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• Uploading to another domain gives HTTP code 405

  - by dragon112

  I'm trying to upload a file (which can be quite large) from the website of one server to the backend of another server using plupload. Lets say: domain 1 = http://www.websitedomain.com/uploadform domain 2 = http://www.backenddomain.com/uploadhandler Trying to upload i send the following: OPTIONS /main/uploadnetwork.php HTTP/1.1 Host: backenddomain.com Connection: keep-alive Access-Control-Request-Method: POST Origin: http://www.websitedomain.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.79 Safari/537.4 Access-Control-Request-Headers: origin, content-type Accept: */* Referer: http://www.websitedomain.com/uploadform Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language: nl-NL,nl;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4 Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3 DNT: 1 But when I try to start the upload the server returns the following: HTTP/1.1 405 Method Not Allowed Allow: GET, HEAD, OPTIONS, TRACE Content-Type: text/html Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-Powered-By-Plesk: PleskWin Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2012 12:41:57 GMT Content-Length: 999 After doing some research I found out that a browser does this to check if the server will accept the intended message. It looks like my server doesn't feel like accepting a simple POST call even tho i use post all the time. The Google Chrome console gives the following error: XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://www.backenddomain.com/uploadhandler. Origin http://www.websitedomain.com is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin. Does anyone know how to stop the browser from checking or how i can tell my server to just accept the POST?

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• How to save image drawn on a JPanel?

  - by swift

  I have a panel with transparent background which i use to draw an image. now problem here is when i draw anything on panel and save the image as a JPEG file its saving the image with black background but i want it to be saved as same, as i draw on the panel. what should be done for this? plz guide me j Client.java public class Client extends Thread { static DatagramSocket datasocket; static DatagramSocket socket; Point point; Whiteboard board; Virtualboard virtualboard; JLayeredPane layerpane; BufferedImage image; public Client(DatagramSocket datasocket) { Client.datasocket=datasocket; } //This function is responsible to connect to the server public static void connect() { try { socket=new DatagramSocket (9000); //client connection socket port= 9000 datasocket=new DatagramSocket (9005); //client data socket port= 9002 ByteArrayOutputStream baos=new ByteArrayOutputStream(); DataOutputStream dos=new DataOutputStream(baos); //this is to tell server that this is a connection request dos.writeChar('c'); dos.close(); byte[]data=baos.toByteArray(); //Server IP address InetAddress ip=InetAddress.getByName("10.123.97.154"); //create the UDP packet DatagramPacket packet=new DatagramPacket(data, data.length,ip , 8000); socket.send(packet); Client client=new Client(datasocket); client.createFrame(); client.run(); } catch(Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } //This function is to create the JFrame public void createFrame() { JFrame frame=new JFrame("Whiteboard"); frame.setVisible(true); frame.setBackground(Color.black); frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); frame.setSize(680,501); frame.addWindowListener(new WindowAdapter() { public void windowOpened(WindowEvent e) {} public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e) { close(); } }); layerpane=frame.getLayeredPane(); board= new Whiteboard(datasocket); image = new BufferedImage(590,463, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB); board.setBounds(74,2,590,463); board.setImage(image); virtualboard=new Virtualboard(); virtualboard.setImage(image); virtualboard.setBounds(74,2,590,463); layerpane.add(virtualboard,new Integer(2));//Panel where remote user draws layerpane.add(board,new Integer(3)); layerpane.add(board.colourButtons(),new Integer(1)); layerpane.add(board.shapeButtons(),new Integer(0)); //frame.add(paper.addButtons(),BorderLayout.WEST); } /* * This function is overridden from the thread class * This function listens for incoming packets from the server * which contains the points drawn by the other client */ public void run () { while (true) { try { byte[] buffer = new byte[512]; DatagramPacket packet = new DatagramPacket(buffer, buffer.length); datasocket.receive(packet); InputStream in=new ByteArrayInputStream(packet.getData(), packet.getOffset(),packet.getLength()); DataInputStream din=new DataInputStream(in); int x=din.readInt(); int y=din.readInt(); String varname=din.readLine(); String var[]=varname.split("-",4); point=new Point(x,y); virtualboard.addPoint(point, var[0], var[1],var[2],var[3]); } catch (IOException ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); } } } //This function is to broadcast the newly drawn point to the server public void broadcast (Point p,String varname,String shape,String event, String color) { try { ByteArrayOutputStream baos=new ByteArrayOutputStream(); DataOutputStream dos=new DataOutputStream(baos); dos.writeInt(p.x); dos.writeInt(p.y); dos.writeBytes(varname); dos.writeBytes("-"); dos.writeBytes(shape); dos.writeBytes("-"); dos.writeBytes(event); dos.writeBytes("-"); dos.writeBytes(color); dos.close(); byte[]data=baos.toByteArray(); InetAddress ip=InetAddress.getByName("10.123.97.154"); DatagramPacket packet=new DatagramPacket(data, data.length,ip , 8002); datasocket.send(packet); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } //This function is to close the client's connection with the server public void close() { try { ByteArrayOutputStream baos=new ByteArrayOutputStream(); DataOutputStream dos=new DataOutputStream(baos); //This is to tell server that this is request to remove the client dos.writeChar('r'); dos.close(); byte[]data=baos.toByteArray(); //Server IP address InetAddress ip=InetAddress.getByName("10.123.97.154"); DatagramPacket packet=new DatagramPacket(data, data.length,ip , 8000); socket.send(packet); System.out.println("closed"); } catch(Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { connect(); } } Whiteboard.java class Whiteboard extends JPanel implements MouseListener,MouseMotionListener,ActionListener,KeyListener { BufferedImage image; Boolean tooltip=false; int post; String shape; String selectedcolor="black"; Color color=Color.black; //Color color=Color.white; Point start; Point end; Point mp; Point tip; int keycode; String fillshape; Point fillstart=new Point(); Point fillend=new Point(); int noofside; Button r=new Button("rect"); Button rectangle=new Button("rect"); Button line=new Button("line"); Button roundrect=new Button("roundrect"); Button polygon=new Button("poly"); Button text=new Button("text"); JButton save=new JButton("Save"); Button elipse=new Button("elipse"); ImageIcon fillicon=new ImageIcon("images/fill.jpg"); JButton fill=new JButton(fillicon); ImageIcon erasericon=new ImageIcon("images/eraser.gif"); JButton erase=new JButton(erasericon); JButton[] colourbutton=new JButton[28]; String selected; Point label; String key=""; int ex,ey;//eraser DatagramSocket dataSocket; JButton button = new JButton("test"); Client client; Boolean first; int w,h; public Whiteboard(DatagramSocket dataSocket) { try { UIManager.setLookAndFeel( UIManager.getCrossPlatformLookAndFeelClassName()); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } setLayout(null); setOpaque(false); setBackground(new Color(237,237,237)); this.dataSocket=dataSocket; client=new Client(dataSocket); addKeyListener(this); addMouseListener(this); addMouseMotionListener(this); setBorder(BorderFactory.createLineBorder(Color.black)); } public void paintComponent(Graphics g) { try { super.paintComponent(g); g.drawImage(image, 0, 0, this); Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D)g; if(color!=null) g2.setPaint(color); if(start!=null && end!=null) { if(selected==("elipse")) g2.drawOval(start.x, start.y,(end.x-start.x),(end.y-start.y)); else if(selected==("rect")) g2.drawRect(start.x, start.y, (end.x-start.x),(end.y-start.y)); else if(selected==("rrect")) g2.drawRoundRect(start.x, start.y, (end.x-start.x),(end.y-start.y),11,11); else if(selected==("line")) g2.drawLine(start.x,start.y,end.x,end.y); else if(selected==("poly")) { g2.drawLine(start.x,start.y,end.x,end.y); client.broadcast(start, "start", "poly", "drag", selectedcolor); client.broadcast(end, "end", "poly", "drag", selectedcolor); } } if(tooltip==true) { System.out.println(selected); if(selected=="text") { g2.drawString("|", tip.x, tip.y-5); g2.drawString("Click to add text", tip.x+10, tip.y+23); g2.drawString("__", label.x+post, label.y); } if(selected=="erase") { g2.setPaint(new Color(237,237,237)); g2.fillRect(tip.x-10,tip.y-10,10,10); g2.setPaint(color); g2.drawRect(tip.x-10,tip.y-10,10,10); } } } catch(Exception e) {} } //Function to draw the shape on image public void draw() { Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D) image.createGraphics(); Font font=new Font("Times New Roman",Font.PLAIN,14); g2.setFont(font); g2.setPaint(color); if(start!=null && end!=null) { if(selected=="line") g2.drawLine(start.x, start.y, end.x, end.y); else if(selected=="elipse") g2.drawOval(start.x, start.y, (end.x-start.x),(end.y-start.y)); else if(selected=="rect") g2.drawRect(start.x, start.y, (end.x-start.x),(end.y-start.y)); else if(selected==("rrect")) g2.drawRoundRect(start.x, start.y, (end.x-start.x),(end.y-start.y),11,11); else if(selected==("poly")) { g2.drawLine(start.x,start.y,end.x,end.y); client.broadcast(start, "start", "poly", "release", selectedcolor); client.broadcast(end, "end", "poly", "release", selectedcolor); } fillstart=start; fillend=end; fillshape=selected; } if(selected!="poly") { start=null; end=null; } if(label!=null) { if(selected==("text")) { g2.drawString(key,label.x,label.y); client.broadcast(label, key, "text", "release", selectedcolor); } } repaint(); g2.dispose(); } //Function which provides the erase functionality public void erase() { Graphics2D pic=(Graphics2D) image.createGraphics(); Color erasecolor=new Color(237,237,237); pic.setPaint(erasecolor); if(start!=null) pic.fillRect(start.x-10, start.y-10, 10, 10); } //To set the size of the image public void setImage(BufferedImage image) { this.image = image; } //Function to add buttons into the panel, calling this function returns a panel public JPanel shapeButtons() { JPanel shape=new JPanel(); shape.setBackground(new Color(181, 197, 210)); shape.setLayout(new GridLayout(5,2,2,4)); shape.setBounds(0, 2, 74, 166); rectangle.addActionListener(this); rectangle.setToolTipText("Rectangle"); line.addActionListener( this); line.setToolTipText("Line"); erase.addActionListener(this); erase.setToolTipText("Eraser"); roundrect.addActionListener(this); roundrect.setToolTipText("Round edge Rectangle"); polygon.addActionListener(this); polygon.setToolTipText("Polygon"); text.addActionListener(this); text.setToolTipText("Text"); fill.addActionListener(this); fill.setToolTipText("Fill with colour"); elipse.addActionListener(this); elipse.setToolTipText("Elipse"); save.addActionListener(this); shape.add(elipse); shape.add(rectangle); shape.add(roundrect); shape.add(polygon); shape.add(line); shape.add(text); shape.add(fill); shape.add(erase); shape.add(save); return shape; } public JPanel colourButtons() { JPanel colourbox=new JPanel(); colourbox.setBackground(new Color(181, 197, 210)); colourbox.setLayout(new GridLayout(8,2,8,8)); colourbox.setBounds(0,323,70,140); //colourbox.add(empty); for(int i=0;i<16;i++) { colourbutton[i]=new JButton(); colourbox.add(colourbutton[i]); if(i==0) colourbutton[0].setBackground(Color.black); else if(i==1) colourbutton[1].setBackground(Color.white); else if(i==2) colourbutton[2].setBackground(Color.red); else if(i==3) colourbutton[3].setBackground(Color.orange); else if(i==4) colourbutton[4].setBackground(Color.blue); else if(i==5) colourbutton[5].setBackground(Color.green); else if(i==6) colourbutton[6].setBackground(Color.pink); else if(i==7) colourbutton[7].setBackground(Color.magenta); else if(i==8) colourbutton[8].setBackground(Color.cyan); else if(i==9) colourbutton[9].setBackground(Color.black); else if(i==10) colourbutton[10].setBackground(Color.yellow); else if(i==11) colourbutton[11].setBackground(new Color(131,168,43)); else if(i==12) colourbutton[12].setBackground(new Color(132,0,210)); else if(i==13) colourbutton[13].setBackground(new Color(193,17,92)); else if(i==14) colourbutton[14].setBackground(new Color(129,82,50)); else if(i==15) colourbutton[15].setBackground(new Color(64,128,128)); colourbutton[i].addActionListener(this); } return colourbox; } public void fill() { if(selected=="fill") { Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D) image.getGraphics(); g2.setPaint(color); System.out.println("Fill"); if(fillshape=="elipse") g2.fillOval(fillstart.x, fillstart.y, (fillend.x-fillstart.x),(fillend.y-fillstart.y)); else if(fillshape=="rect") g2.fillRect(fillstart.x, fillstart.y, (fillend.x-fillstart.x),(fillend.y-fillstart.y)); else if(fillshape==("rrect")) g2.fillRoundRect(fillstart.x, fillstart.y, (fillend.x-fillstart.x),(fillend.y-fillstart.y),11,11); // else if(fillshape==("poly")) // g2.drawPolygon(x,y,2); } repaint(); } //To save the image drawn public void save() { try { ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream(); JPEGImageEncoder encoder = JPEGCodec.createJPEGEncoder(bos); JFileChooser fc = new JFileChooser(); fc.showSaveDialog(this); encoder.encode(image); byte[] jpgData = bos.toByteArray(); FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(fc.getSelectedFile()+".jpeg"); fos.write(jpgData); fos.close(); //add replce confirmation here } catch (IOException e) { System.out.println(e); } } public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e) { } @Override public void mouseEntered(MouseEvent e) { } public void mouseExited(MouseEvent arg0) { } public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e) { if(selected=="line"||selected=="text") { start=e.getPoint(); client.broadcast(start,"start", selected,"press", selectedcolor); } else if(selected=="elipse"||selected=="rect"||selected=="rrect") mp = e.getPoint(); else if(selected=="poly") { if(first==true) { start=e.getPoint(); //client.broadcast(start,"start", selected,"press", selectedcolor); } else if(first==false) { end=e.getPoint(); repaint(); //client.broadcast(end,"end", selected,"press", selectedcolor); } } else if(selected=="erase") { start=e.getPoint(); erase(); } } public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent e) { if(selected=="text") { System.out.println("Reset"); key=""; post=0; label=new Point(); label=e.getPoint(); grabFocus(); } if(start!=null && end!=null) { if(selected=="line") { end=e.getPoint(); client.broadcast(end,"end", selected,"release", selectedcolor); draw(); } else if(selected=="elipse"||selected=="rect"||selected=="rrect") { end.x = Math.max(mp.x,e.getX()); end.y = Math.max(mp.y,e.getY()); client.broadcast(end,"end", selected,"release", selectedcolor); draw(); } else if(selected=="poly") { draw(); first=false; start=end; end=null; } } } public void mouseDragged(MouseEvent e) { if(end==null) end = new Point(); if(start==null) start = new Point(); if(selected=="line") { end=e.getPoint(); client.broadcast(end,"end", selected,"drag", selectedcolor); } else if(selected=="erase") { start=e.getPoint(); erase(); client.broadcast(start,"start", selected,"drag", selectedcolor); } else if(selected=="elipse"||selected=="rect"||selected=="rrect") { start.x = Math.min(mp.x,e.getX()); start.y = Math.min(mp.y,e.getY()); end.x = Math.max(mp.x,e.getX()); end.y = Math.max(mp.y,e.getY()); client.broadcast(start,"start", selected,"drag", selectedcolor); client.broadcast(end,"end", selected,"drag", selectedcolor); } else if(selected=="poly") end=e.getPoint(); System.out.println(tooltip); if(tooltip==true) { if(selected=="erase") { Graphics2D g2=(Graphics2D) getGraphics(); tip=e.getPoint(); g2.drawRect(tip.x-10,tip.y-10,10,10); } } repaint(); } public void mouseMoved(MouseEvent e) { if(selected=="text" ||selected=="erase") { tip=new Point(); tip=e.getPoint(); tooltip=true; repaint(); } } public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { if(e.getSource()==elipse) selected="elipse"; else if(e.getSource()==line) selected="line"; else if(e.getSource()==rectangle) selected="rect"; else if(e.getSource()==erase) { selected="erase"; tooltip=true; System.out.println(selected); erase(); } else if(e.getSource()==roundrect) selected="rrect"; else if(e.getSource()==polygon) { selected="poly"; first=true; start=null; } else if(e.getSource()==text) { selected="text"; tooltip=true; } else if(e.getSource()==fill) { selected="fill"; fill(); } else if(e.getSource()==save) save(); if(e.getSource()==colourbutton[0]) { color=Color.black; selectedcolor="black"; } else if(e.getSource()==colourbutton[1]) { color=Color.white; selectedcolor="white"; } else if(e.getSource()==colourbutton[2]) { color=Color.red; selectedcolor="red"; } else if(e.getSource()==colourbutton[3]) { color=Color.orange; selectedcolor="orange"; } else if(e.getSource()==colourbutton[4]) { selectedcolor="blue"; color=Color.blue; } else if(e.getSource()==colourbutton[5]) { selectedcolor="green"; color=Color.green; } else if(e.getSource()==colourbutton[6]) { selectedcolor="pink"; color=Color.pink; } else if(e.getSource()==colourbutton[7]) { selectedcolor="magenta"; color=Color.magenta; } else if(e.getSource()==colourbutton[8]) { selectedcolor="cyan"; color=Color.cyan; } } @Override public void keyPressed(KeyEvent e) { //System.out.println(e.getKeyChar()+" : "+e.getKeyCode()); if(label!=null) { if(e.getKeyCode()==10) //Check for Enter key { label.y=label.y+14; key=""; post=0; repaint(); } else if(e.getKeyCode()==8) //Backspace { try{ Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D) image.getGraphics(); g2.setPaint(new Color(237,237,237)); g2.fillRect(label.x+post-7, label.y-13, 14, 17); if(post>0) post=post-6; keycode=0; key=key.substring(0, key.length()-1); System.out.println(key.substring(0, key.length())); repaint(); Point broadcastlabel=new Point(); broadcastlabel.x=label.x+post-7; broadcastlabel.y=label.y-13; client.broadcast(broadcastlabel, key, "text", "backspace", selectedcolor); } catch(Exception ex) {} } //Block invalid keys else if(!(e.getKeyCode()>=16 && e.getKeyCode()<=20 || e.getKeyCode()>=112 && e.getKeyCode()<=123 || e.getKeyCode()>=33 && e.getKeyCode()<=40 || e.getKeyCode()>=144 && e.getKeyCode()<=145 || e.getKeyCode()>=524 && e.getKeyCode()<=525 ||e.getKeyCode()==27||e.getKeyCode()==155 ||e.getKeyCode()==127)) { key=key+e.getKeyChar(); post=post+6; draw(); } } } @Override public void keyReleased(KeyEvent e) { } @Override public void keyTyped(KeyEvent e) { } } class Button extends JButton { String name; int i; public Button(String name) { this.name=name; try { UIManager.setLookAndFeel("com.sun.java.swing.plaf.windows.WindowsLookAndFeel"); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } public Button(int i) { this.i=i; } public void paintComponent(Graphics g) { super.paintComponent(g); Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D)g; g2.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING, RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON); //g2.setStroke(new BasicStroke(1.2f)); if (name == "line") g.drawLine(5,5,30,30); if (name == "elipse") g.drawOval(5,7,25,20); if (name== "rect") g.drawRect(5,5,25,23); if (name== "roundrect") g.drawRoundRect(5,5,25,23,10,10); int a[]=new int[]{20,9,20,23,20}; int b[]=new int[]{9,23,25,20,9}; if (name== "poly") g.drawPolyline(a, b, 5); if (name== "text") g.drawString("Text",8, 24); } }

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• pyqt QObject: Cannot create children for a parent that is in a different thread

