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  • Adding a DLL to the GAC in Windows 7

    - by Jim Giercyk
    I recently created a DLL and I wanted to reference it from a project I was developing in Visual Studio.  In previous versions of Windows, doing so was simply a matter of dropping the DLL file in the C:\Windows\assembly folder.  That would add the DLL to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and make it accessible in Visual Studio.  However, as is often the case, Window 7 is different.  Even if you have Administrator privileges on your machine, you still do not have permission to drop a file in the assembly folder.  Undaunted, I thought about using the old DOS command line utility gacutil.exe.  Microsoft developed the tool as part of the .Net framework, and it is available in the Windows SDK Framework Tools.  If you have never used gacutil.exe before, you can find out everything you ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ex0ss12c(v=vs.80).aspx .  Unfortunately, if you do not have the Windows SDK loaded on your development machine, you will need to install it to use gacutil, but it is relatively quick and painless, and the framework tools are very useful.  Look here for your latest SDK: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/search.aspx?q=Windows%20SDK .   After installing the SDK, I tried installing my DLL to the GAC by running gacutil from a DOS command line: That’s odd.  Microsoft is shipping a tool that cannot be executed even with Administrator rights?  Let me stop here and say that I am by no means a Windows security expert, so I actually did contact my system administrators, and they were not sure how to fix the problem….there must be a super administrator access level, but it isn’t available to your average developer in my company.  The solution outlined here is working within the boundaries of a normal windows Administrator. So, now the hacker in me bubbles to the surface.  What if I were to create a simple BAT file containing the gacutil command?  It’s so crazy it just might work!  Ugh!  I was starting to think this would never work, but then I realized that simply executing a batch program did not change my level of access.  Typically in Windows 7, you would select the “Run As Administrator” option to temporarily act as an administrator for the purpose of executing a process.  However, that option is not available for BAT files run from the command line.  SOLUTION: Create a desktop shortcut to execute the BAT file, which in turn will execute the line command…..are you still with me?  I created a shortcut and pointed it to my batch file.  Theoretically, all I need to do now is right-click on the shortcut and select “Run As Administrator” and we’re good, right?  Well, kinda.  If you notice the syntax of my BAT file, the name of the DLL is passed in as a parameter.  Therefore, I either have to hard-code the file name in the BAT program (YUCK!!), or I can leave the parameter and drag the DLL file to the shortcut and drop it.  Sweet, drag-and-drop works for me…..but if I use the drag-and-drop method, there is no way for me to right-click and select “Run As Administrator”.  That is not a problem…..I simply have to adjust the properties of the shortcut I created and I am in business.  I Right-clicked on the shortcut and select “Properties”.  Under the “Shortcut” tab there is an “Advanced” button…..I clicked it. All I needed to do was check the “Run As Administrator” box: In summary, what I have done is create a BAT file to execute a command line utility, gacutil.exe.  Then, rather than executing the BAT file from the command line, I created a desktop shortcut to run it and set the shortcut properties to “Run As Administrator”.  This will effectively mean I am executing the command line utility with Administrator privileges.  Pretty sneaky. Now, when I drag the DLL file  over to the shortcut, it starts the BAT file and adds the DLL to the assembly cache.  I created another BAT file to remove a DLL from the GAC in case the need should arise.  The code for that is: Give it a try.  I can’t imagine why updating the GAC has been made into such a chore in Windows 7.  Hopefully there is a service pack in the works that will give developers the functionality they had in Windows XP, but in the meantime, this workaround is extremely useful.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, October 30, 2011

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, October 30, 2011Popular ReleasesKoober: Koober - The Ebook Creator 0.2: The official release of Koober as Open source. Koober is a ebook creator for Windows, and Koob Reader is the reader.?????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????VidCoder: 1.2.0: Updated to HandBrake svn 4311. Refactored to read in list of encoders from HandBrake itself. Added ffaac, FLAC audio and ffmpeg2 video. Reworked audio encoding UI: removed grid and gave each encoding more vertical space. Added audio quality targeting and compression. Added status messages. Added messages for a few events (encode start/stop, playing a preview clip, update available, update download finished). Made source and destination path UI elements smarter about what parts they cut ...patterns & practices: Enterprise Library Contrib: Enterprise Library Contrib - 5.0 (Oct 2011): This release of Enterprise Library Contrib is based on the Microsoft patterns & practices Enterprise Library 5.0 core and contains the following: Common extensionsTypeConfigurationElement<T> - A Polymorphic Configuration Element without having to be part of a PolymorphicConfigurationElementCollection. AnonymousConfigurationElement - A Configuration element that can be uniquely identified without having to define its name explicitly. Data Access Application Block extensionsMySql Provider - ...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2748: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, NetowrkMonitor_Parsers.msi continues to improve quality and fix bugs. It has included the fo...Duckworth Lewis Professional Edition Calculator: DLcalc 3.0: DLcalc 3.0 can perform Duckworth/Lewis Professional Edition calculations 100% accurately. It also produces over-by-over and ball-by-ball PAR score tables.Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 2.2.0.1: In this version: Custom Icons - now you can change the icons of the bookmarks. By default, whenever an image is added, the icon is automatically changed to a thumbnail of the picture. This can be turned off in the settings (Options... > Settings) Ability to remove items from the 'Recent' category Bugfixes - 'Choose' button in 'Edit Bookmark' now works Another bug fix: another problem in the 'Edit Bookmark' windowMedia Companion: MC 3.420b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Movies Fixed: Fanart and poster scraping issues TV Shows (Re)Added: Rebuild single show Fixed: Issue when shows are moved from original location Ability to handle " for actor nicknames Crash when episode name contains "<" (does not scrape yet) Clears fanart when switch...patterns & practices - Unity: Unity 3.0 for .NET4.5 Preview: The Unity 3.0.1026.0 Preview enables Unity to work on .NET 4.5 with both the WinRT and desktop profiles. The major changes include: Unity projects updated to target .NET 4.5. Dynamic build plans modified to use compiled lambda expressions instead of Reflection.Emit Converting reflection to use the new TypeInfo for reflection. Projects updated to work with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2011 Preview Notes/Known Issues: The Microsoft.Practices.Unity.UnityServiceLocator class cannot be use...Managed Extensibility Framework: MEF 2 Preview 4: Detailed information on this release is available on the BCL team blog.Image Converter: Image Converter 0.3: New Features: - English and German support Technical Improvements: - Microsoft All Rules using Code Analysis Planned Features for future release: 1. Unit testing 2. Command line interface 3. Automatic UpdatesAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.6: ?? ● AcDown??????????、??????,??????????????????????,???????Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、???、Tucao.cc、SF???、?????80????,???????????、?????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????,???,???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??,????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??:????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64),?????"?????????"??? ??????????????,??????????: ??"AcDown?????"????????? ?? v3.6?? ??“????”...Path Copy Copy: 8.0: New version that mostly adds lots of requested features: 11340 11339 11338 11337 This version also features a more elaborate Settings UI that has several tabs. I tried to add some notes to better explain the use and purpose of the various options. The Path Copy Copy documentation is also on the way, both to explain how to develop custom plugins and to explain how to pre-configure options if you're a network admin. Stay tuned.MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.0: Added: The new Client Blocks feaure of Views A new "move" js method for the TreeViews The NewHtmlCreated js event to the DataGrid Improved the ChoiceList structure that now allows also the selection list of a dropdown to be chosen with a lambda expression Improved the AcceptViewHintAttribute controller filter. Now a client can specify not only the name of a View or Partial View it prefers, but also to receive just the rough data in Json format. Now the the SMinimum and SMaximum par...Free SharePoint Master Pages: Buried Alive (Halloween) Theme: Release Notes *Created for Halloween, you will find theme file, custom css file and images. *Created by Al Roome @AlstarRoome Features: Custom styling for web part Custom background *Screenshot https://s3.amazonaws.com/kkhipple/post/sharepoint-showcase-halloween.pngDevForce Application Framework: DevForce AF 2.0.3 RTW: PrerequisitesWPF 4.0 Silverlight 4.0 DevForce 2010 6.1.3.1 Download ContentsDebug and Release Assemblies API Documentation Source code License.txt Requirements.txt Release HighlightsNew: EventAggregator event forwarding New: EntityManagerInterceptor<T> to intercept EntityManger events New: IHarnessAware to allow for ViewModel setup when executed inside of the Development Harness New: Improved design time stability New: Support for add-in development New: CoroutineFns.To...NicAudio: NicAudio 2.0.5: Minor change to accept special DTS stereo modes (LtRt, AB,...)NDepend TFS 2010 integration: version 0.5.0 beta 1: Only the activity and the VS plugin are avalaible right now. They basically work. Data types that are logged into tfs reports are subject to change. This is no big deal since data is not yet sent into the warehouse.Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone v1.3.1: Upgraded Windows Azure projects to Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 1.5 – September 2011 Upgraded the tools tools to support the Windows Phone Developer Tools RTW Update SQL Azure only scenarios to use ASP.NET Universal Providers (through the System.Web.Providers v1.0.1 NuGet package) Changed Shared Access Signature service interface to support more operations Refactored Blobs API to have a similar interface and usage to that provided by the Windows Azure SDK Stor...DotNetNuke® FAQ: 05.00.00: FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) 05.00.00 will work for any DNN version 5.6.1 and up. It is the first version which is rewritten in C#. The scope of this update is to fix all known issues and improve user interface. Please review and rate this release... (stars are welcome)BUG FIXESManage Categories button text was not localized Edit/Add FAQ Entry: button text was not localized ENHANCEMENTSAdded an option to select the control for category display: Listbox with checkboxes (flat category ...New ProjectsalphaCards: Digitale LernkarteiBinary Code Interpreter: The Binary Code Interpreter is a small and funny programming languaage. This interpreter works a bit like a Turing Machine.Buscar ciudades: This is the source code for the application "Buscar ciudades" published in the Windows Phone Marketplace. CamOnWeb - Componente para WebCam: Este projeto tem como objetivo o desenvolvimento um componente para captura e exibição de videos da webcam. Compare.Net: Compare.Net is a configurable application to compare and reconclie from different sources. C# WPF applcation targeting .Net 4CSGame: Academic project for our studies. Subject "Client -server technology"curbside: curbsideDanish Language Pack for Community Server: Danish Language Packs for Community Server 2.1 and 2007. At its inception, this project contains quite incomplete translations to Danish. This project provides a common resource where all interested parties can gradually improve on this language pack. Please join to improve the contents. The source code tree contains two major folders: One for Community Server 2.1 and one for Community Server 2007.Dependency Variable Lib: ??????????????????、?????????????????????。(???????、?????????????w) ???、「??×??=??」???????????????、????????、????????、???「??×??」????????????????????????????????????。 FreedBack: FreedBack allows you to quickly and easily embed a configurable feedback form into any web application. It can be a standalone application that you install and deploy, then embed a bit of script into existing apps to implement feedback, or you can make it part of your MVC App.Hageveld - NieuwsModule (Chris' Tutorial: A news article manager made for educational purposes.Idea Resto: Aplicación para restaurantes.jqgridmvcgeneration: codesmith template that creates js, html and asp.net mvc server side json server for a jqgrid -based table on a arbitratrary database table. The code includes pagination and server side sorting. Jqgrid is a great jquery extension that provides an ajax-enabled fully customizable interactive table based on server side data. However, the actual coding can be a bit tedious and cryptic. This project provides a template base approach that basically performs two tasks: 1. creates a client si...MyClassMapper: A simple configurable classmapper for mapping ClassA to ClassB and vice versa, the ideas are borrowed from the Dozer project (http://dozer.sourceforge.net). Most code is based on 'Dynamic Access' code from Hongju Cao <hjcao_wei@hotmail.com> (All that code is located in the "DynamicAccess" sub-directory from the project.)NavigateTo Providers: This project is a collection of NavigateTo providers for Visual Studio 2010. NObsidian: A proxy component to access Obisidian Portal API from .NetNSession: The objective of this project is to allow ASP Classic to access ASP.NET out-of-process session stores in the same way that ASP.NET accesses them, and thus share the session state with ASP.NET.NTextile: NTextile is a lightweight, humane web compatible markup generator. It generates valid XHTML output using simple easy to remember conventions and text characters (a.k.a modifiers), to markup plain text. NTextile is especially useful to provide quick and valid markup for .NET web applications. For e.g. wikis, blogs, online forums, content management systems etc. This project was inspired by Dean Allen’s original Textile features, as included in the Textpattern content management application. T...OpenTasksBehaviorsLibrary for Windows Phone: Open Tasks Behavior for Windows Phone *OpenWebBrowserTask *OpenMediaLauncherTaskPowerShell Cmdlet Sample: PowerShell Cmdlet SamplePrismEx: PrismEx is a library of helpers and extension methods to allow developers to more easily develop and test Prism applications. QuickDelete: A Windows Explorer add-on to delete files and folders very quickly, much more so than the usual Explorer command. Works on Windows XP or later. Currently in EXPERIMENTAL state. No releases have been produced yet.Quiz Module for DotNetNuke: This is a module that allows you to quickly and easily provide a quiz that can be taken by the visitors on your DotNetNuke website.RaptorDB - The Key Value Store: Smallest, fastest embedded nosql persisted dictionary using b+tree or MurMur hash indexing. (Now with Hybrid WAH bitmap indexes)Rockin CMS-LMS Combo: RockinCmsLms Combo provides a great way for users to build their content and training sites with one great tool. It will be developed with C# 4.0-4.5, Silverlight, JQuery, and ASP.Net and MVC 3.0 with Razor. This project will demonstrate how to use todays technologies to build solutions that last. We may have 2 versions - one with a local db and one with a Windows Azure storage solution. Suggest using the Web Platform Installer to get all of the components.SandKeeper - Time Tracking Addin for Outlook 2010 tasks: SandKeeper is an Outlook Addin that enables you to track time for your tasks.Share: Share is a new web-based content management system. For more information about this project, please visit http://blog.aphysoft.com.SharePoint 2010 ViewEdit Group By Content Type: A simple project that injects JavaScript into the ribbon bar area to add "Content Type" as a choice on the ViewEdit.aspx page. With this, users can once again create views that group by Content Type without having to use SharePoint Designer 2010.Simple Merge Sort: This is a simple implementation of Merge-Sort, using to sort an Array of Integers.UKag: Unity3D?Kr2/KAG3??moduleUsingLinq: TestUtec Logger: Utec Logger is meant to be used the Turbo XS UTEC and UTEC Delta. It is simply a data logger application, it will auto logged based on pre defined conditionals. It also takes this information and displays it in a two dimensional table, averaging the values appropriately to ease of log analysis.WOXalizer: Fork of WOX project. http://woxserializer.sourceforge.net/Zeta Backup Validator: A small .NET 3.5 console application that helps you verifying whether your backups succeed by checking files and folders with various configurable rules (folder size, file age, etc.).Zeta Links: A web application for generating and measuring shortcut hyperlinks, similar to bit.ly.Zombie Slayer v1.0: Zombie Slayer v1.0 is an action first person shooter where players can try and survive a never-ending wave of zombies for as long as they can while a timer keeps track of how long they survived and posts times online from longest to shortest.?????????????: ??????????????????,????。

