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• ASP.NET MVC AND TOOLBOX

  - by imran_ku07

     Introduction :           ASP.NET MVC popularity is not hidden from the today's world of web applications. One of the great thing in ASP.NET is the separation of concerns, in which presentation views are separate from the business or modal layer. In these views ASP.NET MVC provides some very good controls which generate commonly used HTML markup fragments using a shorter syntax. These presentation views are familiar to web forms developers. But a pain for developers to use these controls is that they need to type these helpers controls every time when they need to use a control, because they are more familiar to drag and drop controls from ToolBox. So in this article i will use a cool feature of Visual Studio that allows you to add these controls in ToolBox once and then, when needed, just drag and drop controls from ToolBox, very similar like in web forms.   Description :            Visual Studio ToolBox is rich enough that allows you to store code and HTML snippets in ToolBox. All you need is select the HTML Helper and then simply drag and drop into Toolbox. Repeat this Procedure for every HTML Helper in ASP.NET MVC.             When you need to use a HTML Helper, you can drag and drop it from ToolBox and become happy with drag and drop programming. Summary :              In this article you see that how Visual Studio helps you to drag and drop HTML snippets from Design view to toolbox. This is one of the coolest features in Visual Studio.

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• Inside the Concurrent Collections: ConcurrentBag

  - by Simon Cooper

  Unlike the other concurrent collections, ConcurrentBag does not really have a non-concurrent analogy. As stated in the MSDN documentation, ConcurrentBag is optimised for the situation where the same thread is both producing and consuming items from the collection. We'll see how this is the case as we take a closer look. Again, I recommend you have ConcurrentBag open in a decompiler for reference. Thread Statics ConcurrentBag makes heavy use of thread statics - static variables marked with ThreadStaticAttribute. This is a special attribute that instructs the CLR to scope any values assigned to or read from the variable to the executing thread, not globally within the AppDomain. This means that if two different threads assign two different values to the same thread static variable, one value will not overwrite the other, and each thread will see the value they assigned to the variable, separately to any other thread. This is a very useful function that allows for ConcurrentBag's concurrency properties. You can think of a thread static variable: [ThreadStatic] private static int m_Value; as doing the same as: private static Dictionary<Thread, int> m_Values; where the executing thread's identity is used to automatically set and retrieve the corresponding value in the dictionary. In .NET 4, this usage of ThreadStaticAttribute is encapsulated in the ThreadLocal class. Lists of lists ConcurrentBag, at its core, operates as a linked list of linked lists: Each outer list node is an instance of ThreadLocalList, and each inner list node is an instance of Node. Each outer ThreadLocalList is owned by a particular thread, accessible through the thread local m_locals variable: private ThreadLocal<ThreadLocalList<T>> m_locals It is important to note that, although the m_locals variable is thread-local, that only applies to accesses through that variable. The objects referenced by the thread (each instance of the ThreadLocalList object) are normal heap objects that are not specific to any thread. Thinking back to the Dictionary analogy above, if each value stored in the dictionary could be accessed by other means, then any thread could access the value belonging to other threads using that mechanism. Only reads and writes to the variable defined as thread-local are re-routed by the CLR according to the executing thread's identity. So, although m_locals is defined as thread-local, the m_headList, m_nextList and m_tailList variables aren't. This means that any thread can access all the thread local lists in the collection by doing a linear search through the outer linked list defined by these variables. Adding items So, onto the collection operations. First, adding items. This one's pretty simple. If the current thread doesn't already own an instance of ThreadLocalList, then one is created (or, if there are lists owned by threads that have stopped, it takes control of one of those). Then the item is added to the head of that thread's list. That's it. Don't worry, it'll get more complicated when we account for the other operations on the list! Taking & Peeking items This is where it gets tricky. If the current thread's list has items in it, then it peeks or removes the head item (not the tail item) from the local list and returns that. However, if the local list is empty, it has to go and steal another item from another list, belonging to a different thread. It iterates through all the thread local lists in the collection using the m_headList and m_nextList variables until it finds one that has items in it, and it steals one item from that list. Up to this point, the two threads had been operating completely independently. To steal an item from another thread's list, the stealing thread has to do it in such a way as to not step on the owning thread's toes. Recall how adding and removing items both operate on the head of the thread's linked list? That gives us an easy way out - a thread trying to steal items from another thread can pop in round the back of another thread's list using the m_tail variable, and steal an item from the back without the owning thread knowing anything about it. The owning thread can carry on completely independently, unaware that one of its items has been nicked. However, this only works when there are at least 3 items in the list, as that guarantees there will be at least one node between the owning thread performing operations on the list head and the thread stealing items from the tail - there's no chance of the two threads operating on the same node at the same time and causing a race condition. If there's less than three items in the list, then there does need to be some synchronization between the two threads. In this case, the lock on the ThreadLocalList object is used to mediate access to a thread's list when there's the possibility of contention. Thread synchronization In ConcurrentBag, this is done using several mechanisms: Operations performed by the owner thread only take out the lock when there are less than three items in the collection. With three or greater items, there won't be any conflict with a stealing thread operating on the tail of the list. If a lock isn't taken out, the owning thread sets the list's m_currentOp variable to a non-zero value for the duration of the operation. This indicates to all other threads that there is a non-locked operation currently occuring on that list. The stealing thread always takes out the lock, to prevent two threads trying to steal from the same list at the same time. After taking out the lock, the stealing thread spinwaits until m_currentOp has been set to zero before actually performing the steal. This ensures there won't be a conflict with the owning thread when the number of items in the list is on the 2-3 item borderline. If any add or remove operations are started in the meantime, and the list is below 3 items, those operations try to take out the list's lock and are blocked until the stealing thread has finished. This allows a thread to steal an item from another thread's list without corrupting it. What about synchronization in the collection as a whole? Collection synchronization Any thread that operates on the collection's global structure (accessing anything outside the thread local lists) has to take out the collection's global lock - m_globalListsLock. This single lock is sufficient when adding a new thread local list, as the items inside each thread's list are unaffected. However, what about operations (such as Count or ToArray) that need to access every item in the collection? In order to ensure a consistent view, all operations on the collection are stopped while the count or ToArray is performed. This is done by freezing the bag at the start, performing the global operation, and unfreezing at the end: The global lock is taken out, to prevent structural alterations to the collection. m_needSync is set to true. This notifies all the threads that they need to take out their list's lock irregardless of what operation they're doing. All the list locks are taken out in order. This blocks all locking operations on the lists. The freezing thread waits for all current lockless operations to finish by spinwaiting on each m_currentOp field. The global operation can then be performed while the bag is frozen, but no other operations can take place at the same time, as all other threads are blocked on a list's lock. Then, once the global operation has finished, the locks are released, m_needSync is unset, and normal concurrent operation resumes. Concurrent principles That's the essence of how ConcurrentBag operates. Each thread operates independently on its own local list, except when they have to steal items from another list. When stealing, only the stealing thread is forced to take out the lock; the owning thread only has to when there is the possibility of contention. And a global lock controls accesses to the structure of the collection outside the thread lists. Operations affecting the entire collection take out all locks in the collection to freeze the contents at a single point in time. So, what principles can we extract here? Threads operate independently Thread-static variables and ThreadLocal makes this easy. Threads operate entirely concurrently on their own structures; only when they need to grab data from another thread is there any thread contention. Minimised lock-taking Even when two threads need to operate on the same data structures (one thread stealing from another), they do so in such a way such that the probability of actually blocking on a lock is minimised; the owning thread always operates on the head of the list, and the stealing thread always operates on the tail. Management of lockless operations Any operations that don't take out a lock still have a 'hook' to force them to lock when necessary. This allows all operations on the collection to be stopped temporarily while a global snapshot is taken. Hopefully, such operations will be short-lived and infrequent. That's all the concurrent collections covered. I hope you've found it as informative and interesting as I have. Next, I'll be taking a closer look at ThreadLocal, which I came across while analyzing ConcurrentBag. As you'll see, the operation of this class deserves a much closer look.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 23, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 23, 2010New Projects3D TagCloud for SharePoint 2010: 3D Flash TagCloud WebPart for SharePoint 2010AnyCAD.Net: AnyCAD.NetCassandraemon: Cassandraemon is LINQ Provider for Apache Cassandra.CCLI SongSelect Importer for PowerPoint: CCLI SongSelect Importer for PowerPoint ® is an Add-in for Microsoft ® PowerPoint ® that allows CCLI SongSelect (USR) files to be turned into slide...Compactar Arquivo Txt, Flat File, em Pipeline Decoder Customizado: Objetivo do projeto: Desenvolver um componente do tipo Pipeline Receiver Decoder, onde compacta o conteúdo, cria uma mensagem em XML e transforma ...Console Calculator: Console calculator is a simple, yet useful, mathematical expression calculator, supporting functions and variables. It was created to demonstrate ...CRM Dynamics Excel Importer: CRM Dynamics Excel Importercubace: The standard audio composer software with just single difference: this is CLR compilation.deneb: deneb projectDrive Backup: Drive Backup is an easy to use, automatic backup program. Simply insert a USB drive, and the program will backup either files on the drive to your ...eWebMVCCMS: this is the start of eWeb MVC CMS.Fix.ly: Small app that allows for URL rewriting before passing to the browser. Accepts MEF plugins that make themselves available by informing the applicat...GArphics: GArphics uses a genetic algorithm to produce graphics and animation with the assitance of the user.JDS Toolkit: An experimental toolkit geared to make richer applications with less effort. It will include controls such as the cubeoid and the serializedmenu. ...KrashSRC - MapleStory v.75 Emulator: KrashSRC - MapleStory v.75 EmulatorLast.fm Api: Last.fm api writen in Visaul Basic 2010.MIX 10 DVR and Downloader: A Silverlight application that will manage downloading the sessions and slide decks from the MIX '10 Conference utilizing the MIX OData feed for in...NSIS Autorun: This is a graphical CD/DVD/USB autorun engine that launches installers made with NSIS. Non-rectangular windows and animation are supported. Can be ...Pillbox: Windows Phone 7 sample application for tracking medications.PowerSharp: Very simple application that executes a snippet of PowerShell against C#. This will eventually be used with Live@EDU.Project Halosis: mmorpgProyecto Cero: Proyecto CeroSharePoint XSL Templates: This project is a place to share useful XSL templates that can be reused in SharePoint CQWPs and DVWPs.Silverlight 4.0 Popup Menu: Silverlight 4.0 Popup Menu spsearch: This project provides useful enhancements to Search using the SharePoint platform.StereoVision: StereVision es un proyecto que estudia un algoritmo de visión estereocopicaThe Stoffenmanager: The Stoffenmanager is a tool for prioritizing worker health risks to dangerous substances. But also a quantitative inhalation exposure tool and a ...Transcriber: Transcribe text from one character set to another. Extensible, plug-in based architecture. Default plug-in uses XML rules files with regular expres...Wavelets experiments: эксперименты с вейвлетамиWindows Phone 7 World of Warcraft Armory Browser: A test project to learn a little about Windows Phone development and do a decent armory browserXAML Based Chat: Xaml based chat. A simple chat systemNew Releases#Nose: SharpNose v1.1: Configuration is now done by updating SharpNose.exe.config MEF support added - you can also add your favorite test framework discovery Two tes...Baml Localizer: Version 0.1 (alpha): This is the first release which should show the capabilities of Baml Localizer. The code might still change a lot, but the file formats should be q...BibWord : Microsoft Word Citation and Bibliography styles: APA with DOI - Proof of Concept: IntroductionThis release is a proof of concept (POC) demonstrating a possible way of adding a digital object identifier (DOI) field to the APA styl...Chargify.NET: Chargify.NET v0.685: Releasing Version 0.685 - Changed customer reference ID from Guid to String for systems that don't use Guid as the unique key. - Added method for g...Compactar Arquivo Txt, Flat File, em Pipeline Decoder Customizado: SampleZipDecodePipeline: Solution contem Projeto com o Decoder Pipeline. Projeto para usar o Componente. Classes SharpZipLib para compactar e descompactar arquivosConsole Calculator: Console Calculator: Initial source code release.CSharp Intellisense: V1.6: UPDATE: 2010/04/05: description was added 2010/04/07: single selection + reset filter 20010/04/15: source code available at http://csharpintellis...Drive Backup: Drive Backup: Drive Backup allows you to automatically backup a USB device to your computer, or backup files/directories on your computer to a USB. Once you have...Event Scavenger: Thread recycling changes - Version 3.1: Change the location of where the settings for thread recycling is stored - Moved from config file to database for easier management. Version of dat...Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.013: Added Houses QuizExtend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.014: fixed a bug in Tortoise.approve rearranged the Houses Quiz to be more funFix.ly: Fix.ly 0.1: Initial test releaseFix.ly: Fix.ly 0.11: Fixed a couple bugs, including missing files in the previous releaseGArphics: Beta: This is the beta-version of the program. Version 1.0 shall be relased soon and will include a lot of improvements.HouseFly: HouseFly alpha 0.2.0.5: HouseFly alpha release 0.2.0.5HouseFly controls: HouseFly controls alpha 0.9.4: Version 0.9.4 alpha release of HouseFly controlsHTML Ruby: 6.21.8: Change Math.floor to round for text spacingHTML Shot: 0.1: Solved problems with some URLsJDS Toolkit: JDS Toolkit 0.1: Beta 0.1 version. Almost nothing in these librariesManaged Extensibility Framework: WebForms and MEF Sample: This sample demonstrates the use of these two technologies together in a non-invasive way. Information on how to use it on your own projects is inc...Microsoft - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.0 App Sample (Microsoft Spain): V0.7 - N-Layer DDD Sample App (VS.2010 RTM compat): Required Software (Microsoft Base Software needed for Development environment) Visual Studio 2010 RTM & .NET 4.0 RTM (Final Versions) Unity Applic...MvcContrib Portable Areas: Portable Areas: First Release of some portable areasNSIS Autorun: NSIS Autorun: Initial release.OgmoXNA: OgmoXNA Alpha Source Tree: Zipped version of the source tree in case you don't want to go through the SVN!Particle Plot Pivot: Particle Plot Pivot v1.0.0: Generates a Pivot collection of unpublished plots from the particle physics exeriments DZERO, CDF, ATLAS, and CMS. It can be found at http://deepta...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SPG2010 Drop9: SharePoint Guidance Drop Notes Microsoft patterns and practices ****************************************** ***************************************...Rich Ajax empowered Web/Cloud Applications: 6.3.15: New Visual WebGui rich applications platform versionSilverlight 4.0 Popup Menu: PopupMenu for Silverlight 4: This is the first release of the popup menu class for Silverlight 4.0Silverlight Flow Layouts library: SL and WPF Flow Layouts library April 2010: This release introduces WPF 4.0 RTM and Silverlight 4 RTM support, as well as an additional layout algorithm and some minor bug fixes. Some changes...Spackle.NET: 3.0.0.0 Release: In this release: Spackle.dll now targets the 4.0 version of the .NET Framework SecureRandom implements IDisposable ActionExtensions have been ...Splinger FrameXi: Splinger 1.1: Welcome to a whole new way of learning! Go to release 1.0 for the non .zip packaged files.SQL Server Metadata Toolkit 2008: SQL Server Metadata Toolkit Alpha 6: This release addresses issues 10665, 10678 and 10679. The SQL Parser now understands CAST functions (the AS was causing issues), and is installed ...Star Trooper for XNA 2D Tutorial: Lesson four content: Here is Lesson four original content for the StarTrooper 2D XNA tutorial. It also includes the XNA version of Lesson four source. The blog tutori...Thales Simulator Library: Version 0.8.6: The Thales Simulator Library is an implementation of a software emulation of the Thales (formerly Zaxus & Racal) Hardware Security Module cryptogra...Transcriber: Transcriber v0.1: Initial alpha release. Very nearly useful. :-) This version includes rules files for Mode of Beleriand, Sindarin Tehtar, Quenya, and Black Speech. ...Visual Studio DSite: Picture Box Viewer (Visual F sharp 2008): A simple picturebox viewer made in visual f sharp 2008.Web/Cloud Applications Development Framework | Visual WebGui: 6.4 Beta 2d: Further stabilization of the cutting-edge web applications frameworkWebAssert: WebAssert 0.1: Initial release. Supports HTML & CSS validation using MSTest/Visual Studio testing.XAML Based Chat: Test release: A test releaseすとれおじさん(仮): すとれおじさん β 0.02: ・デザインを大幅に変更 ・まだかなり動作が重いです ・機能も少ないですMost Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: Databasepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrParticle Plot PivotBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationFarseer Physics EngineDotNetZip LibraryFluent Ribbon Control SuiteN2 CMS