  - by memomk

  QObject: Cannot create children for a parent that is in a different thread. (Parent is QTextDocument(0x9919018), parent's thread is QThread(0x97331e0), current thread is flooderthread(0x97b4c10) error means ? am sorry because am new to pyqt here is the code : i know the code is finished yet but it should work i guess the problem is with myfun.log function... #! /usr/bin/python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- import urllib, urllib2, itertools, threading, cookielib, Cookie, sys, time, hashlib, os from PyQt4 import QtCore, QtGui try: _fromUtf8 = QtCore.QString.fromUtf8 except AttributeError: _fromUtf8 = lambda s: s gui=QtGui.QApplication.processEvents texttoset="" class fun(): global texttoset def checkpassword(self): if ui.passwordcheck.isChecked()==True: return 1 else : return 0 def log(self, text): if text != False: firsttext=str(ui.console.toPlainText()) secondtext=firsttext+text+"\n" ui.console.setText(secondtext) log=open("log.log", "a") log.write(text+"\n") log.close() else : firsttext=str(ui.console.toPlainText()) secondtext=firsttext+texttoset+"\n" ui.console.setText(secondtext) log=open("log.log", "a") log.write(texttoset+"\n") log.close() def disable(self): MainWindow.setEnabled(False) pass def enable(self): MainWindow.setEnabled(True) pass def checkmethod(self): if ui.get.isChecked()==True: return 1 elif ui.post.isChecked()==True: return 2 else : return 0 def main(self): connecter() gui() f1.start() gui() time.sleep(3) gui() f2.start() gui() time.sleep(3) gui() f3.start() gui() time.sleep(3) gui() f4.start() gui() time.sleep(3) gui() f5.start() gui() self.sleep(3) gui() f6.start() gui() def killer(self): f1.terminate() f2.terminate() f3.terminate() f4.terminate() f5.terminate() f6.terminate() def close(self): self.killer() os.abort() sys.exit() myfun=fun() def connecter(): QtCore.QObject.connect(f1, QtCore.SIGNAL("log(bool)"), myfun.log) QtCore.QObject.connect(f1, QtCore.SIGNAL("enable()"), myfun.enable) QtCore.QObject.connect(f1, QtCore.SIGNAL("disable()"), myfun.disable) QtCore.QObject.connect(f2, QtCore.SIGNAL("log(bool)"), myfun.log) QtCore.QObject.connect(f2, QtCore.SIGNAL("enable()"), myfun.enable) QtCore.QObject.connect(f2, QtCore.SIGNAL("disable()"), myfun.disable) QtCore.QObject.connect(f3, QtCore.SIGNAL("log(bool)"), myfun.log) QtCore.QObject.connect(f3, QtCore.SIGNAL("enable()"), myfun.enable) QtCore.QObject.connect(f3, QtCore.SIGNAL("disable()"), myfun.disable) QtCore.QObject.connect(f4, QtCore.SIGNAL("log(bool)"), myfun.log) QtCore.QObject.connect(f4, QtCore.SIGNAL("enable()"), myfun.enable) QtCore.QObject.connect(f4, QtCore.SIGNAL("disable()"), myfun.disable) QtCore.QObject.connect(f5, QtCore.SIGNAL("log(bool)"), myfun.log) QtCore.QObject.connect(f5, QtCore.SIGNAL("enable()"), myfun.enable) QtCore.QObject.connect(f5, QtCore.SIGNAL("disable()"), myfun.disable) QtCore.QObject.connect(f6, QtCore.SIGNAL("log(bool)"), myfun.log) QtCore.QObject.connect(f6, QtCore.SIGNAL("enable()"), myfun.enable) QtCore.QObject.connect(f6, QtCore.SIGNAL("disable()"), myfun.disable) x=0 num=0 class flooderthread(QtCore.QThread): global texttoset def __init__(self, x, num): QtCore.QThread.__init__(self) self.x=x self.num=num def log(self, text): texttolog=str(text) time.sleep(1) self.emit(QtCore.SIGNAL("log(bool)"), False) time.sleep(2) def enable(self): time.sleep(1) self.emit(QtCore.SIGNAL("enable()")) def disable(self): time.sleep(1) self.emit(QtCore.SIGNAL("disable()")) def run(self): connecter() self.log("\n\n--------------------------------------------------new session-------------------------------------\n\n") itered=False gui() self.disable() gui() self.log("setting params...") param={ui.dataname1.text():ui.datavalue1.text(),ui.dataname3.text():ui.datavalue3.text(),ui.dataname3.text():ui.datavalue3.text(), } self.log("checking password...") if myfun.checkpassword()==1: itered=True self.log("password is true") else : self.log("password is null ") self.log("itered operation") self.log("setting url") url=str(ui.url.text()) if url[:4]!="http" and url[:3]!="ftp": self.log("url error exiting the whole function") self.log("please set a valide protocole!!") gui() self.enable() gui() return 1 pass else : self.log("valid url") gui() self.log("url is "+url) self.log("setting proxy") proxy="http://"+ui.proxyuser.text()+":"+ui.proxypass.text()+"@"+ui.proxyhost.text()+":"+ui.proxyport.text() self.log("proxy is "+proxy) gui() self.log("preparing params...") urlparam=urllib.urlencode(param) gui() self.log("params are "+urlparam) self.log("setting up headers...") header={'User-Agent':str(ui.useragent.toPlainText())} self.log("headers are "+ str(header)) self.log("setting up proxy handler..") proxyhandler=urllib2.ProxyHandler({"http":str(proxy)}) self.log("checking method") if myfun.checkmethod()==1: self.log("method is get..") self.log("setting request..") finalurl=url+urlparam gui() self.log("final url is"+finalurl) req=urllib2.Request(finalurl, None, headers) elif myfun.checkmethod()==2: self.log("method is post...") self.log("setting request..") finalurl=url gui() self.log("final url is "+finalurl) req=urllib2.Request(finalurl, urlparam, header) else : self.log("error has been accourded") self.log("please select a method!!") gui() self.log("exiting the whole functions") gui() self.enable() return 1 pass self.log("intilizing cookies..") c1=Cookie.SimpleCookie() c1[str(ui.cookiename1.text())]=str(ui.cookievalue1.text()) c1[str(ui.cookiename1.text())]['path']='/' c1[str(ui.cookiename2.text())]=str(ui.cookievalue2.text()) c1[str(ui.cookiename2.text())]['path']='/' c1[str(ui.cookiename3.text())]=str(ui.cookievalue3.text()) c1[str(ui.cookiename3.text())]['domain']=url c1[str(ui.cookiename3.text())]['path']='/' c1[str(ui.cookiename4.text())]=str(ui.cookievalue4.text()) c1[str(ui.cookiename4.text())]['domain']=url c1[str(ui.cookiename4.text())]['path']='/' self.log("cookies are.. :"+str(c1)) cj=cookielib.CookieJar() cj.set_cookie(c1) opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxyhandler, urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj)) self.log("insatlling opener") urllib2.install_opener(opener) self.log("setting the two operations....") if itered==Fasle: self.log("starting the flooding loop") gui() while true: try: gui() opener.open(req) except e: self.log("error connecting : "+e.reason) self.log("will continue....") continue gui() elif itered==True: pass f1=flooderthread(1, 1) f2=flooderthread(2, 2) f3=flooderthread(3, 3) f4=flooderthread(4, 4) f5=flooderthread(5, 5) f6=flooderthread(6, 6) class Ui_MainWindow(object): def setupUi(self, MainWindow): MainWindow.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("MainWindow")) MainWindow.setMinimumSize(QtCore.QSize(838, 500)) MainWindow.setMaximumSize(QtCore.QSize(838, 500)) MainWindow.setWindowTitle(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "memo flooder", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.centralwidget = QtGui.QWidget(MainWindow) self.centralwidget.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("centralwidget")) self.console=QtGui.QTextEdit(self.centralwidget) self.console.setGeometry(10, 350, 800,130) self.console.setReadOnly(True) self.console.setObjectName("console") self.groupBox = QtGui.QGroupBox(self.centralwidget) self.groupBox.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(30, 50, 71, 80)) self.groupBox.setTitle(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "method:", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.groupBox.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("groupBox")) self.post = QtGui.QRadioButton(self.groupBox) self.post.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(10, 20, 61, 22)) self.post.setText(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "post", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.post.setChecked(True) self.post.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("post")) self.get = QtGui.QRadioButton(self.groupBox) self.get.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(10, 50, 51, 22)) self.get.setText(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "get", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.get.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("get")) self.url = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.centralwidget) self.url.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(70, 20, 671, 27)) self.url.setInputMethodHints(QtCore.Qt.ImhUrlCharactersOnly) self.url.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("url")) self.groupBox_2 = QtGui.QGroupBox(self.centralwidget) self.groupBox_2.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(110, 50, 371, 111)) self.groupBox_2.setTitle(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "data:", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.groupBox_2.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("groupBox_2")) self.dataname1 = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_2) self.dataname1.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(20, 30, 101, 27)) self.dataname1.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("dataname1")) self.label = QtGui.QLabel(self.groupBox_2) self.label.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(40, 10, 67, 17)) self.label.setText(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "name:", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.label.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("label")) self.dataname2 = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_2) self.dataname2.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(130, 30, 113, 27)) self.dataname2.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("dataname2")) self.dataname3 = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_2) self.dataname3.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(250, 30, 113, 27)) self.dataname3.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("dataname3")) self.label_2 = QtGui.QLabel(self.groupBox_2) self.label_2.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(40, 60, 67, 17)) self.label_2.setText(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "value:", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.label_2.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("label_2")) self.datavalue1 = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_2) self.datavalue1.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(20, 80, 101, 27)) self.datavalue1.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("datavalue1")) self.datavalue2 = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_2) self.datavalue2.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(130, 80, 113, 27)) self.datavalue2.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("datavalue2")) self.datavalue3 = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_2) self.datavalue3.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(250, 80, 113, 27)) self.datavalue3.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("datavalue3")) self.groupBox_4 = QtGui.QGroupBox(self.centralwidget) self.groupBox_4.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(670, 50, 151, 111)) self.groupBox_4.setTitle(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "password:", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.groupBox_4.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("groupBox_4")) self.passname = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_4) self.passname.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(10, 30, 113, 27)) self.passname.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("passname")) self.passvalue = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_4) self.passvalue.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(10, 80, 113, 27)) self.passvalue.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("passvalue")) self.passwordcheck = QtGui.QCheckBox(self.centralwidget) self.passwordcheck.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(670, 180, 97, 22)) self.passwordcheck.setText(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "password", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.passwordcheck.setChecked(True) self.passwordcheck.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("passwordcheck")) self.groupBox_5 = QtGui.QGroupBox(self.centralwidget) self.groupBox_5.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(29, 169, 441, 81)) self.groupBox_5.setTitle(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "proxy:", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.groupBox_5.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("groupBox_5")) self.proxyhost = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_5) self.proxyhost.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(20, 30, 113, 27)) self.proxyhost.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("proxyhost")) self.proxyport = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_5) self.proxyport.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(140, 30, 51, 27)) self.proxyport.setInputMethodHints(QtCore.Qt.ImhDigitsOnly|QtCore.Qt.ImhPreferNumbers) self.proxyport.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("proxyport")) self.proxyuser = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_5) self.proxyuser.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(200, 30, 113, 27)) self.proxyuser.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("proxyuser")) self.proxypass = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_5) self.proxypass.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(320, 30, 113, 27)) self.proxypass.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("proxypass")) self.label_4 = QtGui.QLabel(self.groupBox_5) self.label_4.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(100, 10, 67, 17)) self.label_4.setText(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "host", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.label_4.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("label_4")) self.label_5 = QtGui.QLabel(self.groupBox_5) self.label_5.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(150, 10, 67, 17)) self.label_5.setText(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "port", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.label_5.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("label_5")) self.label_6 = QtGui.QLabel(self.groupBox_5) self.label_6.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(200, 10, 67, 17)) self.label_6.setText(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "username", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.label_6.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("label_6")) self.label_7 = QtGui.QLabel(self.groupBox_5) self.label_7.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(320, 10, 67, 17)) self.label_7.setText(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "password", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.label_7.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("label_7")) self.groupBox_6 = QtGui.QGroupBox(self.centralwidget) self.groupBox_6.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(30, 260, 531, 91)) self.groupBox_6.setTitle(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "cookies:", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.groupBox_6.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("groupBox_6")) self.cookiename1 = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_6) self.cookiename1.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(10, 20, 113, 27)) self.cookiename1.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("cookiename1")) self.cookiename2 = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_6) self.cookiename2.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(140, 20, 113, 27)) self.cookiename2.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("cookename2")) self.cookiename3 = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_6) self.cookiename3.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(270, 20, 113, 27)) self.cookiename3.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("cookiename3")) self.cookiename4 = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_6) self.cookiename4.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(390, 20, 113, 27)) self.cookiename4.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("cookiename4")) self.cookievalue1 = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_6) self.cookievalue1.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(10, 50, 113, 27)) self.cookievalue1.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("cookievalue1")) self.cookievalue2 = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_6) self.cookievalue2.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(140, 50, 113, 27)) self.cookievalue2.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("cookievalue2")) self.cookievalue3 = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_6) self.cookievalue3.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(270, 50, 113, 27)) self.cookievalue3.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("cookievalue3")) self.cookievalue4 = QtGui.QLineEdit(self.groupBox_6) self.cookievalue4.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(390, 50, 113, 27)) self.cookievalue4.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("cookievalue4")) self.groupBox_7 = QtGui.QGroupBox(self.centralwidget) self.groupBox_7.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(570, 260, 251, 80)) self.groupBox_7.setTitle(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "useragents:", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.groupBox_7.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("groupBox_7")) self.useragent = QtGui.QTextEdit(self.groupBox_7) self.useragent.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(10, 20, 211, 51)) self.useragent.setVerticalScrollBarPolicy(QtCore.Qt.ScrollBarAlwaysOn) self.useragent.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("useragent")) self.start = QtGui.QPushButton(self.centralwidget) self.start.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(750, 20, 71, 27)) self.start.setText(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "start", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.start.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("start")) self.label_3 = QtGui.QLabel(self.centralwidget) self.label_3.setGeometry(QtCore.QRect(30, 20, 67, 17)) self.label_3.setText(QtGui.QApplication.translate("MainWindow", "url :", None, QtGui.QApplication.UnicodeUTF8)) self.label_3.setObjectName(_fromUtf8("label_3")) MainWindow.setCentralWidget(self.centralwidget) QtCore.QObject.connect(self.start, QtCore.SIGNAL(_fromUtf8("clicked(bool)")), myfun.main) QtCore.QObject.connect(self.passwordcheck, QtCore.SIGNAL(_fromUtf8("clicked(bool)")), self.groupBox_4.setEnabled) QtCore.QMetaObject.connectSlotsByName(MainWindow) def __del__(): myfun.killer() os.abort() sys.exit() app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv) MainWindow = QtGui.QMainWindow() ui = Ui_MainWindow() ui.setupUi(MainWindow) myfun.log("\n\n--------------------------------------------------new session-------------------------------------\n\n") MainWindow.show() sys.exit(app.exec_())

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• Receive MMS images and make album using iamge using j2me

  - by Abdul Basit

  I am trying to made application which receive MMS images and make a album from them user can view the pictures while running this application. I am facing problem while running application on mobile. while this application is fully working in wireless tookit emulator. Please guide me to fix this problem.`//package hello; import javax.microedition.midlet.; import javax.microedition.lcdui.; import javax.wireless.messaging.*; import java.io.IOException; import java.util.Vector; import javax.microedition.io.Connector; import javax.microedition.lcdui.Display; //, ItemStateListener public class MMSS extends MIDlet implements CommandListener, Runnable, MessageListener { //-----------------------------------Receive MMS --------------------------- private Thread mReceiver = null; private boolean mEndNow = false; private Message msg = null; String msgReceived = null; private Image[] receivedImage = new Image[5]; private Command mExitCommand = new Command("Exit", Command.EXIT, 2); private Command mRedCommand = new Command("Back", Command.SCREEN, 1); private Command mBlueCommand = new Command("Next", Command.SCREEN, 1); private Command mPlay = new Command("Play", Command.SCREEN, 1); protected static final String DEFAULT_IMAGE = "/MMSS_logo.jpg"; //protected static final String DEFAULT_IMAGE = "/wait.png"; private Display mDisplay = null; //protected ImageItem mColorSquare = null; protected Image mInitialImage = null; private String mAppID = "MMSMIDlet"; private TextField imageName = null; //private Form mForm = null; private int count = 0; private int next = 0; private Integer mMonitor = new Integer(0); //----------------------------------- End Receive MMS --------------------------- private boolean midletPaused = false; private Command exitCommand; private Command exitCommand1; private Command backCommand; private Form form; private StringItem stringItem; private ImageItem imageItem; private Image image1; private Alert alert; private List locationList; private Alert cannotAddLocationAlert; public MMSS() { } /** * Initilizes the application. * It is called only once when the MIDlet is started. The method is called before the startMIDlet method. */ private void initialize() { } /** * Performs an action assigned to the Mobile Device - MIDlet Started point. */ public void startMIDlet() { // write pre-action user code here switchDisplayable(null, getForm()); // write post-action user code here } /** * Performs an action assigned to the Mobile Device - MIDlet Resumed point. */ public void resumeMIDlet() { } /** * Switches a current displayable in a display. The display instance is taken from getDisplay method. This method is used by all actions in the design for switching displayable. * @param alert the Alert which is temporarily set to the display; if null, then nextDisplayable is set immediately * @param nextDisplayable the Displayable to be set / public void switchDisplayable(Alert alert, Displayable nextDisplayable) {//GEN-END:|5-switchDisplayable|0|5-preSwitch // write pre-switch user code here Display display = getDisplay();//GEN-BEGIN:|5-switchDisplayable|1|5-postSwitch if (alert == null) { display.setCurrent(nextDisplayable); } else { display.setCurrent(alert, nextDisplayable); } } /* * Called by a system to indicated that a command has been invoked on a particular displayable. * @param command the Command that was invoked * @param displayable the Displayable where the command was invoked */ public void commandAction(Command command, Displayable displayable) { // write pre-action user code here if (displayable == form) { if (command == exitCommand) { // write pre-action user code here exitMIDlet(); // write post-action user code here } } // write post-action user code here } /** * Returns an initiliazed instance of exitCommand component. * @return the initialized component instance */ public Command getExitCommand() { if (exitCommand == null) { // write pre-init user code here exitCommand = new Command("Exit", Command.EXIT, 0); // write post-init user code here } return exitCommand; } /** * Returns an initiliazed instance of form component. * @return the initialized component instance */ public Form getForm() { if (form == null) { // write pre-init user code here form = new Form("Welcome to MMSS", new Item[] { getStringItem(), getImageItem() }); form.addCommand(getExitCommand()); form.setCommandListener(this); // write post-init user code here } return form; } /** * Returns an initiliazed instance of stringItem component. * @return the initialized component instance */ public StringItem getStringItem() { if (stringItem == null) { // write pre-init user code here stringItem = new StringItem("Hello", "Hello, World!"); // write post-init user code here } return stringItem; } /** * Returns an initiliazed instance of exitCommand1 component. * @return the initialized component instance / public Command getExitCommand1() { if (exitCommand1 == null) { // write pre-init user code here exitCommand1 = new Command("Exit", Command.EXIT, 0); // write post-init user code here } return exitCommand1; } /* * Returns an initiliazed instance of imageItem component. * @return the initialized component instance */ public ImageItem getImageItem() { if (imageItem == null) { // write pre-init user code here imageItem = new ImageItem("imageItem", getImage1(), ImageItem.LAYOUT_CENTER | Item.LAYOUT_TOP | Item.LAYOUT_BOTTOM | Item.LAYOUT_VCENTER | Item.LAYOUT_EXPAND | Item.LAYOUT_VEXPAND, "");//GEN-LINE:|26-getter|1|26-postInit // write post-init user code here } return imageItem; } /** * Returns an initiliazed instance of image1 component. * @return the initialized component instance */ public Image getImage1() { if (image1 == null) { // write pre-init user code here try { image1 = Image.createImage("/B.jpg"); } catch (java.io.IOException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } // write post-init user code here } return image1; } /** * Returns a display instance. * @return the display instance. */ public Display getDisplay () { return Display.getDisplay(this); } /** * Exits MIDlet. */ public void exitMIDlet() { switchDisplayable (null, null); destroyApp(true); notifyDestroyed(); } /** * Called when MIDlet is started. * Checks whether the MIDlet have been already started and initialize/starts or resumes the MIDlet. */ public void startApp() { if (midletPaused) { resumeMIDlet (); } else { initialize (); startMIDlet (); } midletPaused = false; /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// try { conn = (MessageConnection) Connector.open("mms://:" + mAppID); conn.setMessageListener(this); } catch (Exception e) { System.out.println("startApp caught: "); e.printStackTrace(); } if (conn != null) { startReceive(); } /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// } /** * Called when MIDlet is paused. */ public void pauseApp() { midletPaused = true; mEndNow = true; try { conn.setMessageListener(null); conn.close(); } catch (IOException ex) { System.out.println("pausetApp caught: "); ex.printStackTrace(); } } /** * Called to signal the MIDlet to terminate. * @param unconditional if true, then the MIDlet has to be unconditionally terminated and all resources has to be released. */ public void destroyApp(boolean unconditional) { mEndNow = true; try { conn.close(); } catch (IOException ex) { System.out.println("destroyApp caught: "); ex.printStackTrace(); } } private void startReceive() { mEndNow = false; //---- Start receive thread mReceiver = new Thread(this); mReceiver.start(); } protected MessageConnection conn = null; protected int mMsgAvail = 0; // -------------------- Get Next Images ------------------------------------ private void getMessage() { synchronized(mMonitor) { mMsgAvail++; mMonitor.notify(); } } // -------------------- Display Images Thread ------------------------------ public void notifyIncomingMessage(MessageConnection msgConn) { if (msgConn == conn) getMessage(); } public void itemStateChanged(Item item) { throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Not supported yet."); } class SetImage implements Runnable { private Image img = null; public SetImage(Image inImg) { img = inImg; } public void run() { imageItem.setImage(img); imageName.setString(Integer.toString(count)); } } public void run() { mMsgAvail = 0; while (!mEndNow) { synchronized(mMonitor) { // Enter monitor if (mMsgAvail <= 0) try { mMonitor.wait(); } catch (InterruptedException ex) { } mMsgAvail--; } try { msg = conn.receive(); if (msg instanceof MultipartMessage) { MultipartMessage mpm = (MultipartMessage)msg; MessagePart[] parts = mpm.getMessageParts(); if (parts != null) { for (int i = 0; i < parts.length; i++) { MessagePart mp = parts[i]; byte[] ba = mp.getContent(); receivedImage[count] = Image.createImage(ba, 0, ba.length); } Display.getDisplay(this).callSerially(new SetImage(receivedImage[count])); } } } catch (IOException e) { System.out.println("Receive thread caught: "); e.printStackTrace(); } count++; } // of while } } `