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 15, 2014

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 15, 2014Popular ReleasesGoogle .Net API: Drive.Sample: Google .NET Client API – Drive.SampleInstructions for the Google .NET Client API – Drive.Sample</h2> http://code.google.com/p/google-api-dotnet-client/source/browse/?repo=samples#hg%2FDrive.SampleBrowse Source, or main file http://code.google.com/p/google-api-dotnet-client/source/browse/Drive.Sample/Program.cs?repo=samplesProgram.cs <h3>1. Checkout Instructions</h3> <p><b>Prerequisites:</b> Install Visual Studio, and <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a>.</p> ...FineUI - jQuery / ExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v4.1.1: -??Form??????????????(???-5929)。 -?TemplateField??ExpandOnDoubleClick、ExpandOnEnter、ExpandToSelectRow????(LZOM-5932)。 -BodyPadding???????,??“5”“5 10”,???????????“5px”“5px 10px”。 -??TriggerBox?EnableEdit=false????,??????????????(Jango_Jing-5450)。 -???????????DataKeyNames???????????(yygy-6002)。 -????????????????????????(Gnid-6018)。 -??PageManager???AutoSizePanelID????,??????????????????(yygy-6008)。 -?FState???????????????,????????????????(????-5925)。 -??????OnClientClick???return?????????(FineU...SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.042.020 Release 1: Updated Mod support. On startup, only stock items will appear in the Components list. Upon selecting and loading a saved world, the mods for that world only will then be loaded, and only from the local drive. If a mod has not been downloaded in Space Engineers, it will not download it for you. If you are developing a Mod, hitting "Reload" will also reload the mods as well as the saved world. If SEToolbox is crashing when loading a saved world containing mods, it is most likely because one ...Gum UI Tool: Gum 0.6.09: Fixed bug which would not allow plugins to be loaded when the app was distributed. Added animation plugin7zbackup - PowerShell Script to Backup Files with 7zip: 7zBackup v. 1.9.8 Stable: Do you like this piece of software ? It took some time and effort to develop. Please consider helping me with a donation Feat : Lock file now holds process ID and RootDir. On subsequent launches script checks if previous process is still alive. In case it is not it will clean up orphaned junction root directory. Ensure no orphaned rootdirs are on disk and no lockfiles in %temp% directory before running this releaseDNN CMS Platform: 07.03.02: Major Highlights Fixed backwards compatibility issue with 3rd party control panels Fixed issue in the drag and drop functionality of the File Uploader in IE 11 and Safari Fixed issue where users were able to create pages with the same name Fixed issue that affected older versions of DNN that do not include the maxAllowedContentLength during upgrade Fixed issue that stopped some skins from being upgraded to newer versions Fixed issue that randomly showed an unexpected error during us...WordMat: WordMat for Mac: WordMat for Mac has a few limitations compared to the Windows version - Graph is not supported (Gnuplot, GeoGebra and Excel works) - Units are not supported yet (Coming up) The Mac version is yet as tested as the windows version.ConEmu - Windows console with tabs: ConEmu 140814 [Alpha]: ConEmu - developer build x86 and x64 versions. Written in C++, no additional packages required. Run "ConEmu.exe" or "ConEmu64.exe". Some useful information you may found: http://superuser.com/questions/tagged/conemu http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/ConEmuFAQ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/TableOfContents If you want to use ConEmu in portable mode, just create empty "ConEmu.xml" file near to "ConEmu.exe" HP OneView PowerShell Library: HP OneView PowerShell Library 1.10.1193: Branch to HP OneView 1.10 Release. NOTE: This library version does not support older appliance versions. Fixed New-HPOVProfile to check for Firmware and BIOS management for supported platforms. Would erroneously error when neither -firmware or -bios were passed. Fixed Remove-HPOV* cmdlets which did not handle -force switch parameter correctly Fixed New-HPOVUplinkSet and New-HPOVNetwork Fixed Download-File where HTTP stream compression was not handled, resulting in incorrectly writt...NeoLua (Lua for .net dynamic language runtime): NeoLua-0.8.17: Fix: table.insert Fix: table auto convert Fix: Runtime-functions were defined as private it should be internal. Fix: min,max MichaelSenko release.MFCMAPI: August 2014 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1042 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010/2013 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeOooPlayer: 1.1: Added: Support for speex, TAK and OptimFrog files Added: An option to not to load cover art Added: Smaller package size Fixed: Unable to drag&drop audio files to playlist Updated: FLAC, WacPack and Opus playback libraries Updated: ID3v1 and ID3v2 tag librariesEWSEditor: EwsEditor 1.10 Release: • Export and import of items as a full fidelity steam works - without proxy classes! - I used raw EWS POSTs. • Turned off word wrap for EWS request field in EWS POST windows. • Several windows with scrolling texts boxes were limiting content to 32k - I removed this restriction. • Split server timezone info off to separate menu item from the timezone info windows so that the timezone info window could be used without logging into a mailbox. • Lots of updates to the TimeZone window. • UserAgen...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 2.1 RC: Release notes for PTVS 2.1 RC We’re pleased to announce the release candidate for Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.1. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, editing, IntelliSense, interactive debugging, profiling, Microsoft Azure, IPython, and cross-platform debugging support. PTVS 2.1 RC is available for: Visual Studio Expre...Sense/Net ECM - Enterprise CMS: SenseNet 6.3.1 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.3.1 Community EditionSense/Net 6.3.1 is an important step toward a more modular infrastructure, robustness and maintainability. With this release we finally introduce a packaging and a task management framework, and the Image Editor that will surely make the job of content editors more fun. Please review the changes and new features since Sense/Net 6.3 and give a feedback on our forum! Main new featuresSnAdmin (packaging framework) Task Management Image Editor OData REST A...Fluffy: Fluffy 0.3.35.4: Change log: Text editorSKGL - Serial Key Generating Library: SKGL Extension Methods 4 (1.0.5.1): This library contains methods for: Time change check (make sure the time has not been changed on the client computer) Key Validation (this will use http://serialkeymanager.com/ to validate keys against the database) Key Activation (this will, depending on the settings, activate a key with a specific machine code) Key Activation Trial (allows you to update a key if it is a trial key) Get Machine Code (calculates a machine code given any hash function) Get Eight Byte Hash (returns an...Touchmote: Touchmote 1.0 beta 13: Changes Less GPU usage Works together with other Xbox 360 controls Bug fixesModern UI for WPF: Modern UI 1.0.6: The ModernUI assembly including a demo app demonstrating the various features of Modern UI for WPF. BREAKING CHANGE LinkGroup.GroupName renamed to GroupKey NEW FEATURES Improved rendering on high DPI screens, including support for per-monitor DPI awareness available in Windows 8.1 (see also Per-monitor DPI awareness) New ModernProgressRing control with 8 builtin styles New LinkCommands.NavigateLink routed command New Visual Studio project templates 'Modern UI WPF App' and 'Modern UI W...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.74.0: Multiple thread safe improvements including AdjustToContents XLHelper XLColor_Static IntergerExtensions.ToStringLookup Exception now thrown when saving a workbook with no sheets, instead of creating a corrupt workbook Fix for hyperlinks with non-ASCII Characters Added basic workbook protection Fix for error thrown, when a spreadsheet contained comments and images Fix to Trim function Fix Invalid operation Exception thrown when the formula functions MAX, MIN, and AVG referenc...New Projectsapple TV: Apple TV project homepageArma 3 Battle Eye Client: Arma3BEClientASP.NET MVC AngularJS w/ Google Maps API: ASP.NET MVC sample using Google Maps API w/ AngularJS.CC-Classwork: Classwork from CoderCampsCompanyPortal: CompanyPortalcore: Building an Internet of Things (IoT, also Cloud of Things or CoT) core, drawing inspirations from the pre-existing Linus Torvalds linux kernel made from GNU/nixCRM Early Bound Class Simplifier: Simplifies the creation of a Dynamics CRM Early Bound Class. Dirección Desconcentrada de Cultura: Este proyecto web se ha elaborado para la dirección desconcentrada de cultura de cajamarca a cargo de los practicantes de UPNC Sitemas computacionales.Energy Trail Site: NGO Site for designing and collaboration work.Hybrid Platform - Build anything: A Platform that built by loosely coupled architecture. You can build applications for Web, Desktop, Mobile, WCF Services - ASP.NET MVC on this concrete platformipad air: a web tool to sim display same as ipad airipad apps: A serices to support Ipad HD devise to request CURD for codeplex.comiphone 6: iphone6iphone air: Opend API lists for IPhone 6(iphone air)iphone apps: Bus API for iphoneiwatch: A priview version for iwtach API Named Colors in Silverlight: This project is a Silverlight dll to add the missing named colors from System.Windows.Media.Color. Once added as a reference, it makes using named colors easy!OOP_2113110295: Name: Nguyen Trung Thao ID 2113110295 Truong Cao Dang Cong Thuong Mon: OOPPagepark: PageparkProjektRepository: Eine virtuelle Forschungsumgebung (VFU) um Forschungsdaten und Artefakte zu sammeln, gemeinsam zu nutzen, erschließen und mit Metadaten anreichern zu könnenRamonaSniffer: This will be the repository to host the zigbee snifferseawol: A Blog system base on node.jsSonar settings for TFS Build: Sample of configurations for Sonar to work with TFS for copy/pasteSon's Homework and learning to code: Just a collection of coding projects to learn from.SunBurn Terrain Editor: A fully functional standalone WYSWYG terrain (height map and color map) editor. Built upon the SunBurn Platform Framework allowing scope for Linux and Mac ports????.????????: 1) ??????? ???????? ?? 2) C# ?????????? (??????) ??? ???????? ?????? ???? (? ??????? *.dbf) ? ????? ???? 3) WinForms-?????????? ??? ???????????? ?????? ????