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Fun With Enum Methods

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again lets dive into the Little Wonders of .NET, those small things in the .NET languages and BCL classes that make development easier by increasing readability, maintainability, and/or performance. So probably every one of us has used an enumerated type at one time or another in a C# program.  The enumerated types we create are a great way to represent that a value can be one of a set of discrete values (or a combination of those values in the case of bit flags). But the power of enum types go far beyond simple assignment and comparison, there are many methods in the Enum class (that all enum types “inherit” from) that can give you even more power when dealing with them. IsDefined() – check if a given value exists in the enum Are you reading a value for an enum from a data source, but are unsure if it is actually a valid value or not?  Casting won’t tell you this, and Parse() isn’t guaranteed to balk either if you give it an int or a combination of flags.  So what can we do? Let’s assume we have a small enum like this for result codes we want to return back from our business logic layer: 1: public enum ResultCode 2: { 3: Success, 4: Warning, 5: Error 6: } In this enum, Success will be zero (unless given another value explicitly), Warning will be one, and Error will be two. So what happens if we have code like this where perhaps we’re getting the result code from another data source (could be database, could be web service, etc)? 1: public ResultCode PerformAction() 2: { 3: // set up and call some method that returns an int. 4: int result = ResultCodeFromDataSource(); 5:  6: // this will suceed even if result is < 0 or > 2. 7: return (ResultCode) result; 8: } So what happens if result is –1 or 4?  Well, the cast does not fail, so what we end up with would be an instance of a ResultCode that would have a value that’s outside of the bounds of the enum constants we defined. This means if you had a block of code like: 1: switch (result) 2: { 3: case ResultType.Success: 4: // do success stuff 5: break; 6:  7: case ResultType.Warning: 8: // do warning stuff 9: break; 10:  11: case ResultType.Error: 12: // do error stuff 13: break; 14: } That you would hit none of these blocks (which is a good argument for always having a default in a switch by the way). So what can you do?  Well, there is a handy static method called IsDefined() on the Enum class which will tell you if an enum value is defined.  1: public ResultCode PerformAction() 2: { 3: int result = ResultCodeFromDataSource(); 4:  5: if (!Enum.IsDefined(typeof(ResultCode), result)) 6: { 7: throw new InvalidOperationException("Enum out of range."); 8: } 9:  10: return (ResultCode) result; 11: } In fact, this is often recommended after you Parse() or cast a value to an enum as there are ways for values to get past these methods that may not be defined. If you don’t like the syntax of passing in the type of the enum, you could clean it up a bit by creating an extension method instead that would allow you to call IsDefined() off any isntance of the enum: 1: public static class EnumExtensions 2: { 3: // helper method that tells you if an enum value is defined for it's enumeration 4: public static bool IsDefined(this Enum value) 5: { 6: return Enum.IsDefined(value.GetType(), value); 7: } 8: }   HasFlag() – an easier way to see if a bit (or bits) are set Most of us who came from the land of C programming have had to deal extensively with bit flags many times in our lives.  As such, using bit flags may be almost second nature (for a quick refresher on bit flags in enum types see one of my old posts here). However, in higher-level languages like C#, the need to manipulate individual bit flags is somewhat diminished, and the code to check for bit flag enum values may be obvious to an advanced developer but cryptic to a novice developer. For example, let’s say you have an enum for a messaging platform that contains bit flags: 1: // usually, we pluralize flags enum type names 2: [Flags] 3: public enum MessagingOptions 4: { 5: None = 0, 6: Buffered = 0x01, 7: Persistent = 0x02, 8: Durable = 0x04, 9: Broadcast = 0x08 10: } We can combine these bit flags using the bitwise OR operator (the ‘|’ pipe character): 1: // combine bit flags using 2: var myMessenger = new Messenger(MessagingOptions.Buffered | MessagingOptions.Broadcast); Now, if we wanted to check the flags, we’d have to test then using the bit-wise AND operator (the ‘&’ character): 1: if ((options & MessagingOptions.Buffered) == MessagingOptions.Buffered) 2: { 3: // do code to set up buffering... 4: // ... 5: } While the ‘|’ for combining flags is easy enough to read for advanced developers, the ‘&’ test tends to be easy for novice developers to get wrong.  First of all you have to AND the flag combination with the value, and then typically you should test against the flag combination itself (and not just for a non-zero)!  This is because the flag combination you are testing with may combine multiple bits, in which case if only one bit is set, the result will be non-zero but not necessarily all desired bits! Thanks goodness in .NET 4.0 they gave us the HasFlag() method.  This method can be called from an enum instance to test to see if a flag is set, and best of all you can avoid writing the bit wise logic yourself.  Not to mention it will be more readable to a novice developer as well: 1: if (options.HasFlag(MessagingOptions.Buffered)) 2: { 3: // do code to set up buffering... 4: // ... 5: } It is much more concise and unambiguous, thus increasing your maintainability and readability. It would be nice to have a corresponding SetFlag() method, but unfortunately generic types don’t allow you to specialize on Enum, which makes it a bit more difficult.  It can be done but you have to do some conversions to numeric and then back to the enum which makes it less of a payoff than having the HasFlag() method.  But if you want to create it for symmetry, it would look something like this: 1: public static T SetFlag<T>(this Enum value, T flags) 2: { 3: if (!value.GetType().IsEquivalentTo(typeof(T))) 4: { 5: throw new ArgumentException("Enum value and flags types don't match."); 6: } 7:  8: // yes this is ugly, but unfortunately we need to use an intermediate boxing cast 9: return (T)Enum.ToObject(typeof (T), Convert.ToUInt64(value) | Convert.ToUInt64(flags)); 10: } Note that since the enum types are value types, we need to assign the result to something (much like string.Trim()).  Also, you could chain several SetFlag() operations together or create one that takes a variable arg list if desired. Parse() and ToString() – transitioning from string to enum and back Sometimes, you may want to be able to parse an enum from a string or convert it to a string - Enum has methods built in to let you do this.  Now, many may already know this, but may not appreciate how much power are in these two methods. For example, if you want to parse a string as an enum, it’s easy and works just like you’d expect from the numeric types: 1: string optionsString = "Persistent"; 2:  3: // can use Enum.Parse, which throws if finds something it doesn't like... 4: var result = (MessagingOptions)Enum.Parse(typeof (MessagingOptions), optionsString); 5:  6: if (result == MessagingOptions.Persistent) 7: { 8: Console.WriteLine("It worked!"); 9: } Note that Enum.Parse() will throw if it finds a value it doesn’t like.  But the values it likes are fairly flexible!  You can pass in a single value, or a comma separated list of values for flags and it will parse them all and set all bits: 1: // for string values, can have one, or comma separated. 2: string optionsString = "Persistent, Buffered"; 3:  4: var result = (MessagingOptions)Enum.Parse(typeof (MessagingOptions), optionsString); 5:  6: if (result.HasFlag(MessagingOptions.Persistent) && result.HasFlag(MessagingOptions.Buffered)) 7: { 8: Console.WriteLine("It worked!"); 9: } Or you can parse in a string containing a number that represents a single value or combination of values to set: 1: // 3 is the combination of Buffered (0x01) and Persistent (0x02) 2: var optionsString = "3"; 3:  4: var result = (MessagingOptions) Enum.Parse(typeof (MessagingOptions), optionsString); 5:  6: if (result.HasFlag(MessagingOptions.Persistent) && result.HasFlag(MessagingOptions.Buffered)) 7: { 8: Console.WriteLine("It worked again!"); 9: } And, if you really aren’t sure if the parse will work, and don’t want to handle an exception, you can use TryParse() instead: 1: string optionsString = "Persistent, Buffered"; 2: MessagingOptions result; 3:  4: // try parse returns true if successful, and takes an out parm for the result 5: if (Enum.TryParse(optionsString, out result)) 6: { 7: if (result.HasFlag(MessagingOptions.Persistent) && result.HasFlag(MessagingOptions.Buffered)) 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine("It worked!"); 10: } 11: } So we covered parsing a string to an enum, what about reversing that and converting an enum to a string?  The ToString() method is the obvious and most basic choice for most of us, but did you know you can pass a format string for enum types that dictate how they are written as a string?: 1: MessagingOptions value = MessagingOptions.Buffered | MessagingOptions.Persistent; 2:  3: // general format, which is the default, 4: Console.WriteLine("Default : " + value); 5: Console.WriteLine("G (default): " + value.ToString("G")); 6:  7: // Flags format, even if type does not have Flags attribute. 8: Console.WriteLine("F (flags) : " + value.ToString("F")); 9:  10: // integer format, value as number. 11: Console.WriteLine("D (num) : " + value.ToString("D")); 12:  13: // hex format, value as hex 14: Console.WriteLine("X (hex) : " + value.ToString("X")); Which displays: 1: Default : Buffered, Persistent 2: G (default): Buffered, Persistent 3: F (flags) : Buffered, Persistent 4: D (num) : 3 5: X (hex) : 00000003 Now, you may not really see a difference here between G and F because I used a [Flags] enum, the difference is that the “F” option treats the enum as if it were flags even if the [Flags] attribute is not present.  Let’s take a non-flags enum like the ResultCode used earlier: 1: // yes, we can do this even if it is not [Flags] enum. 2: ResultCode value = ResultCode.Warning | ResultCode.Error; And if we run that through the same formats again we get: 1: Default : 3 2: G (default): 3 3: F (flags) : Warning, Error 4: D (num) : 3 5: X (hex) : 00000003 Notice that since we had multiple values combined, but it was not a [Flags] marked enum, the G and default format gave us a number instead of a value name.  This is because the value was not a valid single-value constant of the enum.  However, using the F flags format string, it broke out the value into its component flags even though it wasn’t marked [Flags]. So, if you want to get an enum to display appropriately for whether or not it has the [Flags] attribute, use G which is the default.  If you always want it to attempt to break down the flags, use F.  For numeric output, obviously D or  X are the best choice depending on whether you want decimal or hex. Summary Hopefully, you learned a couple of new tricks with using the Enum class today!  I’ll add more little wonders as I think of them and thanks for all the invaluable input!   Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Little Wonders,Enum,BlackRabbitCoder

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• Should I include HTML markup in my JSON response?

  - by Mike M. Lin

  In an e-commerce site, when adding an item to a cart, I'd like to show a popup window with the options you can choose. Imagine you're ordering an iPod Shuffle and now you have to choose the color and text to engrave. I'd like the window to be modal, so I'm using a lightbox populated by an Ajax call. Now I have two options: Option 1: Send only the data, and generate the HTML markup using JavaScript What's nice about this is that it trims down the Ajax request to the bear minimum and doesn't mix the data with the markup. What's not so great about this is that now I need to use JavaScript to do my rendering, instead of having a template engine on the server-side do it. I might be able to clean up the approach a bit by using a client-side templating solution. Option 2: Send the HTML markup What's good about this is that I can have the same server-side templating engine I'm using for the rest of my rendering tasks (Django), do the rendering of the lightbox. JavaScript is only used to insert the HTML fragment into the page. So it clearly leaves the rendering to the rendering engine. Makes sense to me. But I don't feel comfortable mixing data and markup in an Ajax call for some reason. I'm not sure what makes me feel uneasy about it. I mean, it's the same way every web page is served up -- data plus markup -- right?