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• mac, netbeans 6.8, c++, sdl, opengl: compilation problems

  - by ufk

  Hiya. I'm trying to properly compile a c++ opengl+sdl application using netbeans 6.8 under Snow Leopard 64-bit. I have libSDL 1.2.14 installed using macports. The script that I try to compile is the following: #ifdef WIN32 #define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN #include <windows.h> #endif #if defined(__APPLE__) && defined(__MACH__) #include <OpenGL/gl.h> // Header File For The OpenGL32 Library #include <OpenGL/glu.h> // Header File For The GLu32 Library #else #include <GL/gl.h> // Header File For The OpenGL32 Library #include <GL/glu.h> // Header File For The GLu32 Library #endif #include "sdl/SDL.h" #include <stdio.h> #include <unistd.h> #include "SDL/SDL_main.h" SDL_Surface *screen=NULL; GLfloat rtri; // Angle For The Triangle ( NEW ) GLfloat rquad; // Angle For The Quad ( NEW ) void InitGL(int Width, int Height) // We call this right after our OpenGL window is created. { glViewport(0, 0, Width, Height); glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); // This Will Clear The Background Color To Black glClearDepth(1.0); // Enables Clearing Of The Depth Buffer glDepthFunc(GL_LESS); // The Type Of Depth Test To Do glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); // Enables Depth Testing glShadeModel(GL_SMOOTH); // Enables Smooth Color Shading glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); // Reset The Projection Matrix gluPerspective(45.0f,(GLfloat)Width/(GLfloat)Height,0.1f,100.0f); // Calculate The Aspect Ratio Of The Window glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); } /* The main drawing function. */ int DrawGLScene() { glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); // Clear The Screen And The Depth Buffer glLoadIdentity(); // Reset The View glTranslatef(-1.5f,0.0f,-6.0f); // Move Left 1.5 Units And Into The Screen 6.0 glRotatef(rtri,0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Rotate The Triangle On The Y axis ( NEW ) // draw a triangle glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES); // Begin Drawing Triangles glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // Red glVertex3f( 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); // Top Of Triangle (Front) glColor3f(0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Green glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Left Of Triangle (Front) glColor3f(0.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // Blue glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Right Of Triangle (Front) glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // Red glVertex3f( 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); // Top Of Triangle (Right) glColor3f(0.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // Blue glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Left Of Triangle (Right) glColor3f(0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Green glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, -1.0f); // Right Of Triangle (Right) glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // Red glVertex3f( 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); // Top Of Triangle (Back) glColor3f(0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Green glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, -1.0f); // Left Of Triangle (Back) glColor3f(0.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // Blue glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, -1.0f); // Right Of Triangle (Back) glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // Red glVertex3f( 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); // Top Of Triangle (Left) glColor3f(0.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // Blue glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f); // Left Of Triangle (Left) glColor3f(0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Green glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Right Of Triangle (Left) glEnd(); glLoadIdentity(); // Reset The Current Modelview Matrix glTranslatef(1.5f,0.0f,-7.0f); // Move Right 1.5 Units And Into The Screen 6.0 glRotatef(rquad,1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // Rotate The Quad On The X axis ( NEW ) glBegin(GL_QUADS); // Start Drawing Quads glColor3f(0.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Set The Color To Green glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f); // Top Right Of The Quad (Top) glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f); // Top Left Of The Quad (Top) glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Bottom Left Of The Quad (Top) glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Bottom Right Of The Quad (Top) glColor3f(1.0f,0.5f,0.0f); // Set The Color To Orange glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Top Right Of The Quad (Bottom) glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Top Left Of The Quad (Bottom) glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f); // Bottom Left Of The Quad (Bottom) glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f); // Bottom Right Of The Quad (Bottom) glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,0.0f); // Set The Color To Red glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Top Right Of The Quad (Front) glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Top Left Of The Quad (Front) glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Bottom Left Of The Quad (Front) glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Bottom Right Of The Quad (Front) glColor3f(1.0f,1.0f,0.0f); // Set The Color To Yellow glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f); // Bottom Left Of The Quad (Back) glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f); // Bottom Right Of The Quad (Back) glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f); // Top Right Of The Quad (Back) glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f); // Top Left Of The Quad (Back) glColor3f(0.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // Set The Color To Blue glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Top Right Of The Quad (Left) glVertex3f(-1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f); // Top Left Of The Quad (Left) glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f); // Bottom Left Of The Quad (Left) glVertex3f(-1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Bottom Right Of The Quad (Left) glColor3f(1.0f,0.0f,1.0f); // Set The Color To Violet glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f,-1.0f); // Top Right Of The Quad (Right) glVertex3f( 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f); // Top Left Of The Quad (Right) glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f, 1.0f); // Bottom Left Of The Quad (Right) glVertex3f( 1.0f,-1.0f,-1.0f); // Bottom Right Of The Quad (Right) glEnd(); // Done Drawing A Quad rtri+=0.02f; // Increase The Rotation Variable For The Triangle ( NEW ) rquad-=0.015f; // Decrease The Rotation Variable For The Quad ( NEW ) // swap buffers to display, since we're double buffered. SDL_GL_SwapBuffers(); return true; } int main(int argc,char* argv[]) { int done; /*variable to hold the file name of the image to be loaded *In real world error handling code would precede this */ /* Initialize SDL for video output */ if ( SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO) < 0 ) { fprintf(stderr, "Unable to initialize SDL: %s\n", SDL_GetError()); exit(1); } atexit(SDL_Quit); /* Create a 640x480 OpenGL screen */ if ( SDL_SetVideoMode(640, 480, 0, SDL_OPENGL) == NULL ) { fprintf(stderr, "Unable to create OpenGL screen: %s\n", SDL_GetError()); SDL_Quit(); exit(2); } SDL_WM_SetCaption("another example",NULL); InitGL(640,480); done=0; while (! done) { DrawGLScene(); SDL_Event event; while ( SDL_PollEvent(&event) ) { if ( event.type == SDL_QUIT ) { done = 1; } if ( event.type == SDL_KEYDOWN ) { if ( event.key.keysym.sym == SDLK_ESCAPE ) { done = 1; } } } } } Under netbeans project properties I configured the following: C++ Compiler: added /usr/X11/include and /opt/local/include to the include directories. Linker: I added the following libraries: /usr/X11/lib/libGL.dylib /usr/X11/lib/libGLU.dylib /opt/local/lib/libSDL.dylib /opt/local/lib/libSDLmain.a Now... before I included SDL_main.h and libSDLMain.a to the project I got an error unknown reference to _main then I read here: http://www.libsdl.org/faq.php?action=listentries&category=7#55 that I need to include SDL_Main.h and to link libSDLMain.so to my project. after doing so, the project still won't compile. this is the Netbeans output: /usr/bin/make -f nbproject/Makefile-Debug.mk SUBPROJECTS= .clean-conf rm -f -r build/Debug rm -f dist/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/opengl2 CLEAN SUCCESSFUL (total time: 79ms) /usr/bin/make -f nbproject/Makefile-Debug.mk SUBPROJECTS= .build-conf /usr/bin/make -f nbproject/Makefile-Debug.mk dist/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/opengl2 mkdir -p build/Debug/GNU-MacOSX rm -f build/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/main.o.d g++ -c -g -I/usr/X11/include -I/opt/local/include -MMD -MP -MF build/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/main.o.d -o build/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/main.o main.cpp mkdir -p dist/Debug/GNU-MacOSX g++ -o dist/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/opengl2 build/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/main.o /opt/local/lib/libIL.dylib /opt/local/lib/libILU.dylib /opt/local/lib/libILUT.dylib /usr/X11/lib/libGL.dylib /usr/X11/lib/libGLU.dylib /opt/local/lib/libSDL.dylib /opt/local/lib/libSDLmain.a Undefined symbols: "_OBJC_CLASS_$_NSMenu", referenced from: __objc_classrefs__DATA@0 in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "__objc_empty_cache", referenced from: _OBJC_METACLASS_$_SDLMain in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _OBJC_CLASS_$_SDLMain in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CFBundleGetMainBundle", referenced from: -[SDLMain setupWorkingDirectory:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CFURLGetFileSystemRepresentation", referenced from: -[SDLMain setupWorkingDirectory:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_NSApp", referenced from: _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_OBJC_CLASS_$_NSProcessInfo", referenced from: __objc_classrefs__DATA@0 in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CFURLCreateCopyDeletingLastPathComponent", referenced from: -[SDLMain setupWorkingDirectory:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_NSAllocateMemoryPages", referenced from: -[NSString(ReplaceSubString) stringByReplacingRange:with:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "___CFConstantStringClassReference", referenced from: cfstring=CFBundleName in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring= in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=About in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=Hide in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=h in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=Hide Others in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=Show All in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=Quit in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=q in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=Window in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=m in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) cfstring=Minimize in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_OBJC_CLASS_$_NSAutoreleasePool", referenced from: __objc_classrefs__DATA@0 in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CPSEnableForegroundOperation", referenced from: _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CPSGetCurrentProcess", referenced from: _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CFBundleCopyBundleURL", referenced from: -[SDLMain setupWorkingDirectory:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_NSDeallocateMemoryPages", referenced from: -[NSString(ReplaceSubString) stringByReplacingRange:with:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_OBJC_CLASS_$_NSApplication", referenced from: l_OBJC_$_CATEGORY_NSApplication_$_SDLApplication in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) __objc_classrefs__DATA@0 in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CPSSetFrontProcess", referenced from: _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_OBJC_CLASS_$_NSString", referenced from: l_OBJC_$_CATEGORY_NSString_$_ReplaceSubString in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) __objc_classrefs__DATA@0 in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_OBJC_CLASS_$_NSObject", referenced from: _OBJC_CLASS_$_SDLMain in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CFBundleGetInfoDictionary", referenced from: _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_CFRelease", referenced from: -[SDLMain setupWorkingDirectory:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) -[SDLMain setupWorkingDirectory:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "__objc_empty_vtable", referenced from: _OBJC_METACLASS_$_SDLMain in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _OBJC_CLASS_$_SDLMain in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_OBJC_CLASS_$_NSMenuItem", referenced from: __objc_classrefs__DATA@0 in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_objc_msgSend", referenced from: -[SDLMain application:openFile:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) -[SDLMain applicationDidFinishLaunching:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) -[NSString(ReplaceSubString) stringByReplacingRange:with:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) -[NSString(ReplaceSubString) stringByReplacingRange:with:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) -[NSString(ReplaceSubString) stringByReplacingRange:with:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) -[NSString(ReplaceSubString) stringByReplacingRange:with:] in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _main in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_OBJC_METACLASS_$_NSObject", referenced from: _OBJC_METACLASS_$_SDLMain in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) _OBJC_METACLASS_$_SDLMain in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) "_objc_msgSend_fixup", referenced from: l_objc_msgSend_fixup_objectForKey_ in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) l_objc_msgSend_fixup_length in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) l_objc_msgSend_fixup_alloc in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) l_objc_msgSend_fixup_release in libSDLmain.a(SDLMain.o) ld: symbol(s) not found collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make[2]: *** [dist/Debug/GNU-MacOSX/opengl2] Error 1 make[1]: *** [.build-conf] Error 2 make: *** [.build-impl] Error 2 BUILD FAILED (exit value 2, total time: 263ms) any ideas? thanks a lot!

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• Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?

  - by Rick Strahl

  With the pending release of ASP.NET MVC 4 and the new ASP.NET Web API, there has been a lot of discussion of where the new Web API technology fits in the ASP.NET Web stack. There are a lot of choices to build HTTP based applications available now on the stack - we've come a long way from when WebForms and Http Handlers/Modules where the only real options. Today we have WebForms, MVC, ASP.NET Web Pages, ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST and now Web API as well as the core ASP.NET runtime to choose to build HTTP content with. Web API definitely squarely addresses the 'API' aspect - building consumable services - rather than HTML content, but even to that end there are a lot of choices you have today. So where does Web API fit, and when doesn't it? But before we get into that discussion, let's talk about what a Web API is and why we should care. What's a Web API? HTTP 'APIs' (Microsoft's new terminology for a service I guess)  are becoming increasingly more important with the rise of the many devices in use today. Most mobile devices like phones and tablets run Apps that are using data retrieved from the Web over HTTP. Desktop applications are also moving in this direction with more and more online content and synching moving into even traditional desktop applications. The pending Windows 8 release promises an app like platform for both the desktop and other devices, that also emphasizes consuming data from the Cloud. Likewise many Web browser hosted applications these days are relying on rich client functionality to create and manipulate the browser user interface, using AJAX rather than server generated HTML data to load up the user interface with data. These mobile or rich Web applications use their HTTP connection to return data rather than HTML markup in the form of JSON or XML typically. But an API can also serve other kinds of data, like images or other binary files, or even text data and HTML (although that's less common). A Web API is what feeds rich applications with data. ASP.NET Web API aims to service this particular segment of Web development by providing easy semantics to route and handle incoming requests and an easy to use platform to serve HTTP data in just about any content format you choose to create and serve from the server. But .NET already has various HTTP Platforms The .NET stack already includes a number of technologies that provide the ability to create HTTP service back ends, and it has done so since the very beginnings of the .NET platform. From raw HTTP Handlers and Modules in the core ASP.NET runtime, to high level platforms like ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, ASP.NET AJAX and the WCF REST engine (which technically is not ASP.NET, but can integrate with it), you've always been able to handle just about any kind of HTTP request and response with ASP.NET. The beauty of the raw ASP.NET platform is that it provides you everything you need to build just about any type of HTTP application you can dream up from low level APIs/custom engines to high level HTML generation engine. ASP.NET as a core platform clearly has stood the test of time 10+ years later and all other frameworks like Web API are built on top of this ASP.NET core. However, although it's possible to create Web APIs / Services using any of the existing out of box .NET technologies, none of them have been a really nice fit for building arbitrary HTTP based APIs. Sure, you can use an HttpHandler to create just about anything, but you have to build a lot of plumbing to build something more complex like a comprehensive API that serves a variety of requests, handles multiple output formats and can easily pass data up to the server in a variety of ways. Likewise you can use ASP.NET MVC to handle routing and creating content in various formats fairly easily, but it doesn't provide a great way to automatically negotiate content types and serve various content formats directly (it's possible to do with some plumbing code of your own but not built in). Prior to Web API, Microsoft's main push for HTTP services has been WCF REST, which was always an awkward technology that had a severe personality conflict, not being clear on whether it wanted to be part of WCF or purely a separate technology. In the end it didn't do either WCF compatibility or WCF agnostic pure HTTP operation very well, which made for a very developer-unfriendly environment. Personally I didn't like any of the implementations at the time, so much so that I ended up building my own HTTP service engine (as part of the West Wind Web Toolkit), as have a few other third party tools that provided much better integration and ease of use. With the release of Web API for the first time I feel that I can finally use the tools in the box and not have to worry about creating and maintaining my own toolkit as Web API addresses just about all the features I implemented on my own and much more. ASP.NET Web API provides a better HTTP Experience ASP.NET Web API differentiates itself from the previous Microsoft in-box HTTP service solutions in that it was built from the ground up around the HTTP protocol and its messaging semantics. Unlike WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX with ASMX, it’s a brand new platform rather than bolted on technology that is supposed to work in the context of an existing framework. The strength of the new ASP.NET Web API is that it combines the best features of the platforms that came before it, to provide a comprehensive and very usable HTTP platform. Because it's based on ASP.NET and borrows a lot of concepts from ASP.NET MVC, Web API should be immediately familiar and comfortable to most ASP.NET developers. Here are some of the features that Web API provides that I like: Strong Support for URL Routing to produce clean URLs using familiar MVC style routing semantics Content Negotiation based on Accept headers for request and response serialization Support for a host of supported output formats including JSON, XML, ATOM Strong default support for REST semantics but they are optional Easily extensible Formatter support to add new input/output types Deep support for more advanced HTTP features via HttpResponseMessage and HttpRequestMessage classes and strongly typed Enums to describe many HTTP operations Convention based design that drives you into doing the right thing for HTTP Services Very extensible, based on MVC like extensibility model of Formatters and Filters Self-hostable in non-Web applications  Testable using testing concepts similar to MVC Web API is meant to handle any kind of HTTP input and produce output and status codes using the full spectrum of HTTP functionality available in a straight forward and flexible manner. Looking at the list above you can see that a lot of functionality is very similar to ASP.NET MVC, so many ASP.NET developers should feel quite comfortable with the concepts of Web API. The Routing and core infrastructure of Web API are very similar to how MVC works providing many of the benefits of MVC, but with focus on HTTP access and manipulation in Controller methods rather than HTML generation in MVC. There’s much improved support for content negotiation based on HTTP Accept headers with the framework capable of detecting automatically what content the client is sending and requesting and serving the appropriate data format in return. This seems like such a little and obvious thing, but it's really important. Today's service backends often are used by multiple clients/applications and being able to choose the right data format for what fits best for the client is very important. While previous solutions were able to accomplish this using a variety of mixed features of WCF and ASP.NET, Web API combines all this functionality into a single robust server side HTTP framework that intrinsically understands the HTTP semantics and subtly drives you in the right direction for most operations. And when you need to customize or do something that is not built in, there are lots of hooks and overrides for most behaviors, and even many low level hook points that allow you to plug in custom functionality with relatively little effort. No Brainers for Web API There are a few scenarios that are a slam dunk for Web API. If your primary focus of an application or even a part of an application is some sort of API then Web API makes great sense. HTTP ServicesIf you're building a comprehensive HTTP API that is to be consumed over the Web, Web API is a perfect fit. You can isolate the logic in Web API and build your application as a service breaking out the logic into controllers as needed. Because the primary interface is the service there's no confusion of what should go where (MVC or API). Perfect fit. Primary AJAX BackendsIf you're building rich client Web applications that are relying heavily on AJAX callbacks to serve its data, Web API is also a slam dunk. Again because much if not most of the business logic will probably end up in your Web API service logic, there's no confusion over where logic should go and there's no duplication. In Single Page Applications (SPA), typically there's very little HTML based logic served other than bringing up a shell UI and then filling the data from the server with AJAX which means the business logic required for data retrieval and data acceptance and validation too lives in the Web API. Perfect fit. Generic HTTP EndpointsAnother good fit are generic HTTP endpoints that to serve data or handle 'utility' type functionality in typical Web applications. If you need to implement an image server, or an upload handler in the past I'd implement that as an HTTP handler. With Web API you now have a well defined place where you can implement these types of generic 'services' in a location that can easily add endpoints (via Controller methods) or separated out as more full featured APIs. Granted this could be done with MVC as well, but Web API seems a clearer and more well defined place to store generic application services. This is one thing I used to do a lot of in my own libraries and Web API addresses this nicely. Great fit. Mixed HTML and AJAX Applications: Not a clear Choice  For all the commonality that Web API and MVC share they are fundamentally different platforms that are independent of each other. A lot of people have asked when does it make sense to use MVC vs. Web API when you're dealing with typical Web application that creates HTML and also uses AJAX functionality for rich functionality. While it's easy to say that all 'service'/AJAX logic should go into a Web API and all HTML related generation into MVC, that can often result in a lot of code duplication. Also MVC supports JSON and XML result data fairly easily as well so there's some confusion where that 'trigger point' is of when you should switch to Web API vs. just implementing functionality as part of MVC controllers. Ultimately there's a tradeoff between isolation of functionality and duplication. A good rule of thumb I think works is that if a large chunk of the application's functionality serves data Web API is a good choice, but if you have a couple of small AJAX requests to serve data to a grid or autocomplete box it'd be overkill to separate out that logic into a separate Web API controller. Web API does add overhead to your application (it's yet another framework that sits on top of core ASP.NET) so it should be worth it .Keep in mind that MVC can generate HTML and JSON/XML and just about any other content easily and that functionality is not going away, so just because you Web API is there it doesn't mean you have to use it. Web API is not a full replacement for MVC obviously either since there's not the same level of support to feed HTML from Web API controllers (although you can host a RazorEngine easily enough if you really want to go that route) so if you're HTML is part of your API or application in general MVC is still a better choice either alone or in combination with Web API. I suspect (and hope) that in the future Web API's functionality will merge even closer with MVC so that you might even be able to mix functionality of both into single Controllers so that you don't have to make any trade offs, but at the moment that's not the case. Some Issues To think about Web API is similar to MVC but not the Same Although Web API looks a lot like MVC it's not the same and some common functionality of MVC behaves differently in Web API. For example, the way single POST variables are handled is different than MVC and doesn't lend itself particularly well to some AJAX scenarios with POST data. Code Duplication I already touched on this in the Mixed HTML and Web API section, but if you build an MVC application that also exposes a Web API it's quite likely that you end up duplicating a bunch of code and - potentially - infrastructure. You may have to create authentication logic both for an HTML application and for the Web API which might need something different altogether. More often than not though the same logic is used, and there's no easy way to share. If you implement an MVC ActionFilter and you want that same functionality in your Web API you'll end up creating the filter twice. AJAX Data or AJAX HTML On a recent post's comments, David made some really good points regarding the commonality of MVC and Web API's and its place. One comment that caught my eye was a little more generic, regarding data services vs. HTML services. David says: I see a lot of merit in the combination of Knockout.js, client side templates and view models, calling Web API for a responsive UI, but sometimes late at night that still leaves me wondering why I would no longer be using some of the nice tooling and features that have evolved in MVC ;-) You know what - I can totally relate to that. On the last Web based mobile app I worked on, we decided to serve HTML partials to the client via AJAX for many (but not all!) things, rather than sending down raw data to inject into the DOM on the client via templating or direct manipulation. While there are definitely more bytes on the wire, with this, the overhead ended up being actually fairly small if you keep the 'data' requests small and atomic. Performance was often made up by the lack of client side rendering of HTML. Server rendered HTML for AJAX templating gives so much better infrastructure support without having to screw around with 20 mismatched client libraries. Especially with MVC and partials it's pretty easy to break out your HTML logic into very small, atomic chunks, so it's actually easy to create small rendering islands that can be used via composition on the server, or via AJAX calls to small, tight partials that return HTML to the client. Although this is often frowned upon as to 'heavy', it worked really well in terms of developer effort as well as providing surprisingly good performance on devices. There's still plenty of jQuery and AJAX logic happening on the client but it's more manageable in small doses rather than trying to do the entire UI composition with JavaScript and/or 'not-quite-there-yet' template engines that are very difficult to debug. This is not an issue directly related to Web API of course, but something to think about especially for AJAX or SPA style applications. Summary Web API is a great new addition to the ASP.NET platform and it addresses a serious need for consolidation of a lot of half-baked HTTP service API technologies that came before it. Web API feels 'right', and hits the right combination of usability and flexibility at least for me and it's a good fit for true API scenarios. However, just because a new platform is available it doesn't meant that other tools or tech that came before it should be discarded or even upgraded to the new platform. There's nothing wrong with continuing to use MVC controller methods to handle API tasks if that's what your app is running now - there's very little to be gained by upgrading to Web API just because. But going forward Web API clearly is the way to go, when building HTTP data interfaces and it's good to see that Microsoft got this one right - it was sorely needed! Resources ASP.NET Web API AspConf Ask the Experts Session (first 5 minutes) © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Differences Between NHibernate and Entity Framework