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 20, 2013

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 20, 2013Popular ReleasesHyper-V Management Pack Extensions 2012: HyperVMPE2012: Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions 2012 Beta ReleasePS3 Library .NET v3: PS3 Library v3: No bug found - Current Version 3.0.0.0 Put the PS3Lib.XML file in the same directory for get all comments for each methods.Outlook 2013 Add-In: Email appointments: This new version includes the following changes: - Ability to drag emails to the calendar to create appointments. Will gather all the recipients from all the emails and create an appointment on the day you drop the emails, with the text and subject of the last selected email (if more than one selected). - Increased maximum of numbers to display appointments to 30. You will have to uninstall the previous version (add/remove programs) if you had installed it before. Before unzipping the file...Caliburn Micro: WPF, Silverlight, WP7 and WinRT/Metro made easy.: Caliburn.Micro v1.5.2: v1.5.2 - This is a service release. We've fixed a number of issues with Tasks and IoC. We've made some consistency improvements across platforms and fixed a number of minor bugs. See changes.txt for details. Packages Available on Nuget Caliburn.Micro – The full framework compiled into an assembly. Caliburn.Micro.Start - Includes Caliburn.Micro plus a starting bootstrapper, view model and view. Caliburn.Micro.Container – The Caliburn.Micro inversion of control container (IoC); source code...CODE Framework: 4.0.30618.0: See change notes in the documentation section for details on what's new. Note: If you download the class reference help file with, you have to right-click the file, pick "Properties", and then unblock the file, as many browsers flag the file as blocked during download (for security reasons) and thus hides all content.Toolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011: XrmToolBox (v1.2013.6.18): XrmToolbox improvement Use new connection controls (use of Microsoft.Xrm.Client.dll) New display capabilities for tools (size, image and colors) Added prerequisites check Added Most Used Tools feature Tools improvementNew toolSolution Transfer Tool (v1.0.0.0) developed by DamSim Updated toolView Layout Replicator (v1.2013.6.17) Double click on source view to display its layoutXml All tools list Access Checker (v1.2013.6.17) Attribute Bulk Updater (v1.2013.6.18) FetchXml Tester (v1.2013.6.1...Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.570b: New* Movie - using XBMC TMDB - now renames movies if option selected. * Movie - using Xbmc Tmdb - Actor images saved from TMDb if option selected. Fixed* Movie - Checks for poster.jpg against missing poster filter * Movie - Fixed continual scraping of vob movie file (not DVD structure) * Both - Correctly display audio channels * Both - Correctly populate audio info in nfo's if multiple audio tracks. * Both - added icons and checked for DTS ES and Dolby TrueHD audio tracks. * Both - Stream d...Document.Editor: 2013.24: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.24: Improved Video Editing support Improved Link Editing support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v3.3.0: ??FineUI ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET ???。 FineUI??? ?? No JavaScript,No CSS,No UpdatePanel,No ViewState,No WebServices ???????。 ?????? IE 7.0、Firefox 3.6、Chrome 3.0、Opera 10.5、Safari 3.0+ ???? Apache License v2.0 ?:ExtJS ?? GPL v3 ?????(http://www.sencha.com/license)。 ???? ??:http://fineui.com/bbs/ ??:http://fineui.com/demo/ ??:http://fineui.com/doc/ ??:http://fineui.codeplex.com/ FineUI???? ExtJS ?????????,???? ExtJS ?。 ????? FineUI ? ExtJS ?:http://fineui.com/bbs/forum.php?mod=viewthrea...BarbaTunnel: BarbaTunnel 8.0: Check Version History for more information about this release.ExpressProfiler: ExpressProfiler v1.5: [+] added Start time, End time event columns [+] added SP:StmtStarting, SP:StmtCompleted events [*] fixed bug with Audit:Logout eventpatterns & practices: Data Access Guidance: Data Access Guidance Drop4 2013.06.17: Drop 4Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.94: add dstLine and dstCol attributes to the -Analyze output in XML mode. un-combine leftover comma-separates expression statements after optimizations are complete so downstream tools don't stack-overflow on really deep comma trees. add support for using a single source map generator instance with multiple runs of MinifyJavaScript, assuming that the results are concatenated to the same output file.Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 4.1.1: The stable release of Kooboo CMS 4.1.0 with fixed the following issues: https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/1 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/11 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/13 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/15 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/19 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/20 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/24 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/43 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/45 https://github.com/Kooboo/CMS/issues/46 https://github....VidCoder: 1.5.0 Beta: The betas have started up again! If you were previously on the beta track you will need to install this to get back on it. That's because you can now run both the Beta and Stable version of VidCoder side-by-side! Note that the OpenCL and Intel QuickSync changes being tested by HandBrake are not in the betas yet. They will appear when HandBrake integrates them into the main branch. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5590. This adds a new FDK AAC encoder. The FAAC encoder has been removed and now...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1306.16: Date/Time are displayed as Local Time. (Last Contact, Last Report and DeadLine) Wpp now remember the last used path for update publishing. (See 'Settings' Form for options) Add an option to allow users to publish an update even if the Framework has judged the certificate as invalid. (Attention : Using this option will NOT allow you to publish or revise an update if your certificate is really invalid). When publishing a new update, filter update files to ensure that there is not files wi...Employee Info Starter Kit: v6.0 - ASP.NET MVC Edition: Release Home - Getting Started - Hands on Coding Walkthrough – Technology Stack - Design & Architecture EISK v6.0 – ASP.NET MVC edition bundles most of the greatest and successful platforms, frameworks and technologies together, to enable web developers to learn and build manageable and high performance web applications with rich user experience effectively and quickly. User End SpecificationsCreating a new employee record Read existing employee records Update an existing employee reco...OLAP PivotTable Extensions: Release 0.8.1: Use the 32-bit download for... Excel 2007 Excel 2010 32-bit (even Excel 2010 32-bit on a 64-bit operating system) Excel 2013 32-bit (even Excel 2013 32-bit on a 64-bit operating system) Use the 64-bit download for... Excel 2010 64-bit Excel 2013 64-bit Just download and run the EXE. There is no need to uninstall the previous release. If you have problems getting the add-in to work, see the Troubleshooting Installation wiki page. The new features in this release are: View #VALUE! Err...DirectXTex texture processing library: June 2013: June 15, 2013 Custom filtering implementation for Resize & GenerateMipMaps(3D) - Point, Box, Linear, Cubic, and Triangle TEX_FILTER_TRIANGLE finite low-pass triangle filter TEX_FILTER_WRAP, TEX_FILTER_MIRROR texture semantics for custom filtering TEX_FILTER_BOX alias for TEX_FILTER_FANT WIC Ordered and error diffusion dithering for non-WIC conversion sRGB gamma correct custom filtering and conversion DDS_FLAGS_EXPAND_LUMINANCE - Reader conversion option for L8, L16, and A8L8 legacy ...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 3.0.0.440: Version: 3.0.0.440 (Release Candidate): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Please build the whole solution before you start one of the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.5 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2012) Changelog Legend: [B] Breaking change; [O] Marked member as obsolete Samples: Use ValueConverters via StaticResource instead of x:Static. Other Downloads Downloads OverviewNew Projectsarduinoay: Plays 8-bit chip tunes and sends the data to an Arduino device acting as a serial device, which then sends it to an AY-3-8910/YM-2149 PSG.Aricie - Lucene Search: Aricie - Lucene Search is a powerful DotNetNuke module and Search / Indexing provider replacement based on Lucene.Net, with many extensibility pointsBalloon: coolBattaglia Navale: Battaglia Navale xml battaglia navale xml xaml data binding Broma Mod Launcher: It's a mod launcher for ArmA 2, possibly 3 in the futureC#Duino: Tento projekt Vás provede zacátky vývoje aplikací pro NetDuino Plus a Arduino Nano ve vývojovém prostredí Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 v jazyce .NET C#Customer Management Information System: Customer Management Information System (CMIS)Demo1: this is a demoFedFramework: ...FractionCPP: C++ Library for Fractional Arithmetic with Overflow Detection: This is a C++ library providing a 'Fraction' class that implements full precision arithmetic operations on rational numbers with overflow detection.InfoSys: InfoSysJQuerySamples: Gallery of jquery samples in asp.net applicationKookaburra library: Kookaburray LibraryLombiq Antispam Orchard module: An Orchard module for better spam protection.Lombiq Security Orchard module: An Orchard module to enhance security.MailWithAttachment: Outlook,Forgot to attach an Item while sending a very important mail. Use this Add-in. The Safest Risk.miaoshow: ????,????MyFramework: this project is a simple mvvmc frameworkNew Style SSO for use in BizTalk Projects: A new style of SSO config. The purpose of this project is to make it very easy to store items in SSO. Although there are several projects dedicated to SSO none of them were easy enough to use straight away. The idea is to have a base class that knows how to save/load itself from SSO. So when you need a config item stored in SSO, simply create a new class with some properties, Inherit from SSO Base functionality and Presto. You are done. Your class will have some extra methods to help you....newsandalert: project summarynoppoj: DirvingSystemprakark06192013Git01: bold* _italics_ +underline+ ! Heading 1 !! Heading 2 * Bullet List ** Bullet List 2 # Number List ## Number List 2 [another wiki page] [url:http://www.example.cprakark06192013Hg01: *bold* _italics_ +underline+ ! Heading 1 !! 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This project is open to anyone: coders, users, ideas.Starting Windows 8 App Development with HTML/CSS/JS: This is a beginner's guide to creating Windows 8 Store Apps using HTML/CSS/JavaScript.Test Automation As A Service: Over the three years we have been developing a azure cloud based solution to provide "Test Automaton as a Service" (TaaaS) using a hybrid automation approachtestdd06192013hg01: fdgVMConnect.exe replacement using FreeRDP.exe: This is a replacemnet for VMconnect.exe that you do not get with Free Core Server 2012 to allow you to connect to your VM's from the Server console.vtccds: vtccdsWaterNet: ????Worklight Portal: Chuong trình Academic c?a IBM s? t? ch?c l?p h?c cho các giáo viên. Mobile Application Development with IBM Worklight V5 (WU503) XTool: jdk????????