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• css: zoooming-out inside the browser moves rightmost floated div below other divs

  - by John Sonderson

  I am seeing something strange in both firefox and chrome when I increase the zoom level inside these browsers, although I see nothing wrong with my CSS... I am hoping someone on this group will be able to help. Here is the whole story: I have a right-floated top-level div containing three right-floated right. The three inner divs have all box-model measurements in pixels which add up to the width of the enclosing container. Everything looks fine when the browser size is 100%, but when I start making the browser smaller with CTRL+scrollwheel or CTRL+minus the rightmost margin shrinks down too fast and eventually becomes zero, forcing my rightmost floated inner div to fall down below the other two! I can't make sense out of this, almost seems like some integer division is being performed incorrectly in the browser code, but alas firefox and chrome both display the same result. Here is the example (just zoom out with CTRL-minus to see what I mean): Click Here to View What I Mean on Example Site Just to narrow things down a bit, the tags of interest are the following: div#mainContent div#contentLeft div#contentCenter div#contentRight I've searched stackoverflow for an answer and found the following posts which seem related to my question but was not able to apply them to the problem I am experiencing: http:// stackoverflow.com/questions/6955313/div-moves-incorrectly-on-browser-resize http:// stackoverflow.com/questions/18246882/divs-move-when-resizing-page http:// stackoverflow.com/questions/17637231/moving-an-image-when-browser-resizes http:// stackoverflow.com/questions/5316380/how-to-stop-divs-moving-when-the-browser-is-resized I've duplicated the html and css code below for your convenience: Here is the HTML: <!doctype html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Pinco</title> <link href="css/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"> </head> <body> <div id="wrapper"> <header> <div class="logo"> <a href="http://pinco.com"> <img class="logo" src="images/PincoLogo5.png" alt="Pinco" /> </a> </div> <div class="titolo"> <h1>Benvenuti!</h1> <h2>Siete arrivati al sito pinco.</h2> </div> <nav> <ul class="menu"> <li><a href="#">Menù Qui</a></li> <li><a href="#">Menù Quo</a></li> <li><a href="#">Menù Qua</a></li> </ul> </nav> </header> <div id="mainContent"> <div id="contentLeft"> <section> <article> <p> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque tempor turpis est, nec varius est pharetra scelerisque. Sed eu pellentesque purus, at cursus nisi. In bibendum tristique nunc eu mattis. Nulla pretium tincidunt ipsum, non imperdiet metus tincidunt ac. In et lobortis elit, nec lobortis purus. Cras ac viverra risus. Proin dapibus tortor justo, a vulputate ipsum lacinia sed. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Phasellus sit amet malesuada velit. Fusce diam neque, cursus id dui ac, blandit vehicula tortor. Phasellus interdum ipsum eu leo condimentum, in dignissim erat tincidunt. Ut fermentum consectetur tellus, dignissim volutpat orci suscipit ac. Praesent scelerisque urna metus. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Duis pulvinar, sem a sodales eleifend, odio elit blandit risus, a dapibus ligula orci non augue. Nullam vitae cursus tortor, eget malesuada lectus. Nulla facilisi. Cras pharetra nisi sit amet orci dignissim, a eleifend odio hendrerit. </p> </article> </section> </div> <div id="contentCenter"> <section> <article> <p> Maecenas vitae purus at orci euismod pretium. Nam gravida gravida bibendum. Donec nec dolor vel magna consequat laoreet in a urna. Phasellus cursus ultrices lorem ut sagittis. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Vivamus purus felis, ornare quis ante vel, commodo scelerisque tortor. Integer vel facilisis mauris. </p> <img src="images/auto1.jpg" width="272" height="272" /> <p> In urna purus, fringilla a urna a, ultrices convallis orci. Duis mattis sit amet leo sed luctus. Donec nec sem non nunc mattis semper quis vitae enim. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Suspendisse dictum porta quam, vel lobortis enim bibendum et. Donec iaculis tortor id metus interdum, hendrerit tincidunt orci tempor. Sed dignissim cursus mattis. </p> </article> </section> </div> <div id="contentRight"> <section> <article> <img src="images/auto2.jpg" width="272" height="272" /> <img src="images/auto3.jpg" width="272" height="272" /> <p> Cras eu quam lobortis, sodales felis ultricies, rhoncus neque. Aenean nisi eros, blandit ac lacus sit amet, vulputate sodales mi. Nunc eget purus ultricies, aliquam quam sit amet, porttitor velit. In imperdiet justo in quam tristique, eget semper nisi pellentesque. Cras fringilla eros enim, in euismod nisl imperdiet ac. Fusce tempor justo vitae faucibus luctus. </p> </article> </section> </div> </div> <footer> <div class="footerText"> <p> Copyright &copy; Pinco <br />Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. <br />Fusce ornare turpis orci, nec egestas leo feugiat ac. <br />Morbi eget sem facilisis, laoreet erat ut, tristique odio. Proin sollicitudin quis nisi id consequat. </p> </div> <div class="footerLogo"> <img class="footerLogo" src="images/auto4.jpg" width="80" height="80" /> </div> </footer> </div> </body> </html> and here is the CSS: /* CSS Document */ * { margin: 0; border: 0; padding: 0; } body { background: #8B0000; /* darkred */; } body { margin: 0; border: 0; padding: 0; } div#wrapper { margin: 0 auto; width: 960px; height: 100%; background: #FFC0CB /* pink */; } header { position: relative; background: #005b97; height: 140px; } header div.logo { float: left; width: 360px; height: 140px; } header div.logo img.logo { width: 360px; height: 140px; } header div.titolo { float: left; padding: 12px 0 0 35px; color: black; } header div.titolo h1 { font-size: 36px; font-weight: bold; } header div.titolo h2 { font-size: 24px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; color: white;} header nav { position: absolute; right: 0; bottom: 0; } header ul.menu { background: black; } header ul.menu li { display: inline-block; padding: 3px 15px; font-weight: bold; } div#mainContent { float: left; width: 100%; /* width: 960px; *//* height: 860px; */ padding: 30px 0; text-align: justify; } div#mainContent img { margin: 12px 0; } div#contentLeft { height: 900px; float: left; margin-left: 12px; border: 1px solid black; padding: 15px; width: 272px; background: #ccc; } div#contentCenter { height: 900px; float: left; margin-left: 12px; border: 1px solid transparent; padding: 15px; width: 272px; background: #E00; } div#contentRight { height: 900px; float: left; margin-left: 12px; border: 1px solid black; padding: 15px; width: 272px; background: #ccc; } footer { clear: both; padding: 12px; background: #306; color: white; height: 80px; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; } footer div.footerText { float: left; } footer div.footerLogo { float: right; } a { color: white; text-decoration: none; } Thanks.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #039

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 FQL – Facebook Query Language Facebook list following advantages of FQL: Condensed XML reduces bandwidth and parsing costs. More complex requests can reduce the number of requests necessary. Provides a single consistent, unified interface for all of your data. It’s fun! UDF – Get the Day of the Week Function The day of the week can be retrieved in SQL Server by using the DatePart function. The value returned by the function is between 1 (Sunday) and 7 (Saturday). To convert this to a string representing the day of the week, use a CASE statement. UDF – Function to Get Previous And Next Work Day – Exclude Saturday and Sunday While reading ColdFusion blog of Ben Nadel Getting the Previous Day In ColdFusion, Excluding Saturday And Sunday, I realize that I use similar function on my SQL Server Database. This function excludes the Weekends (Saturday and Sunday), and it gets previous as well as next work day. Complete Series of SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Introduction Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Part 1 Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Part 2 Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Part 3 Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers Complete List Download 2008 Introduction to Log Viewer In SQL Server all the windows event logs can be seen along with SQL Server logs. Interface for all the logs is same and can be launched from the same place. This log can be exported and filtered as well. DBCC SHRINKFILE Takes Long Time to Run If you are DBA who are involved with Database Maintenance and file group maintenance, you must have experience that many times DBCC SHRINKFILE operations takes a long time but any other operations with Database are relatively quicker. mssqlsystemresource – Resource Database The purpose of resource database is to facilitates upgrading to the new version of SQL Server without any hassle. In previous versions whenever version of SQL Server was upgraded all the previous version system objects needs to be dropped and new version system objects to be created. 2009 Puzzle – Write Script to Generate Primary Key and Foreign Key In SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), there is no option to script all the keys. If one is required to script keys they will have to manually script each key one at a time. If database has many tables, generating one key at a time can be a very intricate task. I want to throw a question to all of you if any of you have scripts for the same purpose. Maximizing View of SQL Server Management Studio – Full Screen – New Screen I had explained the following two different methods: 1) Open Results in Separate Tab - This is a very interesting method as result pan shows up in a different tab instead of the splitting screen horizontally. 2) Open SSMS in Full Screen - This works always and to its best. Not many people are aware of this method; hence, very few people use it to enhance performance. 2010 Find Queries using Parallelism from Cached Plan T-SQL script gets all the queries and their execution plan where parallelism operations are kicked up. Pay attention there is TOP 10 is used, if you have lots of transactional operations, I suggest that you change TOP 10 to TOP 50 This is the list of the all the articles in the series of computed columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Storage This article talks about how computed columns are created and why they take more storage space than before. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Performance This article talks about how PERSISTED columns give better performance than non-persisted columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Performance – Part 2 This article talks about how non-persisted columns give better performance than PERSISTED columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column and Performance – Part 3 This article talks about how Index improves the performance of Computed Columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Storage – Part 2 This article talks about how creating index on computed column does not grow the row length of table. SQL SERVER – Computed Columns – Index and Performance This article summarized all the articles related to computed columns. 2011 SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 21 of 31 What is Data Warehousing? What is Business Intelligence (BI)? What is a Dimension Table? What is Dimensional Modeling? What is a Fact Table? What are the Fundamental Stages of Data Warehousing? What are the Different Methods of Loading Dimension tables? Describes the Foreign Key Columns in Fact Table and Dimension Table? What is Data Mining? What is the Difference between a View and a Materialized View? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 22 of 31 What is OLTP? What is OLAP? What is the Difference between OLTP and OLAP? What is ODS? What is ER Diagram? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 23 of 31 What is ETL? What is VLDB? Is OLTP Database is Design Optimal for Data Warehouse? If denormalizing improves Data Warehouse Processes, then why is the Fact Table is in the Normal Form? What are Lookup Tables? What are Aggregate Tables? What is Real-Time Data-Warehousing? What are Conformed Dimensions? What is a Conformed Fact? How do you Load the Time Dimension? What is a Level of Granularity of a Fact Table? What are Non-Additive Facts? What is a Factless Facts Table? What are Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD)? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 24 of 31 What is Hybrid Slowly Changing Dimension? What is BUS Schema? What is a Star Schema? What Snow Flake Schema? Differences between the Star and Snowflake Schema? What is Difference between ER Modeling and Dimensional Modeling? What is Degenerate Dimension Table? Why is Data Modeling Important? What is a Surrogate Key? What is Junk Dimension? What is a Data Mart? What is the Difference between OLAP and Data Warehouse? What is a Cube and Linked Cube with Reference to Data Warehouse? What is Snapshot with Reference to Data Warehouse? What is Active Data Warehousing? What is the Difference between Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence? What is MDS? Explain the Paradigm of Bill Inmon and Ralph Kimball. SQL SERVER – Azure Interview Questions and Answers – Guest Post by Paras Doshi – Day 25 of 31 Paras Doshi has submitted 21 interesting question and answers for SQL Azure. 1.What is SQL Azure? 2.What is cloud computing? 3.How is SQL Azure different than SQL server? 4.How many replicas are maintained for each SQL Azure database? 5.How can we migrate from SQL server to SQL Azure? 6.Which tools are available to manage SQL Azure databases and servers? 7.Tell me something about security and SQL Azure. 8.What is SQL Azure Firewall? 9.What is the difference between web edition and business edition? 10.How do we synchronize On Premise SQL server with SQL Azure? 11.How do we Backup SQL Azure Data? 12.What is the current pricing model of SQL Azure? 13.What is the current limitation of the size of SQL Azure DB? 14.How do you handle datasets larger than 50 GB? 15.What happens when the SQL Azure database reaches Max Size? 16.How many databases can we create in a single server? 17.How many servers can we create in a single subscription? 18.How do you improve the performance of a SQL Azure Database? 19.What is code near application topology? 20.What were the latest updates to SQL Azure service? 21.When does a workload on SQL Azure get throttled? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Guest Post by Malathi Mahadevan – Day 26 of 31 Malachi had asked a simple question which has several answers. Each answer makes you think and ponder about the reality of the IT world. Look at the simple question – ‘What is the toughest challenge you have faced in your present job and how did you handle it’? and its various answers. Each answer has its own story. SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Guest Post by Rick Morelan – Day 27 of 31 Rick Morelan of Joes2Pros has written an excellent blog post on the subject how to find top N values. Most people are fully aware of how the TOP keyword works with a SELECT statement. After years preparing so many students to pass the SQL Certification I noticed they were pretty well prepared for job interviews too. Yes, they would do well in the interview but not great. There seemed to be a few questions that would come up repeatedly for almost everyone. Rick addresses similar questions in his lucid writing skills. 2012 Observation of Top with Index and Order of Resultset SQL Server has lots of things to learn and share. It is amazing to see how people evaluate and understand different techniques and styles differently when implementing. The real reason may be absolutely different but we may blame something totally different for the incorrect results. Read the blog post to learn more. How do I Record Video and Webcast How to Convert Hex to Decimal or INT Earlier I asked regarding a question about how to convert Hex to Decimal. I promised that I will post an answer with Due Credit to the author but never got around to post a blog post around it. Read the original post over here SQL SERVER – Question – How to Convert Hex to Decimal. Query to Get Unique Distinct Data Based on Condition – Eliminate Duplicate Data from Resultset The natural reaction will be to suggest DISTINCT or GROUP BY. However, not all the questions can be solved by DISTINCT or GROUP BY. Let us see the following example, where a user wanted only latest records to be displayed. Let us see the example to understand further. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• The Red Gate and .NET Reflector Debacle