  - by Ricardo Peres

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

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• Top 4 Lame Tech Blogging Posts

  - by jkauffman

  From a consumption point of view, tech blogging is a great resource for one-off articles on niche subjects. If you spend any time reading tech blogs, you may find yourself running into several common, useless types of posts tech bloggers slip into. Some of these lame posts may just be natural due to common nerd psychology, and some others are probably due to lame, lemming-like laziness. I’m sure I’ll do my fair share of fitting the mold, but I quickly get bored when I happen upon posts that hit these patterns without any real purpose or personal touches. 1. The Content Regurgitation Posts This is a common pattern fueled by the starving pan-handlers in the web traffic economy. These are posts that are terse opinions or addendums to an existing post. I commonly see these involve huge block quotes from the linked article which almost always produces over 50% of the post itself. I’ve accidentally gone to these posts when I’m knowingly only interested in the source material. Web links can degrade as well, so if the source link is broken, then, well, I’m pretty steamed. I see this occur with simple opinions on technologies, Stack Overflow solutions, or various tech news like posts from Microsoft. It’s not uncommon to go to the linked article and see the author announce that he “added a blog post” as a response or summary of the topic. This is just rude, but those who do it are probably aware of this. It’s a matter of winning that sweet, juicy web traffic. I doubt this leeching is fooling anybody these days. I would like to rally human dignity and urge people to avoid these types of posts, and just leave a comment on the source material. 2. The “Sorry I Haven’t Posted In A While” Posts This one is far too common. You’ll most likely see this quote somewhere in the body of the offending post: I have been really busy. If the poster is especially guilt-ridden, you’ll see a few volleys of excuses. Here are some common reasons I’ve seen, which I’ll list from least to most painfully awkward. Out of town Vague allusions to personal health problems (these typically includes phrases like “sick”, “treatment'”, and “all better now!”) “Personal issues” (which I usually read as "divorce”) Graphic or specific personal health problems (maximum awkwardness potential is achieved if you see links to charity fund websites) I can’t help but to try over-analyzing why this occurs. Personally, I see this an an amalgamation of three plain factors: Life happens Us nerds are duty-driven, and driven to guilt at personal inefficiencies Tech blogs can become personal journals I don’t think we can do much about the first two, but on the third I think we could certainly contain our urges. I’m a pretty boring guy and, whether or I like it or not, I have an unspoken duty to protect the world from hearing about my unremarkable existence. Nobody cares what kind of sandwich I’m eating. Similarly, if I disappear for a while, it’s unlikely that anybody who happens upon my blog would care why. Rest assured, if I stop posting for a while due to a vasectomy, you will be the first to know. 3. The “At A Conference”, or “Conference Review” Posts I don’t know if I’m like everyone else on this one, but I have never been successfully interested in these posts. It even sounds like a good idea: if I can’t make it to a particular conference (like the KCDC this year), wouldn’t I be interested in a concentrated summary of events? Apparently, no! Within this realm, I’ve never read a post by a blogger that held my interest. What really baffles is is that, for whatever reason, I am genuinely engaged and interested when talking to someone in person regarding the same topic. I have noticed the same phenomenon when hearing about others’ vacations. If someone sends me an email about their vacation, I gloss over it and forget about it quickly. In contrast, if I’m speaking to that individual in person about their vacation, I’m actually interested. I’m unsure why the written medium eradicates the intrigue. I was raised by a roaming pack of friendly wild video games, so that may be a factor. 4. The “Top X Number of Y’s That Z” Posts I’ve seen this one crop up a lot more in the past few of years. Here are some fabricated examples: 5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Code Top 7 Good Habits Programmers Learn From Experience The 8 Things to Consider When Giving Estimates Top 4 Lame Tech Blogging Posts These are attention-grabbing headlines, and I’d assume they rack up hits. In fact, I enjoy a good number of these. But, I’ve been drawn to articles like this just to find an endless list of identically formatted posts on the blog’s archive sidebar. Often times these posts have overlapping topics, too. These types of posts give the impression that the author has given thought to prioritize and organize the points as a result of a comprehensive consideration of a particular topic. Did the author really weigh all the possibilities when identifying the “Top 4 Lame Tech Blogging Patterns”? Unfortunately, probably not. What a tool. To reiterate, I still enjoy the format, but I feel it is abused. Nowadays, I’m pretty skeptical when approaching posts in this format. If these trends continue, my brain will filter these blog posts out just as effectively as it ignores the encroaching “do xxx with this one trick” advertisements. Conclusion To active blog readers, I hope my guide has served you precious time in being able to identify lame blog posts at a glance. Save time and energy by skipping over the chaff of the internet! And if you author a blog, perhaps my insight will help you to avoid the occasional urge to produce these needless filler posts.

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• Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy Adds Social Cloud and Showcases early customers Redwood Shores, Calif. – June 6, 2012 “Almost seven years of relentless engineering and innovation plus key strategic acquisitions. An investment of billions. We are now announcing the most comprehensive Cloud on the planet Earth,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “Most cloud vendors only have niche assets. They don’t have platforms to extend. Oracle is the only vendor that offers a complete suite of modern, socially-enabled applications, all based on a standards-based platform.” News Facts In a major strategy update today, Larry Ellison announced the industry’s broadest and most advanced Cloud strategy and introduced Oracle Cloud Social Services, a broad Enterprise Social Platform offering. Oracle Cloud delivers a broad set of industry-standards based, integrated services that provide customers with subscription-based access to Oracle Platform Services, Application Services, and Social Services, all completely managed, hosted and supported by Oracle. Offering a wide range of business applications and platform services, the Oracle Cloud is the only cloud to enable customers to avoid the data and business process fragmentation that occurs when using multiple, siloed public clouds. Oracle Cloud is powered by leading enterprise-grade infrastructure, including Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic, providing customers and partners with a high-performance, reliable, and secure infrastructure for running critical business applications. Oracle Cloud enables easy self-service for both business users and developers. Business users can order, configure, extend, and monitor their applications. Developers and administrators can easily develop, deploy, monitor and manage their applications. As part of the event, Oracle also showcased several early Oracle Cloud customers and partners including system integrators and independent software vendors. Oracle Cloud Platform Services Built on a common, complete, standards-based and enterprise-grade set of infrastructure components, Oracle Cloud Platform Services enable customers to speed time to market and lower costs by quickly building, deploying and managing bespoke applications. Oracle Cloud Platform Services will include: Database Services to manage data and build database applications with the Oracle Database. Java Services to develop, deploy and manage Java applications with Oracle WebLogic. Developer Services to allow application developers to collaboratively build applications. Web Services to build Web applications rapidly using PHP, Ruby, and Python. Mobile Services to allow developers to build cross-platform native and HTML5 mobile applications for leading smartphones and tablets. Documents Services to allow project teams to collaborate and share documents through online workspaces and portals. Sites Services to allow business users to develop and maintain visually engaging .com sites Analytics Services to allow business users to quickly build and share analytic dashboards and reports through the Cloud. Oracle Cloud Application Services Oracle Cloud Application Services provides customers access to the industry’s broadest range of enterprise applications available in the cloud today, with built-in business intelligence, social and mobile capabilities. Easy to setup, configure, extend, use and administer, Oracle Cloud Application Services will include: ERP Services: A complete set of Financial Accounting, Project Management, Procurement, Sourcing, and Governance, Risk & Compliance solutions. HCM Services: A complete Human Capital Management solution including Global HR, Workforce Lifecycle Management, Compensation, Benefits, Payroll and other solutions. Talent Management Services: A complete Talent Management solution including Recruiting, Sourcing, Performance Management, and Learning. Sales and Marketing Services: A complete Sales and Marketing solution including Sales Planning, Territory Management, Leads & Opportunity Management, and Forecasting. Customer Experience Services: A complete Customer Service solution including Web Self-Service, Contact Centers, Knowledge Management, Chat, and e-mail Management. Oracle Cloud Social Services Oracle Cloud Social Services provides the most broad and complete enterprise social platform available in the cloud today.  With Oracle Cloud Social Services, enterprises can engage with their customers on a range of social media properties in a comprehensive and meaningful fashion including social marketing, commerce, service and listening. The platform also provides enterprises with a rich social networking solution for their employees to collaborate effectively inside the enterprise. Oracle’s integrated social platform will include: Oracle Social Network to enable secure enterprise collaboration and purposeful social networking for business. Oracle Social Data Services to aggregate data from social networks and enterprise data sources to enrich business applications. Oracle Social Marketing and Engagement Services to enable marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns. Oracle Social Intelligence Services to enable marketers to analyze social media interactions and to enable customer service and sales teams to engage with customers and prospects effectively. Supporting Resources Oracle Cloud – learn more cloud.oracle.com – sign up now Webcast – watch the replay About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. TrademarksOracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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• SQL SERVER – PAGELATCH_DT, PAGELATCH_EX, PAGELATCH_KP, PAGELATCH_SH, PAGELATCH_UP – Wait Type – Day 12 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  This is another common wait type. However, I still frequently see people getting confused with PAGEIOLATCH_X and PAGELATCH_X wait types. Actually, there is a big difference between the two. PAGEIOLATCH is related to IO issues, while PAGELATCH is not related to IO issues but is oftentimes linked to a buffer issue. Before we delve deeper in this interesting topic, first let us understand what Latch is. Latches are internal SQL Server locks which can be described as very lightweight and short-term synchronization objects. Latches are not primarily to protect pages being read from disk into memory. It’s a synchronization object for any in-memory access to any portion of a log or data file.[Updated based on comment of Paul Randal] The difference between locks and latches is that locks seal all the involved resources throughout the duration of the transactions (and other processes will have no access to the object), whereas latches locks the resources during the time when the data is changed. This way, a latch is able to maintain the integrity of the data between storage engine and data cache. A latch is a short-living lock that is put on resources on buffer cache and in the physical disk when data is moved in either directions. As soon as the data is moved, the latch is released. Now, let us understand the wait stat type  related to latches. From Book On-Line: PAGELATCH_DT Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is not in an I/O request. The latch request is in Destroy mode. PAGELATCH_EX Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is not in an I/O request. The latch request is in Exclusive mode. PAGELATCH_KP Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is not in an I/O request. The latch request is in Keep mode. PAGELATCH_SH Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is not in an I/O request. The latch request is in Shared mode. PAGELATCH_UP Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is not in an I/O request. The latch request is in Update mode. PAGELATCH_X Explanation: When there is a contention of access of the in-memory pages, this wait type shows up. It is quite possible that some of the pages in the memory are of very high demand. For the SQL Server to access them and put a latch on the pages, it will have to wait. This wait type is usually created at the same time. Additionally, it is commonly visible when the TempDB has higher contention as well. If there are indexes that are heavily used, contention can be created as well, leading to this wait type. Reducing PAGELATCH_X wait: The following counters are useful to understand the status of the PAGELATCH: Average Latch Wait Time (ms): The wait time for latch requests that have to wait. Latch Waits/sec: This is the number of latch requests that could not be granted immediately. Total Latch Wait Time (ms): This is the total latch wait time for latch requests in the last second. If there is TempDB contention, I suggest that you read the blog post of Robert Davis right away. He has written an excellent blog post regarding how to find out TempDB contention. The same blog post explains the terms in the allocation of GAM, SGAM and PFS. If there was a TempDB contention, Paul Randal explains the optimal settings for the TempDB in his misconceptions series. Trace Flag 1118 can be useful but use it very carefully. I totally understand that this blog post is not as clear as my other blog posts. I suggest if this wait stats is on one of your higher wait type. Do leave a comment or send me an email and I will get back to you with my solution for your situation. May the looking at all other wait stats and types together become effective as this wait type can help suggest proper bottleneck in your system. Read all the post in the Wait Types and Queue series. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and there is no way that I claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading Book OnLine for further clarification. All the discussions of Wait Stats in this blog are generic and vary from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on a development server before implementing it to a production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)   Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 13, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 13, 2010Popular ReleasesRequest Tracker Data Access: 1.0.0.0: First releaseMicrosoft All-In-One Code Framework: All-In-One Code Framework 2010-12-13: Improved and Newly Added Examples:For an up-to-date code sample index, please refer to All-In-One Code Framework Sample Catalog. NEW Samples for ASP.NET Name Description Owner CSASPNETCMD Run batch/cmd from ASP.NET (C#) YiXiang VBASPNETCMD Run batch/cmd from ASP.NET (VB) YiXiang VBASPNETAJAXWebChat Ajax web chat application (VB) JerryWeng CSASPNETAJAXWebChat Ajax web chat application (C#) JerryWeng CSASPNETCurrentOnlineUserList Get current online u...Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 0.9 Beta: - Aqua or brushed metal style for Mac OS X - Shows selection count beside ID - Game list selection mode via settings - Compare Files <-> WBFS game lists - Verify game images/DVD/WBFS - WIT command line for log (via settings) - Cancel possibility for loading games process - Progress infos while loading games - Localization for dates - UTF-8 support - Shortcuts added - View game infos in browser - Transfer infos for log - All transfer routines rewritten - Extract image from image/WBFS - Support....NETTER Code Starter Pack: v1.0.beta: '.NETTER Code Starter Pack ' contains a gallery of Visual Studio 2010 solutions leveraging latest and new technologies and frameworks based on Microsoft .NET Framework. Each Visual Studio solution included here is focused to provide a very simple starting point for cutting edge development technologies and framework, using well known Northwind database (for database driven scenarios). The current release of this project includes starter samples for the following technologies: ASP.NET Dynamic...WPF Multiple Document Interface (MDI): Beta Release v1.1: WPF.MDI is a library to imitate the traditional Windows Forms Multiple Document Interface (MDI) features in WPF. This is Beta release, means there's still work to do. Please provide feedback, so next release will be better. Features: Position dependency property MdiLayout dependency property Menu dependency property Ctrl + F4, Ctrl + Tab shortcuts should work Behavior: don’t allow negative values for MdiChild position minimized windows: remember position, tile multiple windows, ...SQL Server PowerShell Extensions: 2.3.1 Production: Release 2.3.1 implements SQLPSX as PowersShell version 2.0 modules. SQLPSX consists of 12 modules with 155 advanced functions, 2 cmdlets and 7 scripts for working with ADO.NET, SMO, Agent, RMO, SSIS, SQL script files, PBM, Performance Counters, SQLProfiler and using Powershell ISE as a SQL and Oracle query tool. In addition optional backend databases and SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 reports are provided with SQLServer and PBM modules. See readme file for details.EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.1 ALPHA: 2.2.1 ALPHAThis release adds in the changes for 4.03a. at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Updated th...NuGet (formerly NuPack): NuGet 1.0 Release Candidate: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. This new build targets the newer feed (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669) and package format. See http://nupack.codeplex.com/documentation?title=Nuspe...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire Silverlight, WPF Charts v3.6.5 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing final version of Visifire, v3.6.5 with the following new feature: * New property AutoFitToPlotArea has been introduced in DataSeries. AutoFitToPlotArea will bring bubbles inside the PlotArea in order to avoid clipping of bubbles in bubble chart. You can visit Visifire documentation to know more. http://www.visifire.com/visifirechartsdocumentation.php Also this release includes few bug fixes: * Chart threw exception while adding new Axis in Chart using Vi...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.5 Production: DonationsDonate via PayPal via PayPal. If you want to, we can also add your name / company on our Donation Acknowledgements page. PEAR channelWe now also have a full PEAR channel! Here's how to use it: New installation: pear channel-discover pear.pearplex.net pear install pearplex/PHPExcel Or if you've already installed PHPExcel before: pear upgrade pearplex/PHPExcel The official page can be found at http://pearplex.net. Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page.??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2010-12-10: ?????All-In-One Code Framework（??） 2010?12??????！！http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ?????release?，???????ASP.NET, WinForm, Silverlight????12?Sample Code。???，??????????sample code。 ?????：http://blog.csdn.net/sjb5201/archive/2010/12/13/6072675.aspx ??，??????MSDN????????????。 http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/zh-CN/codezhchs/threads ?????????????????，??Email ????DNN Simple Article: DNNSimpleArticle Module V00.00.03: The initial release of the DNNSimpleArticle module (labelled V00.00.03) There are C# and VB versions of this module for this initial release. No promises that going forward there will be packages for both languages provided for future releases. This module provides the following functionality Create and display articles Display a paged list of articles Articles get created as DNN ContentItems Categorization provided through DNN Taxonomy SEO functionality for article display providi...UOB & ME: UOB_ME 2.5: latest versionAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.4.3: AutoLoL now supports importing the build pages from Mobafire.com as well! Just insert the url to the build and voila. (For example: http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/build/unforgivens-guide-how-to-build-a-successful-mordekaiser-24061) Stable release of AutoChat (It is still recommended to use with caution and to read the documentation) It is now possible to associate *.lolm files with AutoLoL to quickly open them The selected spells are now displayed in the masteries tab for qu...PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7: This is a final stable release of PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7. This is a minor incremental release that contains all the functionality available in 53121 plus additional features listed below: Improved detection logic for existing PHP installations. Now PHP Manager detects the location to php.ini file in accordance to the PHP specifications Configuring date.timezone. PHP Manager can automatically set the date.timezone directive which is required to be set starting from PHP 5.3 Ability to ...Algorithmia: Algorithmia 1.1: Algorithmia v1.1, released on December 8th, 2010.My Web Pages Starter Kit: 1.3.1 Production Release (Security HOTFIX): Due to a critical security issue, it's strongly advised to update the My Web Pages Starter Kit to this version. Possible attackers could misuse the image upload to transmit any type of file to the website. If you already have a running version of My Web Pages Starter Kit 1.3.0, you can just replace the ftb.imagegallery.aspx file in the root directory with the one attached to this release.ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.4: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: popup WhiteSpaceFilterAttribute tested on mozilla, safari, chrome, opera, ie 9b/8/7/6nopCommerce. ASP.NET open source shopping cart: nopCommerce 1.90: To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 4: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 4 ChangesReintroduced fluent interface support via satellite assembly Added entities support, entity segmentation, and ITweetable/ITweeter interfaces for client development Numerous fixes reported by preview users Preview 3 ChangesNumerous fixes and improvements to core engine Twitter API coverage: a...New Projects.NET Tips Repository: This project is the source code repository for all the projects, samples, and tutorials posted at vahidnasiri.blogspot.com. Its main focus is on .NET programming.a hash implement by basic array and link list: a hash implement by basic array and link listApplication Essentials for WPF, Silverlight, and Windows Phone 7: Application essentials is a simplified, small footprint redux of the Structured MVVM and Color Blending projects and is used to build WPF, Silverlight, and Windows Phone 7 applications with an MVVM architecture.Bit.ly Button: Bit.ly Button lets you use the power of Bit.ly bookmarklet to shorten any webpage (especially on sites like Facebook and Twitter). It's like a sharing button, except it will shorten the link before you share on Facebook or Twitter.Check Dependency: Check Dependency is designed to identify the dependency problems in assemblies. It is a valuable assistant to a project hat has complex dependency in many assemblies.Circo: A product oriented towards the need of having a powerful tool improving the construction process of applications. User interface for creating Entity Dictionary, generating .Net classes and also SQL model. It provides a strong productivity oriented.CoralCubeDB: This is the db for coralcube.Dotnet.Samples: Microsoft® .NET™ sample projects Created by Nano Taboada under a MIT License All projects have been coded using Microsoft(R) Visual Studio(R) 2010 mostly targeting framework version 4.0 Get a free copy of Visual C# 2010 Express at http://tinyurl.com/visualstudio2010expressElasticity: An library implementation of the Scheduler-Agent-Supervisor pattern. http://vasters.com/clemensv/2010/09/28/Cloud+Architecture+The+SchedulerAgentSupervisor+Pattern.aspxFacebook Graph Toolkit: get Graph API in ASP.NET.Grabbers: An object relational library and code generator designed to assist agile development teams generate data aware objects. InSimSniffer: InSimSniffer is a InSim packet sniffer for the racing simulator Live for Speed. It allows programmers to view and debug packets sent by the game.Irrlicht Wrapper for D: A D wrapper for the Irrlicht game engine generated by SWIG.Linq to LDAP: Linq provider built on top of System.DirectoryServices.Protocols for querying LDAP servers.ME Video Player: ME Video Player makes it easier for web developers to present medis on web pages. It's developed in C# and Silverlight by Mahyar Esteki.Mladi.com.hr: CMS system for croatian youth portalMouse Practise: A small project that creates a game to train a beginner to use mouse. Developer's Blog : http://shekhar-pro.blogspot.com Follow on Twitter : http://twitter.com/samajshekharMVVMKit: MVVMKit makes it easier to create WPF applications using the MVVM pattern.mygully-searcher: MyGully-Searcher makes it easier for Mygully-Forum-Users to search the forums for downloads. You'll no longer have to click to all forums. It's developed in VB.Net.NBooks Accounting: A simple clone to Quickbooks.Projeto Teste do curso de Pós graduação em Engenharia de Software.: Projeto teste do curso de pós graduação em Engenharia de Software. Códigos exemplos em Javascript e outros. Nayanne Araújo Bonifácio.Razor Reports - a Visualizer for the DotNetNuke Reports Module: Razor Reports is a Visualizer for the DotNetNuke Reports ModuleSiteGrabber: Groepsopdracht 2Supermarket: Hat: tTheSharePage: Project contains the core library for use in my website that i am developing for my NIIT project work. (The website will integrate facebook and twitter in a single website) The library features full custom developed facebook and twitter sdk library that can even be reused.Tip Of Day SharePoint WebPart: Tip Of Day webpartTranslit Hebrew to Russian: Application, which can translit Hebrew text into Russian.WP7 Thai Text Input: WP7 Thai text input makes it possible to enter Thai characters in WP7. It's developed in C# and were used in some of the CoreSharp's WP7 apps.