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  • Of these 3 methods for reading linked lists from shared memory, why is the 3rd fastest?

    - by Joseph Garvin
    I have a 'server' program that updates many linked lists in shared memory in response to external events. I want client programs to notice an update on any of the lists as quickly as possible (lowest latency). The server marks a linked list's node's state_ as FILLED once its data is filled in and its next pointer has been set to a valid location. Until then, its state_ is NOT_FILLED_YET. I am using memory barriers to make sure that clients don't see the state_ as FILLED before the data within is actually ready (and it seems to work, I never see corrupt data). Also, state_ is volatile to be sure the compiler doesn't lift the client's checking of it out of loops. Keeping the server code exactly the same, I've come up with 3 different methods for the client to scan the linked lists for changes. The question is: Why is the 3rd method fastest? Method 1: Round robin over all the linked lists (called 'channels') continuously, looking to see if any nodes have changed to 'FILLED': void method_one() { std::vector<Data*> channel_cursors; for(ChannelList::iterator i = channel_list.begin(); i != channel_list.end(); ++i) { Data* current_item = static_cast<Data*>(i->get(segment)->tail_.get(segment)); channel_cursors.push_back(current_item); } while(true) { for(std::size_t i = 0; i < channel_list.size(); ++i) { Data* current_item = channel_cursors[i]; ACQUIRE_MEMORY_BARRIER; if(current_item->state_ == NOT_FILLED_YET) { continue; } log_latency(current_item->tv_sec_, current_item->tv_usec_); channel_cursors[i] = static_cast<Data*>(current_item->next_.get(segment)); } } } Method 1 gave very low latency when then number of channels was small. But when the number of channels grew (250K+) it became very slow because of looping over all the channels. So I tried... Method 2: Give each linked list an ID. Keep a separate 'update list' to the side. Every time one of the linked lists is updated, push its ID on to the update list. Now we just need to monitor the single update list, and check the IDs we get from it. void method_two() { std::vector<Data*> channel_cursors; for(ChannelList::iterator i = channel_list.begin(); i != channel_list.end(); ++i) { Data* current_item = static_cast<Data*>(i->get(segment)->tail_.get(segment)); channel_cursors.push_back(current_item); } UpdateID* update_cursor = static_cast<UpdateID*>(update_channel.tail_.get(segment)); while(true) { if(update_cursor->state_ == NOT_FILLED_YET) { continue; } ::uint32_t update_id = update_cursor->list_id_; Data* current_item = channel_cursors[update_id]; if(current_item->state_ == NOT_FILLED_YET) { std::cerr << "This should never print." << std::endl; // it doesn't continue; } log_latency(current_item->tv_sec_, current_item->tv_usec_); channel_cursors[update_id] = static_cast<Data*>(current_item->next_.get(segment)); update_cursor = static_cast<UpdateID*>(update_cursor->next_.get(segment)); } } Method 2 gave TERRIBLE latency. Whereas Method 1 might give under 10us latency, Method 2 would inexplicably often given 8ms latency! Using gettimeofday it appears that the change in update_cursor-state_ was very slow to propogate from the server's view to the client's (I'm on a multicore box, so I assume the delay is due to cache). So I tried a hybrid approach... Method 3: Keep the update list. But loop over all the channels continuously, and within each iteration check if the update list has updated. If it has, go with the number pushed onto it. If it hasn't, check the channel we've currently iterated to. void method_three() { std::vector<Data*> channel_cursors; for(ChannelList::iterator i = channel_list.begin(); i != channel_list.end(); ++i) { Data* current_item = static_cast<Data*>(i->get(segment)->tail_.get(segment)); channel_cursors.push_back(current_item); } UpdateID* update_cursor = static_cast<UpdateID*>(update_channel.tail_.get(segment)); while(true) { for(std::size_t i = 0; i < channel_list.size(); ++i) { std::size_t idx = i; ACQUIRE_MEMORY_BARRIER; if(update_cursor->state_ != NOT_FILLED_YET) { //std::cerr << "Found via update" << std::endl; i--; idx = update_cursor->list_id_; update_cursor = static_cast<UpdateID*>(update_cursor->next_.get(segment)); } Data* current_item = channel_cursors[idx]; ACQUIRE_MEMORY_BARRIER; if(current_item->state_ == NOT_FILLED_YET) { continue; } found_an_update = true; log_latency(current_item->tv_sec_, current_item->tv_usec_); channel_cursors[idx] = static_cast<Data*>(current_item->next_.get(segment)); } } } The latency of this method was as good as Method 1, but scaled to large numbers of channels. The problem is, I have no clue why. Just to throw a wrench in things: if I uncomment the 'found via update' part, it prints between EVERY LATENCY LOG MESSAGE. Which means things are only ever found on the update list! So I don't understand how this method can be faster than method 2. The full, compilable code (requires GCC and boost-1.41) that generates random strings as test data is at: http://pastebin.com/e3HuL0nr

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  • Getting App.config to be configuration specific in VS2010

    - by MarkPearl
    I recently wanted to have a console application that had configuration specific settings. For instance, if I had two configurations “Debug” and “Release”, depending on the currently selected configuration I wanted it to use a specific configuration file (either debug or config). If you are wanting to do something similar, here is a potential solution that worked for me. Setting up a demo app to illustrate the point First, let’s set up an application that will demonstrate the most basic concept. using System; using System.Configuration; namespace ConsoleSpecificConfiguration { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Config"); Console.WriteLine(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["Example Config"]); Console.ReadLine(); } } }   This does a really simple thing. Display a config when run. To do this, you also need a config file set up. My default looks as follows… <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <appSettings> <add key="Example Config" value="Default"/> </appSettings> </configuration>   Your entire solution will look as follows… Running the project you will get the following amazing output…   Let’s now say instead of having one config file we want depending on whether we are running in “Debug” or “Release” for the solution configuration we want different config settings to be propagated across you can do the following… Step 1 – Create alternate config Files First add additional config files to your solution. You should have some form of naming convention for these config files, I have decided to follow a similar convention to the one used for web.config, so in my instance I am going to add a App.Debug.config and a App.Release.config file BUT you can follow any naming convention you want provided you wire up the rest of the approach to use this convention. My files look as follows.. App.Debug.config <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <appSettings> <add key="Example Config" value="Debug"/> </appSettings> </configuration>   App.Release.config <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <appSettings> <add key="Example Config" value="Release"/> </appSettings> </configuration>   Your solution will now look as follows… Step 2 – Create a bat file that will overwrite files The next step is to create a bat file that will overwrite one file with another. If you right click on the solution in the solution explorer there will be a menu option to add new items to the solution. Create a text file called “copyifnewer.bat” which will be our copy script. It’s contents should look as follows… @echo off echo Comparing two files: %1 with %2 if not exist %1 goto File1NotFound if not exist %2 goto File2NotFound fc %1 %2 /A if %ERRORLEVEL%==0 GOTO NoCopy echo Files are not the same. Copying %1 over %2 copy %1 %2 /y & goto END :NoCopy echo Files are the same. Did nothing goto END :File1NotFound echo %1 not found. goto END :File2NotFound copy %1 %2 /y goto END :END echo Done. Your solution should now look as follows…   Step 3 – Customize the Post Build event command line We now need to wire up everything – which we will do using the post build event command line in VS2010. Right click on your project and go to it’s properties We are now going to wire up the script so that when we build our project it will overwrite the default App.config with whatever file we want. The syntax goes as follows… call "$(SolutionDir)copyifnewer.bat" "$(ProjectDir)App.$(ConfigurationName).config" "$(ProjectDir)$(OutDir)\$(TargetFileName).config" Testing it If I now change my project configuration to Release   And then run my application I get the following output… Toggling between Release and Debug mode will show that the config file is changing each time. And that is it!

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  • Top 50 ASP.Net Interview Questions & Answers