  - by Rick Strahl

  About a month ago Red Gate – the company who owns the NET Reflector tool most .NET devs use at one point or another – decided to change their business model for Reflector and take the product from free to a fully paid for license model. As a bit of history: .NET Reflector was originally created by Lutz Roeder as a free community tool to inspect .NET assemblies. Using Reflector you can examine the types in an assembly, drill into type signatures and quickly disassemble code to see how a particular method works.  In case you’ve been living under a rock and you’ve never looked at Reflector, here’s what it looks like drilled into an assembly from disk with some disassembled source code showing: Note that you get tons of information about each element in the tree, and almost all related types and members are clickable both in the list and source view so it’s extremely easy to navigate and follow the code flow even in this static assembly only view. For many year’s Lutz kept the the tool up to date and added more features gradually improving an already amazing tool and making it better. Then about two and a half years ago Red Gate bought the tool from Lutz. A lot of ruckus and noise ensued in the community back then about what would happen with the tool and… for the most part very little did. Other than the incessant update notices with prominent Red Gate promo on them life with Reflector went on. The product didn’t die and and it didn’t go commercial or to a charge model. When .NET 4.0 came out it still continued to work mostly because the .NET feature set doesn’t drastically change how types behave.  Then a month back Red Gate started making noise about a new Version Version 7 which would be commercial. No more free version - and a shit storm broke out in the community. Now normally I’m not one to be critical of companies trying to make money from a product, much less for a product that’s as incredibly useful as Reflector. There isn’t day in .NET development that goes by for me where I don’t fire up Reflector. Whether it’s for examining the innards of the .NET Framework, checking out third party code, or verifying some of my own code and resources. Even more so recently I’ve been doing a lot of Interop work with a non-.NET application that needs to access .NET components and Reflector has been immensely valuable to me (and my clients) if figuring out exact type signatures required to calling .NET components in assemblies. In short Reflector is an invaluable tool to me. Ok, so what’s the problem? Why all the fuss? Certainly the $39 Red Gate is trying to charge isn’t going to kill any developer. If there’s any tool in .NET that’s worth $39 it’s Reflector, right? Right, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is how Red Gate went about moving the product to commercial which borders on the downright bizarre. It’s almost as if somebody in management wrote a slogan: “How can we piss off the .NET community in the most painful way we can?” And that it seems Red Gate has a utterly succeeded. People are rabid, and for once I think that this outrage isn’t exactly misplaced. Take a look at the message thread that Red Gate dedicated from a link off the download page. Not only is Version 7 going to be a paid commercial tool, but the older versions of Reflector won’t be available any longer. Not only that but older versions that are already in use also will continually try to update themselves to the new paid version – which when installed will then expire unless registered properly. There have also been reports of Version 6 installs shutting themselves down and failing to work if the update is refused (I haven’t seen that myself so not sure if that’s true). In other words Red Gate is trying to make damn sure they’re getting your money if you attempt to use Reflector. There’s a lot of temptation there. Think about the millions of .NET developers out there and all of them possibly upgrading – that’s a nice chunk of change that Red Gate’s sitting on. Even with all the community backlash these guys are probably making some bank right now just because people need to get life to move on. Red Gate also put up a Feedback link on the download page – which not surprisingly is chock full with hate mail condemning the move. Oddly there’s not a single response to any of those messages by the Red Gate folks except when it concerns license questions for the full version. It puzzles me what that link serves for other yet than another complete example of failure to understand how to handle customer relations. There’s no doubt that that all of this has caused some serious outrage in the community. The sad part though is that this could have been handled so much less arrogantly and without pissing off the entire community and causing so much ill-will. People are pissed off and I have no doubt that this negative publicity will show up in the sales numbers for their other products. I certainly hope so. Stupidity ought to be painful! Why do Companies do boneheaded stuff like this? Red Gate’s original decision to buy Reflector was hotly debated but at that the time most of what would happen was mostly speculation. But I thought it was a smart move for any company that is in need of spreading its marketing message and corporate image as a vendor in the .NET space. Where else do you get to flash your corporate logo to hordes of .NET developers on a regular basis?  Exploiting that marketing with some goodwill of providing a free tool breeds positive feedback that hopefully has a good effect on the company’s visibility and the products it sells. Instead Red Gate seems to have taken exactly the opposite tack of corporate bullying to try to make a quick buck – and in the process ruined any community goodwill that might have come from providing a service community for free while still getting valuable marketing. What’s so puzzling about this boneheaded escapade is that the company doesn’t need to resort to underhanded tactics like what they are trying with Reflector 7. The tools the company makes are very good. I personally use SQL Compare, Sql Data Compare and ANTS Profiler on a regular basis and all of these tools are essential in my toolbox. They certainly work much better than the tools that are in the box with Visual Studio. Chances are that if Reflector 7 added useful features I would have been more than happy to shell out my $39 to upgrade when the time is right. It’s Expensive to give away stuff for Free At the same time, this episode shows some of the big problems that come with ‘free’ tools. A lot of organizations are realizing that giving stuff away for free is actually quite expensive and the pay back is often very intangible if any at all. Those that rely on donations or other voluntary compensation find that they amount contributed is absolutely miniscule as to not matter at all. Yet at the same time I bet most of those clamouring the loudest on that Red Gate Reflector feedback page that Reflector won’t be free anymore probably have NEVER made a donation to any open source project or free tool ever. The expectation of Free these days is just too great – which is a shame I think. There’s a lot to be said for paid software and having somebody to hold to responsible to because you gave them some money. There’s an incentive –> payback –> responsibility model that seems to be missing from free software (not all of it, but a lot of it). While there certainly are plenty of bad apples in paid software as well, money tends to be a good motivator for people to continue working and improving products. Reasons for giving away stuff are many but often it’s a naïve desire to share things when things are simple. At first it might be no problem to volunteer time and effort but as products mature the fun goes out of it, and as the reality of product maintenance kicks in developers want to get something back for the time and effort they’re putting in doing non-glamorous work. It’s then when products die or languish and this is painful for all to watch. For Red Gate however, I think there was always a pretty good payback from the Reflector acquisition in terms of marketing: Visibility and possible positioning of their products although they seemed to have mostly ignored that option. On the other hand they started this off pretty badly even 2 and a half years back when they aquired Reflector from Lutz with the same arrogant attitude that is evident in the latest episode. You really gotta wonder what folks are thinking in management – the sad part is from advance emails that were circulating, they were fully aware of the shit storm they were inciting with this and I suspect they are banking on the sheer numbers of .NET developers to still make them a tidy chunk of change from upgrades… Alternatives are coming For me personally the single license isn’t a problem, but I actually have a tool that I sell (an interop Web Service proxy generation tool) to customers and one of the things I recommend to use with has been Reflector to view assembly information and to find which Interop classes to instantiate from the non-.NET environment. It’s been nice to use Reflector for this with its small footprint and zero-configuration installation. But now with V7 becoming a paid tool that option is not going to be available anymore. Luckily it looks like the .NET community is jumping to it and trying to fill the void. Amidst the Red Gate outrage a new library called ILSpy has sprung up and providing at least some of the core functionality of Reflector with an open source library. It looks promising going forward and I suspect there will be a lot more support and interest to support this project now that Reflector has gone over to the ‘dark side’…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011

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• Silverlight Cream for April 21, 2010 -- #843

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Alan Beasley, Roboblob, SilverLaw, Mike Snow, and Chris Koenig. Shoutouts: Ozymandias has a discussion up: The Three Pillars of Xbox Live on Windows Phone John Papa announced that Silverlight 4 is now on WebPI: Get Silverlight 4 – Simplified! Dan Wahlin posted the code and material from DevConnections: Code from my DevConnections Talks and Workshop Tim Heuer has a good deal posted from GoDaddy: Get a Silverlight XAP signing certificate for cheap thanks to GoDaddy From SilverlightCream.com: ListBox Styling (Part2-ControlTemplate) in Expression Blend & Silverlight Alan Beasley is back with part 2 of his ListBox styling tutorial adventure in Expression Blend... this looks like some of the stuff I was getting close to in Win32 a bunch of years back... great stuff... thanks Alan! Unit Testing Modal Dialogs in MVVM and Silverlight 4 Roboblob responds to some feedback with an expansion on his previous post with the addition of some Unit Testing. ChildWindowResizeBehavior - Silverlight 4 Blend 4 RC design time support SilverLaw has a short post about a behavior he has available at the Expression Gallery that resizes a child window with the Mouse Wheel, and also has Design-time support in Blend. Tip of the Day #111 – How to Configure your Silverlight App to run in Elevated Trust Mode Mike Snow has his latest tip up, and this one is on both ends of of the Elevated Trust Mode of OOB ... how to set it, and what your user experience is like. WP7 Part 2 – Working with Data Chris Koenig has part 2 of his WP7 exploration up ... he's tackling Nerd Dinner and pulling down Odata. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Warnings When Undo Isn't Possible

  - by ultan o'broin

  Enjoyed this post Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo by Aza Raskin. It makes sense never to warn users if an undo option is possible. The examples given are from the web space. Here's the conclusion: Warnings cause us to lose our work, to mistrust our computers, and to blame ourselves. A simple but foolproof design methodology solves the problem: "Never use a warning when you mean undo." And when a user is deleting their work, you always mean undo. However, in enterprise apps you may find that an undo option isn't technically possible or desirable. Objects may be shared, part of a flow elsewhere, or undoing something committed to the database (a rollback I guess) may not be feasible if it becomes locked by another process. Plus, what constitutes user ownership of objects isn't always clear to users. The implications of delete (and other) actions need to be clearly communicated out in advance. Really, warnings are important in the enterprise space. Data has a very high value, and users can perform a wide variety of actions that may risk that data, not always within the application itself (at browser level, for example). That said, throwing warnings all over the place when an undo option is possible is annoying. Instead, treat warnings with respect. When there is no undo option possible, use warning messages to communicate potentially dangerous or irrecoverable actions or the downstream consequences of user actions on the process or task flow. Force the user to respond to a warning message by using a modal dialog with clearly labeled action buttons. Here's a couple of examples. A great article that got me thinking. Let's see more like that. Let's not forget there's more types of messages than just error messages. User assistance and user experience professionals need to understand when best to use confirmation, information, and warning types too!

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• Taming Hopping Windows

  - by Roman Schindlauer

  At first glance, hopping windows seem fairly innocuous and obvious. They organize events into windows with a simple periodic definition: the windows have some duration d (e.g. a window covers 5 second time intervals), an interval or period p (e.g. a new window starts every 2 seconds) and an alignment a (e.g. one of those windows starts at 12:00 PM on March 15, 2012 UTC). var wins = xs     .HoppingWindow(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5),                    TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2),                    new DateTime(2012, 3, 15, 12, 0, 0, DateTimeKind.Utc)); Logically, there is a window with start time a + np and end time a + np + d for every integer n. That’s a lot of windows. So why doesn’t the following query (always) blow up? var query = wins.Select(win => win.Count()); A few users have asked why StreamInsight doesn’t produce output for empty windows. Primarily it’s because there is an infinite number of empty windows! (Actually, StreamInsight uses DateTimeOffset.MaxValue to approximate “the end of time” and DateTimeOffset.MinValue to approximate “the beginning of time”, so the number of windows is lower in practice.) That was the good news. Now the bad news. Events also have duration. Consider the following simple input: var xs = this.Application                 .DefineEnumerable(() => new[]                     { EdgeEvent.CreateStart(DateTimeOffset.UtcNow, 0) })                 .ToStreamable(AdvanceTimeSettings.IncreasingStartTime); Because the event has no explicit end edge, it lasts until the end of time. So there are lots of non-empty windows if we apply a hopping window to that single event! For this reason, we need to be careful with hopping window queries in StreamInsight. Or we can switch to a custom implementation of hopping windows that doesn’t suffer from this shortcoming. The alternate window implementation produces output only when the input changes. We start by breaking up the timeline into non-overlapping intervals assigned to each window. In figure 1, six hopping windows (“Windows”) are assigned to six intervals (“Assignments”) in the timeline. Next we take input events (“Events”) and alter their lifetimes (“Altered Events”) so that they cover the intervals of the windows they intersect. In figure 1, you can see that the first event e1 intersects windows w1 and w2 so it is adjusted to cover assignments a1 and a2. Finally, we can use snapshot windows (“Snapshots”) to produce output for the hopping windows. Notice however that instead of having six windows generating output, we have only four. The first and second snapshots correspond to the first and second hopping windows. The remaining snapshots however cover two hopping windows each! While in this example we saved only two events, the savings can be more significant when the ratio of event duration to window duration is higher. Figure 1: Timeline The implementation of this strategy is straightforward. We need to set the start times of events to the start time of the interval assigned to the earliest window including the start time. Similarly, we need to modify the end times of events to the end time of the interval assigned to the latest window including the end time. The following snap-to-boundary function that rounds a timestamp value t down to the nearest value t' <= t such that t' is a + np for some integer n will be useful. For convenience, we will represent both DateTime and TimeSpan values using long ticks: static long SnapToBoundary(long t, long a, long p) {     return t - ((t - a) % p) - (t > a ? 0L : p); } How do we find the earliest window including the start time for an event? It’s the window following the last window that does not include the start time assuming that there are no gaps in the windows (i.e. duration < interval), and limitation of this solution. To find the end time of that antecedent window, we need to know the alignment of window ends: long e = a + (d % p); Using the window end alignment, we are finally ready to describe the start time selector: static long AdjustStartTime(long t, long e, long p) {     return SnapToBoundary(t, e, p) + p; } To find the latest window including the end time for an event, we look for the last window start time (non-inclusive): public static long AdjustEndTime(long t, long a, long d, long p) {     return SnapToBoundary(t - 1, a, p) + p + d; } Bringing it together, we can define the translation from events to ‘altered events’ as in Figure 1: public static IQStreamable<T> SnapToWindowIntervals<T>(IQStreamable<T> source, TimeSpan duration, TimeSpan interval, DateTime alignment) {     if (source == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("source");     // reason about DateTime and TimeSpan in ticks     long d = Math.Min(DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks, duration.Ticks);     long p = Math.Min(DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks, Math.Abs(interval.Ticks));     // set alignment to earliest possible window     var a = alignment.ToUniversalTime().Ticks % p;     // verify constraints of this solution     if (d <= 0L) { throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("duration"); }     if (p == 0L || p > d) { throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("interval"); }     // find the alignment of window ends     long e = a + (d % p);     return source.AlterEventLifetime(         evt => ToDateTime(AdjustStartTime(evt.StartTime.ToUniversalTime().Ticks, e, p)),         evt => ToDateTime(AdjustEndTime(evt.EndTime.ToUniversalTime().Ticks, a, d, p)) -             ToDateTime(AdjustStartTime(evt.StartTime.ToUniversalTime().Ticks, e, p))); } public static DateTime ToDateTime(long ticks) {     // just snap to min or max value rather than under/overflowing     return ticks < DateTime.MinValue.Ticks         ? new DateTime(DateTime.MinValue.Ticks, DateTimeKind.Utc)         : ticks > DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks         ? new DateTime(DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks, DateTimeKind.Utc)         : new DateTime(ticks, DateTimeKind.Utc); } Finally, we can describe our custom hopping window operator: public static IQWindowedStreamable<T> HoppingWindow2<T>(     IQStreamable<T> source,     TimeSpan duration,     TimeSpan interval,     DateTime alignment) {     if (source == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("source"); }     return SnapToWindowIntervals(source, duration, interval, alignment).SnapshotWindow(); } By switching from HoppingWindow to HoppingWindow2 in the following example, the query returns quickly rather than gobbling resources and ultimately failing! public void Main() {     var start = new DateTimeOffset(new DateTime(2012, 6, 28), TimeSpan.Zero);     var duration = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5);     var interval = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2);     var alignment = new DateTime(2012, 3, 15, 12, 0, 0, DateTimeKind.Utc);     var events = this.Application.DefineEnumerable(() => new[]     {         EdgeEvent.CreateStart(start.AddSeconds(0), "e0"),         EdgeEvent.CreateStart(start.AddSeconds(1), "e1"),         EdgeEvent.CreateEnd(start.AddSeconds(1), start.AddSeconds(2), "e1"),         EdgeEvent.CreateStart(start.AddSeconds(3), "e2"),         EdgeEvent.CreateStart(start.AddSeconds(9), "e3"),         EdgeEvent.CreateEnd(start.AddSeconds(3), start.AddSeconds(10), "e2"),         EdgeEvent.CreateEnd(start.AddSeconds(9), start.AddSeconds(10), "e3"),     }).ToStreamable(AdvanceTimeSettings.IncreasingStartTime);     var adjustedEvents = SnapToWindowIntervals(events, duration, interval, alignment);     var query = from win in HoppingWindow2(events, duration, interval, alignment)                 select win.Count();     DisplayResults(adjustedEvents, "Adjusted Events");     DisplayResults(query, "Query"); } As you can see, instead of producing a massive number of windows for the open start edge e0, a single window is emitted from 12:00:15 AM until the end of time: Adjusted Events StartTime EndTime Payload 6/28/2012 12:00:01 AM 12/31/9999 11:59:59 PM e0 6/28/2012 12:00:03 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:07 AM e1 6/28/2012 12:00:05 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:15 AM e2 6/28/2012 12:00:11 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:15 AM e3 Query StartTime EndTime Payload 6/28/2012 12:00:01 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:03 AM 1 6/28/2012 12:00:03 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:05 AM 2 6/28/2012 12:00:05 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:07 AM 3 6/28/2012 12:00:07 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:11 AM 2 6/28/2012 12:00:11 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:15 AM 3 6/28/2012 12:00:15 AM 12/31/9999 11:59:59 PM 1 Regards, The StreamInsight Team