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• From Bluehost to WP Engine, My WordPress Story

  - by thatjeffsmith

  This is probably the longest blog post I’ve written in a LONG time. And if you’re used to coming here for the Oracle stuff, this post is not about that. It’s about my blog, and the stuff under the hood that makes it run, AKA WordPress. If you want to skip to the juicy stuff, then use these shortcuts: My Site Slowed Down How I Moved to WP Engine How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me Why WP Engine? I started thatJeffSmith.com on May 28th, 2010. I had been already been blogging for several years, but a couple of really smart people I respected (Andy, Brent – thanks again!) suggested that I take ownership of my content and begin building my personal brand. I thought that was a good idea, and so I signed up for service with bluehost. Bluehost makes setting up a WordPress site very, very easy. And, they continued to be easy to work with for the past 2 years. I would even recommend them to anyone looking to host their own WordPress install/site. For $83.40, I purchased a year’s worth of service and my domain name registration – a very good value. And then last year I paid $107.40 for another year’s services. And when that year expired I paid another $190.80 for an additional two year’s service in advance. I had been up to that point, getting my money’s worth. And then, just a few weeks ago… My Site Slowed to a Crawl That spike was from an April Fool's Day Post, I think Why? Well, when I first started blogging, I had the same problem that most beginner bloggers have – not many readers. In my first year of blogging, I think the highest number of readers on a single day was about 125. I remember that day as I was very excited to break 100! Bluehost was very reliable, serving up my content with maybe a total of 3-4 outages in the past 2 years. Support was usually very prompt with answers and solutions, and I love their ‘Chat now’ technology – much nicer than message boards only or pay-to-talk phone support. In the past 6 months however, I noticed a couple of things: daily traffic was increasing – woohoo! my service was experiencing severe CPU throttling – doh! To be honest, I wasn’t aware the throttling was occuring, but I did know that the response time of my blog was starting to lag. Average load times were approaching 20-30 seconds. Not good when good sites are loading in 5 seconds or less. And just this past week, in getting ready to launch a new website for work that sucked in an RSS feed from my blog, the new page was left waiting for more than a minute. Not good! In fact my boss asked, why aren’t you blogging on Blogger? Ugh. I tried a few things to fix the problem: I paid for a premium WordPress theme – Themify’s Grido (thanks to @SQLRockstar for the heads-up) I installed a couple of WP caching plugins I read every WP optimization blog post I could get my greedy little eyes on However, at the same time I was also getting addicted to WordPress bloggers talking about all the cool things you could do with your blog. As a result I had at one point about 30 different plugins installed. WordPress runs on MySQL, and certain queries running via these plugins were starving for CPU. Plugins that would be called every page load meant that as more people clicked on my site, the more CPU I needed. I’m not stupid, so I eventually figured out that maybe less plugins was better, and was able to go down to just 20. But still, the site was running like a dog. CPU Throttling, makes MySQL wait to run a query Bluehost runs shared servers. Your site runs on the same box that several hundred (or thousand?) other services are running on. If you take more CPU than they think you should have, they will limit your service by making you stand in line for CPU, AKA ‘throttling.’ This is not bad. This business model allows them to serve many, many users for a very fair price. It works great until, well, until it doesn’t. I noticed in the last week that for every minute of service, I was being throttled between 60 and 300 seconds. If there were 5 MySQL processes running, then every single one of them were being held in check. The blog visitor notice this as their page requests would take a minute or more to be answered. Bluehost unfortunately doesn’t offer dedicated server hosting, so there was no real upgrade path for me follow and remain one of their customers. So what was I to do? Uninstall every plugin and hope the site sped up? Ask for people to take turns on my blog? I decided to spend my way out of the problem. I signed up for service with WP Engine and moved ThatJeffSmith.com The first 2 months are free, and after that it’s about $29/month to run my site on their system. My math tells me that’s a good bit more expensive than what Bluehost was charging me – to the tune of about 300% more a month. Oh, and I should just say that my blog is a personal blog even though I talk about work stuff here. I don’t get paid for blogging, I don’t sell ads, and I don’t expense the service fees – this is my personal passion. So is it worth it? In the first 4 days, it seems to be totally worth it. Load times have gone from 20-30 seconds to less than 5 seconds. A few folks have told me via Twitter that they notice faster page loads. I anticipate this will indirectly lead to more traffic as Google penalizes you in search results if your site is too slow, and of course some folks won’t even bother waiting more than 5-10 seconds. I noticed right away that writing posts, uploading pictures, and just using the WordPress dashboard in general was much more responsive. So writing is less of a chore now, which means I won’t have a good reason not to write How I Moved to WP Engine I signed up for the service and registered my domain. I then took a full export of my ‘old’ site by doing a FTP GET of all my files, then did a MySQL database backup, exported my WordPress Theme settings to a .zip file, and then finally used the WordPress ‘Export’ feature. I then used the WordPress ‘Import’ on the new site to load up my posts. Then I uploaded the theme .zip package from Themify. Then I FTP’d the ‘wp-content’ directory up to my new server using SFTP (WP Engine only supports secure FTP – good on them!) Using a temporary URL to see my new site, I was able to confirm that everything looked mostly OK – I’ll detail the challenges and issues of fixing the content next – but then it was time to ‘flip the switch.’ I updated the IP address that the DNS lookup tables use to route traffic to my new server. In a matter of minutes the DNS servers around the world were updated and it was time to see the new site! But It Was ‘Broken’ I had never moved a website before, and in my rush to update the DNS, I had changed the records without really finding out what I was supposed to do first. After re-reading the directions provided by WP Engine and following the guidance of their support engineer, I realized I had needed to set the CNAME (Alias) ‘www’ record to point to a different URL than the ‘www.thatjeffsmith.com’ entry I had set. Once corrected the site was up and running in less than a minute. Then It Was Only Mostly Broken Many of my plugins weren’t working. Apparently just ftp’ing the wp-content directory up wasn’t the proper way to re-install the plugin. I suspect file permissions or file ownership wasn’t proper. Some plug-ins were working, many had their settings wiped to the defaults, and a few just didn’t work again. I had to delete the directory of the plug-in manually via SFTP, and then use the WP Dashboard to install it from scratch. And here was my first ‘lesson’ – don’t switch the DNS records until you’ve completely tested your new site. I wasn’t able to navigate the old WP console to review my plug-in settings. Thankfully I was able to use the Wayback Machine to reverse engineer some things, and of course most plug-ins aren’t that complicated to setup to begin with. An example of one that I had to redo from scratch is the ‘Twitter @Anywhere Plus’ plugin that I use to create the form that allows folks to tweet a post they enjoyed at the end of each story. How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me I actually signed up with another provider first. They ranked highly in Google searches and a few Tweeps recommended them to me. But hours after signing up and I still didn’t have sever reyady, I was ready to give up on them. They offered no chat or phone support – only mail and message boards. And the message boards were rife with posts about how the service had gone downhill in the past 6 months. To their credit, they did make it easy to cancel, although I did have to do so via email as their website ‘cancel’ button was non-existent. Within minutes of activating my WP Engine account I had received my welcome message and directions on how to get started. I was able to see my staged website right away. They also did something very cool before I even got started – they looked at my existing site and told me by how much they could improve its performance. The proof is in the web pudding. I like this for a few reasons, but primarily I liked their business model. It told me they knew what they were doing, and that they were willing to put their money where their mouth was. This was further evident by their 60-day money back guarantee. And if I understand it correctly, they don’t even take your money until after that 60 day period is over. After a day, I was welcomed by the WP Engine social media team, and was given the opportunity to subscribe to their newsletter and follow their account on Twitter. I noticed their Twitter team is sure to post regular WordPress tips several times a day. It’s not just an account that’s setup for the sake of having a Twitter presence. These little things add up and give me confidence in my decision to choose them as my hosting partner. ‘Partner’ – that’s a lot nicer word than just ‘service provider,’ isn’t it? Oh, and they offered me a t-shirt. Don’t ever doubt the power of a ‘free’ t-shirt! How awesome is this e-mail, from a customer perspective? I wasn’t really expecting any of this. Exceeding expectations before I have even handed over a single dollar seems like a pretty good business plan. This is how you treat customers. Love them to death, and they reward you with loyalty. But Jeff, You Skipped a Piece Here, Why WP Engine? I found them on one of those ‘Top 10′ list posts, and pulled up their webpage. I noticed they offered a specialized service – they host WordPress installs, and that’s it. Their servers are tuned specifically for running WordPress. They had in bolded text, things like ‘INSANELY FAST. INFINITELY SCALABLE.’ and ‘LIGHTNING SPEED.’ And then they offered insurance against hackers and they took care of automatic backups and restores. The only drawbacks I have noticed so far relate to plugins I used that have been ‘blacklisted.’ In order to guarantee that ‘lightning’ speed, they have banned the use of the CPU-suckiest plugins. One of those is the ‘Related Posts’ plugin. So if you are a subscriber and are reading this in your email, you’ll notice there’s no links back to my blog to continue reading other related stories. Since that referral traffic is very small single-digit for my site, I decided that I’m OK with that. I’d rather have the warp-speed page loads. Again, I think that will lead to higher traffic down the road. In 50+ days I will need to decide if WP Engine is a permanent solution. I’ll be sure to update this post when that time comes and let y’all know how it turns out.

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• The way I think about Diagnostic tools

  - by Daniel Moth

  Every software has issues, or as we like to call them "bugs". That is not a discussion point, just a mere fact. It follows that an important skill for developers is to be able to diagnose issues in their code. Of course we need to advance our tools and techniques so we can prevent bugs getting into the code (e.g. unit testing), but beyond designing great software, diagnosing bugs is an equally important skill. To diagnose issues, the most important assets are good techniques, skill, experience, and maybe talent. What also helps is having good diagnostic tools and what helps further is knowing all the features that they offer and how to use them. The following classification is how I like to think of diagnostics. Note that like with any attempt to bucketize anything, you run into overlapping areas and blurry lines. Nevertheless, I will continue sharing my generalizations ;-) It is important to identify at the outset if you are dealing with a performance or a correctness issue. If you have a performance issue, use a profiler. I hear people saying "I am using the debugger to debug a performance issue", and that is fine, but do know that a dedicated profiler is the tool for that job. Just because you don't need them all the time and typically they cost more plus you are not as familiar with them as you are with the debugger, doesn't mean you shouldn't invest in one and instead try to exclusively use the wrong tool for the job. Visual Studio has a profiler and a concurrency visualizer (for profiling multi-threaded apps). If you have a correctness issue, then you have several options - that's next :-) This is how I think of identifying a correctness issue Do you want a tool to find the issue for you at design time? The compiler is such a tool - it gives you an exact list of errors. Compilers now also offer warnings, which is their way of saying "this may be an error, but I am not smart enough to know for sure". There are also static analysis tools, which go a step further than the compiler in identifying issues in your code, sometimes with the aid of code annotations and other times just by pointing them at your raw source. An example is FxCop and much more in Visual Studio 11 Code Analysis. Do you want a tool to find the issue for you with code execution? Just like static tools, there are also dynamic analysis tools that instead of statically analyzing your code, they analyze what your code does dynamically at runtime. Whether you have to setup some unit tests to invoke your code at runtime, or have to manually run your app (and interact with it) under the tool, or have to use a script to execute your binary under the tool… that varies. The result is still a list of issues for you to address after the analysis is complete or a pause of the execution when the first issue is encountered. If a code path was not taken, no analysis for it will exist, obviously. An example is the GPU Race detection tool that I'll be talking about on the C++ AMP team blog. Another example is the MSR concurrency CHESS tool. Do you want you to find the issue at design time using a tool? Perform a code walkthrough on your own or with colleagues. There are code review tools that go beyond just diffing sources, and they help you with that aspect too. For example, there is a new one in Visual Studio 11 and searching with my favorite search engine yielded this article based on the Developer Preview. Do you want you to find the issue with code execution? Use a debugger - let’s break this down further next. This is how I think of debugging: There is post mortem debugging. That means your code has executed and you did something in order to examine what happened during its execution. This can vary from manual printf and other tracing statements to trace events (e.g. ETW) to taking dumps. In all cases, you are left with some artifact that you examine after the fact (after code execution) to discern what took place hoping it will help you find the bug. Learn how to debug dump files in Visual Studio. There is live debugging. I will elaborate on this in a separate post, but this is where you inspect the state of your program during its execution, and try to find what the problem is. More from me in a separate post on live debugging. There is a hybrid of live plus post-mortem debugging. This is for example what tools like IntelliTrace offer. If you are a tools vendor interested in the diagnostics space, it helps to understand where in the above classification your tool excels, where its primary strength is, so you can market it as such. Then it helps to see which of the other areas above your tool touches on, and how you can make it even better there. Finally, see what areas your tool doesn't help at all with, and evaluate whether it should or continue to stay clear. Even though the classification helps us think about this space, the reality is that the best tools are either extremely excellent in only one of this areas, or more often very good across a number of them. Another approach is to offer a toolset covering all areas, with appropriate integration and hand off points from one to the other. Anyway, with that brain dump out of the way, in follow-up posts I will dive into live debugging, and specifically live debugging in Visual Studio - stay tuned if that interests you. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• TFS API-Process Template currently applied to the Team Project