    - by Samir R. Bhogayta
    1. What is ASP.Net? It is a framework developed by Microsoft on which we can develop new generation web sites using web forms(aspx), MVC, HTML, Javascript, CSS etc. Its successor of Microsoft Active Server Pages(ASP). Currently there is ASP.NET 4.0, which is used to develop web sites. There are various page extensions provided by Microsoft that are being used for web site development. Eg: aspx, asmx, ascx, ashx, cs, vb, html, xml etc. 2. What’s the use of Response.Output.Write()? We can write formatted output  using Response.Output.Write(). 3. In which event of page cycle is the ViewState available?   After the Init() and before the Page_Load(). 4. What is the difference between Server.Transfer and Response.Redirect?   In Server.Transfer page processing transfers from one page to the other page without making a round-trip back to the client’s browser.  This provides a faster response with a little less overhead on the server.  The clients url history list or current url Server does not update in case of Server.Transfer. Response.Redirect is used to redirect the user’s browser to another page or site.  It performs trip back to the client where the client’s browser is redirected to the new page.  The user’s browser history list is updated to reflect the new address. 5. From which base class all Web Forms are inherited? Page class.  6. What are the different validators in ASP.NET? Required field Validator Range  Validator Compare Validator Custom Validator Regular expression Validator Summary Validator 7. Which validator control you use if you need to make sure the values in two different controls matched? Compare Validator control. 8. What is ViewState? ViewState is used to retain the state of server-side objects between page post backs. 9. Where the viewstate is stored after the page postback? ViewState is stored in a hidden field on the page at client side.  ViewState is transported to the client and back to the server, and is not stored on the server or any other external source. 10. How long the items in ViewState exists? They exist for the life of the current page. 11. What are the different Session state management options available in ASP.NET? In-Process Out-of-Process. In-Process stores the session in memory on the web server. Out-of-Process Session state management stores data in an external server.  The external server may be either a SQL Server or a State Server.  All objects stored in session are required to be serializable for Out-of-Process state management. 12. How you can add an event handler?  Using the Attributes property of server side control. e.g. [csharp] btnSubmit.Attributes.Add(“onMouseOver”,”JavascriptCode();”) [/csharp] 13. What is caching? Caching is a technique used to increase performance by keeping frequently accessed data or files in memory. The request for a cached file/data will be accessed from cache instead of actual location of that file. 14. What are the different types of caching? ASP.NET has 3 kinds of caching : Output Caching, Fragment Caching, Data Caching. 15. Which type if caching will be used if we want to cache the portion of a page instead of whole page? Fragment Caching: It caches the portion of the page generated by the request. For that, we can create user controls with the below code: [xml] <%@ OutputCache Duration=”120? VaryByParam=”CategoryID;SelectedID”%> [/xml] 16. List the events in page life cycle.   1) Page_PreInit 2) Page_Init 3) Page_InitComplete 4) Page_PreLoad 5) Page_Load 6) Page_LoadComplete 7) Page_PreRender 8)Render 17. Can we have a web application running without web.Config file?   Yes 18. Is it possible to create web application with both webforms and mvc? Yes. We have to include below mvc assembly references in the web forms application to create hybrid application. [csharp] System.Web.Mvc System.Web.Razor System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations [/csharp] 19. Can we add code files of different languages in App_Code folder?   No. The code files must be in same language to be kept in App_code folder. 20. What is Protected Configuration? It is a feature used to secure connection string information. 21. Write code to send e-mail from an ASP.NET application? [csharp] MailMessage mailMess = new MailMessage (); mailMess.From = “[email protected]”; mailMess.To = “[email protected]”; mailMess.Subject = “Test email”; mailMess.Body = “Hi This is a test mail.”; SmtpMail.SmtpServer = “localhost”; SmtpMail.Send (mailMess); [/csharp] MailMessage and SmtpMail are classes defined System.Web.Mail namespace.  22. How can we prevent browser from caching an ASPX page?   We can SetNoStore on HttpCachePolicy object exposed by the Response object’s Cache property: [csharp] Response.Cache.SetNoStore (); Response.Write (DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString ()); [/csharp] 23. What is the good practice to implement validations in aspx page? Client-side validation is the best way to validate data of a web page. It reduces the network traffic and saves server resources. 24. What are the event handlers that we can have in Global.asax file? Application Events: Application_Start , Application_End, Application_AcquireRequestState, Application_AuthenticateRequest, Application_AuthorizeRequest, Application_BeginRequest, Application_Disposed,  Application_EndRequest, Application_Error, Application_PostRequestHandlerExecute, Application_PreRequestHandlerExecute, Application_PreSendRequestContent, Application_PreSendRequestHeaders, Application_ReleaseRequestState, Application_ResolveRequestCache, Application_UpdateRequestCache Session Events: Session_Start,Session_End 25. Which protocol is used to call a Web service? HTTP Protocol 26. Can we have multiple web config files for an asp.net application? Yes. 27. What is the difference between web config and machine config? Web config file is specific to a web application where as machine config is specific to a machine or server. There can be multiple web config files into an application where as we can have only one machine config file on a server. 28.  Explain role based security ?   Role Based Security used to implement security based on roles assigned to user groups in the organization. Then we can allow or deny users based on their role in the organization. Windows defines several built-in groups, including Administrators, Users, and Guests. [xml] <AUTHORIZATION>< authorization > < allow roles=”Domain_Name\Administrators” / >   < !– Allow Administrators in domain. — > < deny users=”*”  / >                            < !– Deny anyone else. — > < /authorization > [/xml] 29. What is Cross Page Posting? When we click submit button on a web page, the page post the data to the same page. The technique in which we post the data to different pages is called Cross Page posting. This can be achieved by setting POSTBACKURL property of  the button that causes the postback. Findcontrol method of PreviousPage can be used to get the posted values on the page to which the page has been posted. 30. How can we apply Themes to an asp.net application? We can specify the theme in web.config file. Below is the code example to apply theme: [xml] <configuration> <system.web> <pages theme=”Windows7? /> </system.web> </configuration> [/xml] 31: What is RedirectPermanent in ASP.Net?   RedirectPermanent Performs a permanent redirection from the requested URL to the specified URL. Once the redirection is done, it also returns 301 Moved Permanently responses. 32: What is MVC? MVC is a framework used to create web applications. The web application base builds on  Model-View-Controller pattern which separates the application logic from UI, and the input and events from the user will be controlled by the Controller. 33. Explain the working of passport authentication. First of all it checks passport authentication cookie. If the cookie is not available then the application redirects the user to Passport Sign on page. Passport service authenticates the user details on sign on page and if valid then stores the authenticated cookie on client machine and then redirect the user to requested page 34. What are the advantages of Passport authentication? All the websites can be accessed using single login credentials. So no need to remember login credentials for each web site. Users can maintain his/ her information in a single location. 35. What are the asp.net Security Controls? <asp:Login>: Provides a standard login capability that allows the users to enter their credentials <asp:LoginName>: Allows you to display the name of the logged-in user <asp:LoginStatus>: Displays whether the user is authenticated or not <asp:LoginView>: Provides various login views depending on the selected template <asp:PasswordRecovery>:  email the users their lost password 36: How do you register JavaScript for webcontrols ? We can register javascript for controls using <CONTROL -name>Attribtues.Add(scriptname,scripttext) method. 37. In which event are the controls fully loaded? Page load event. 38: what is boxing and unboxing? Boxing is assigning a value type to reference type variable. Unboxing is reverse of boxing ie. Assigning reference type variable to value type variable. 39. Differentiate strong typing and weak typing In strong typing, the data types of variable are checked at compile time. On the other hand, in case of weak typing the variable data types are checked at runtime. In case of strong typing, there is no chance of compilation error. Scripts use weak typing and hence issues arises at runtime. 40. How we can force all the validation controls to run? The Page.Validate() method is used to force all the validation controls to run and to perform validation. 41. List all templates of the Repeater control. ItemTemplate AlternatingltemTemplate SeparatorTemplate HeaderTemplate FooterTemplate 42. List the major built-in objects in ASP.NET?  Application Request Response Server Session Context Trace 43. What is the appSettings Section in the web.config file? The appSettings block in web config file sets the user-defined values for the whole application. For example, in the following code snippet, the specified ConnectionString section is used throughout the project for database connection: [csharp] <em><configuration> <appSettings> <add key=”ConnectionString” value=”server=local; pwd=password; database=default” /> </appSettings></em> [/csharp] 44.      Which data type does the RangeValidator control support? The data types supported by the RangeValidator control are Integer, Double, String, Currency, and Date. 45. What is the difference between an HtmlInputCheckBox control and anHtmlInputRadioButton control? In HtmlInputCheckBoxcontrol, multiple item selection is possible whereas in HtmlInputRadioButton controls, we can select only single item from the group of items. 46. Which namespaces are necessary to create a localized application? System.Globalization System.Resources 47. What are the different types of cookies in ASP.NET? Session Cookie – Resides on the client machine for a single session until the user does not log out. Persistent Cookie – Resides on a user’s machine for a period specified for its expiry, such as 10 days, one month, and never. 48. What is the file extension of web service? Web services have file extension .asmx.. 49. What are the components of ADO.NET? The components of ADO.Net are Dataset, Data Reader, Data Adaptor, Command, connection. 50. What is the difference between ExecuteScalar and ExecuteNonQuery? ExecuteScalar returns output value where as ExecuteNonQuery does not return any value but the number of rows affected by the query. ExecuteScalar used for fetching a single value and ExecuteNonQuery used to execute Insert and Update statements.

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  • Subterranean IL: Generics and array covariance

    - by Simon Cooper
    Arrays in .NET are curious beasts. They are the only built-in collection types in the CLR, and SZ-arrays (single dimension, zero-indexed) have their own commands and IL syntax. One of their stranger properties is they have a kind of built-in covariance long before generic variance was added in .NET 4. However, this causes a subtle but important problem with generics. First of all, we need to briefly recap on array covariance. SZ-array covariance To demonstrate, I'll tweak the classes I introduced in my previous posts: public class IncrementableClass { public int Value; public virtual void Increment(int incrementBy) { Value += incrementBy; } } public class IncrementableClassx2 : IncrementableClass { public override void Increment(int incrementBy) { base.Increment(incrementBy); base.Increment(incrementBy); } } In the CLR, SZ-arrays of reference types are implicitly convertible to arrays of the element's supertypes, all the way up to object (note that this does not apply to value types). That is, an instance of IncrementableClassx2[] can be used wherever a IncrementableClass[] or object[] is required. When an SZ-array could be used in this fashion, a run-time type check is performed when you try to insert an object into the array to make sure you're not trying to insert an instance of IncrementableClass into an IncrementableClassx2[]. This check means that the following code will compile fine but will fail at run-time: IncrementableClass[] array = new IncrementableClassx2[1]; array[0] = new IncrementableClass(); // throws ArrayTypeMismatchException These checks are enforced by the various stelem* and ldelem* il instructions in such a way as to ensure you can't insert a IncrementableClass into a IncrementableClassx2[]. For the rest of this post, however, I'm going to concentrate on the ldelema instruction. ldelema This instruction pops the array index (int32) and array reference (O) off the stack, and pushes a pointer (&) to the corresponding array element. However, unlike the ldelem instruction, the instruction's type argument must match the run-time array type exactly. This is because, once you've got a managed pointer, you can use that pointer to both load and store values in that array element using the ldind* and stind* (load/store indirect) instructions. As the same pointer can be used for both input and output to the array, the type argument to ldelema must be invariant. At the time, this was a perfectly reasonable restriction, and maintained array type-safety within managed code. However, along came generics, and with it the constrained callvirt instruction. So, what happens when we combine array covariance and constrained callvirt? .method public static void CallIncrementArrayValue() { // IncrementableClassx2[] arr = new IncrementableClassx2[1] ldc.i4.1 newarr IncrementableClassx2 // arr[0] = new IncrementableClassx2(); dup newobj instance void IncrementableClassx2::.ctor() ldc.i4.0 stelem.ref // IncrementArrayValue<IncrementableClass>(arr, 0) // here, we're treating an IncrementableClassx2[] as IncrementableClass[] dup ldc.i4.0 call void IncrementArrayValue<class IncrementableClass>(!!0[],int32) // ... ret } .method public static void IncrementArrayValue<(IncrementableClass) T>( !!T[] arr, int32 index) { // arr[index].Increment(1) ldarg.0 ldarg.1 ldelema !!T ldc.i4.1 constrained. !!T callvirt instance void IIncrementable::Increment(int32) ret } And the result: Unhandled Exception: System.ArrayTypeMismatchException: Attempted to access an element as a type incompatible with the array. at IncrementArrayValue[T](T[] arr, Int32 index) at CallIncrementArrayValue() Hmm. We're instantiating the generic method as IncrementArrayValue<IncrementableClass>, but passing in an IncrementableClassx2[], hence the ldelema instruction is failing as it's expecting an IncrementableClass[]. On features and feature conflicts What we've got here is a conflict between existing behaviour (ldelema ensuring type safety on covariant arrays) and new behaviour (managed pointers to object references used for every constrained callvirt on generic type instances). And, although this is an edge case, there is no general workaround. The generic method could be hidden behind several layers of assemblies, wrappers and interfaces that make it a requirement to use array covariance when calling the generic method. Furthermore, this will only fail at runtime, whereas compile-time safety is what generics were designed for! The solution is the readonly. prefix instruction. This modifies the ldelema instruction to ignore the exact type check for arrays of reference types, and so it lets us take the address of array elements using a covariant type to the actual run-time type of the array: .method public static void IncrementArrayValue<(IncrementableClass) T>( !!T[] arr, int32 index) { // arr[index].Increment(1) ldarg.0 ldarg.1 readonly. ldelema !!T ldc.i4.1 constrained. !!T callvirt instance void IIncrementable::Increment(int32) ret } But what about type safety? In return for ignoring the type check, the resulting controlled mutability pointer can only be used in the following situations: As the object parameter to ldfld, ldflda, stfld, call and constrained callvirt instructions As the pointer parameter to ldobj or ldind* As the source parameter to cpobj In other words, the only operations allowed are those that read from the pointer; stind* and similar that alter the pointer itself are banned. This ensures that the array element we're pointing to won't be changed to anything untoward, and so type safety within the array is maintained. This is a typical example of the maxim that whenever you add a feature to a program, you have to consider how that feature interacts with every single one of the existing features. Although an edge case, the readonly. prefix instruction ensures that generics and array covariance work together and that compile-time type safety is maintained. Tune in next time for a look at the .ctor generic type constraint, and what it means.