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• Big GRC: Turning Data into Actionable GRC Intelligence

  - by Jenna Danko

  While it’s no longer headline news that Governments have carried out large scale data-mining programmes aimed at terrorism detection and identifying other patterns of interest across a wide range of digital data sources, the debate over the ethics and justification over this action, will clearly continue for some time to come. What is becoming clear is that these programmes are a framework for the collation and aggregation of massive amounts of unstructured data and from this, the creation of actionable intelligence from analyses that allowed the analysts to explore and extract a variety of patterns and then direct resources. This data included audio and video chats, phone calls, photographs, e-mails, documents, internet searches, social media posts and mobile phone logs and connections. Although Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) professionals are not looking at the implementation of such programmes, there are many similar GRC “Big data” challenges to be faced and potential lessons to be learned from these high profile government programmes that can be applied a lot closer to home. For example, how can GRC professionals collect, manage and analyze an enormous and disparate volume of data to create and manage their own actionable intelligence covering hidden signs and patterns of criminal activity, the early or retrospective, violation of regulations/laws/corporate policies and procedures, emerging risks and weakening controls etc. Not exactly the stuff of James Bond to be sure, but it is certainly more applicable to most GRC professional’s day to day challenges. So what is Big Data and how can it benefit the GRC process? Although it often varies, the definition of Big Data largely refers to the following types of data: Traditional Enterprise Data – includes customer information from CRM systems, transactional ERP data, web store transactions, and general ledger data. Machine-Generated /Sensor Data – includes Call Detail Records (“CDR”), weblogs and trading systems data. Social Data – includes customer feedback streams, micro-blogging sites like Twitter, and social media platforms like Facebook. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that data volume is growing 40% per year, and will grow 44x between 2009 and 2020. But while it’s often the most visible parameter, volume of data is not the only characteristic that matters. In fact, according to sources such as Forrester there are four key characteristics that define big data: Volume. Machine-generated data is produced in much larger quantities than non-traditional data. This is all the data generated by IT systems that power the enterprise. This includes live data from packaged and custom applications – for example, app servers, Web servers, databases, networks, virtual machines, telecom equipment, and much more. Velocity. Social media data streams – while not as massive as machine-generated data – produce a large influx of opinions and relationships valuable to customer relationship management as well as offering early insight into potential reputational risk issues. Even at 140 characters per tweet, the high velocity (or frequency) of Twitter data ensures large volumes (over 8 TB per day) need to be managed. Variety. Traditional data formats tend to be relatively well defined by a data schema and change slowly. In contrast, non-traditional data formats exhibit a dizzying rate of change. Without question, all GRC professionals work in a dynamic environment and as new services, new products, new business lines are added or new marketing campaigns executed for example, new data types are needed to capture the resultant information.  Value. The economic value of data varies significantly. Typically, there is good information hidden amongst a larger body of non-traditional data that GRC professionals can use to add real value to the organisation; the greater challenge is identifying what is valuable and then transforming and extracting that data for analysis and action. For example, customer service calls and emails have millions of useful data points and have long been a source of information to GRC professionals. Those calls and emails are critical in helping GRC professionals better identify hidden patterns and implement new policies that can reduce the amount of customer complaints.   Now on a scale and depth far beyond those in place today, all that unstructured call and email data can be captured, stored and analyzed to reveal the reasons for the contact, perhaps with the aggregated customer results cross referenced against what is being said about the organization or a similar peer organization on social media. The organization can then take positive actions, communicating to the market in advance of issues reaching the press, strengthening controls, adjusting risk profiles, changing policy and procedures and completely minimizing, if not eliminating, complaints and compensation for that specific reason in the future. In this one example of many similar ones, the GRC team(s) has demonstrated real and tangible business value. Big Challenges - Big Opportunities As pointed out by recent Forrester research, high performing companies (those that are growing 15% or more year-on-year compared to their peers) are taking a selective approach to investing in Big Data.  "Tomorrow's winners understand this, and they are making selective investments aimed at specific opportunities with tangible benefits where big data offers a more economical solution to meet a need." (Forrsights Strategy Spotlight: Business Intelligence and Big Data, Q4 2012) As pointed out earlier, with the ever increasing volume of regulatory demands and fines for getting it wrong, limited resource availability and out of date or inadequate GRC systems all contributing to a higher cost of compliance and/or higher risk profile than desired – a big data investment in GRC clearly falls into this category. However, to make the most of big data organizations must evolve both their business and IT procedures, processes, people and infrastructures to handle these new high-volume, high-velocity, high-variety sources of data and be able integrate them with the pre-existing company data to be analyzed. GRC big data clearly allows the organization access to and management over a huge amount of often very sensitive information that although can help create a more risk intelligent organization, also presents numerous data governance challenges, including regulatory compliance and information security. In addition to client and regulatory demands over better information security and data protection the sheer amount of information organizations deal with the need to quickly access, classify, protect and manage that information can quickly become a key issue  from a legal, as well as technical or operational standpoint. However, by making information governance processes a bigger part of everyday operations, organizations can make sure data remains readily available and protected. The Right GRC & Big Data Partnership Becomes Key  The "getting it right first time" mantra used in so many companies remains essential for any GRC team that is sponsoring, helping kick start, or even overseeing a big data project. To make a big data GRC initiative work and get the desired value, partnerships with companies, who have a long history of success in delivering successful GRC solutions as well as being at the very forefront of technology innovation, becomes key. Clearly solutions can be built in-house more cheaply than through vendor, but as has been proven time and time again, when it comes to self built solutions covering AML and Fraud for example, few have able to scale or adapt appropriately to meet the changing regulations or challenges that the GRC teams face on a daily basis. This has led to the creation of GRC silo’s that are causing so many headaches today. The solutions that stand out and should be explored are the ones that can seamlessly merge the traditional world of well-known data, analytics and visualization with the new world of seemingly innumerable data sources, utilizing Big Data technologies to generate new GRC insights right across the enterprise.Ultimately, Big Data is here to stay, and organizations that embrace its potential and outline a viable strategy, as well as understand and build a solid analytical foundation, will be the ones that are well positioned to make the most of it. A Blueprint and Roadmap Service for Big Data Big data adoption is first and foremost a business decision. As such it is essential that your partner can align your strategies, goals, and objectives with an architecture vision and roadmap to accelerate adoption of big data for your environment, as well as establish practical, effective governance that will maintain a well managed environment going forward. Key Activities: While your initiatives will clearly vary, there are some generic starting points the team and organization will need to complete: Clearly define your drivers, strategies, goals, objectives and requirements as it relates to big data Conduct a big data readiness and Information Architecture maturity assessment Develop future state big data architecture, including views across all relevant architecture domains; business, applications, information, and technology Provide initial guidance on big data candidate selection for migrations or implementation Develop a strategic roadmap and implementation plan that reflects a prioritization of initiatives based on business impact and technology dependency, and an incremental integration approach for evolving your current state to the target future state in a manner that represents the least amount of risk and impact of change on the business Provide recommendations for practical, effective Data Governance, Data Quality Management, and Information Lifecycle Management to maintain a well-managed environment Conduct an executive workshop with recommendations and next steps There is little debate that managing risk and data are the two biggest obstacles encountered by financial institutions.  Big data is here to stay and risk management certainly is not going anywhere, and ultimately financial services industry organizations that embrace its potential and outline a viable strategy, as well as understand and build a solid analytical foundation, will be best positioned to make the most of it. Matthew Long is a Financial Crime Specialist for Oracle Financial Services. He can be reached at matthew.long AT oracle.com.

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• ASP.NET MVC Cookbook &ndash; public review

  - by Andrew Siemer - www.andrewsiemer.com

  I have recently started writing another book.  The topic of this book is ASP.NET MVC.  This book differs from my previous book in that rather than working towards building one project from end to end – this book will demonstrate specific topics from end to end.  It is a recipe book (hence the cookbook name) and will be part of the Packt Publishing cookbook series.  An example recipe in this book might be how to consume JSON, creating a master /details page, jquery modal popups, custom ActionResults, etc.  Basically anything recipe oriented around the topic of ASP.NET MVC might be acceptable.  If you are interested in helping out with the review process you can join the “ASP.NET MVC 2 Cookbook-review” group on Google here: http://groups.google.com/group/aspnet-mvc-2-cookbook-review Currently the suggested TOC for the project is listed.  Also, chapters 1, 2, and most of 8 are posted.  Chapter 5 should be available tonight or tomorrow. In addition to reporting any errors that you might find (much appreciated), I am very interested in hearing about recipes that you want included, expanded, or removed (as being redundant or overly simple).  Any input is appreciated!  Hearing user feedback after the book is complete is a little late in my opinion (unless it is positive feedback of course). Thank you!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, November 25, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, November 25, 2012Popular ReleasesMath.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.3.0: Common: Continued major linear algebra storage rework, in this release focusing on vectors (previous release was on matrices) Static CreateRandom for all dense matrix and vector types Thin QR decomposition (in additin to existing full QR) Consistent static Sample methods for continuous and discrete distributions (was previously missing on a few) Portable build adds support for WP8 (.Net 4.0 and higher, SL5, WP8 and .NET for Windows Store apps) Various bug, performance and usability ...ExtJS based ASP.NET 2.0 Controls: FineUI v3.2.1: +2012-11-25 v3.2.1 +????????。 -MenuCheckBox?CheckedChanged??????，??????????。 -???????window.IDS??????????????。 -?????（??TabCollection，ControlBaseCollection）???，????????????????。 +Grid??。 -??SelectAllRows??。 -??PageItems??，?????????????，?????、??、?????。 -????grid/gridpageitems.aspx、grid/gridpageitemsrowexpander.aspx、grid/gridpageitems_pagesize.aspx。 -???????????????????。 -??ExpandAllRowExpanders??，?????????????????（grid/gridrowexpanderexpandall2.aspx）。 -??????ExpandRowExpande...VidCoder: 1.4.9 Beta: Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5079. Fixed crashes when encoding DVDs with title gaps.ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.10.0.0: On the way to a release 1.0 the API should be stable now with this version. sync with rev. 2521 of the java version windows phone 8 assemblies improvements and fixesCharmBar: Windows 8 Charm Bar for Windows 7: Windows 8 Charm Bar for Windows 7BlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.3: 2012.11.24 Ver5.7.3 (1)SMTP???????、?????????、??????????????????????? (2)?????????、?????????????????????????? (3)DNS???????CNAME????CNAME????????????????? (4)DNS????????????TTL???????? (5)???????????????????????、?????????????????? (6)???????????????????????????????TEncoder: 3.1: -Added: Turkish translation (Translators, please see "To translators.txt") -Added: Profiles are now stored in different files under "Profiles" folder -Added: User created Profiles will be saved in a differen directory -Added: Custom video and audio options to profiles -Added: Container options to profiles -Added: Parent folder of input file will be created in the output folder -Added: Option to use 32bit FFmpeg eventhough the OS is 64bit -Added: New skin "Mint" -Fixed: FFMpeg could not open A...Liberty: v3.4.3.0 Release 23rd November 2012: Change Log -Added -H4 A dialog which gives further instructions when attempting to open a "Halo 4 Data" file -H4 Added a short note to the weapon editor stating that dropping your weapons will cap their ammo -Reach Edit the world's gravity -Reach Fine invincibility controls in the object editor -Reach Edit object velocity -Reach Change the teams of AI bipeds and vehicles -Reach Enable/disable fall damage on the biped editor screen -Reach Make AIs deaf and/or blind in the objec...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.11.0: NugetNuGet BlogRead the release blog post for 4.11.0. Whats new50 bugfixes (see the issue tracker for a complete list) Read the documentation for the MVC bits. Breaking changesGetPropertyValue now returns an object, not a string (only affects upgrades from 4.10.x to 4.11.0) NoteIf you need Courier use the release candidate (as of build 26). The code editor has been greatly improved, but is sometimes problematic in Internet Explorer 9 and lower. Previously it was just disabled for IE and...Audio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch And Shift 5.1.0.3: Fixed supported files list on open dialog (added .pls and .m3u) Impulse Media Player splash message (can be disabled anyway)WiX Toolset: WiX v3.7 RC: WiX v3.7 RC (3.7.1119.0) provides feature complete Bundle update and reference tracking plus several bug fixes. For more information see Rob's blog post about the release: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/11/20/WiX-v3.7-Release-Candidate-availablePicturethrill: Version 2.11.20.0: Fixed up Bing image provider on Windows 8Excel AddIn to reset the last worksheet cell: XSFormatCleaner.xla: Modified the commandbar code to use CommandBar IDs instead of English names.Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 11: New feature - Added ITraceWriter, MemoryTraceWriter, DiagnosticsTraceWriter New feature - Added StringEscapeHandling with options to escape HTML and non-ASCII characters New feature - Added non-generic JToken.ToObject methods New feature - Deserialize ISet<T> properties as HashSet<T> New feature - Added implicit conversions for Uri, TimeSpan, Guid New feature - Missing byte, char, Guid, TimeSpan and Uri explicit conversion operators added to JToken New feature - Special case...HigLabo: HigLabo_20121119: HigLabo_2012111 --HigLabo.Mail-- Modify bug fix of ExecuteAppend method. Add ExecuteXList method to ImapClient class. --HigLabo.Net.WindowsLive-- Add AsyncCall to WindowsLiveClient class.SharePoint CAML Extensions: Version 1.1: Beta version! <Membership>, <Today/>, <Now/> and <UserID /> tags are not supported!mojoPortal: 2.3.9.4: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2394-released Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0, but we recommend you to use .NET 4, we will probably drop support for .NET 3.5 once .NET 4.5 is available The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code and are not intended for use in Visual Studio. To download the source code see getting the lates...Keleyi: keleyi-1.1.0: ????： .NET Framework 4.0 ??：MD5??，?????IP??（??????），????? www.keleyi.com keleyi.codeplex.comHoliday Calendar: Calendar Control: Month navigation introduced.NDateTime: Version 1.0: This is the first releaseNew Projects.NET vFaceWall: .NET vFaceWall is autility script written in asp.net which allows developer to build next generation facebook wall style user profiles for asp.net websites.29th Infantry Division Engineer Corps: Code repository and project management hub for the 29th Infantry Division's Engineer Corps.A.M. Lost: A.M. Lost is game project developed during the GameDevParty Jam 3 event (23-24-25 november 2012).ABAP BLOG MIKE: ABAP blog AgileNETSlayer: Agile.Net Deobfuscator, supports all obfuscation methods.BERP Games: This project site contains XNA game development concepts and software produced by BERP Games.CFileUpload: This project will let you upload files with progress bar, without using Flash, HTML5 or similar technologies that the user's browser might not have. CharmBar: Windows 8 Charm Bar is a application that works just like the Windows 8 CharmBar. The word charmbar, the Windows 8 Logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.Confidentialité des données: Développer une application permettant de faciliter la mise en œuvre, l’utilisation et la gestion de ces outils, en exploitant les API .NET.End of control: Project has not been started yet. Just absorbing attentions.Enhanced XML Search: Easy and fastest methods to manipulate XML Data.Exchange Automatic Replies Administrator: Exchange Automatic Replies Administrator is a PowerShell GUI tool for Helpdesk and Sysadmins to set a users' Out-Of-Office without using the command line.File Explorer for WPF: FileExplorer is a WPF control that's emulate the Windows Explorer, it supports both FIleSystem and non-FileSystem class.ForcePlot: Using brute force, plots any difficult equation even some popular software cannot plot. Currently supports 2D graphs, trigonometric and logarithmic functions.Game Dev: Currently in ideas phaseGroupEmulationEMK11: Discussion and sharing of member data Group Emulation Engineering Mechanical 2011Jenkins CI: Views, Jobs, Build status and color. mvcMusicOnLine: mvcMusicOnLinemy own site project no 1: still testing...Nauplius.KeyStore: Provides secure application key storage backed by SQL 2008 and Active Directory.Noctl Library: Noctl is a C# multiplatform Library.open Archive Mediator: High-performance middle-ware for process historiansOpen Source Game - Prince's Revenge: Open Source Game.PackToKindle: Project allow to send folder content to your kindle. Functionality is the same as the official SendToKindle application, but this project is designed to use froPunkPong: PunkPong is an open source "Pong" alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses keyboard or mouse. This cross-platform and cross-browser game was tested under BeOS, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Windows and others.Quick Data Processor: A simple and quick data processor for csv files.SFProject: It'll be a game at some pointsilverlight ? flash? policy ??: silverlight? flash? policy socket server? ??Universe.WCF.Behaviors: Universe.WCF.Behaviors provides behaviors: - Easy migration from Remoting - Transparent delivery - Traffic Statistics - WCF Streaming Adaptor for BinaryWriter and TextWriter - etc WowDotNetAPI for Silverlight: Silverlight class library implementation of Briam Ramos World Of Warcraft WowDotNetAPI .NET library on GitHub ( https://github.com/briandek/WowDotNetAPI ) C# .Net library to access the new World of Warcraft Community Platform API.WP7NUMConvert: A really simple project to create a small library for number conversions in multiple formats. Written in VB for Windows PhoneWPF CodeEditor: The Dev Tools project is intended to contain a set of features, tools & controls useful for development purposes.