  - by Tarun Arora

  Download Demo Solution - here In this blog post I’ll show you how to use the TFS API to get the name of the Process Template that is currently applied to the Team Project. You can also download the demo solution attached, I’ve tested this solution against TFS 2010 and TFS 2011.    1. Connecting to TFS Programmatically I have a blog post that shows you from where to download the VS 2010 SP1 SDK and how to connect to TFS programmatically. private TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs; private string _selectedTeamProject;   TeamProjectPicker tfsPP = new TeamProjectPicker(TeamProjectPickerMode.SingleProject, false); tfsPP.ShowDialog(); this._tfs = tfsPP.SelectedTeamProjectCollection; this._selectedTeamProject = tfsPP.SelectedProjects[0].Name; 2. Programmatically get the Process Template details of the selected Team Project I’ll be making use of the VersionControlServer service to get the Team Project details and the ICommonStructureService to get the Project Properties. private ProjectProperty[] GetProcessTemplateDetailsForTheSelectedProject() { var vcs = _tfs.GetService<VersionControlServer>(); var ics = _tfs.GetService<ICommonStructureService>(); ProjectProperty[] ProjectProperties = null; var p = vcs.GetTeamProject(_selectedTeamProject); string ProjectName = string.Empty; string ProjectState = String.Empty; int templateId = 0; ProjectProperties = null; ics.GetProjectProperties(p.ArtifactUri.AbsoluteUri, out ProjectName, out ProjectState, out templateId, out ProjectProperties); return ProjectProperties; } 3. What’s the catch? The ProjectProperties will contain a property “Process Template” which as a value has the name of the process template. So, you will be able to use the below line of code to get the name of the process template. var processTemplateName = processTemplateDetails.Where(pt => pt.Name == "Process Template").Select(pt => pt.Value).FirstOrDefault();   However, if the process template does not contain the property “Process Template” then you will need to add it. So, the question becomes how do i add the Name property to the Process Template. Download the Process Template from the Process Template Manager on your local        Once you have downloaded the Process Template to your local machine, navigate to the Classification folder with in the template       From the classification folder open Classification.xml        Add a new property <property name=”Process Template” value=”MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0” />           4. Putting it all together… using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Drawing; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Windows.Forms; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server; using System.Diagnostics; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client; namespace TfsAPIDemoProcessTemplate { public partial class Form1 : Form { public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); } private TfsTeamProjectCollection _tfs; private string _selectedTeamProject; private void btnConnect_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { TeamProjectPicker tfsPP = new TeamProjectPicker(TeamProjectPickerMode.SingleProject, false); tfsPP.ShowDialog(); this._tfs = tfsPP.SelectedTeamProjectCollection; this._selectedTeamProject = tfsPP.SelectedProjects[0].Name; var processTemplateDetails = GetProcessTemplateDetailsForTheSelectedProject(); listBox1.Items.Clear(); listBox1.Items.Add(String.Format("Team Project Selected => '{0}'", _selectedTeamProject)); listBox1.Items.Add(Environment.NewLine); var processTemplateName = processTemplateDetails.Where(pt => pt.Name == "Process Template") .Select(pt => pt.Value).FirstOrDefault(); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(processTemplateName)) { listBox1.Items.Add(Environment.NewLine); listBox1.Items.Add(String.Format("Process Template Name: {0}", processTemplateName)); } else { listBox1.Items.Add(String.Format("The Process Template does not have the 'Name' property set up")); listBox1.Items.Add(String.Format("***TIP: Download the Process Template and in Classification.xml add a new property Name, update the template then you will be able to see the Process Template Name***")); listBox1.Items.Add(String.Format(" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -")); } } private ProjectProperty[] GetProcessTemplateDetailsForTheSelectedProject() { var vcs = _tfs.GetService<VersionControlServer>(); var ics = _tfs.GetService<ICommonStructureService>(); ProjectProperty[] ProjectProperties = null; var p = vcs.GetTeamProject(_selectedTeamProject); string ProjectName = string.Empty; string ProjectState = String.Empty; int templateId = 0; ProjectProperties = null; ics.GetProjectProperties(p.ArtifactUri.AbsoluteUri, out ProjectName, out ProjectState, out templateId, out ProjectProperties); return ProjectProperties; } } } Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Have you come across a better way of doing this, please share your experience here. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. Thank You! Share this post : CodeProject

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, February 09, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, February 09, 2011Popular ReleasesWatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.09.03: Whats NewAdded New Skin TagTastic http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/TagCloud-TagTastic-Skin.jpg Added New Skin RoundedButton http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/TagCloud-RoundedButton-Skin.jpg changes Tag Count fixed on Tag Source Referrals Fixed Tag Count when multiple Tag Sources are usedFolder Space Quota: com_folderspacequotaV1.1: Correct Language String settingWinXound: WinXound 3.4.x (Windows - OsX - Linux): Release Notes (3.4.x) for all platforms: New: Added an internal audio player (it is automatically called when rendering to an audio file or called by the user with Ctrl+P); New: Reimplemented the orc/sco file editor (and of course also the ability to convert them to the csd format) - The default open action can be changed in the settings; New: The new untitled or imported files are now automatically saved into a temporary directory (no more need to save them before to compile); New: Add...ExtremeML: ExtremeML v1.0 Beta 3: VS solution source code updated for compatibility with VS2010 (accommodates VS2010 breaking changes in T4 template support).People's Note: People's Note 0.23: Sorry for the long pause between updates — I had my hands full. Version 0.23 makes fairly significant improvements: A bug with local note deletion has been fixed. Synchronization has been improved. A single failed note no longer stops the whole process. Unsynchronized notes are now highlighted. Added an option to display notebook title; thanks to Vovansky for the idea. Text colour has been fixed for people whose default is not black; thanks to JZerr for pointing this out. Incorrect ...Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.1: This release adds a few more performance and graphical enhancements to 1.0. Switching desktops is now about as fast as you can blink. Desktop switching optimizations New welcome wizard for Vista/7 Fixed a few minor bugs Added a few more options to the options dialog (including ability to disable the taskbar switching)youtubeFisher: youtubeFisher 3.0 [beta]: What's new: Supports YouTube's new layout Complete internal refactoringNearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v5.0: Version 5.0 of the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing the following improvements: .NET 4.0 as target framework using ASP.NET MVC 3. All views migrated to Razor for cleaner markup. Alternate template (Layout file) for mobile devices 4 Bug Fixes since Version 4.1 Visit the project Roadmap for more details.fuv: 1.0 release, codename Chopper Joe: features: search/replace :o to open file :s to save file :q to quitASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager html generation optimized new features for the lookup (add additional search data ) live demo went aeroEnhSim: EnhSim 2.3.6 BETA: 2.3.6 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.06 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 Changes since 2.3.0 ...TestApi - a library of Test APIs: TestApi v0.6: TestApi v0.6 comes with the following changes: TestApi code development has been moved to Codeplex: Moved TestApi soluton to VS 2010; Moved all source code to Codeplex. All development work is done there now. Fault Injection API: Integrated the unmanaged FaultInjectionEngine.dll COM component in the build; Cleaned up FaultInjectionEngine.dll to build at warning level 4; Implemented “FaultScope” which allows for in-process fault injection; Added automation scripts & sample program; ...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.5: AutoChat now allows up to 6 items. Items with nr. 7-0 will be removed! News page url's are now opened in the default browser Added a context menu to the system tray icon (thanks to Alex Banagos) AutoChat now allows configuring the Chat Keys and the Modifier Key The recent files list now supports compact and full mode Fix: Swapped mouse buttons are now properly detected Fix: Sometimes the Play button was pressed while still greyed out Champion: Karma Note: You can also run the u...mojoPortal: 2.3.6.2: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2362-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Rawr: Rawr 4.0.19 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...IronRuby: 1.1.2: IronRuby 1.1.2 is a servicing release that keeps on improving compatibility with Ruby 1.9.2 and includes IronRuby integration to Visual Studio 2010. We decided to drop 1.8.6 compatibility mode in all post-1.0 releases. We recommend using IronRuby 1.0 if you need 1.8.6 compatibility. In this release we fixed several major issues: - problems that blocked Gem installation in certain cases - regex syntax: the parser was replaced with a new one that is much more compatible with Ruby 1.9.2 - cras...MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 (4): There was a small issue with the previous release that caused errors when installing the templates in VS10 Express. This release corrects the error. Only use this if you encountered issues when installing the previous release. No changes in the binaries.Facebook C# SDK: 5.0.2 (BETA): PLEASE TAKE A FEW MINUTES TO GIVE US SOME FEEDBACK: Facebook C# SDK Survey This is third BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. This release contains some breaking changes. Particularly with authentication. After spending time reviewing the trouble areas that people are having using th...ASP.NET MVC SiteMap provider: MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 for MVC3: Using NuGet?MvcSiteMapProvider is also listed in the NuGet feed. Learn more... Like the project? Consider a donation!Donate via PayPal via PayPal. ChangelogTargeting ASP.NET MVC 3 and .NET 4.0 Additional UpdatePriority options for generating XML sitemaps Allow to specify target on SiteMapTitleAttribute One action with multiple routes and breadcrumbs Medium Trust optimizations Create SiteMapTitleAttribute for setting parent title IntelliSense for your sitemap with MvcSiteMapSchem...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab consists of six labs: one for logging, one for service location, and four for application setting manager. Each lab takes about 20 minutes to walk through. Each lab consists of a PDF document. You can go through the steps in the doc to create solution and then build/deploy the solution and run the lab. For those of you who wants to save the time, we included the final solution so you can just build/deploy the solution and run the lab.New Projects.NET Proxy (netProxy): ASP.NET and Javascript proxies for accessing external content. The ASPX file can be used for returning external content over the current channel (HTTP/SSL). Used with the ASPX, the JS file can provide remote server access (no "same origin policy") with XMLHttpRequest syntax.CalCheck: CalCheck is a Calendar Checking Tool for Outlook. It opens the default Calendar and checks the items in the calendar for known problems, and for certain logic problems, etc.CBM11: CBM11 makes use of the Cosmos C# operating system project, and 6502 CPU emulation code, to provide an bootable 6502 CPU environment, complete with simulated RAM, and a built-in ML monitor.Ela, functional language: Ela is a modern functional programming language that runs on CLR and Mono. It's developed in C#.Framework for Image Processing: This is small framework of image processing tools.fuv: fuv is a programmer's editor that is an excellent replacement for vim. *All* editing is done by searching and replacing over the existing text, using regular expressions.HD44780-compatible Character LCD class: LCD class for .NET Micro Framework provides everything needed to work with HD44780-compatible Character LCD.Home Budget Planner: Home Budget PlannerMath training program: The math training program. Great for kids who started to learn addition and multiplication tables. Easy interface, friendly design. Features timer. Number of equations and a math sign are set up by user. It's developed in C#.Mefisto.NET CMS: Mefisto.NET CMS is a project of CMS, developped in ASP.NET MVC3, coupled with MEF and ENTITY FRAMEWORK. This project is respectful of good practice: - accessible - based on jquery - using css - expandable with mef Now you're interested, contact me !MongoMapper: A .NET Object Mapper for MongoDB over MongoDB C# DriverMoshpit: A companion WP7 app for Microsoft Student Partners and students interested in everything Microsoft has to offer in the Academic space.myproject_0023: test firstNonHealthServicePageSample: NonHealthServicePageSample shows how to create a HealthVault Online application without deriving from HealthServicePage. This is developed in C#.Pokemon Battle System: A battle system for a roleplaying forums. Putting Data in Cold Storage with Windows Azure Table: Historical records and blobs are two examples of data that aren't necessarily kept in relational storage forever. Use Windows Azure Table to put "completed" records into cold storage. See a detailed explanation of this C# project at: http://tinyurl.com/4ocy2aj.Python library to read/write ooxml document files: Python library to read/write ooxml document filesRemoteLogMonitor: A tool which can monitor logs in remote computer realtimeRetete: Aplicatia gestioneaza stocul unui restaurant pe baza de retete. Materia prima este introdusa in sistem prin receptii si inventar, iar la vanzare este consumata in functie de retetele configurate. Vanzarile pot fi inregistrate pe o casa de marcat folosind driver-ul DocPrint. SilverDiagram Extensions: Tutorials, utilities and samples for Silver Diagram, a fast and extendable client framework for diagrams.SoPrism: SoPrism is a Solution Visual Studio Template using best practices to build a Silverlight composite application. This template generate a full Silverlight application based on a solid architecture including the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern and PRISM framework.TempProject: Temp project hostingWCF Data Services Toolkit: The WCF Data Services Toolkit is a set of extensions to WCF Data Services (the .NET implementation of OData) that attempt to make it easier to create OData services on top of arbitrary data stores without having deep knowledge of LINQ.Web Browser BOT.NET: To automate to manipulate form using .NET codeZombie Blogger: Zombie Blog Engine

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• 7u10: JavaFX packaging tools update

  - by igor

  Last weeks were very busy here in Oracle. JavaOne 2012 is next week. Come to see us there! Meanwhile i'd like to quickly update you on recent developments in the area of packaging tools. This is an area of ongoing development for the team, and we are  continuing to refine and improve both the tools and the process. Thanks to everyone who shared experiences and suggestions with us. We are listening and fixed many of reported issues. Please keep them coming as comments on the blog or (even better) file issues directly to the JIRA. In this post i'll focus on several new packaging features added in JDK 7 update 10: Self-Contained Applications: Select Java Runtime to bundle Self-Contained Applications: Create Package without Java Runtime Self-Contained Applications: Package non-JavaFX application Option to disable proxy setup in the JavaFX launcher Ability to specify codebase for WebStart application Option to update existing jar file Self-Contained Applications: Specify application icon Self-Contained Applications: Pass parameters on the command line All these features and number of other important bug fixes are available in the developer preview builds of JDK 7 update 10 (build 8 or later). Please give them a try and share your feedback! Self-Contained Applications: Select Java Runtime to bundle Packager tools in 7u6 assume current JDK (based on java.home property) is the source for embedded runtime. This is useful simplification for many scenarios but there are cases where ability to specify what to embed explicitly is handy. For example IDE may be using fixed JDK to build the project and this is not the version you want to bundle into your application. To make it more flexible we now allow to specify location of base JDK explicitly. It is optional and if you do not specify it then current JDK will be used (i.e. this change is fully backward compatible). New 'basedir' attribute was added to <fx:platform> tag. Its value is location of JDK to be used. It is ok to point to either JRE inside the JDK or JDK top level folder. However, it must be JDK and not JRE as we need other JDK tools for proper packaging and it must be recent version of JDK that is bundled with JavaFX (i.e. Java 7 update 6 or later). Here are examples (<fx:platform> is part of <fx:deploy> task): <fx:platform basedir="${java.home}"/> <fx:platform basedir="c:\tools\jdk7"/> Hint: this feature enables you to use packaging tools from JDK 7 update 10 (and benefit from bug fixes and other features described below) to create application package with bundled FCS version of JRE 7 update 6. Self-Contained Applications: Create Package without Java Runtime This may sound a bit puzzling at first glance. Package without embedded Java Runtime is not really self-contained and obviously will not help with: Deployment on fresh systems. JRE need to be installed separately (and this step will require admin permissions). Possible compatibility issues due to updates of system runtime. However, these packages are much much smaller in size. If download size matters and you are confident that user have recommended system JRE installed then this may be good option to consider if you want to improve user experience for install and launch. Technically, this is implemented as an extension of previous feature. Pass empty string as value for 'basedir' attribute and this will be treated as request to not bundle Java runtime, e.g. <fx:platform basedir=""/> Self-Contained Applications: Package non-JavaFX application One of popular questions people ask about self-contained applications - can i package my Java application as self-contained application? Absolutely. This is true even for tools shipped with JDK 7 update 6. Simply follow steps for creating package for Swing application with integrated JavaFX content and they will work even if your application does not use JavaFX. What's wrong with it? Well, there are few caveats: bundle size is larger because JavaFX is bundled whilst it is not really needed main application jar needs to be packaged to comply to JavaFX packaging requirements(and this may be not trivial to achieve in your existing build scripts) javafx application launcher may not work well with startup logic of your application (for example launcher will initialize networking stack and this may void custom networking settings in your application code) In JDK 7 update 6 <fx:deploy> was updated to accept arbitrary executable jar as an input. Self-contained application package will be created preserving input jar as-is, i.e. no JavaFX launcher will be embedded. This does not help with first point above but resolves other two. More formally following assertions must be true for packaging to succeed: application can be launched as "java -jar YourApp.jar" from the command line  mainClass attribute of <fx:application> refers to application main class <fx:resources> lists all resources needed for the application To give you an example lets assume we need to create a bundle for application consisting of 3 jars:     dist/javamain.jar     dist/lib/somelib.jar    dist/morelibs/anotherlib.jar where javamain.jar has manifest with      Main-Class: app.Main     Class-Path: lib/somelib.jar morelibs/anotherlib.jar Here is sample ant code to package it: <target name="package-bundle"> <taskdef resource="com/sun/javafx/tools/ant/antlib.xml" uri="javafx:com.sun.javafx.tools.ant" classpath="${javafx.tools.ant.jar}"/> <fx:deploy nativeBundles="all" width="100" height="100" outdir="native-packages/" outfile="MyJavaApp"> <info title="Sample project" vendor="Me" description="Test built from Java executable jar"/> <fx:application id="myapp" version="1.0" mainClass="app.Main" name="MyJavaApp"/> <fx:resources> <fx:fileset dir="dist"> <include name="javamain.jar"/> <include name="lib/somelib.jar"/> <include name="morelibs/anotherlib.jar"/> </fx:fileset> </fx:resources> </fx:deploy> </target> Option to disable proxy setup in the JavaFX launcher Since JavaFX 2.2 (part of JDK 7u6) properly packaged JavaFX applications  have proxy settings initialized according to Java Runtime configuration settings. This is handy for most of the application accessing network with one exception. If your application explicitly sets networking properties (e.g. socksProxyHost) then they must be set before networking stack is initialized. Proxy detection will initialize networking stack and therefore your custom settings will be ignored. One way to disable proxy setup by the embedded JavaFX launcher is to pass "-Djavafx.autoproxy.disable=true" on the command line. This is good for troubleshooting (proxy detection may cause significant startup time increases if network is misconfigured) but not really user friendly. Now proxy setup will be disabled if manifest of main application jar has "JavaFX-Feature-Proxy" entry with value "None". Here is simple example of adding this entry using <fx:jar> task: <fx:jar destfile="dist/sampleapp.jar"> <fx:application refid="myapp"/> <fx:resources refid="myresources"/> <fileset dir="build/classes"/> <manifest> <attribute name="JavaFX-Feature-Proxy" value="None"/> </manifest> </fx:jar> Ability to specify codebase for WebStart application JavaFX applications do not need to specify codebase (i.e. absolute location where application code will be deployed) for most of real world deployment scenarios. This is convenient as application does not need to be modified when it is moved from development to deployment environment. However, some developers want to ensure copies of their application JNLP file will redirect to master location. This is where codebase is needed. To avoid need to edit JNLP file manually <fx:deploy> task now accepts optional codebase attribute. If attribute is not specified packager will generate same no-codebase files as before. If codebase value is explicitly specified then generated JNLP files (including JNLP content embedded into web page) will use it.  Here is an example: <fx:deploy width="600" height="400" outdir="Samples" codebase="http://localhost/codebaseTest" outfile="TestApp"> .... </fx:deploy> Option to update existing jar file JavaFX packaging procedures are optimized for new application that can use ant or command line javafxpackager utility. This may lead to some redundant steps when you add it to your existing build process. One typical situation is that you might already have a build procedure that produces executable jar file with custom manifest. To properly package it as JavaFX executable jar you would need to unpack it and then use javafxpackager or <fx:jar> to create jar again (and you need to make sure you pass all important details from your custom manifest). We added option to pass jar file as an input to javafxpackager and <fx:jar>. This simplifies integration of JavaFX packaging tools into existing build  process as postprocessing step. By the way, we are looking for ways to simplify this further. Please share your suggestions! On the technical side this works as follows. Both <fx:jar> and javafxpackager will attempt to update existing jar file if this is the only input file. Update process will add JavaFX launcher classes and update the jar manifest with JavaFX attributes. Your custom attributes will be preserved. Update could be performed in place or result may be saved to a different file. Main-Class and Class-Path elements (if present) of manifest of input jar file will be used for JavaFX application  unless they are explicitly overriden in the packaging command you use. E.g. attribute mainClass of <fx:application> (or -appclass in the javafxpackager case) overrides existing Main-Class in the jar manifest. Note that class specified in the Main-Class attribute could either extend JavaFX Application or provide static main() method. Here are examples of updating jar file using javafxpackager: Create new JavaFX executable jar as a copy of given jar file javafxpackager -createjar -srcdir dist -srcfiles fish_proto.jar -outdir dist -outfile fish.jar  Update existing jar file to be JavaFX executable jar and use test.Fish as main application class javafxpackager -createjar -srcdir dist -appclass test.Fish -srcfiles fish.jar -outdir dist -outfile fish.jar  And here is example of using <fx:jar> to create new JavaFX executable jar from the existing fish_proto.jar: <fx:jar destfile="dist/fish.jar"> <fileset dir="dist"> <include name="fish_proto.jar"/> </fileset> </fx:jar> Self-Contained Applications: Specify application icon The only way to specify application icon for self-contained application using tools in JDK 7 update 6 is to use drop-in resources. Now this bug is resolved and you can also specify icon using <fx:icon> tag. Here is an example: <fx:deploy ...> <fx:info> <fx:icon href="default.png"/> </fx:info> ... </fx:deploy> Few things to keep in mind: Only default kind of icon is applicable to self-contained applications (as of now) Icon should follow platform specific rules for sizes and image format (e.g. .ico on Windows and .icns on Mac) Self-Contained Applications: Pass parameters on the command line JavaFX applications support two types of application parameters: named and unnamed (see the API for Application.Parameters). Static named parameters can be added to the application package using <fx:param> and unnamed parameters can be added using <fx:argument>. They are applicable to all execution modes including standalone applications. It is also possible to pass parameters to a JavaFX application from a Web page that hosts it, using <fx:htmlParam>.  Prior to JavaFX 2.2, this was only supported for embedded applications. Starting from JavaFX 2.2, <fx:htmlParam> is applicable to Web Start applications also. See JavaFX deployment guide for more details on this. However, there was no way to pass dynamic parameters to the self-contained application. This has been improved and now native launchers will  delegate parameters from command line to the application code. I.e. to pass parameter to the application you simply need to run it as "myapp.exe somevalue" and then use getParameters().getUnnamed().get(0) to get "somevalue".