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  • Functional Adaptation

    - by Charles Courchaine
    In real life and OO programming we’re often faced with using adapters, DVI to VGA, 1/4” to 1/8” audio connections, 110V to 220V, wrapping an incompatible interface with a new one, and so on.  Where the adapter pattern is generally considered for interfaces and classes a similar technique can be applied to method signatures.  To be fair, this adaptation is generally used to reduce the number of parameters but I’m sure there are other clever possibilities to be had.  As Jan questioned in the last post, how can we use a common method to execute an action if the action has a differing number of parameters, going back to the greeting example it was suggested having an AddName method that takes a first and last name as parameters.  This is exactly what we’ll address in this post. Let’s set the stage with some review and some code changes.  First, our method that handles the setup/tear-down infrastructure for our WCF service: 1: private static TResult ExecuteGreetingFunc<TResult>(Func<IGreeting, TResult> theGreetingFunc) 2: { 3: IGreeting aGreetingService = null; 4: try 5: { 6: aGreetingService = GetGreetingChannel(); 7: return theGreetingFunc(aGreetingService); 8: } 9: finally 10: { 11: CloseWCFChannel((IChannel)aGreetingService); 12: } 13: } Our original AddName method: 1: private static string AddName(string theName) 2: { 3: return ExecuteGreetingFunc<string>(theGreetingService => theGreetingService.AddName(theName)); 4: } Our new AddName method: 1: private static int AddName(string firstName, string lastName) 2: { 3: return ExecuteGreetingFunc<int>(theGreetingService => theGreetingService.AddName(firstName, lastName)); 4: } Let’s change the AddName method, just a little bit more for this example and have it take the greeting service as a parameter. 1: private static int AddName(IGreeting greetingService, string firstName, string lastName) 2: { 3: return greetingService.AddName(firstName, lastName); 4: } The new signature of AddName using the Func delegate is now Func<IGreeting, string, string, int>, which can’t be used with ExecuteGreetingFunc as is because it expects Func<IGreeting, TResult>.  Somehow we have to eliminate the two string parameters before we can use this with our existing method.  This is where we need to adapt AddName to match what ExecuteGreetingFunc expects, and we’ll do so in the following progression. 1: Func<IGreeting, string, string, int> -> Func<IGreeting, string, int> 2: Func<IGreeting, string, int> -> Func<IGreeting, int>   For the first step, we’ll create a method using the lambda syntax that will “eliminate” the last name parameter: 1: string lastNameToAdd = "Smith"; 2: //Func<IGreeting, string, string, int> -> Func<IGreeting, string, int> 3: Func<IGreeting, string, int> addName = (greetingService, firstName) => AddName(greetingService, firstName, lastNameToAdd); The new addName method gets us one step close to the signature we need.  Let’s say we’re going to call this in a loop to add several names, we’ll take the final step from Func<IGreeting, string, int> -> Func<IGreeting, int> in line as a lambda passed to ExecuteGreetingFunc like so: 1: List<string> firstNames = new List<string>() { "Bob", "John" }; 2: int aID; 3: foreach (string firstName in firstNames) 4: { 5: //Func<IGreeting, string, int> -> Func<IGreeting, int> 6: aID = ExecuteGreetingFunc<int>(greetingService => addName(greetingService, firstName)); 7: Console.WriteLine(GetGreeting(aID)); 8: } If for some reason you needed to break out the lambda on line 6 you could replace it with 1: aID = ExecuteGreetingFunc<int>(ApplyAddName(addName, firstName)); and use this method: 1: private static Func<IGreeting, int> ApplyAddName(Func<IGreeting, string, int> addName, string lastName) 2: { 3: return greetingService => addName(greetingService, lastName); 4: } Splitting out a lambda into its own method is useful both in this style of coding as well as LINQ queries to improve the debugging experience.  It is not strictly necessary to break apart the steps & functions as was shown above; the lambda in line 6 (of the foreach example) could include both the last name and first name instead of being composed of two functions.  The process demonstrated above is one of partially applying functions, this could have also been done with Currying (also see Dustin Campbell’s excellent post on Currying for the canonical curried add example).  Matthew Podwysocki also has some good posts explaining both Currying and partial application and a follow up post that further clarifies the difference between Currying and partial application.  In either technique the ultimate goal is to reduce the number of parameters passed to a function.  Currying makes it a single parameter passed at each step, where partial application allows one to use multiple parameters at a time as we’ve done here.  This technique isn’t for everyone or every problem, but can be extremely handy when you need to adapt a call to something you don’t control.

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  • Source Control and SQL Development &ndash; Part 3

    - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell
    In parts one and two of this series, I have been specifically focusing on the latest version of SQL Source Control by Red Gate Software.  But I have been doing source-controlled SQL development for years, long before this product was available, and well before Microsoft came out with Database Projects for Visual Studio.  “So, how does that work?” you may wonder.  Well, let me share some of the details of how we do it where I work… The key to this approach is that everything is done via Transact-SQL script files; either natively written T-SQL, or generated.  My preference is to write all my code by hand, which forces you to become better at your SQL syntax.  But if you really prefer to use the Management Studio GUI to make database changes, you can still do that, and then you use the Generate Scripts feature of the GUI to produce T-SQL scripts afterwards, and store those in your source control system.  You can generate scripts for things like stored procedures and views by right-clicking on the database in the Object Explorer, and Choosing Tasks, Generate Scripts (see figure 1 to the left).  You can also do that for the CREATE scripts for tables, but that does not work when you have a table that is already in production, and you need to make just a simple change, such as adding a new column or index.  In this case, you can use the GUI to make the table changes, and then instead of clicking the Save button, click the Generate Change Script button (). Then, once you have saved the change script, go ahead and execute it on your development database to actually make the change.  I believe that it is important to actually execute the script rather than just click the Save button because this is your first test that your change script is working and you didn’t somehow lose a portion of the change. As you can imagine, all this generating of scripts can get tedious and tempting to skip entirely, so again, I would encourage you to just get in the habit of writing your own Transact-SQL code, and then it is just a matter of remembering to save your work, just like you are in the habit of saving changes to a Word or Excel document before you exit the program. So, now that you have all of these script files, what do you do with them?  Well, we organize ours into folders labeled ChangeScripts, Functions, Views, and StoredProcedures, and those folders are loaded into our source control system.  ChangeScripts contains all of the table and index changes, and anything else that is basically a one-time-only execution.  Of course you want to write your scripts with qualifying logic so that if a script were accidentally run more than once in a database, it would not crash nor corrupt anything; but these scripts are really intended to be run only once in a database. Once you have your initial set of scripts loaded into source control, then making changes, such as altering a stored procedure becomes a simple matter of checking out your CREATE PROCEDURE* script, editing it in SSMS, saving the change, executing the script in order to effect the change in your database, and then checking the script back in to source control.  Of course, this is where the lack of integration for source control systems within SSMS becomes an irritation, because this means that in addition to SSMS, I also have my source control client application running to do the check-out and check-in.  And when you have 800+ procedures like we do, that can be quite tedious to locate the procedure I want to change in source control, check it out, then locate the script file in my working folder, open it in SSMS, do the change, save it, and the go back to source control to check in.  Granted, it is not nearly as burdensome as, say, losing your source code and having to rebuild it from memory, or losing the audit trail that good source control systems provide.  It is worth the effort, and this is how I have been doing development for the last several years. Remember that everything that the SQL Server Management Studio does in modifying your database can also be done in plain Transact-SQL code, and this is what you are storing.  And now I have shown you how you can do it all without spending any extra money.  You already have source control, or can get free, open-source source control systems (almost seems like an oxymoron, doesn’t it) and of course Management Studio is free with your SQL Server database engine software. So, whether you spend the money on tools to make it easier, or not, you now have no excuse for not using source control with your SQL development. * In our current model, the scripts for stored procedures and similar database objects are written with an IF EXISTS…DROP… at the top, followed by the CREATE PROCEDURE… section, and that followed by a section that assigns permissions.  This allows me to run the same script regardless of whether the procedure previously existed in the database.  If the script was only an ALTER PROCEDURE, then it would fail the first time that procedure was deployed to a database, unless you wrote other code to stub it if it did not exist.  There are a few different ways you could organize your scripts for deployment, each with its own trade-offs, but I think it is absolutely critical that whichever way you organize things, you ensure that the same script is run throughout the deployment cycle, and do not allow customizations to creep in between TEST and PROD.  If you do, then you have broken the integrity of your deployment process because what you deployed to PROD was not exactly the same as what was tested in TEST, so you effectively have now released untested code into PROD.

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  • Converting LINQ to Twitter to Twitter API v1.1

    - by Joe Mayo
    Twitter recently updated their API to v1.1 (Current status: API v1.1). Naturally, LINQ to Twitter  needed to be updated too. This blog post outlines the changes made to LINQ to Twitter during this conversion and highlights important features that LINQ to Twitter developers will want to know. Overall Impact Generally speaking, Twitter API v1.1 is semantically very much the same as it’s predecessor. The base URL changed and so did a few resource segments, but the resources themselves are still intact. The good news is that LINQ to Twitter has always shielded the developer from this plumbing, so the entities, types, and filters didn’t change much at all.  The following sections describe what did  change. Authentication In Twitter API v1.0 authentication was not required for some resources, such as user timelines and search. However, that’s all changed because *all* queries must be authenticated in Twitter API v1.1. LINQ to Twitter has various types of authorizers you can use, supporting whatever OAuth options are available via Twitter.  You can see the LINQ to Twitter documentation, Securing Your Applications, for more info on OAuth support. The New Search One of the larger changes to the API was Search. To be more specific, the Search entity now contains a List<Status>, named Statuses, to hold results.  Additionally, any meta-data associated with the search is now in a property named SearchMetaData. The change to the Search entity and responses is the big change, but the good news is that your Search query syntax doesn’t change. Different Rate Limits The issue of rate limits itself is contentious, but this discussion is focused on the coding experience and I’ll leave the politics to those who prefer to engage in that activity. What’s important here is that both headers and resources have changed. You should review Twitter’s Rate Limit documentation to understand what the changes mean.  A quick explanation is that rate limits are applied individually to each resource in 15 minute time intervals. In LINQ to Twitter these changes surface on the Help entity, via HelpType.RateLimits. The RateLimits query has a Resources filter where you can specify a comma-separated list of categories to return rate limit info for.  The results materialize in the RateLimits dictionary, keyed on category. The Help entity also has a RateLimitsAuthorizationContext, holding the Access Token for the user performing queries – and to whom the rate limits apply. In addition to the new RateLimits query, there are new RateLimit headers that appear in the query response, whose HTTP header name is of the form X-Rate-Limit… which is different from the previous header name. LINQ to Twitter surfaces these headers via the existing properties of the TwitterContext instance. For anyone who retrieved rate limit information via the Headers property of TwitterContext, you should be aware of the new header names.  I haven’t done anything with Feature rate limit properties yet, but they appear to no longer be available – this will require more follow-up. Error Handling Twitter API v1.1 has a new format for Error Codes & Responses. LINQ to Twitter wraps these messages in the TwitterQueryException, which has been updated appropriately. The Message property of TwitterQueryException now reflects the Twitter error message, when available. There’s also a new ErrorCode that’s populated with the message error code. Parameters Most parameters stayed the same, but one of interest is Include Entities (different from LINQ to Twitter data object entities). Entities are metadata hanging off tweets, that provide start/end position in the tweet and other information for mentions, urls, hash tags, and media. Entities used to not be included unless you specified you wanted them. Now, in v1.1, entities are included by default for all APIs that return a Status.  If you were always setting IncludeEntities to true, then you won’t see a change. However, be aware that you’ll now be receiving additional data in your response from Twitter, which will explain a sudden increase in bandwidth utilization. This might or might not  matter to you  depending on the requirements of your application, but you should be aware of it. Everything Else There might be small changes here and there that I haven’t mentioned, but these were the ones you should be most aware of.  Streams didn’t change, but Twitter will be deprecating username/password authentication on public streams, in favor of OAuth, so you’ll be seeing me make that change some time in the future.  Also, Twitter will continue to evolve the API and you can expect that LINQ to Twitter will change accordingly. Summary The big changes to Twitter API were Authentication, Search, Rate Limits, and Error Handling. All API calls must be authenticated. You’ll need to change your code to read Search results differently, but the query is much the same as you use now. There’s a new RateLimits API, one of the Help queries.  Also, the new error messages are integrated into TwitterQueryException. Besides these changes, I expect  most others to be small or affect a smaller percentage of developers.  You can get the latest version of LINQ to Twitter from NuGet or visit the LINQ to Twitter download page at CodePlex.com.   @JoeMayo