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• Of transactions and Mongo

  - by Nuri Halperin

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/nuri/archive/2014/05/20/of-transactions-and-mongo-again.aspxWhat's the first thing you hear about NoSQL databases? That they lose your data? That there's no transactions? No joins? No hope for "real" applications? Well, you *should* be wondering whether a certain of database is the right one for your job. But if you do so, you should be wondering that about "traditional" databases as well! In the spirit of exploration let's take a look at a common challenge: You are a bank. You have customers with accounts. Customer A wants to pay B. You want to allow that only if A can cover the amount being transferred. Let's looks at the problem without any context of any database engine in mind. What would you do? How would you ensure that the amount transfer is done "properly"? Would you prevent a "transaction" from taking place unless A can cover the amount? There are several options: Prevent any change to A's account while the transfer is taking place. That boils down to locking. Apply the change, and allow A's balance to go below zero. Charge person A some interest on the negative balance. Not friendly, but certainly a choice. Don't do either. Options 1 and 2 are difficult to attain in the NoSQL world. Mongo won't save you headaches here either. Option 3 looks a bit harsh. But here's where this can go: ledger. See, and account doesn't need to be represented by a single row in a table of all accounts with only the current balance on it. More often than not, accounting systems use ledgers. And entries in ledgers - as it turns out – don't actually get updated. Once a ledger entry is written, it is not removed or altered. A transaction is represented by an entry in the ledger stating and amount withdrawn from A's account and an entry in the ledger stating an addition of said amount to B's account. For sake of space-saving, that entry in the ledger can happen using one entry. Think {Timestamp, FromAccountId, ToAccountId, Amount}. The implication of the original question – "how do you enforce non-negative balance rule" then boils down to: Insert entry in ledger Run validation of recent entries Insert reverse entry to roll back transaction if validation failed. What is validation? Sum up the transactions that A's account has (all deposits and debits), and ensure the balance is positive. For sake of efficiency, one can roll up transactions and "close the book" on transactions with a pseudo entry stating balance as of midnight or something. This lets you avoid doing math on the fly on too many transactions. You simply run from the latest "approved balance" marker to date. But that's an optimization, and premature optimizations are the root of (some? most?) evil.. Back to some nagging questions though: "But mongo is only eventually consistent!" Well, yes, kind of. It's not actually true that Mongo has not transactions. It would be more descriptive to say that Mongo's transaction scope is a single document in a single collection. A write to a Mongo document happens completely or not at all. So although it is true that you can't update more than one documents "at the same time" under a "transaction" umbrella as an atomic update, it is NOT true that there' is no isolation. So a competition between two concurrent updates is completely coherent and the writes will be serialized. They will not scribble on the same document at the same time. In our case - in choosing a ledger approach - we're not even trying to "update" a document, we're simply adding a document to a collection. So there goes the "no transaction" issue. Now let's turn our attention to consistency. What you should know about mongo is that at any given moment, only on member of a replica set is writable. This means that the writable instance in a set of replicated instances always has "the truth". There could be a replication lag such that a reader going to one of the replicas still sees "old" state of a collection or document. But in our ledger case, things fall nicely into place: Run your validation against the writable instance. It is guaranteed to have a ledger either with (after) or without (before) the ledger entry got written. No funky states. Again, the ledger writing *adds* a document, so there's no inconsistent document state to be had either way. Next, we might worry about data loss. Here, mongo offers several write-concerns. Write-concern in Mongo is a mode that marshals how uptight you want the db engine to be about actually persisting a document write to disk before it reports to the application that it is "done". The most volatile, is to say you don't care. In that case, mongo would just accept your write command and say back "thanks" with no guarantee of persistence. If the server loses power at the wrong moment, it may have said "ok" but actually no written the data to disk. That's kind of bad. Don't do that with data you care about. It may be good for votes on a pole regarding how cute a furry animal is, but not so good for business. There are several other write-concerns varying from flushing the write to the disk of the writable instance, flushing to disk on several members of the replica set, a majority of the replica set or all of the members of a replica set. The former choice is the quickest, as no network coordination is required besides the main writable instance. The others impose extra network and time cost. Depending on your tolerance for latency and read-lag, you will face a choice of what works for you. It's really important to understand that no data loss occurs once a document is flushed to an instance. The record is on disk at that point. From that point on, backup strategies and disaster recovery are your worry, not loss of power to the writable machine. This scenario is not different from a relational database at that point. Where does this leave us? Oh, yes. Eventual consistency. By now, we ensured that the "source of truth" instance has the correct data, persisted and coherent. But because of lag, the app may have gone to the writable instance, performed the update and then gone to a replica and looked at the ledger there before the transaction replicated. Here are 2 options to deal with this. Similar to write concerns, mongo support read preferences. An app may choose to read only from the writable instance. This is not an awesome choice to make for every ready, because it just burdens the one instance, and doesn't make use of the other read-only servers. But this choice can be made on a query by query basis. So for the app that our person A is using, we can have person A issue the transfer command to B, and then if that same app is going to immediately as "are we there yet?" we'll query that same writable instance. But B and anyone else in the world can just chill and read from the read-only instance. They have no basis to expect that the ledger has just been written to. So as far as they know, the transaction hasn't happened until they see it appear later. We can further relax the demand by creating application UI that reacts to a write command with "thank you, we will post it shortly" instead of "thank you, we just did everything and here's the new balance". This is a very powerful thing. UI design for highly scalable systems can't insist that the all databases be locked just to paint an "all done" on screen. People understand. They were trained by many online businesses already that your placing of an order does not mean that your product is already outside your door waiting (yes, I know, large retailers are working on it... but were' not there yet). The second thing we can do, is add some artificial delay to a transaction's visibility on the ledger. The way that works is simply adding some logic such that the query against the ledger never nets a transaction for customers newer than say 15 minutes and who's validation flag is not set. This buys us time 2 ways: Replication can catch up to all instances by then, and validation rules can run and determine if this transaction should be "negated" with a compensating transaction. In case we do need to "roll back" the transaction, the backend system can place the timestamp of the compensating transaction at the exact same time or 1ms after the original one. Effectively, once A or B visits their ledger, both transactions would be visible and the overall balance "as of now" would reflect no change.  The 2 transactions (attempted/ reverted) would be visible , since we do actually account for the attempt. Hold on a second. There's a hole in the story: what if several transfers from A to some accounts are registered, and 2 independent validators attempt to compute the balance concurrently? Is there a chance that both would conclude non-sufficient-funds even though rolling back transaction 100 would free up enough for transaction 117 (some random later transaction)? Yes. there is that chance. But the integrity of the business rule is not compromised, since the prime rule is don't dispense money you don't have. To minimize or eliminate this scenario, we can also assign a single validation process per origin account. This may seem non-scalable, but it can easily be done as a "sharded" distribution. Say we have 11 validation threads (or processing nodes etc.). We divide the account number space such that each validator is exclusively responsible for a certain range of account numbers. Sounds cunningly similar to Mongo's sharding strategy, doesn't it? Each validator then works in isolation. More capacity needed? Chop the account space into more chunks. So where  are we now with the nagging questions? "No joins": Huh? What are those for? "No transactions": You mean no cross-collection and no cross-document transactions? Granted - but don't always need them either. "No hope for real applications": well... There are more issues and edge cases to slog through, I'm sure. But hopefully this gives you some ideas of how to solve common problems without distributed locking and relational databases. But then again, you can choose relational databases if they suit your problem.

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• Are web application usability issues equal to website usability issues?

  - by Kor

  I've been reading two books about web usability issues and tests (Rocket Surgery Made Easy¹ and Prioritizing Web Usability²) and they claim some strategies and typical problems about website usability and how to lead them. However, I want to do a web application, and I think I lost track of what I am trying to solve. These two books claim to work with raw websites (e-commerce, business sites, even intranet), but I'm not sure if everything about web usability is applicable to web application usability. They sure talk about always having available (and usable) the Back button, to focus on short information rather than big amounts of text, etc., but they could be inaccurate in deeper problems that may be easier (or just skippable) in regular websites. Has anybody some experience in this field and could tell me if both web applications and websites share their usability issues? Thanks in advance Edit: Quoting Wikipedia, a website is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets, and a web application is an application that is accessed over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. To sum up, both shows/lets you search/produce information but websites are "simple" in interaction and keep the classics of websites (one-click actions) and the other one is closer to desktop applications in the meaning of their uses and ways of interaction (double click, modal windows, asynchronous calls [to keep you in the same "environment" instead of reloading it] etc.). I don't know if this clarifies the difference. Edit 2: Quoting @Victor and myself, a website is anything running in your browser, but a web application is somewhat running in your browser that could be running in your desktop, with similar behaviors and features. Gmail is a web application that could replace Outlook. GDocs could replace Office. Grooveshark could replace your music player, etc.

