this works like any other ASP.NET application. Yes you end up on a background thread for debugging but Visual Studio handles that just fine and if you stay on a single thread this is no different than debugging any other code.SummaryUsing ASP.NET to run background service operations is probably not a super common scenario, but it probably should be something that is considered carefully when building services. Many applications have service like features and with the auto-start functionality of the Application Initialization module, it's easy to build this functionality into ASP.NET. Especially when combined with the notification features of SignalR it becomes very, very easy to create rich services that can also communicate their status easily to the outside world.Whether it's existing applications that need some background processing for scheduling related tasks, or whether you just create a separate site altogether just to host your service it's easy to do and you can leverage the same tool chain you're already using for other Web projects. If you have lots of service projects it's worth considering… give it some thought…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in ASP.NET  SignalR  IIS   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework

    - by ScottGu
    Today we released VS 2013 and .NET 4.5.1. These releases include a ton of great improvements, and include some fantastic enhancements to ASP.NET and the Entity Framework.  You can download and start using them now. Below are details on a few of the great ASP.NET, Web Development, and Entity Framework improvements you can take advantage of with this release.  Please visit http://www.asp.net/vnext for additional release notes, documentation, and tutorials. One ASP.NET With the release of Visual Studio 2013, we have taken a step towards unifying the experience of using the different ASP.NET sub-frameworks (Web Forms, MVC, Web API, SignalR, etc), and you can now easily mix and match the different ASP.NET technologies you want to use within a single application. When you do a File-New Project with VS 2013 you’ll now see a single ASP.NET Project option: Selecting this project will bring up an additional dialog that allows you to start with a base project template, and then optionally add/remove the technologies you want to use in it.  For example, you could start with a Web Forms template and add Web API or Web Forms support for it, or create a MVC project and also enable Web Forms pages within it: This makes it easy for you to use any ASP.NET technology you want within your apps, and take advantage of any feature across the entire ASP.NET technology span. Richer Authentication Support The new “One ASP.NET” project dialog also includes a new Change Authentication button that, when pushed, enables you to easily change the authentication approach used by your applications – and makes it much easier to build secure applications that enable SSO from a variety of identity providers.  For example, when you start with the ASP.NET Web Forms or MVC templates you can easily add any of the following authentication options to the application: No Authentication Individual User Accounts (Single Sign-On support with FaceBook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft ID – or Forms Auth with ASP.NET Membership) Organizational Accounts (Single Sign-On support with Windows Azure Active Directory ) Windows Authentication (Active Directory in an intranet application) The Windows Azure Active Directory support is particularly cool.  Last month we updated Windows Azure Active Directory so that developers can now easily create any number of Directories using it (for free and deployed within seconds).  It now takes only a few moments to enable single-sign-on support within your ASP.NET applications against these Windows Azure Active Directories.  Simply choose the “Organizational Accounts” radio button within the Change Authentication dialog and enter the name of your Windows Azure Active Directory to do this: This will automatically configure your ASP.NET application to use Windows Azure Active Directory and register the application with it.  Now when you run the app your users can easily and securely sign-in using their Active Directory credentials within it – regardless of where the application is hosted on the Internet. For more information about the new process for creating web projects, see Creating ASP.NET Web Projects in Visual Studio 2013. Responsive Project Templates with Bootstrap The new default project templates for ASP.NET Web Forms, MVC, Web API and SPA are built using Bootstrap. Bootstrap is an open source CSS framework that helps you build responsive websites which look great on different form factors such as mobile phones, tables and desktops. For example in a browser window the home page created by the MVC template looks like the following: When you resize the browser to a narrow window to see how it would like on a phone, you can notice how the contents gracefully wrap around and the horizontal top menu turns into an icon: When you click the menu-icon above it expands into a vertical menu – which enables a good navigation experience for small screen real-estate devices: We think Bootstrap will enable developers to build web applications that work even better on phones, tablets and other mobile devices – and enable you to easily build applications that can leverage the rich ecosystem of Bootstrap CSS templates already out there.  