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  • Application Development: Python or Java (or PHP)

    - by luckysmack
    I'm looking to get into application development, such as Facebook or Android apps and games. I am doing this for fun and to learn. Once my skills are to par I would like to have some side income from the apps, but I'm not banking on living off that (just so you know where I'm coming from and know what my end goals are). Currently I know and am familiar with PHP and frameworks such as cakephp and yii. However, I have been wanting to learn another language to broaden my horizons and to become a better developer. So I have narrowed it down to 2 languages. Python, and Java (I can already hear people cringing at the difference in the languages I have chosen, but I have some reasons). Python: closer to PHP that Java. Cross platformability. Also great as a general scripting language and has many file system level benefits that PHP does not. Cleaner syntax, readability, blah blah and the list goed on. Python will work great for cross platform apps and can be run on many OS's and is supported by Facebook for app development. But there is no support on Android (for full fledged apps). Java: a much stronger typed language, very robust community and corporate backing. Knowing Java is also good for personal marketability for enterprises, if you're into that. The main benefit here is that Java can write apps natively for Android and the apps can be ported for web versions to play on Facebook. So while I have seen many developers prefer Java over the two, Java has this significant advantage, where I can market my apps in both markets and in the future build more potential income. But like I said it is for fun. While money isn't the goal, it would still be nice. PHP: I'm putting this here because I know it already, and I'm sure a case could be made for it. It obviously works great for Facebook but like Python does not do so well on android. While it's mostly the realm of 'application development' that appeals to me, I do find Android apps fairly interesting and something that has a ton of potential to. But then again Facebook has a ton more users and the apps can also potentially be more immersive (desktop vs. mobile). So this is why I'm kinda stuck on what route to choose. Python for Facebook and web apps, with likely faster development to production times, or Java which can be developed for any of the platforms to make apps. Side note: I'm not really trying to get into 3D development, mostly 2D. And I also want to make an app with real-time play (websockets, etc). Someone mentioned node, js to me for that but Python seems to be more globally versatile for my goals. So, to anyone that does Facebook or Android development in either language: what do you suggest? Any input is valuable and I do appreciate it. And sorry for being long winded. EDIT: as mentioned in one of the answers, my primary goal is gaming. Although I do have some plans for non gaming apps such as general web based and desktop based ones. But gaming is my main goal with the possibility of income. EDIT: Another consideration could be Jython. Writing Python code which is converted into Java bytecode. This would allow the ability to do Android apps using Python. I could be wrong though, I'm still looking into it. Update 1-26-11: I recently acquired a new job which required I learn .NET using C#. Im sure some of you are cringing already but I really like the whole system and how it all works together between desktop and web development. But, as I am still interested in Python very much, and after some research I have decided I will learn Python as well as the IronPython implementation for .NET. But (again: I know...) since .NET is mostly a Windows thing and not as cross-compatible as I like, I will be learning Mono which is a cross platform implementation of .NET where I can use what I learn at work using C# and what I want to learn, Python/IronPython. So while learning and writing C#/.NET @ work I will be learning Python - Mono - Iron Python for what I want to do personally. And the benefit of them all being very closely related will help me out a lot, I think. What do you guys think? I almost feel like that should be another question, but there's not much of a question. Either way, you guys gave very helpful input.

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  • Using Transaction Logging to Recover Post-Archived Essbase data

    - by Keith Rosenthal
    Data recovery is typically performed by restoring data from an archive.  Data added or removed since the last archive took place can also be recovered by enabling transaction logging in Essbase.  Transaction logging works by writing transactions to a log store.  The information in the log store can then be recovered by replaying the log store entries in sequence since the last archive took place.  The following information is recorded within a transaction log entry: Sequence ID Username Start Time End Time Request Type A request type can be one of the following categories: Calculations, including the default calculation as well as both server and client side calculations Data loads, including data imports as well as data loaded using a load rule Data clears as well as outline resets Locking and sending data from SmartView and the Spreadsheet Add-In.  Changes from Planning web forms are also tracked since a lock and send operation occurs during this process. You can use the Display Transactions command in the EAS console or the query database MAXL command to view the transaction log entries. Enabling Transaction Logging Transaction logging can be enabled at the Essbase server, application or database level by adding the TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION essbase.cfg setting.  The following is the TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION syntax: TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION [appname [dbname]] LOGLOCATION NATIVE ENABLE | DISABLE Note that you can have multiple TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION entries in the essbase.cfg file.  For example: TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION Hyperion/trlog NATIVE ENABLE TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION Sample Hyperion/trlog NATIVE DISABLE The first statement will enable transaction logging for all Essbase applications, and the second statement will disable transaction logging for the Sample application.  As a result, transaction logging will be enabled for all applications except the Sample application. A location on a physical disk other than the disk where ARBORPATH or the disk files reside is recommended to optimize overall Essbase performance. Configuring Transaction Log Replay Although transaction log entries are stored based on the LOGLOCATION parameter of the TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION essbase.cfg setting, copies of data load and rules files are stored in the ARBORPATH/app/appname/dbname/Replay directory to optimize the performance of replaying logged transactions.  The default is to archive client data loads, but this configuration setting can be used to archive server data loads (including SQL server data loads) or both client and server data loads. To change the type of data to be archived, add the TRANSACTIONLOGDATALOADARCHIVE configuration setting to the essbase.cfg file.  Note that you can have multiple TRANSACTIONLOGDATALOADARCHIVE entries in the essbase.cfg file to adjust settings for individual applications and databases. Replaying the Transaction Log and Transaction Log Security Considerations To replay the transactions, use either the Replay Transactions command in the EAS console or the alter database MAXL command using the replay transactions grammar.  Transactions can be replayed either after a specified log time or using a range of transaction sequence IDs. The default when replaying transactions is to use the security settings of the user who originally performed the transaction.  However, if that user no longer exists or that user's username was changed, the replay operation will fail. Instead of using the default security setting, add the REPLAYSECURITYOPTION essbase.cfg setting to use the security settings of the administrator who performs the replay operation.  REPLAYSECURITYOPTION 2 will explicitly use the security settings of the administrator performing the replay operation.  REPLAYSECURITYOPTION 3 will use the administrator security settings if the original user’s security settings cannot be used. Removing Transaction Logs and Archived Replay Data Load and Rules Files Transaction logs and archived replay data load and rules files are not automatically removed and are only removed manually.  Since these files can consume a considerable amount of space, the files should be removed on a periodic basis. The transaction logs should be removed one database at a time instead of all databases simultaneously.  The data load and rules files associated with the replayed transactions should be removed in chronological order from earliest to latest.  In addition, do not remove any data load and rules files with a timestamp later than the timestamp of the most recent archive file. Partitioned Database Considerations For partitioned databases, partition commands such as synchronization commands cannot be replayed.  When recovering data, the partition changes must be replayed manually and logged transactions must be replayed in the correct chronological order. If the partitioned database includes any @XREF commands in the calc script, the logged transactions must be selectively replayed in the correct chronological order between the source and target databases. References For additional information, please see the Oracle EPM System Backup and Recovery Guide.  For EPM 11.1.2.2, the link is http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/epm_backup_recovery_1112200.pdf

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  • Custom Configuration Section Handlers

    Most .NET developers who need to store something in configuration tend to use appSettings for this purpose, in my experience.  More recently, the framework itself has helped things by adding the <connectionStrings /> section so at least these are in their own section and not adding to the appSettings clutter that pollutes most apps.  I recommend avoiding appSettings for several reasons.  In addition to those listed there, I would add that strong typing and validation are additional reasons to go the custom configuration section route. For my ASP.NET Tips and Tricks talk, I use the following example, which is a simple DemoSettings class that includes two fields.  The first is an integer representing how many attendees there are present for the talk, and the second is the title of the talk.  The setup in web.config is as follows: <configSections> <section name="DemoSettings" type="ASPNETTipsAndTricks.Code.DemoSettings" /> </configSections>   <DemoSettings sessionAttendees="100" title="ASP.NET Tips and Tricks DevConnections Spring 2010" /> Referencing the values in code is strongly typed and straightforward.  Here I have a page that exposes two properties which internally get their values from the configuration section handler: public partial class CustomConfig1 : System.Web.UI.Page { public string SessionTitle { get { return DemoSettings.Settings.Title; } } public int SessionAttendees { get { return DemoSettings.Settings.SessionAttendees; } } } Note that the settings are only read from the config file once after that they are cached so there is no need to be concerned about excessive file access. Now weve seen how to set it up on the config file and how to refer to the settings in code.  All that remains is to see the file itself: public class DemoSettings : ConfigurationSection { private static DemoSettings settings = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("DemoSettings") as DemoSettings; public static DemoSettings Settings{ get { return settings;} }   [ConfigurationProperty("sessionAttendees" , DefaultValue = 200 , IsRequired = false)] [IntegerValidator(MinValue = 1 , MaxValue = 10000)] public int SessionAttendees { get { return (int)this["sessionAttendees"]; } set { this["sessionAttendees"] = value; } }   [ConfigurationProperty("title" , IsRequired = true)] [StringValidator(InvalidCharacters = "~!@#$%^&*()[]{}/;\"|\\")] public string Title { get { return (string)this["title"]; } set { this["title"] = value; }   } } The class is pretty straightforward, but there are some important components to note.  First, it must inherit from System.Configuration.ConfigurationSection.  Next, as a convention I like to have a static settings member that is responsible for pulling out the section when the class is first referenced, and further to expose this collection via a static readonly property, Settings.  Note that the types of both of these are the type of my class, DemoSettings. The properties of the class, SessionAttendees and Title, should map to the attributes of the config element in the XML file.  The [ConfigurationProperty] attribute allows you to map the attribute name to the property name (thus using both XML standard naming conventions and C# naming conventions).  In addition, you can specify a default value to use if nothing is specified in the config file, and whether or not the setting must be provided (IsRequired).  If it is required, then it doesnt make sense to include a default value. Beyond defaults and required, you can specify more advanced validation rules for the configuration values using additional C# attributes, such as [IntegerValidator] and [StringValidator].  Using these, you can declaratively specify that your configuration values be in a given range, or omit certain forbidden characters, for instance.  Of course you can write your own custom validation attributes, and there are others specified in System.Configuration. Individual sections can also be loaded from separate files, using syntax like this: <DemoSettings configSource="demosettings.config" /> Summary Using a custom configuration section handler is not hard.  If your application or component requires configuration, I recommend creating a custom configuration handler dedicated to your app or component.  Doing so will reduce the clutter in appSettings, will provide you with strong typing and validation, and will make it much easier for other developers or system administrators to locate and understand the various configuration values that are necessary for a given application. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • YouTube Scalability Lessons