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• Taming Hopping Windows

  - by Roman Schindlauer

  At first glance, hopping windows seem fairly innocuous and obvious. They organize events into windows with a simple periodic definition: the windows have some duration d (e.g. a window covers 5 second time intervals), an interval or period p (e.g. a new window starts every 2 seconds) and an alignment a (e.g. one of those windows starts at 12:00 PM on March 15, 2012 UTC). var wins = xs     .HoppingWindow(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5),                    TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2),                    new DateTime(2012, 3, 15, 12, 0, 0, DateTimeKind.Utc)); Logically, there is a window with start time a + np and end time a + np + d for every integer n. That’s a lot of windows. So why doesn’t the following query (always) blow up? var query = wins.Select(win => win.Count()); A few users have asked why StreamInsight doesn’t produce output for empty windows. Primarily it’s because there is an infinite number of empty windows! (Actually, StreamInsight uses DateTimeOffset.MaxValue to approximate “the end of time” and DateTimeOffset.MinValue to approximate “the beginning of time”, so the number of windows is lower in practice.) That was the good news. Now the bad news. Events also have duration. Consider the following simple input: var xs = this.Application                 .DefineEnumerable(() => new[]                     { EdgeEvent.CreateStart(DateTimeOffset.UtcNow, 0) })                 .ToStreamable(AdvanceTimeSettings.IncreasingStartTime); Because the event has no explicit end edge, it lasts until the end of time. So there are lots of non-empty windows if we apply a hopping window to that single event! For this reason, we need to be careful with hopping window queries in StreamInsight. Or we can switch to a custom implementation of hopping windows that doesn’t suffer from this shortcoming. The alternate window implementation produces output only when the input changes. We start by breaking up the timeline into non-overlapping intervals assigned to each window. In figure 1, six hopping windows (“Windows”) are assigned to six intervals (“Assignments”) in the timeline. Next we take input events (“Events”) and alter their lifetimes (“Altered Events”) so that they cover the intervals of the windows they intersect. In figure 1, you can see that the first event e1 intersects windows w1 and w2 so it is adjusted to cover assignments a1 and a2. Finally, we can use snapshot windows (“Snapshots”) to produce output for the hopping windows. Notice however that instead of having six windows generating output, we have only four. The first and second snapshots correspond to the first and second hopping windows. The remaining snapshots however cover two hopping windows each! While in this example we saved only two events, the savings can be more significant when the ratio of event duration to window duration is higher. Figure 1: Timeline The implementation of this strategy is straightforward. We need to set the start times of events to the start time of the interval assigned to the earliest window including the start time. Similarly, we need to modify the end times of events to the end time of the interval assigned to the latest window including the end time. The following snap-to-boundary function that rounds a timestamp value t down to the nearest value t' <= t such that t' is a + np for some integer n will be useful. For convenience, we will represent both DateTime and TimeSpan values using long ticks: static long SnapToBoundary(long t, long a, long p) {     return t - ((t - a) % p) - (t > a ? 0L : p); } How do we find the earliest window including the start time for an event? It’s the window following the last window that does not include the start time assuming that there are no gaps in the windows (i.e. duration < interval), and limitation of this solution. To find the end time of that antecedent window, we need to know the alignment of window ends: long e = a + (d % p); Using the window end alignment, we are finally ready to describe the start time selector: static long AdjustStartTime(long t, long e, long p) {     return SnapToBoundary(t, e, p) + p; } To find the latest window including the end time for an event, we look for the last window start time (non-inclusive): public static long AdjustEndTime(long t, long a, long d, long p) {     return SnapToBoundary(t - 1, a, p) + p + d; } Bringing it together, we can define the translation from events to ‘altered events’ as in Figure 1: public static IQStreamable<T> SnapToWindowIntervals<T>(IQStreamable<T> source, TimeSpan duration, TimeSpan interval, DateTime alignment) {     if (source == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("source");     // reason about DateTime and TimeSpan in ticks     long d = Math.Min(DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks, duration.Ticks);     long p = Math.Min(DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks, Math.Abs(interval.Ticks));     // set alignment to earliest possible window     var a = alignment.ToUniversalTime().Ticks % p;     // verify constraints of this solution     if (d <= 0L) { throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("duration"); }     if (p == 0L || p > d) { throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("interval"); }     // find the alignment of window ends     long e = a + (d % p);     return source.AlterEventLifetime(         evt => ToDateTime(AdjustStartTime(evt.StartTime.ToUniversalTime().Ticks, e, p)),         evt => ToDateTime(AdjustEndTime(evt.EndTime.ToUniversalTime().Ticks, a, d, p)) -             ToDateTime(AdjustStartTime(evt.StartTime.ToUniversalTime().Ticks, e, p))); } public static DateTime ToDateTime(long ticks) {     // just snap to min or max value rather than under/overflowing     return ticks < DateTime.MinValue.Ticks         ? new DateTime(DateTime.MinValue.Ticks, DateTimeKind.Utc)         : ticks > DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks         ? new DateTime(DateTime.MaxValue.Ticks, DateTimeKind.Utc)         : new DateTime(ticks, DateTimeKind.Utc); } Finally, we can describe our custom hopping window operator: public static IQWindowedStreamable<T> HoppingWindow2<T>(     IQStreamable<T> source,     TimeSpan duration,     TimeSpan interval,     DateTime alignment) {     if (source == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("source"); }     return SnapToWindowIntervals(source, duration, interval, alignment).SnapshotWindow(); } By switching from HoppingWindow to HoppingWindow2 in the following example, the query returns quickly rather than gobbling resources and ultimately failing! public void Main() {     var start = new DateTimeOffset(new DateTime(2012, 6, 28), TimeSpan.Zero);     var duration = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5);     var interval = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2);     var alignment = new DateTime(2012, 3, 15, 12, 0, 0, DateTimeKind.Utc);     var events = this.Application.DefineEnumerable(() => new[]     {         EdgeEvent.CreateStart(start.AddSeconds(0), "e0"),         EdgeEvent.CreateStart(start.AddSeconds(1), "e1"),         EdgeEvent.CreateEnd(start.AddSeconds(1), start.AddSeconds(2), "e1"),         EdgeEvent.CreateStart(start.AddSeconds(3), "e2"),         EdgeEvent.CreateStart(start.AddSeconds(9), "e3"),         EdgeEvent.CreateEnd(start.AddSeconds(3), start.AddSeconds(10), "e2"),         EdgeEvent.CreateEnd(start.AddSeconds(9), start.AddSeconds(10), "e3"),     }).ToStreamable(AdvanceTimeSettings.IncreasingStartTime);     var adjustedEvents = SnapToWindowIntervals(events, duration, interval, alignment);     var query = from win in HoppingWindow2(events, duration, interval, alignment)                 select win.Count();     DisplayResults(adjustedEvents, "Adjusted Events");     DisplayResults(query, "Query"); } As you can see, instead of producing a massive number of windows for the open start edge e0, a single window is emitted from 12:00:15 AM until the end of time: Adjusted Events StartTime EndTime Payload 6/28/2012 12:00:01 AM 12/31/9999 11:59:59 PM e0 6/28/2012 12:00:03 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:07 AM e1 6/28/2012 12:00:05 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:15 AM e2 6/28/2012 12:00:11 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:15 AM e3 Query StartTime EndTime Payload 6/28/2012 12:00:01 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:03 AM 1 6/28/2012 12:00:03 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:05 AM 2 6/28/2012 12:00:05 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:07 AM 3 6/28/2012 12:00:07 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:11 AM 2 6/28/2012 12:00:11 AM 6/28/2012 12:00:15 AM 3 6/28/2012 12:00:15 AM 12/31/9999 11:59:59 PM 1 Regards, The StreamInsight Team

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• ASP.NET MVC Cookbook - public review

  - by asiemer

  I have recently started writing another book.  The topic of this book is ASP.NET MVC.  This book differs from my previous book in that rather than working towards building one project from end to end - this book will demonstrate specific topics from end to end.  It is a recipe book (hence the cookbook name) and will be part of the Packt Publishing cookbook series.  An example recipe in this book might be how to consume JSON, creating a master /details page, jquery modal popups, custom ActionResults, etc.  Basically anything recipe oriented around the topic of ASP.NET MVC might be acceptable.  If you are interested in helping out with the review process you can join the "ASP.NET MVC 2 Cookbook-review" group on Google here: http://groups.google.com/group/aspnet-mvc-2-cookbook-review Currently the suggested TOC for the project is listed.  Also, chapters 1, 2, and most of 8 are posted.  Chapter 5 should be available tonight or tomorrow. In addition to reporting any errors that you might find (much appreciated), I am very interested in hearing about recipes that you want included, expanded, or removed (as being redundant or overly simple).  Any input is appreciated!  Hearing user feedback after the book is complete is a little late in my opinion (unless it is positive feedback of course). Thank you!

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• Release Notes for 5/31/2012

  Here are the notes for this week’s release: Pull Requests We’ve moved the pull request creation UI from a modal dialog to a full page to make room for more context on what you’re sending with your pull request. In this week’s changes, you’ll see the list of commits; look for diffs to appear in the coming weeks. Corrected several issues where the line that had comments associated was not being properly differentiated in the code snippet previews on pull request discussions. Corrected an issue where pull request line comments would not appear to be associated with the proper line of code. Fixed an issue where accepting pull requests was not working properly. Bug Fixes Fixed an issue where code snippets could not be inserted using Opera. Fixed an issue where Internet Explorer displayed an error message when browsing the site using https. Fixed an issue where the CAPTCHA was not displaying properly on the Contact User page. Fixed an issue where paging was not working properly in the “Recent Release in Followed Projects” sections for logged in users. Other Updated the activity stream to no longer auto-load new items when scrolling down. Added an explicit download link at the end of the download countdown in case certain browsers/scenarios don’t automatically start downloading. Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Visit our ideas page! Vote for your favorite ideas or submit a new one. Got Twitter? Follow us and keep apprised of the latest releases and service status at @codeplex.

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• Release Notes for 7/6/2012

  Happy belated 4th of July, everyone! Here are the notes for this week’s release on CodePlex: Implemented performance improvements to Git repositories. Fixed an issue that caused the final “click here” download link to fail in projects that display ads. Fixed an issue for certain projects that made it impossible to edit releases. Fixed an issue where the URL for a diff of a file would not take users to the diff in question. Fixed a rare issue that prevented a small subset of projects from modifying their project details. Fixed an issue where scrollbars were missing in our side-by-side diff viewer. Super- and sub-scripts now work properly in documentation. Addressed several usability issues around the diff viewer. Fixed an issue where the scrollbar could disappear in the advanced issue tracker if a user opens a modal dialog. Have ideas on how to improve CodePlex? Visit our ideas page! Vote for your favorite ideas or submit a new one. Got Twitter? Follow us and keep apprised of the latest releases and service status at @codeplex.

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• PSTN Trunk TDM400P Install on Asterisk / Trixbox

  - by Jona

  Hey All, I'm trying to get a TDM400P card with FXO module to connect to our PSTN line. The card is correctly detected by Linux: [trixbox1.localdomain asterisk]# lspci 00:09.0 Communication controller: Tiger Jet Network Inc. Tiger3XX Modem/ISDN interface I've run setup-pstn which produces the following output trixbox1.localdomain ~]# setup-pstn -------------------------------------------------------------- Detecting PSTN cards and USB PSTN Devices -------------------------------------------------------------- Hardware present! STOPPING ASTERISK Asterisk Stopped STOPPING FOP SERVER FOP Server Stopped Unloading DAHDI hardware modules: done Loading DAHDI hardware modules: wct4xxp: [ OK ] wcte12xp: [ OK ] wct1xxp: [ OK ] wcte11xp: [ OK ] wctdm24xxp: [ OK ] opvxa1200: [ OK ] wcfxo: [ OK ] wctdm: [ OK ] wcb4xxp: [ OK ] wctc4xxp: [ OK ] xpp_usb: [ OK ] Running dahdi_cfg: [ OK ] SETTING FILE PERMISSIONS Permissions OK STARTING ASTERISK Asterisk Started STARTING FOP SERVER FOP Server Started Chan Extension Context Language MOH Interpret Blocked State pseudo default en default In Service 1 from-pstn en default In Service dahdi_scan returns: dahdi_scan [1] active=yes alarms=OK description=Wildcard TDM400P REV I Board 5 name=WCTDM/4 manufacturer=Digium devicetype=Wildcard TDM400P REV I location=PCI Bus 00 Slot 10 basechan=1 totchans=4 irq=209 type=analog port=1,FXO port=2,none port=3,none port=4,none And asterisk can see the channel: > trixbox1*CLI> dahdi show channel 1 > Channel: 1LI> File Descriptor: 14 > Span: 11*CLI> Extension: I> Dialing: > noI> Context: from-pstn Caller ID: I> > Calling TON: 0 Caller ID name: > Mailbox: none Destroy: 0LI> InAlarm: > 1LI> Signalling Type: FXS Kewlstart > Radio: 0*CLI> Owner: <None> Real: > <None>> Callwait: <None> Threeway: > <None> Confno: -1LI> Propagated > Conference: -1 Real in conference: 0 > DSP: no1*CLI> Busy Detection: no TDD: > no1*CLI> Relax DTMF: no > Dialing/CallwaitCAS: 0/0 Default law: > ulaw Fax Handled: no Pulse phone: no > DND: no1*CLI> Echo Cancellation: > trixbox1128 taps trixbox1(unless TDM > bridged) currently OFF Actual > Confinfo: Num/0, Mode/0x0000 Actual > Confmute: No > Hookstate (FXS only): Onhook A cat of /etc/asterisk/dahdi.conf shows: [trixbox1.localdomain ~]# cat /etc/asterisk/dahdi-channels.conf ; Autogenerated by /usr/sbin/dahdi_genconf on Tue May 25 17:45:13 2010 ; If you edit this file and execute /usr/sbin/dahdi_genconf again, ; your manual changes will be LOST. ; Dahdi Channels Configurations (chan_dahdi.conf) ; ; This is not intended to be a complete chan_dahdi.conf. Rather, it is intended ; to be #include-d by /etc/chan_dahdi.conf that will include the global settings ; ; Span 1: WCTDM/4 "Wildcard TDM400P REV I Board 5" (MASTER) ;;; line="1 WCTDM/4/0 FXSKS (SWEC: MG2)" signalling=fxs_ks callerid=asreceived group=0 context=from-pstn channel => 1 callerid= group= context=default I have configured a "ZAP Trunk (DAHDI compatibility Mode)" with the ZAP identifier 1 and an outbound route, but when ever I try to make an external call via it I get the "All Circuits are busy now, please try your call again later message". I have one outbound route which uses the dial pattern 9|. and the Trunk Zap/1 and one Zap Trunk which uses Zap Identifier (trunk name): 1 and has no Dial Rules. The FXO module is directly connected to our phone line from BT via a BT-RJ11 cable. When running tail -f /var/log/asterisk/full and placing a call I get the following output: [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2723] logger.c: == Using SIP RTP TOS bits 184 [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2723] logger.c: == Using SIP RTP CoS mark 5 [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2723] logger.c: == Using SIP VRTP TOS bits 136 [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2723] logger.c: == Using SIP VRTP CoS mark 6 [May 26 11:10:52] WARNING[2661] pbx.c: FONALITY: This thread has already held the conlock, skip locking [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [901483890915@from-internal:1] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "user-callerid,SKIPTTL,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:1] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "AMPUSER=801") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:2] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?report") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:3] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?Set(REALCALLERIDNUM=801)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:4] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "AMPUSER=801") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:5] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "AMPUSERCIDNAME=Jona") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:6] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?report") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:7] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "AMPUSERCID=801") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:8] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "CALLERID(all)="Jona" <801>") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:9] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "REALCALLERIDNUM=801") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:10] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(CHANNEL(language)=)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:11] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?continue") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-user-callerid,s,20) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:20] NoOp("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "Using CallerID "Jona" <801>") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [901483890915@from-internal:2] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "_NODEST=") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [901483890915@from-internal:3] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "record-enable,801,OUT,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-record-enable:1] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?check") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-record-enable,s,4) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-record-enable:4] AGI("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "recordingcheck,20100526-111052,1274868652.1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Launched AGI Script /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/recordingcheck [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: recordingcheck,20100526-111052,1274868652.1: Outbound recording not enabled [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- <SIP/801-b7ce8c28>AGI Script recordingcheck completed, returning 0 [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-record-enable:5] MacroExit("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [901483890915@from-internal:4] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "dialout-trunk,1,01483890915,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:1] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "DIAL_TRUNK=1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:2] GosubIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?sub-pincheck,s,1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:3] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?disabletrunk,1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:4] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "DIAL_NUMBER=01483890915") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:5] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "DIAL_TRUNK_OPTIONS=tr") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:6] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "OUTBOUND_GROUP=OUT_1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:7] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?nomax") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-dialout-trunk,s,9) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:9] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?skipoutcid") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:10] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "DIAL_TRUNK_OPTIONS=") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:11] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "outbound-callerid,1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:1] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(CALLERPRES()=)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:2] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(REALCALLERIDNUM=801)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:3] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?normcid") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-outbound-callerid,s,6) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:6] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "USEROUTCID=") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:7] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "EMERGENCYCID=") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:8] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "TRUNKOUTCID=") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:9] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?trunkcid") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-outbound-callerid,s,12) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:12] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(CALLERID(all)=)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:13] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(CALLERID(all)=)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:14] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(CALLERPRES()=prohib_passed_screen)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:12] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?AGI(fixlocalprefix)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:13] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "OUTNUM=01483890915") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:14] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "custom=DAHDI/1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:15] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(DIAL_TRUNK_OPTIONS=M(setmusic^))") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:16] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "dialout-trunk-predial-hook,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk-predial-hook:1] MacroExit("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:17] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?bypass,1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:18] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?customtrunk") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:19] Dial("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "DAHDI/1/01483890915,300,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] WARNING[2858] app_dial.c: Unable to create channel of type 'DAHDI' (cause 0 - Unknown) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: == Everyone is busy/congested at this time (1:0/0/1) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:20] Goto("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "s-CHANUNAVAIL,1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-dialout-trunk,s-CHANUNAVAIL,1) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s-CHANUNAVAIL@macro-dialout-trunk:1] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?noreport") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-dialout-trunk,s-CHANUNAVAIL,3) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s-CHANUNAVAIL@macro-dialout-trunk:3] NoOp("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "TRUNK Dial failed due to CHANUNAVAIL (hangupcause: 0) - failing through to other trunks") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [901483890915@from-internal:5] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "outisbusy,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outisbusy:1] Playback("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "all-circuits-busy-now,noanswer") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- <SIP/801-b7ce8c28> Playing 'all-circuits-busy-now.ulaw' (language 'en') [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outisbusy:2] Playback("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "pls-try-call-later,noanswer") in new stack [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- <SIP/801-b7ce8c28> Playing 'pls-try-call-later.ulaw' (language 'en') [May 26 11:10:54] WARNING[2661] pbx.c: FONALITY: This thread has already held the conlock, skip locking [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: == Spawn extension (macro-outisbusy, s, 2) exited non-zero on 'SIP/801-b7ce8c28' in macro 'outisbusy' [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: == Spawn extension (from-internal, 901483890915, 5) exited non-zero on 'SIP/801-b7ce8c28' [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [h@from-internal:1] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "hangupcall") in new stack [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:1] ResetCDR("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "vw") in new stack [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:2] NoCDR("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "") in new stack [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:3] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?skiprg") in new stack [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-hangupcall,s,6) [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:6] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?skipblkvm") in new stack [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-hangupcall,s,9) [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:9] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?theend") in new stack [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-hangupcall,s,11) [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:11] Hangup("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "") in new stack [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: == Spawn extension (macro-hangupcall, s, 11) exited non-zero on 'SIP/801-b7ce8c28' in macro 'hangupcall' [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: == Spawn extension (from-internal, h, 1) exited non-zero on 'SIP/801-b7ce8c28' I'm guessing I've missed a configuration step somewhere but no idea where, any help greatly appreciated.