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• Helping install mrcwa and solve problems with f2py in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

  - by user288160

  I am sorry if this is the wrong section but I am starting to get desperate, please someone help me... I need to install the program mrcwa-20080820 (sourceforge.net/projects/mrcwa/) because a summer project that I am involved. I need to use it together with anaconda (store.continuum.io/cshop/anaconda/), I already installed Anaconda and apparently it is working. When I type: conda --version I got the expected answer. conda 3.5.2 If I tried to import numpy or scipy with python or simple type f2py there are no errors. So far so good. But when I tried to install this program sudo python setup.py install I got these errors: running install running build sh: 1: f2py: not found cp: cannot stat ‘mrcwaf.so’: No such file or directory running build_py running install_lib running install_egg_info Removing /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mrcwa-20080820.egg-info Writing /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/mrcwa-20080820.egg-info Obs: I am trying to use intel fortran 64-bits and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. So I was checking f2py and tried to execute the program hello world f2py -c -m hello hello.f from here: cens.ioc.ee/projects/f2py2e/index.html#usage and I had some problems too: running build running config_cc unifing config_cc, config, build_clib, build_ext, build commands --compiler options running config_fc unifing config_fc, config, build_clib, build_ext, build commands --fcompiler options running build_src build_src building extension "hello" sources f2py options: [] f2py:> /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/hellomodule.c creating /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7 Reading fortran codes... Reading file 'hello.f' (format:fix,strict) Post-processing... Block: hello Block: foo Post-processing (stage 2)... Building modules... Building module "hello"... Constructing wrapper function "foo"... foo(a) Wrote C/API module "hello" to file "/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7 /hellomodule.c" adding '/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/fortranobject.c' to sources. adding '/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7' to include_dirs. copying /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/f2py/src/fortranobject.c -> /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7 copying /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/f2py/src/fortranobject.h -> /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7 build_src: building npy-pkg config files running build_ext customize UnixCCompiler customize UnixCCompiler using build_ext customize Gnu95FCompiler Could not locate executable gfortran Could not locate executable f95 customize IntelFCompiler Found executable /opt/intel/composer_xe_2013_sp1.3.174/bin/intel64/ifort customize LaheyFCompiler Could not locate executable lf95 customize PGroupFCompiler Could not locate executable pgfortran customize AbsoftFCompiler Could not locate executable f90 Could not locate executable f77 customize NAGFCompiler customize VastFCompiler customize CompaqFCompiler Could not locate executable fort customize IntelItaniumFCompiler customize IntelEM64TFCompiler customize IntelEM64TFCompiler customize IntelEM64TFCompiler using build_ext building 'hello' extension compiling C sources C compiler: gcc -pthread -fno-strict-aliasing -g -O2 -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fPIC creating /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/tmp creating /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3 creating /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7 compile options: '-I/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7 -I/home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include -I/home/felipe/anaconda/include/python2.7 -c' gcc: /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/hellomodule.c In file included from /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/ndarraytypes.h:1761:0, from /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/ndarrayobject.h:17, from /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/arrayobject.h:4, from /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/fortranobject.h:13, from /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/hellomodule.c:17: /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/npy_1_7_deprecated_api.h:15:2: warning: #warning "Using deprecated NumPy API, disable it by " "#defining NPY_NO_DEPRECATED_API NPY_1_7_API_VERSION" [-Wcpp] #warning "Using deprecated NumPy API, disable it by " \ ^ gcc: /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/fortranobject.c In file included from /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/ndarraytypes.h:1761:0, from /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/ndarrayobject.h:17, from /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/arrayobject.h:4, from /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/fortranobject.h:13, from /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/fortranobject.c:2: /home/felipe/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/npy_1_7_deprecated_api.h:15:2: warning: #warning "Using deprecated NumPy API, disable it by " "#defining NPY_NO_DEPRECATED_API NPY_1_7_API_VERSION" [-Wcpp] #warning "Using deprecated NumPy API, disable it by " \ ^ compiling Fortran sources Fortran f77 compiler: /opt/intel/composer_xe_2013_sp1.3.174/bin/intel64/ifort -FI -fPIC -xhost -openmp -fp-model strict Fortran f90 compiler: /opt/intel/composer_xe_2013_sp1.3.174/bin/intel64/ifort -FR -fPIC -xhost -openmp -fp-model strict Fortran fix compiler: /opt/intel/composer_xe_2013_sp1.3.174/bin/intel64/ifort -FI -fPIC -xhost -openmp -fp-model strict compile options: '-I/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7 -I/home/felipe/.local /lib/python2.7/site-packages/numpy/core/include -I/home/felipe/anaconda/include/python2.7 -c' ifort:f77: hello.f /opt/intel/composer_xe_2013_sp1.3.174/bin/intel64/ifort -shared -shared -nofor_main /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/hellomodule.o /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3 /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/src.linux-x86_64-2.7/fortranobject.o /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3/hello.o -L/home/felipe /anaconda/lib -lpython2.7 -o ./hello.so Removing build directory /tmp/tmpf8P4Y3 Please help me I am new in ubuntu and python. I really need this program, my advisor is waiting an answer. Thank you very much, Felipe Oliveira.

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• User Experience Fundamentals

  - by ultan o'broin

  Understanding what user experience means in the modern work environment is central to building great-looking usable applications on the desktop or mobile devices. What better place to start a series of blog posts on such Applications User Experience team enablement for customers and partners than by sharing what the term really means, writes team member Karen Scipi. Applications UX have gained valuable insights into developing a user experience that reflects the experience of today’s worker. We have observed real workers performing real tasks in real work environments, and we have developed a set of new standards of application design that have been scientifically proven to be beneficial to enable today’s workers. We share such expertise to enable our customers and partners to benefit from our insights and to further their return on investment when building Oracle applications. So, What is User Experience? ?The user interface (UI) is about the on-screen user context provided by the layout of widgets (such as icons, fields, and buttons and more) and the visual impact of colors, typographic choices, and so on. The UI comprises the “look and feel” of the application that users interact with, and reflects, in essence, the most immediate aspects of usability we can now all relate to.  User experience, on the other hand, is about understanding the whole context of the world of work, how workers go about completing tasks, crossing all sorts of boundaries along the way. It is a study of how business processes and workers goals coincide, how users work with technology or other tools to get their jobs done, their interactions with other users, and their response to the technical, physical, and cultural environment around them. User experience is all about how users work—their work environments, office layouts, desk tools, types of devices, their working day, and more. Even their job aids, such as sticky notes, offer insight for UX innovation. User experience matters because businesses needs to be efficient, work must be productive, and users now demand to be satisfied by the applications they work with. In simple terms, tasks finished quickly and accurately for a business evokes organization and worker satisfaction, which in turn makes workers feel good and more than willing to use the application again tomorrow. Design Principles for the Enterprise Worker The consumerization of information technology has raised the bar for enterprise applications. Applications must be consistent, simple, intuitive, but above all contextual, reflecting how and when workers work, in the office or on the go. For example, the Google search experience with its type-ahead keyword-prompting feature is how workers expect to be able to discover enterprise information, too. Type-ahead in PeopleSoft 9.1 To build software that enables workers to be productive, our design principles meet modern work requirements about consistency, with well-organized, context-driven information, geared for a working world of discovery and collaboration. Our applications must also behave in a simple, web-like way just like Amazon, Google, and Apple products that workers use at home or on the go. Our user experience must also reflect workers’ needs for flexibility and well-loved enterprise practices such as using popular desktop tools like Microsoft Excel or Outlook as required. Building User Experience Productively The building blocks of Oracle Fusion Applications are the user experience design patterns. Based on the Oracle Fusion Middleware technology used to build Oracle Fusion Applications, the patterns are reusable solutions to common usability challenges that ADF developers typically face as they build applications, extensions, and integrations. Developers use the patterns as part of their Oracle toolkits to realize great usability consistently and in a productive way. Our design pattern creation process is informed by user experience research and science, an understanding of our technology’s capabilities, the demands for simplification and intuitiveness from users, and the best of Oracle’s acquisitions strategy (an injection of smart people and smart innovation). The patterns are supported by usage guidelines and are tested in our labs and assembled into a library of proven resources we used to build own Oracle Fusion Applications and other Oracle applications user experiences. The design patterns library is now available to the ADF community and to our partners and customers, for free. Developers with ADF skills and other technology skills can now offer more than just coding and functionality and still use the best in enterprise methodologies to ensure that a great user experience is easily applied, scaled, and maintained, whether it be for SaaS or on-premise deployments for Oracle Fusion Applications, for applications coexistence, or for partner integrations scenarios.  Oracle partners and customers already using our design patterns to build solutions and win business in smart and productive ways are now sharing their experiences and insights on pattern use to benefit your entire business. Applications UX is going global with the message and the means. Our hands-on user experience enablement through ADF  is expanding. So, stay tuned to Misha Vaughan's Voice of User Experience (VOX) blog and follow along on Twitter at @usableapps for news of outreach events and other learning opportunities. Interested in Learning More? Oracle Fusion Applications User Experience Patterns and Guidelines Library Shout-outs for Oracle UX Design Patterns Oracle Fusion Applications User Experience Design Patterns: Productivity Realized

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• .NET Security Part 2

  - by Simon Cooper

  So, how do you create partial-trust appdomains? Where do you come across them? There are two main situations in which your assembly runs as partially-trusted using the Microsoft .NET stack: Creating a CLR assembly in SQL Server with anything other than the UNSAFE permission set. The permissions available in each permission set are given here. Loading an assembly in ASP.NET in any trust level other than Full. Information on ASP.NET trust levels can be found here. You can configure the specific permissions available to assemblies using ASP.NET policy files. Alternatively, you can create your own partially-trusted appdomain in code and directly control the permissions and the full-trust API available to the assemblies you load into the appdomain. This is the scenario I’ll be concentrating on in this post. Creating a partially-trusted appdomain There is a single overload of AppDomain.CreateDomain that allows you to specify the permissions granted to assemblies in that appdomain – this one. This is the only call that allows you to specify a PermissionSet for the domain. All the other calls simply use the permissions of the calling code. If the permissions are restricted, then the resulting appdomain is referred to as a sandboxed domain. There are three things you need to create a sandboxed domain: The specific permissions granted to all assemblies in the domain. The application base (aka working directory) of the domain. The list of assemblies that have full-trust if they are loaded into the sandboxed domain. The third item is what allows us to have a fully-trusted API that is callable by partially-trusted code. I’ll be looking at the details of this in a later post. Granting permissions to the appdomain Firstly, the permissions granted to the appdomain. This is encapsulated in a PermissionSet object, initialized either with no permissions or full-trust permissions. For sandboxed appdomains, the PermissionSet is initialized with no permissions, then you add permissions you want assemblies loaded into that appdomain to have by default: PermissionSet restrictedPerms = new PermissionSet(PermissionState.None); // all assemblies need Execution permission to run at all restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new SecurityPermission(SecurityPermissionFlag.Execution)); // grant general read access to C:\config.xml restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.Read, @"C:\config.xml")); // grant permission to perform DNS lookups restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new DnsPermission(PermissionState.Unrestricted)); It’s important to point out that the permissions granted to an appdomain, and so to all assemblies loaded into that appdomain, are usable without needing to go through any SafeCritical code (see my last post if you’re unsure what SafeCritical code is). That is, partially-trusted code loaded into an appdomain with the above permissions (and so running under the Transparent security level) is able to create and manipulate a FileStream object to read from C:\config.xml directly. It is only for operations requiring permissions that are not granted to the appdomain that partially-trusted code is required to call a SafeCritical method that then asserts the missing permissions and performs the operation safely on behalf of the partially-trusted code. The application base of the domain This is simply set as a property on an AppDomainSetup object, and is used as the default directory assemblies are loaded from: AppDomainSetup appDomainSetup = new AppDomainSetup { ApplicationBase = @"C:\temp\sandbox", }; If you’ve read the documentation around sandboxed appdomains, you’ll notice that it mentions a security hole if this parameter is set correctly. I’ll be looking at this, and other pitfalls, that will break the sandbox when using sandboxed appdomains, in a later post. Full-trust assemblies in the appdomain Finally, we need the strong names of the assemblies that, when loaded into the appdomain, will be run as full-trust, irregardless of the permissions specified on the appdomain. These assemblies will contain methods and classes decorated with SafeCritical and Critical attributes. I’ll be covering the details of creating full-trust APIs for partial-trust appdomains in a later post. This is how you get the strongnames of an assembly to be executed as full-trust in the sandbox: // get the Assembly object for the assembly Assembly assemblyWithApi = ... // get the StrongName from the assembly's collection of evidence StrongName apiStrongName = assemblyWithApi.Evidence.GetHostEvidence<StrongName>(); Creating the sandboxed appdomain So, putting these three together, you create the appdomain like so: AppDomain sandbox = AppDomain.CreateDomain( "Sandbox", null, appDomainSetup, restrictedPerms, apiStrongName); You can then load and execute assemblies in this appdomain like any other. For example, to load an assembly into the appdomain and get an instance of the Sandboxed.Entrypoint class, implementing IEntrypoint, you do this: IEntrypoint o = (IEntrypoint)sandbox.CreateInstanceFromAndUnwrap( "C:\temp\sandbox\SandboxedAssembly.dll", "Sandboxed.Entrypoint"); // call method the Execute method on this object within the sandbox o.Execute(); The second parameter to CreateDomain is for security evidence used in the appdomain. This was a feature of the .NET 2 security model, and has been (mostly) obsoleted in the .NET 4 model. Unless the evidence is needed elsewhere (eg. isolated storage), you can pass in null for this parameter. Conclusion That’s the basics of sandboxed appdomains. The most important object is the PermissionSet that defines the permissions available to assemblies running in the appdomain; it is this object that defines the appdomain as full or partial-trust. The appdomain also needs a default directory used for assembly lookups as the ApplicationBase parameter, and you can specify an optional list of the strongnames of assemblies that will be given full-trust permissions if they are loaded into the sandboxed appdomain. Next time, I’ll be looking closer at full-trust assemblies running in a sandboxed appdomain, and what you need to do to make an API available to partial-trust code.

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• Demystified - BI in SharePoint 2010

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). Frequently, my clients ask me if there is a good guide on deciphering the seemingly daunting choice of products from Microsoft when it comes to business intelligence offerings in a SharePoint 2010 world. These are all described in detail in my book, but here is a one (well maybe two) page executive overview. Microsoft Excel: Yes, Microsoft Excel! Your favorite and most commonly used in the world database. No it isn’t a database in technical pure definitions, but this is the most commonly used ‘database’ in the world. You will find many business users craft up very compelling excel sheets with tonnes of logic inside them. Good for: Quick Ad-Hoc reports. Excel 64 bit allows the possibility of very large datasheets (Also see 32 bit vs 64 bit Office, and PowerPivot Add-In below). Audience: End business user can build such solutions. Related technologies: PowerPivot, Excel Services Microsoft Excel with PowerPivot Add-In: The powerpivot add-in is an extension to Excel that adds support for large-scale data. Think of this as Excel with the ability to deal with very large amounts of data. It has an in-memory data store as an option for Analysis services. Good for: Ad-hoc reporting and logic with very large amounts of data. Audience: End business user can build such solutions. Related technologies: Excel, and Excel Services Excel Services: Excel Services is a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 shared service that brings the power of Excel to SharePoint Server by providing server-side calculation and browser-based rendering of Excel workbooks. Thus, excel sheets can be created by end users, and published to SharePoint server – which are then rendered right through the browser in read-only or parameterized-read-only modes. They can also be accessed by other software via SOAP or REST based APIs. Good for: Sharing excel sheets with a larger number of people, while maintaining control/version control etc. Sharing logic embedded in excel sheets with other software across the organization via REST/SOAP interfaces Audience: End business users can build such solutions once your tech staff has setup excel services on a SharePoint server instance. Programmers can write software consuming functionality/complex formulae contained in your sheets. Related technologies: PerformancePoint Services, Excel, and PowerPivot. Visio Services: Visio Services is a shared service on the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 platform that allows users to share and view Visio diagrams that may or may not have data connected to them. Connected data can update these diagrams allowing a visual/graphical view into the data. The diagrams are viewable through the browser. They are rendered in silverlight, but will automatically down-convert to .png formats. Good for: Showing data as diagrams, live updating. Comes with a developer story. Audience: End business users can build such solutions once your tech staff has setup visio services on a SharePoint server instance. Developers can enhance the visualizations Related Technologies: Visio Services can be used to render workflow visualizations in SP2010 Reporting Services: SQL Server reporting services can integrate with SharePoint, allowing you to store reports and data sources in SharePoint document libraries, and render these reports and associated functionality such as subscriptions through a SharePoint site. In SharePoint 2010, you can also write reports against SharePoint lists (access services uses this technique). Good for: Showing complex reports running in a industry standard data store, such as SQL server. Audience: This is definitely developer land. Don’t expect end users to craft up reports, unless a report model has previously been published. Related Technologies: PerformancePoint Services PerformancePoint Services: PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint 2010 is now fully integrated with SharePoint, and comes with features that can either be used in the BI center site definition, or on their own as activated features in existing site collections. PerformancePoint services allows you to build reports and dashboards that target a variety of back-end datasources including: SQL Server reporting services, SQL Server analysis services, SharePoint lists, excel services, simple tables, etc. Using these you have the ability to create dashboards, scorecards/kpis, and simple reports. You can also create reports targeting hierarchical multidimensional data sources. The visual decomposition tree is a new report type that lets you quickly breakdown multi-dimensional data. Good for: Mostly everything :), except your wallet – it’s not free! But this is the most comprehensive offering. If you have SharePoint server, forget everything and go with performance point. Audience: Developers need to setup the back-end sources, manageability story. DBAs need to setup datawarehouses with cubes. Moderately sophisticated business users, or developers can craft up reports using dashboard designer which is a click-once App that deploys with PerformancePoint Related Technologies: Excel services, reporting services, etc.   Other relevant technologies to know about: Business Connectivity Services: Allows for consumption of external data in SharePoint as columns or external lists. This can be paired with one or more of the above BI offerings allowing insight into such data. Access Services: Allows the representation/publishing of an access database as a SharePoint 2010 site, leveraging many SharePoint features. Reporting services is used by Access services. Secure Store Service: The SP2010 Secure store service is a replacement for the SP2007 single sign on feature. This acts as a credential policeman providing credentials to various applications running with SharePoint. BCS, PerformancePoint Services, Excel Services, and many other apps use the SSS (Secure Store Service) for credential control. Comment on the article ....