You can learn more about Bootstrap here. Visual Studio Web Tooling Improvements Visual Studio 2013 includes a new, much richer, HTML editor for Razor files and HTML files in web applications. The new HTML editor provides a single unified schema based on HTML5. It has automatic brace completion, jQuery UI and AngularJS attribute IntelliSense, attribute IntelliSense Grouping, and other great improvements. For example, typing “ng-“ on an HTML element will show the intellisense for AngularJS: This support for AngularJS, Knockout.js, Handlebars and other SPA technologies in this release of ASP.NET and VS 2013 makes it even easier to build rich client web applications: The screen shot below demonstrates how the HTML editor can also now inspect your page at design-time to determine all of the CSS classes that are available. In this case, the auto-completion list contains classes from Bootstrap’s CSS file. No more guessing at which Bootstrap element names you need to use: Visual Studio 2013 also comes with built-in support for both CoffeeScript and LESS editing support. The LESS editor comes with all the cool features from the CSS editor and has specific Intellisense for variables and mixins across all the LESS documents in the @import chain. Browser Link – SignalR channel between browser and Visual Studio The new Browser Link feature in VS 2013 lets you run your app within multiple browsers on your dev machine, connect them to Visual Studio, and simultaneously refresh all of them just by clicking a button in the toolbar. You can connect multiple browsers (including IE, FireFox, Chrome) to your development site, including mobile emulators, and click refresh to refresh all the browsers all at the same time.  This makes it much easier to easily develop/test against multiple browsers in parallel. Browser Link also exposes an API to enable developers to write Browser Link extensions.  By enabling developers to take advantage of the Browser Link API, it becomes possible to create very advanced scenarios that crosses boundaries between Visual Studio and any browser that’s connected to it. Web Essentials takes advantage of the API to create an integrated experience between Visual Studio and the browser’s developer tools, remote controlling mobile emulators and a lot more. You will see us take advantage of this support even more to enable really cool scenarios going forward. ASP.NET Scaffolding ASP.NET Scaffolding is a new code generation framework for ASP.NET Web applications. It makes it easy to add boilerplate code to your project that interacts with a data model. In previous versions of Visual Studio, scaffolding was limited to ASP.NET MVC projects. With Visual Studio 2013, you can now use scaffolding for any ASP.NET project, including Web Forms. When using scaffolding, we ensure that all required dependencies are automatically installed for you in the project. For example, if you start with an ASP.NET Web Forms project and then use scaffolding to add a Web API Controller, the required NuGet packages and references to enable Web API are added to your project automatically.  To do this, just choose the Add->New Scaffold Item context menu: Support for scaffolding async controllers uses the new async features from Entity Framework 6. ASP.NET Identity ASP.NET Identity is a new membership system for ASP.NET applications that we are introducing with this release. ASP.NET Identity makes it easy to integrate user-specific profile data with application data. ASP.NET Identity also allows you to choose the persistence model for user profiles in your application. You can store the data in a SQL Server database or another data store, including NoSQL data stores such as Windows Azure Storage Tables. ASP.NET Identity also supports Claims-based authentication, where the user’s identity is represented as a set of claims from a trusted issuer. Users can login by creating an account on the website using username and password, or they can login using social identity providers (such as Microsoft Account, Twitter, Facebook, Google) or using organizational accounts through Windows Azure Active Directory or Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). To learn more about how to use ASP.NET Identity visit http://www.asp.net/identity.  ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 has a bunch of great improvements including: Attribute routing ASP.NET Web API now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your Web API routes by annotating your actions and controllers like this: OAuth 2.0 support The Web API and Single Page Application project templates now support authorization using OAuth 2.0. OAuth 2.0 is a framework for authorizing client access to protected resources. It works for a variety of clients including browsers and mobile devices. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API also now provides support for OData endpoints and enables support for both ATOM and JSON-light formats. With OData you get support for rich query semantics, paging, $metadata, CRUD operations, and custom actions over any data source. Below are some of the specific enhancements in ASP.NET Web API 2 OData. Support for $select, $expand, $batch, and $value Improved extensibility Type-less support Reuse an existing model OWIN Integration ASP.NET Web API now fully supports OWIN and can be run on any OWIN capable host. With OWIN integration, you can self-host Web API in your own process alongside other OWIN middleware, such as SignalR. For more information, see Use OWIN to Self-Host ASP.NET Web API. More Web API Improvements In addition to the features above there have been a host of other features in ASP.NET Web API, including CORS