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• Pigs in Socks?

  - by MightyZot

  My wonderful wife Annie surprised me with a cruise to Cozumel for my fortieth birthday. I love to travel. Every trip is ripe with adventure, crazy things to see and experience. For example, on the way to Mobile Alabama to catch our boat, some dude hauling a mobile home lost a window and we drove through a cloud of busting glass going 80 miles per hour! The night before the cruise, we stayed in the Malaga Inn and I crawled UNDER the hotel to look at an old civil war bunker. WOAH! Then, on the way to and from Cozumel, the boat plowed through two beautiful and slightly violent storms. But, the adventures you have while travelling often pale in comparison to the cult of personalities you meet along the way.  :) We met many cool people during our travels and we made some new friends. Todd and Andrea are in the publishing business (www.myneworleans.com) and teaching, respectively. Erika is a teacher too and Matt has a pig on his foot. This story is about the pig. Without that pig on Matt’s foot, we probably would have hit a buoy and drowned. Alright, so…this pig on Matt’s foot…this is no henna tatt, this is a man’s tattoo. Apparently, getting tattoos on your feet is very painful because there is very little muscle and fat and lots of nifty nerves to tell you that you might be doing something stupid. Pig and rooster tattoos carry special meaning for sailors of old. According to some sources, having a tattoo of a pig or rooster on one foot or the other will keep you from drowning. There are many great musings as to why a pig and a rooster might save your life. The most plausible in my opinion is that pigs and roosters were common livestock tagging along with the crew. Since they were shipped in wooden crates, pigs and roosters were often counted amongst the survivors when ships succumbed to Davy Jones’ Locker. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time researching the pig and the rooster, so consider these musings as you would a grain of salt. And, I was not able to find a lot of what you might consider credible history regarding the tradition. What I did find was a comfort, or solace, in the maritime tradition. Seems like raw traditions like the pig and the rooster are in danger of getting lost in a sea of non-permanence. I mean, what traditions are us old programmers and techies leaving behind for future generations? Makes me wonder what Ward Christensen has tattooed on his left foot.  I guess my choice would have to be a Commodore 64.   (I met Ward, by the way, in an elevator after he received his Dvorak awards in 1992. He was a very non-assuming individual sporting business casual and was very much a “sailor” of an old-school programmer. I can’t remember his exact words, but I think they were essentially that he felt it odd that he was getting an award for just doing his work. I’m sure that Ward doesn’t know this…he couldn’t have set a more positive example for a young 22 year old programmer. Thanks Ward!)

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• cannot make ubuntu 64-bit v12.04 install work

  - by honestann

  I decided it was time to update my ubuntu (single boot) computer from 64-bit v10.04 to 64-bit v12.04. Unfortunately, for some reason (or reasons) I just can't make it work. Note that I am attempting a fresh install of 64-bit v12.04 onto a new 3TB hard disk, not an upgrade of the 1TB hard disk that contains my working 64-bit v10.04 installation. To perform the attempted install of v12.04 I unplug the SATA cable from the 1TB drive and plug it into the 3TB drive (to avoid risking damage to my working v10.04 installation). I downloaded the ubuntu 64-bit v12.04 install DVD ISO file (~1.6 GB) from the ubuntu releases webpage and burned it onto a DVD. I have downloaded the DVD ISO file 3 times and burned 3 of these installation DVDs (twice with v10.04 and once with my winxp64 system), but none of them work. I run the "check disk" on the DVDs at the beginning of the installation process to assure the DVD is valid. When installation completes and the system boots the 3TB drive, it reports "unknown filesystem". After installation on the 250GB drives, the system boots up fine. During every install I plug the same SATA cable (sda) into only one disk drive (the 3TB or one of the 250GB drives) and leave the other disk drives unconnected (for simplicity). It is my understanding that 64-bit ubuntu (and 64-bit linux in general) has no problem with 3TB disk drives. In the BIOS I have tried having EFI set to "enabled" and "auto" with no apparent difference (no success). I never bothered setting the BIOS to "non-EFI". I have tried partitioning the drive in a few ways to see if that makes a difference, but so far it has not mattered. Typically I manually create partitions something like this: 8GB /boot ext4 8GB swap 3TB / ext4 But I've also tried the following, just in case it matters: 8GB boot efi 8GB swap 8GB /boot ext4 3TB / ext4 Note: In the partition dialog I specify bootup on the same drive I am partitioning and installing ubuntu v12.04 onto. It is a VERY DANGEROUS FACT that the default for this always comes up with the wrong drive (some other drive, generally the external drive). Unless I'm stupid or misunderstanding something, this is very wrong and very dangerous default behavior. Note: If I connect the SATA cable to the 1TB drive that has been my ubuntu 64-bit v10.04 system drive for the past 2 years, it boots up and runs fine. I guess there must be a log file somewhere, and maybe it gives some hints as to what the problem is. I should be able to boot off the 1TB drive with the 3TB drive connected as a secondary (non-boot) drive and get the log file, assuming there is one and someone tells me the name (and where to find it if the name is very generic). After installation on the 3TB drive completes and the system reboots, the following prints out on a black screen: Loading Operating System ... Boot from CD/DVD : Boot from CD/DVD : error: unknown filesystem grub rescue> Note: I have two DVD burners in the system, hence the duplicate line above. Note: I install and boot 64-bit ubuntu v12.04 on both of my 250GB in this same system, but still cannot make the 3TB drive boot. Sigh. Any ideas? ========== motherboard == gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 CPU == AMD FX-8150 8-core bulldozer @ 3.6 GHz RAM == 8GB of DDR3 in 2 sticks (matched pair) HDD == seagate 3TB SATA3 @ 7200 rpm (new install 64-bit v12.04 FAILS) HDD == seagate 1TB SATA3 @ 7200 rpm (64-bit v10.04 WORKS for two years) HDD == seagate 250GB SATA2 @ 7200 rpm (new install 64-bit v12.04 WORKS) HDD == seagate 250GB SATA2 @ 7200 rpm (new install 64-bit v12.04 WORKS) GPU == nvidia GTX-285 ??? == no overclocking or other funky business USB == external seagate 2TB HDD for making backups DVD == one bluray burner (SATA) DVD == one DVD burner (SATA) 64-bit ubuntu v10.04 has booted and run fine on the seagate 1TB drive for 2 years.

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• Framework 4 Features: Support for Timed Jobs

  - by Anthony Shorten

  One of the new features of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4 is the ability for the batch framework to support Timed Batch. Traditionally batch is associated with set processing in the background in a fixed time frame. For example, billing customers. Over the last few versions their has been functionality required by the products required a more monitoring style batch process. The monitor is a batch process that looks for specific business events based upon record status or other pieces of data. For example, the framework contains a fact monitor (F1-FCTRN) that can be configured to look for specific status's or other conditions. The batch process then uses the instructions on the object to determine what to do. To support monitor style processing, you need to run the process regularly a number of times a day (for example, every ten minutes). Traditional batch could support this but it was not as optimal as expected (if you are a site using the old Workflow subsystem, you understand what I mean). The Batch framework was extended to add additional facilities to support times (and continuous batch which is another new feature for another blog entry). The new facilities include: The batch control now defines the job as Timed or Not Timed. Non-Timed batch are traditional batch jobs. The timer interval (the interval between executions) can be specified The timer can be made active or inactive. Only active timers are executed. Setting the Timer Active to inactive will stop the job at the next time interval. Setting the Timer Active to Active will start the execution of the timed job. You can specify the credentials, language to view the messages and an email address to send the a summary of the execution to. The email address is optional and requires an email server to be specified in the relevant feature configuration. You can specify the thread limits and commit intervals to be sued for the multiple executions. Once a timer job is defined it will be executed automatically by the Business Application Server process if the DEFAULT threadpool is active. This threadpool can be started using the online batch daemon (for non-production) or externally using the threadpoolworker utility. At that time any batch process with the Timer Active set to Active and Batch Control Type of Timed will begin executing. As Timed jobs are executed automatically then they do not appear in any external schedule or are managed by an external scheduler (except via the DEFAULT threadpool itself of course). Now, if the job has no work to do as the timer interval is being reached then that instance of the job is stopped and the next instance started at the timer interval. If there is still work to complete when the interval interval is reached, the instance will continue processing till the work is complete, then the instance will be stopped and the next instance scheduled for the next timer interval. One of the key ways of optimizing this processing is to set the timer interval correctly for the expected workload. This is an interesting new feature of the batch framework and we anticipate it will come in handy for specific business situations with the monitor processes.

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• Inequality joins, Asynchronous transformations and Lookups : SSIS

  - by jamiet

  It is pretty much accepted by SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) developers that synchronous transformations are generally quicker than asynchronous transformations (for a description of synchronous and asynchronous transformations go read Asynchronous and synchronous data flow components). Notice I said “generally” and not “always”; there are circumstances where using asynchronous transformations can be beneficial and in this blog post I’ll demonstrate such a scenario, one that is pretty common when building data warehouses. Imagine I have a [Customer] dimension table that manages information about all of my customers as a slowly-changing dimension. If that is a type 2 slowly changing dimension then you will likely have multiple rows per customer in that table. Furthermore you might also have datetime fields that indicate the effective time period of each member record. Here is such a table that contains data for four dimension members {Terry, Max, Henry, Horace}: Notice that we have multiple records per customer and that the [SCDStartDate] of a record is equivalent to the [SCDEndDate] of the record that preceded it (if there was one). (Note that I am on record as saying I am not a fan of this technique of storing an [SCDEndDate] but for the purposes of clarity I have included it here.) Anyway, the idea here is that we will have some incoming data containing [CustomerName] & [EffectiveDate] and we need to use those values to lookup [Customer].[CustomerId]. The logic will be: Lookup a [CustomerId] WHERE [CustomerName]=[CustomerName] AND [SCDStartDate] <= [EffectiveDate] AND [EffectiveDate] <= [SCDEndDate] The conventional approach to this would be to use a full cached lookup but that isn’t an option here because we are using inequality conditions. The obvious next step then is to use a non-cached lookup which enables us to change the SQL statement to use inequality operators: Let’s take a look at the dataflow: Notice these are all synchronous components. This approach works just fine however it does have the limitation that it has to issue a SQL statement against your lookup set for every row thus we can expect the execution time of our dataflow to increase linearly in line with the number of rows in our dataflow; that’s not good. OK, that’s the obvious method. Let’s now look at a different way of achieving this using an asynchronous Merge Join transform coupled with a Conditional Split. I’ve shown it post-execution so that I can include the row counts which help to illustrate what is going on here: Notice that there are more rows output from our Merge Join component than on the input. That is because we are joining on [CustomerName] and, as we know, we have multiple records per [CustomerName] in our lookup set. Notice also that there are two asynchronous components in here (the Sort and the Merge Join). I have embedded a video below that compares the execution times for each of these two methods. The video is just over 8minutes long. View on Vimeo  For those that can’t be bothered watching the video I’ll tell you the results here. The dataflow that used the Lookup transform took 36 seconds whereas the dataflow that used the Merge Join took less than two seconds. An illustration in case it is needed: Pretty conclusive proof that in some scenarios it may be quicker to use an asynchronous component than a synchronous one. Your mileage may of course vary. The scenario outlined here is analogous to performance tuning procedural SQL that uses cursors. It is common to eliminate cursors by converting them to set-based operations and that is effectively what we have done here. Our non-cached lookup is performing a discrete operation for every single row of data, exactly like a cursor does. By eliminating this cursor-in-disguise we have dramatically sped up our dataflow. I hope all of that proves useful. You can download the package that I demonstrated in the video from my SkyDrive at http://cid-550f681dad532637.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/BlogShare/20100514/20100514%20Lookups%20and%20Merge%20Joins.zip Comments are welcome as always. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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