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• Surface and the Uphill Battle to Win Over iPad Users (Namely: Me)

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I went away this past weekend and decided to bring along the Windows 8 tablet from the Build conference last year – y’know, to give Windows 8 a try in a typical scenario. I also brought our iPad 2 along since I figured my wife would want to use that. I’d love to tell you how I found using my Windows 8 tablet but I can’t – I used the iPad exclusively the entire weekend. It was during this that I realized what Microsoft needs to do to win me over as an iPad user. As you’ll see, I’m left wondering what it is that Surface is meant to compete with: iPad and other tablets, or thin laptops like the MacBook Air or Ultrabooks. Device Size I really like the size of the iPad compared with the Build tablet. It’s not as long and the thinness/weight of the device makes it feel more like you’re holding a magazine than a computer. I’m pleased that Microsoft will be matching the thinness of the iPad with Surface, but I’m suspect as to what that actually means. The iPad’s edges slant inwards where the Surface has a thicker boxish look (similar to the iPhone 4S). So while they may have the same depth at the deepest part of both devices, I bet the iPad will come off feeling thinner. However, its not lost on me the number of external port options the Surface’s design provides over the iPad (Usb, etc.). With that said, I haven’t missed having a USB slot on my iPad. I’m not a fan of lengthening the Surface screen size to almost a full inch over the iPad, mainly because… Vertical Orientation Experience Did you notice at the announce event, in the images of the devices that have been released, and in any marketing for it, that the surface is always displayed in horizontal orientation. This is a huge beef I have with my Build tablet and why I prefer the iPad. Yes the iPad can do the wide-screenish mode, but the iPad is oriented to be vertical by nature. Don’t agree? Look at the button and camera placement – both on the shorter sides of the device. Compare that with the Surface, where the orientation for the button and camera is on the longer sides. To be fair, Blackberry and the horde of Android tablets out there haven’t gotten this either – since most monitors are widescreen nowadays tablets should be too right? Wrong. Widescreen is great for certain things, but tasks such as reading is not one of them – hence why monitor companies like Dell provide stands that allow you to flip your widescreen monitor to a vertical orientation. That Microsoft has chosen a horizontal orientation by default for Windows 8 is disappointing – hopefully hardware manufacturers will be given the option of a default vertical orientation. Fast Startup Time I like that I can turn off/turn on the iPad very quickly. Even from a true “off” mode and not just sleeping, the iPad boots up very quickly. Windows RT needs to have that same quick response. If I start finding that I’m waiting for the device to boot up for more than 30 seconds that could be a show stopper. No Heat I really hate that the Build tablet has fans that kick in to cool the procs, but its basically a slate computer and I get its part of that prototype build. For Surface, it needs to be the same type of experience as the iPad – no heat! I know Surface doesn’t have fans and uses some cool new vent system or something like that, but even then – I want to sit and read a book on my Surface without having to feel any heat coming from the device, which is the experience I have with the iPad now. What About Apps?! I am definitely not the target client when it comes to app stores. On my iPad I use: Safari Kindle Reader Twitter App Settlers of Catan TSN’s App And that’s it. So really, while its nice that some version of Office might be available, I’m not planning on utilizing a Surface for creating a PowerPoint or working on a Word document – that’s what my laptop is for. I want my tablet to be for information snacking or as an e-reader and occasionally an entertainment device. Surface vs iPad or Surface vs Air? The more that I read up on Surface, the more I wonder if it won’t be a touch-enabled MacBook Air competitor more than an iPad one. Also, I really question if Microsoft gets tablets – when one of your main selling features is a built-in physical keyboard it speaks more to a traditional laptop experience than a tablet one that’s entirely reliant on touch. Still, I really love the Windows Phone interface – way more than iOS – so I’m still very optimistic that the Metro experience on the tablet will be fantastic. I just worry that Microsoft has interpreted a tablet as a computer with a removable keyboard and a touch screen, and that’s not what tablet computing is about at all.

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• Using Deployment Manager

  - by Jess Nickson

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

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, January 19, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, January 19, 2011Popular ReleasesAutoSPInstaller: AutoSPInstaller for SharePoint 2010 (v2 Beta): New package consisting of AutoSPInstaller v2 files. If you have not previously downloaded AutoSPInstaller, or are interested in the new functionality and format, this is the recommended release.MiniTwitter: 1.65: MiniTwitter 1.65 ???? ?? List ????? in-reply-to ???????? ????????????????????????? ?? OAuth ????????????????????????????iTracker Asp.Net Starter Kit: Version 3.0.0: This is the inital release of the version 3.0.0 Visual Studio 2010 (.Net 4.0) remake of the ITracker application. I connsider this a working, stable application but since there are still some features missing to make it "complete" I'm leaving it listed as a "beta" release. I am hoping to make it feature complete for v3.1.0 but anything is possible.mytrip.mvc (CMS & e-Commerce): mytrip.mvc 1.0.52.1 beta 2: New MVC3 RTM fix bug: Dropdown select fix bug: Add Store/Department and Add Store/Produser WEB.mytrip.mvc 1.0.52.1 Web for install hosting System Requirements: NET 4.0, MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) SRC.mytrip.mvc 1.0.52.1 System Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 or Web Deweloper 2010 MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) Connector/Net...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.6.1: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager changes: RenderView controller extension works for razor also live demo switched to razorBloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.3.1: - Priority update to resolve a bug that was causing Boss damage to ignore Blood Shields entirelyRawr: Rawr 4.0.16 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of this release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Tracker. W...MvcContrib: an Outer Curve Foundation project: MVC 3 - 3.0.51.0: Please see the Change Log for a complete list of changes. MVC BootCamp Description of the releases: MvcContrib.Release.zip MvcContrib.dll MvcContrib.TestHelper.dll MvcContrib.Extras.Release.zip T4MVC. The extra view engines / controller factories and other functionality which is in the project. This file includes the main MvcContrib assembly. Samples are included in the release. You do not need MvcContrib if you download the Extras.Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor for .Net: Version 1.5.0.0 - Jalthi: Updated solution to VS2010. New: Work Item #4450 - Optional MSBuild task parameter :: Do not error if no files were found. Fixed: Work Item #5028 - Output file encoding is the same as the optional MSBuild task encoding argument. Fixed: Work Item #5824 - MSBuilds where slow, after the first build due to the Current Thread being forced to en-gb, on none en-gb systems. Changed: Work Item #6873 - Project license changed from MS-PL to GPLv2. New: Added all the unit tests from the Java YU...N2 CMS: 2.1.1: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps you build great web sites that anyone can update. 2.1.1 Maintenance release List of changes 2.1 Major Changes Support for auto-implemented properties ({get;set;}, based on contribution by And Poulsen) File manager improvements (multiple file upload, resize images to fit) New image gallery Infinite scroll paging on news Content templates First time with N2? Try the demo site Download one of the template packs (above) and open...VidCoder: 0.8.1: Adds ability to choose an arbitrary range (in seconds or frames) to encode. Adds ability to override the title number in the output file name when enqueing multiple titles. Updated presets: Added iPhone 4, Apple TV 2, fixed some existing presets that should have had weightp=0 or trellis=0 on them. Added {parent} option to auto-name format. Use {parent:2} to refer to a folder 2 levels above the input file. Added {title:2} option to auto-name format. Adds leading zeroes to reach the sp...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks2008R2 without filestream: This download contains a version of the AdventureWorks2008R2 OLTP database without FILESTREAM properties. You do not need to have filestream enabled to attach this database. No additional schema or data changes have been made. To install the version of AdventureWorks2008R2 that includes filestream, use the SR1 installer available here. Prerequisites: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 must be installed. Full-Text Search must be enabled. Installing the AdventureWorks2008R2 OLTP database: 1. Cl...NuGet: NuGet 1.0 RTM: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. The URL to the package OData feed is: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669MVC Music Store: MVC Music Store v2.0: This is the 2.0 release of the MVC Music Store Tutorial. This tutorial is updated for ASP.NET MVC 3 and Entity Framework Code-First, and contains fixes and improvements based on feedback and common questions from previous releases. The main download, MvcMusicStore-v2.0.zip, contains everything you need to build the sample application, including A detailed tutorial document in PDF format Assets you will need to build the project, including images, a stylesheet, and a pre-populated databas...Fluent Validation for .NET: 2.0: Changes since 2.0 RC Fix typo in the name of FallbackAwareResourceAccessorBuilder Fix issue #7062 - allow validator selectors to work against nullable properties with overriden names. Fix error in German localization. Better support for client-side validation messages in MVC integration. All changes since 1.3 Allow custom MVC ModelValidators to be added to the FVModelValidatorProvider Support resource provider for custom property validators through the new IResourceAccessorBuilder ...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.3.2 ALPHA: 2.3.2 ALPHAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Quick update to ...??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2011-01-12: 2011???????All-In-One Code Framework（??） 2011?1??????！！http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ?????release?，???????ASP.NET, AJAX, WinForm, Windows Shell????13?Sample Code。???，??????????sample code。 ?????：http://blog.csdn.net/sjb5201/archive/2011/01/13/6135037.aspx ??，??????MSDN????????????。 http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/zh-CN/codezhchs/threads ?????????????????，??Email ????patterns & practices – Enterprise Library: Enterprise Library 5.0 - Extensibility Labs: This is a preview release of the Hands-on Labs to help you learn and practice different ways the Enterprise Library can be extended. Learning MapCustom exception handler (estimated time to complete: 1 hr 15 mins) Custom logging trace listener (1 hr) Custom configuration source (registry-based) (30 mins) System requirementsEnterprise Library 5.0 / Unity 2.0 installed SQL Express 2008 installed Visual Studio 2010 Pro (or better) installed AuthorsChris Tavares, Microsoft Corporation ...Orchard Project: Orchard 1.0: Orchard Release Notes Build: 1.0.20 Published: 1/12/2010 How to Install OrchardTo install Orchard using Web PI, follow these instructions: http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/Installing-Orchard.ashx Web PI will detect your hardware environment and install the application. --OR-- Alternatively, to install the release manually, download the Orchard.Web.1.0.20.zip file. http://orchardproject.net/docs/Manually-installing-Orchard-zip-file.ashx The zip contents are pre-built and ready-to-run...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.6.1: The Umbraco 4.6.1 (codename JUNO) release contains many new features focusing on an improved installation experience, a number of robust developer features, and contains nearly 200 bug fixes since the 4.5.2 release. Getting Started A great place to start is with our Getting Started Guide: Getting Started Guide: http://umbraco.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?DownloadId=197051 Make sure to check the free foundation videos on how to get started building Umbraco sites. They're ...New ProjectsBAM Service Generator: BizTalk BAM Service Generator is a command line to generate .NET 4.0 WCF services for BizTalk BAM activities. Don't Drink and Code Library: Don't Drink and Code Library is a collection of useful services to help you build functional websites and applications.F# Sample: Transportation Algorithm: Implementation of the transportation algorithm in F#.Fast Replace: This application replaces characters in big files in very fast way, by not loading the hole file in memory. Usuful because Microsoft's Word, Wordpad and Notepad cannot handle big files (more than 50 MB) very well, so replacing characters is a painful process.Hall: ????I Know: Post anonymous information online.jQuery Image Rotator Plugin: jQuery Image Rotator Plugin makes it easier for web developers to create a rotating display of images. You'll no longer have to write this logic on a case by case basis. It's developed in JavaScript using jQuery.MetaREST: MetaREST makes it easier for Web or Service Developers to publish REST Services using simple Class, Method and Parameters Attributes. You can publish your legacy business class as a REST Service in a couple of minutes. Multi-Project Templates with Wizard: Visual Studio 2010 Sample: This project shows you simple example of creating multi-project templates with wizard using Visual Studio 2010, which generates VSIX file. A VSIX file enables us to install Visual Studio extensions (tools, controls, template etc) with a single click.Orchard Contact Form: This project is to create an Orchard module that allows you to create one or more Contact Pages, alternatively you can assign a ContactForm as a content part or widget to an arbitrary page. Orchard LDAP module: Active directory authentication module for Orchard.ProcessDomain: ProcessDomain allows developers to isolate the execution of code in a separate process using similar semantics to that of AppDomain. It's developed in C# and the binaries can be used with .NET Framework 2.0 or later.QRCode Helper: This helper for WebMatrix and ASP.NET Web Pages allows you to easily display QR Code graph to your site. ????ASP.NET????QR?????????????????、WebMatrix ??? ASP.NET Web Pages ????????。QuantaOS: QuantaOS is a 32bit operating system, multitasking and GUI support is soon to be added. Written in C++ and assemblyShuttle Service Bus: Shuttle Service Bus is a free open-source software project that aims to provide an enterprise ready service bus without any restrictions.Socket Policy File Server: The socket policy file server is a simple TCP server that serves the socket policy file required by Adobe Flash Player for cross domain resource access. TibiaPinger: Tibia Pinger, Tools, Bot, ArkBot, Tibia, NeoBot, TibiaAuto, NG, ElfBotVingy - Visual Studio Instant Search Addin: A simple, but effective add in for Visual Studio 2010 so that you can search the web in a non intrusive way, and can filter results based on sources.

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• My Right-to-Left Foot (T-SQL Tuesday #13)

  - by smisner

  As a business intelligence consultant, I often encounter the situation described in this month's T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Steve Jones ( Blog | Twitter) – “What the Business Says Is Not What the  Business Wants.” Steve posed the question, “What issues have you had in interacting with the business to get your job done?” My profession requires me to have one foot firmly planted in the technology world and the other foot planted in the business world. I learned long ago that the business never says exactly what the business wants because the business doesn't have the words to describe what the business wants accurately enough for IT. Not only do technological-savvy barriers exist, but there are also linguistic barriers between the two worlds. So how do I cope? The adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" is particularly helpful when I'm called in to help design a new business intelligence solution. Many of my students in BI classes have heard me explain ("rant") about left-to-right versus right-to-left design. To understand what I mean about these two design options, let's start with a picture: When we design a business intelligence solution that includes some sort of traditional data warehouse or data mart design, we typically place the data sources on the left, the new solution in the middle, and the users on the right. When I've been called in to help course-correct a failing BI project, I often find that IT has taken a left-to-right approach. They look at the data sources, decide how to model the BI solution as a _______ (fill in the blank with data warehouse, data mart, cube, etc.), and then build the new data structures and supporting infrastructure. (Sometimes, they actually do this without ever having talked to the business first.) Then, when they show what they've built to the business, the business says that is not what we want. Uh-oh. I prefer to take a right-to-left approach. Preferably at the beginning of a project. But even if the project starts left-to-right, I'll do my best to swing it around so that we’re back to a right-to-left approach. (When circumstances are beyond my control, I carry on, but it’s a painful project for everyone – not because of me, but because the approach just doesn’t get to what the business wants in the most effective way.) By using a right to left approach, I try to understand what it is the business is trying to accomplish. I do this by having them explain reports to me, and explaining the decision-making process that relates to these reports. Sometimes I have them explain to me their business processes, or better yet show me their business processes in action because I need pictures, too. I (unofficially) call this part of the project "getting inside the business's head." This is starting at the right side of the diagram above. My next step is to start moving leftward. I do this by preparing some type of prototype. Depending on the nature of the project, this might mean that I simply mock up some data in a relational database and build a prototype report in Reporting Services. If I'm lucky, I might be able to use real data in a relational database. I'll either use a subset of the data in the prototype report by creating a prototype database to hold the sample data, or select data directly from the source. It all depends on how much data there is, how complex the queries are, and how fast I need to get the prototype completed. If the solution will include Analysis Services, then I'll build a prototype cube. Analysis Services makes it incredibly easy to prototype. You can sit down with the business, show them the prototype, and have a meaningful conversation about what the BI solution should look like. I know I've done a good job on the prototype when I get knocked out of my chair so that the business user can explore the solution further independently. (That's really happened to me!) We can talk about dimensions, hierarchies, levels, members, measures, and so on with something tangible to look at and without using those terms. It's not helpful to use sample data like Adventure Works or to use BI terms that they don't really understand. But when I show them their data using the BI technology and talk to them in their language, then they truly have a picture worth a thousand words. From that, we can fine tune the prototype to move it closer to what they want. They have a better idea of what they're getting, and I have a better idea of what to build. So right to left design is not truly moving from the right to the left. But it starts from the right and moves towards the middle, and once I know what the middle needs to look like, I can then build from the left to meet in the middle. And that’s how I get past what the business says to what the business wants.

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• BIP and Mapviewer Mash Up I

  - by Tim Dexter

  I was out in Yellowstone last week soaking up various wildlife and a bit too much rain ... good to be back until the 95F heat yesterday. Taking a little break from the Excel templates; the dev folks are planing an Excel patch in the next week or so that will add a mass of new functionality. At the risk of completely mis leading you I'm going to hang back a while. What I have written so far holds true and will continue to do so. This week, I have been mostly eating 'mapviewer' ... answers on a post card please, TV show and character. I had a request to show how BIP can call mapviewer and render a dynamic map in an output. So I hit the books and colleagues for some answers. Mapviewer is Oracle's geographic information system, hereby known as GIS. I use it a lot in our BIEE demos where the interaction with the maps is very impressive. Need a map of California and its congressional districts? I have contacts; Jerry and David with their little black box of maps. Once in my possession I can build highly interactive, clickable maps that allow the user to drill into more information using a very friendly interface driving BIEE content and navigation. But what about maps in BIP output? Bryan Wise, who has written some articles on this blog did some work a while back with the PL/SQL API interface. The extract for the report called a function that in turn called the mapviewer server, passing a set of mapping requirements, it then returned a URL to a cached copy of that map. Easy to then have BIP render that image. Thats still very doable. You need to install a couple of packages and then load the mapviewer java APIs into the database. Then you can write your function to the APIs. A little involved? Maybe, but the database is doing all the heavy lifting for you. I thought I would investigate another method for getting the maps back into BIP. There is a URL interface you can call, this involves building an XML message to be passed to the mapviewer server. It's pretty straightforward to use on the mapviewer side. On the BIP side things are little more tricksy. After some unexpected messing about I finally got the ubiquitous Hello World map to render using the URL method. Not the most exciting map in the world, lots of ocean and a rather long URL to get it to render. http://127.0.0.1:9704/mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=%3Cmap_request%20title=%22Hello%20World%22%20datasource=%22cagis%22%20format=%22GIF_STREAM%22/%3E Notice all of the encoding in the URL string to handle the spaces, quotes, etc. All necessary to get BIP to make the call to the mapviewer server correctly without truncating the URL if it hits a real space rather than a %20. With that in mind constructing the URL was pretty simple. I'm not going to get into the content of the URL too much, for that you need to bone up on the mapviewer XML API. Check out the home page here and the documentation here. To make the template portable I used the standard CURRENT_SERVER_URL parameter from the BIP server and declared that in my template. <?param@begin:CURRENT_SERVER_URL;'myserver'?> Ignore the 'myserver', that was just a dummy value for testing at runtime it will resolve to: 'http://yourserver:port/xmlpserver' Not quite what we need as mapviewer has its own server path, in my case I needed 'mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=' as the fixed path to the mapviewer request URL. A little concatenation and substringing later I came up with <?param@begin:mURL;concat(substring($CURRENT_SERVER_URL,1,22),'mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=')?> Thats the basic URL that I can then build on. To get the Hello World map I need to add the following: <map_request title="Hello World" datasource="cagis" format="GIF_STREAM"/> Those angle brackets were the source of my headache, BIPs XSLT engine was attempting to process them rather than just pass them. Hok Min to the rescue ... again. I owe him lunch when I get out to HQ again! To solve the problem, I needed to escape all the characters and white space and then use native XSL to assign the string to a parameter. <xsl:param xdofo:ctx="begin"name="pXML">%3Cmap_request%20title=%22Hello%20World%22 %20datasource=%22cagis%22%20format=%22GIF_STREAM%22/%3E</xsl:param> I did not need to assign it to a parameter but I felt that if I were going to do anything more serious than Hello World like plotting points of interest on the map. I would need to dynamically build the URL, so using a set of parameters or variables that I then concatenated would be easier. Now I had the initial server string and the request all I then did was combine the two using a concat: concat($mURL,$pXML) Embedding that into an image tag: <fo:external-graphic src="url({concat($mURL,$pXML)})"/> and I was done. Notice the curly braces to get the concat evaluated prior to the image call. As you will see next time, building the XML message to go onto the URL can get quite complex but I have used it with some data. Ultimately, it would be easier to build an extension to BIP to handle the data to be plotted, it would then build the XML message, call mapviewer and return a URL to the map image for BIP to render. More on that next time ...

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