support Authentication Filters Filter Overrides Improved Unit Testability Portable ASP.NET Web API Client To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/web-api/ ASP.NET SignalR 2 ASP.NET SignalR is library for ASP.NET developers that dramatically simplifies the process of adding real-time web functionality to your applications. Real-time web functionality is the ability to have server-side code push content to connected clients instantly as it becomes available. SignalR 2.0 introduces a ton of great improvements. We’ve added support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) to SignalR 2.0. iOS and Android support for SignalR have also been added using the MonoTouch and MonoDroid components from the Xamarin library (for more information on how to use these additions, see the article Using Xamarin Components from the SignalR wiki). We’ve also added support for the Portable .NET Client in SignalR 2.0 and created a new self-hosting package. This change makes the setup process for SignalR much more consistent between web-hosted and self-hosted SignalR applications. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/signalr. ASP.NET MVC 5 The ASP.NET MVC project templates integrate seamlessly with the new One ASP.NET experience and enable you to integrate all of the above ASP.NET Web API, SignalR and Identity improvements. You can also customize your MVC project and configure authentication using the One ASP.NET project creation wizard. The MVC templates have also been updated to use ASP.NET Identity and Bootstrap as well. An introductory tutorial to ASP.NET MVC 5 can be found at Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 5. This release of ASP.NET MVC also supports several nice new MVC-specific features including: Authentication filters: These filters allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller or globally for all controllers. Attribute Routing: Attribute Routing allows you to define your routes on actions or controllers. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/mvc Entity Framework 6 Improvements Visual Studio 2013 ships with Entity Framework 6, which bring a lot of great new features to the data access space: Async and Task<T> Support EF6’s new Async Query and Save support enables you to perform asynchronous data access and take advantage of the Task<T> support introduced in .NET 4.5 within data access scenarios.  This allows you to free up threads that might otherwise by blocked on data access requests, and enable them to be used to process other requests whilst you wait for the database engine to process operations. When the database server responds the thread will be re-queued within your ASP.NET application and execution will continue.  This enables you to easily write significantly more scalable server code. Here is an example ASP.NET WebAPI action that makes use of the new EF6 async query methods: Interception and Logging Interception and SQL logging allows you to view – or even change – every command that is sent to the database by Entity Framework. This includes a simple, human readable log – which is great for debugging – as well as some lower level building blocks that give you access to the command and results. Here is an example of wiring up the simple log to Debug in the constructor of an MVC controller: Custom Code-First Conventions The new Custom Code-First Conventions enable bulk configuration of a Code First model – reducing the amount of code you need to write and maintain. Conventions are great when your domain classes don’t match the Code First conventions. For example, the following convention configures all properties that are called ‘Key’ to be the primary key of the entity they belong to. This is different than the default Code First convention that expects Id or <type name>Id. Connection Resiliency The new Connection Resiliency feature in EF6 enables you to register an execution strategy to handle – and potentially retry – failed database operations. This is especially useful when deploying to cloud environments where dropped connections become more common as you traverse load balancers and distributed networks. EF6 includes a built-in execution strategy for SQL Azure that knows about retryable exception types and has some sensible – but overridable – defaults for the number of retries and time between retries when errors occur. Registering it is simple using the new Code-Based Configuration support: These are just some of the new features in EF6. You can visit the release notes section of the Entity Framework site for a complete list of new features. Microsoft OWIN Components Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN) defines an open abstraction between .NET web servers and web applications, and the ASP.NET “Katana” project brings this abstraction to ASP.NET. OWIN decouples the web application from the server, making web applications host-agnostic. For example, you can host an OWIN-based web application in IIS or self-host it in a custom process. For more information about OWIN and Katana, see What's new in OWIN and Katana. Summary Today’s Visual Studio 2013, ASP.NET and Entity Framework release delivers some fantastic new features that streamline your web development lifecycle. These feature span from server framework to data access to tooling to client-side HTML development.  They also integrate some great open-source technology and contributions from our developer community. Download and start using them today! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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