    - by Bertrand Matthelié
    @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Calibri"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }h2 { margin: 12pt 0cm 3pt; page-break-after: avoid; font-size: 14pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-style: italic; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }span.Heading2Char { font-family: Calibri; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Very interesting blog post by Todd Hoff at highscalability.com presenting “7 Years of YouTube Scalability Lessons in 30 min” based on a presentation from Mike Solomon, one of the original engineers at YouTube: …. The key takeaway away of the talk for me was doing a lot with really simple tools. While many teams are moving on to more complex ecosystems, YouTube really does keep it simple. They program primarily in Python, use MySQL as their database, they’ve stuck with Apache, and even new features for such a massive site start as a very simple Python program. That doesn’t mean YouTube doesn’t do cool stuff, they do, but what makes everything work together is more a philosophy or a way of doing things than technological hocus pocus. What made YouTube into one of the world’s largest websites? Read on and see... Stats @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } 4 billion Views a day 60 hours of video is uploaded every minute 350+ million devices are YouTube enabled Revenue double in 2010 The number of videos has gone up 9 orders of magnitude and the number of developers has only gone up two orders of magnitude. 1 million lines of Python code Stack @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Python - most of the lines of code for YouTube are still in Python. Everytime you watch a YouTube video you are executing a bunch of Python code. Apache - when you think you need to get rid of it, you don’t. Apache is a real rockstar technology at YouTube because they keep it simple. Every request goes through Apache. Linux - the benefit of Linux is there’s always a way to get in and see how your system is behaving. No matter how bad your app is behaving, you can take a look at it with Linux tools like strace and tcpdump. MySQL - is used a lot. When you watch a video you are getting data from MySQL. Sometime it’s used a relational database or a blob store. It’s about tuning and making choices about how you organize your data. Vitess- a  new project released by YouTube, written in Go, it’s a frontend to MySQL. It does a lot of optimization on the fly, it rewrites queries and acts as a proxy. Currently it serves every YouTube database request. It’s RPC based. Zookeeper - a distributed lock server. It’s used for configuration. Really interesting piece of technology. Hard to use correctly so read the manual Wiseguy - a CGI servlet container. Spitfire - a templating system. It has an abstract syntax tree that let’s them do transformations to make things go faster. Serialization formats - no matter which one you use, they are all expensive. Measure. Don’t use pickle. Not a good choice. Found protocol buffers slow. They wrote their own BSON implementation, which is 10-15 time faster than the one you can download. ...Contiues. Read the blog Watch the video

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  • Mixing Forms and Token Authentication in a single ASP.NET Application (the Details)

    - by Your DisplayName here!
    The scenario described in my last post works because of the design around HTTP modules in ASP.NET. Authentication related modules (like Forms authentication and WIF WS-Fed/Sessions) typically subscribe to three events in the pipeline – AuthenticateRequest/PostAuthenticateRequest for pre-processing and EndRequest for post-processing (like making redirects to a login page). In the pre-processing stage it is the modules’ job to determine the identity of the client based on incoming HTTP details (like a header, cookie, form post) and set HttpContext.User and Thread.CurrentPrincipal. The actual page (in the ExecuteHandler event) “sees” the identity that the last module has set. So in our case there are three modules in effect: FormsAuthenticationModule (AuthenticateRequest, EndRequest) WSFederationAuthenticationModule (AuthenticateRequest, PostAuthenticateRequest, EndRequest) SessionAuthenticationModule (AuthenticateRequest, PostAuthenticateRequest) So let’s have a look at the different scenario we have when mixing Forms auth and WS-Federation. Anoymous request to unprotected resource This is the easiest case. Since there is no WIF session cookie or a FormsAuth cookie, these modules do nothing. The WSFed module creates an anonymous ClaimsPrincipal and calls the registered ClaimsAuthenticationManager (if any) to transform it. The result (by default an anonymous ClaimsPrincipal) gets set. Anonymous request to FormsAuth protected resource This is the scenario where an anonymous user tries to access a FormsAuth protected resource for the first time. The principal is anonymous and before the page gets rendered, the Authorize attribute kicks in. The attribute determines that the user needs authentication and therefor sets a 401 status code and ends the request. Now execution jumps to the EndRequest event, where the FormsAuth module takes over. The module then converts the 401 to a redirect (302) to the forms login page. If authentication is successful, the login page sets the FormsAuth cookie.   FormsAuth authenticated request to a FormsAuth protected resource Now a FormsAuth cookie is present, which gets validated by the FormsAuth module. This cookie gets turned into a GenericPrincipal/FormsIdentity combination. The WS-Fed module turns the principal into a ClaimsPrincipal and calls the registered ClaimsAuthenticationManager. The outcome of that gets set on the context. Anonymous request to STS protected resource This time the anonymous user tries to access an STS protected resource (a controller decorated with the RequireTokenAuthentication attribute). The attribute determines that the user needs STS authentication by checking the authentication type on the current principal. If this is not Federation, the redirect to the STS will be made. After successful authentication at the STS, the STS posts the token back to the application (using WS-Federation syntax). Postback from STS authentication After the postback, the WS-Fed module finds the token response and validates the contained token. If successful, the token gets transformed by the ClaimsAuthenticationManager, and the outcome is a) stored in a session cookie, and b) set on the context. STS authenticated request to an STS protected resource This time the WIF Session authentication module kicks in because it can find the previously issued session cookie. The module re-hydrates the ClaimsPrincipal from the cookie and sets it.     FormsAuth and STS authenticated request to a protected resource This is kind of an odd case – e.g. the user first authenticated using Forms and after that using the STS. This time the FormsAuth module does its work, and then afterwards the session module stomps over the context with the session principal. In other words, the STS identity wins.   What about roles? A common way to set roles in ASP.NET is to use the role manager feature. There is a corresponding HTTP module for that (RoleManagerModule) that handles PostAuthenticateRequest. Does this collide with the above combinations? No it doesn’t! When the WS-Fed module turns existing principals into a ClaimsPrincipal (like it did with the FormsIdentity), it also checks for RolePrincipal (which is the principal type created by role manager), and turns the roles in role claims. Nice! But as you can see in the last scenario above, this might result in unnecessary work, so I would rather recommend consolidating all role work (and other claims transformations) into the ClaimsAuthenticationManager. In there you can check for the authentication type of the incoming principal and act accordingly. HTH

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  • Redirect Google crawler to different robots.txt via .htaccess

    - by user3474818
    I have googled for the answer all day and still couldn't find an answer. I have a virtual subdomain www.static.example.com which is a mirror site of www.example.com. It means I have just one root folder for subdomain and domain aswell. I want to redirect crawlers to different robots.txt file - robots_static.txt when they see .static in url in which I will forbid indexing via /disallow command. I want to do this because I have duplicated content in Google search results. Subdomain is showing the exact same content as the main domain. Does anyone know how could I achieve that crawlers sees robots_static.txt instead of robots.txt? What I have managed to find so far is this: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.static.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*robots\.txt.*\ HTTP/ [NC] RewriteRule ^robots\.txt /robots_static.txt [NC,L] but when I check in webmaster tools, it still sees robots.txt as my robots file instead of robots_static.txt, so it crawls and index everything twice. What did I do wrong? Thanks EDIT: This is my .htaccess file ## # @package Joomla # @copyright Copyright (C) 2005 - 2013 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved. # @license GNU General Public License version 2 or later; see LICENSE.txt ## ## # READ THIS COMPLETELY IF YOU CHOOSE TO USE THIS FILE! # # The line just below this section: 'Options +FollowSymLinks' may cause problems # with some server configurations. It is required for use of mod_rewrite, but may already # be set by your server administrator in a way that dissallows changing it in # your .htaccess file. If using it causes your server to error out, comment it out (add # to # beginning of line), reload your site in your browser and test your sef url's. If they work, # it has been set by your server administrator and you do not need it set here. ## ## Can be commented out if causes errors, see notes above. Options +FollowSymLinks ## Mod_rewrite in use. RewriteEngine On RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.static.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*robots\.txt.*\ HTTP/ [NC] RewriteRule ^robots\.txt /robots_static.txt [NC,L] ## Begin - Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits. # If you experience problems on your site block out the operations listed below # This attempts to block the most common type of exploit `attempts` to Joomla! # # Block out any script trying to base64_encode data within the URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} base64_encode[^(]*\([^)]*\) [OR] # Block out any script that includes a <script> tag in URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (<|%3C)([^s]*s)+cript.*(>|%3E) [NC,OR] # Block out any script trying to set a PHP GLOBALS variable via URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} GLOBALS(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR] # Block out any script trying to modify a _REQUEST variable via URL. RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _REQUEST(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) # Return 403 Forbidden header and show the content of the root homepage RewriteRule .* index.php [F] # ## End - Rewrite rules to block out some common exploits. ## Begin - Custom redirects # # If you need to redirect some pages, or set a canonical non-www to # www redirect (or vice versa), place that code here. Ensure those # redirects use the correct RewriteRule syntax and the [R=301,L] flags. # ## End - Custom redirects ## # Uncomment following line if your webserver's URL # is not directly related to physical file paths. # Update Your Joomla! Directory (just / for root). ## # RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.*index\.php [NC] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} !/system/.* RewriteRule (.*?)index\.php/*(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET ## Begin - Joomla! core SEF Section. # RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}] # # If the requested path and file is not /index.php and the request # has not already been internally rewritten to the index.php script RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index\.php # and the request is for something within the component folder, # or for the site root, or for an extensionless URL, or the # requested URL ends with one of the listed extensions RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /component/|(/[^.]*|\.(php|html?|feed|pdf|vcf|raw))$ [NC] # and the requested path and file doesn't directly match a physical file RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f # and the requested path and file doesn't directly match a physical folder RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d # internally rewrite the request to the index.php script RewriteRule .* index.php [L] # ## End - Joomla! core SEF Section. <FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|ttf|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$"> Header set Expires "Wed, 15 Apr 2020 20:00:00 GMT" Header set Cache-Control "public" </FilesMatch> <ifModule mod_headers.c> Header set Connection keep-alive </ifModule> ########## Begin - Remove Etags # FileETag none # ########## End - Remove Etags

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  • Application crashing when talking to oracle unless executable path contains spaces

    - by Lasse V. Karlsen
    We have an x-files problem with our .NET application. Or, rather, hybrid Win32 and .NET application. When it attempts to communicate with Oracle, it just dies. Vanishes. Goes to the big black void in the sky. No event log message, no exception, no nothing. If we simply ask the application to talk to a MS SQL Server instead, which has the effect of replacing the usage of OracleConnection and related classes with SqlConnection and related classes, it works as expected. Today we had a breakthrough. For some reason, a customer had figured out that by placing all the application files in a directory on his desktop, it worked as expected with Oracle as well. Moving the directory down to the root of the drive, or in C:\Temp or, well, around a bit, made the crash reappear. Basically it was 100% reproducable that the application worked if run from directory on desktop, and failed if run from directory in root. Today we figured out that the difference that counted was wether there was a space in the directory name or not. So, these directories would work: C:\Program Files\AppDir\Executable.exe C:\Temp Lemp\AppDir\Executable.exe C:\Documents and Settings\someuser\Desktop\AppDir\Executable.exe whereas these would not: C:\CompanyName\AppDir\Executable.exe C:\Programfiler\AppDir\Executable.exe <-- Program Files in norwegian C:\Temp\AppDir\Executable.exe I'm hoping someone reading this has seen similar behavior and have a "aha, you need to twiddle the frob on the oracle glitz driver configuration" or similar. Anyone? Followup #1: Ok, I've processed the procmon output now, both files from when I hit the button that attempts to open the window that triggers the cascade failure, and I've noticed that they keep track mostly, there's some smallish differences near the top of both files, and they they keep track a long way down. However, when one run fails, the other keeps going and the next few lines of the log output are these: ReadFile C:\oracle\product\10.2.0\db_1\BIN\orageneric10.dll SUCCESS Offset: 274 432, Length: 32 768, I/O Flags: Non-cached, Paging I/O, Synchronous Paging I/O ReadFile C:\oracle\product\10.2.0\db_1\BIN\orageneric10.dll SUCCESS Offset: 233 472, Length: 32 768, I/O Flags: Non-cached, Paging I/O, Synchronous Paging I/O After this, the working run continues to execute, and the other touches the mscorwks.dll files a few times before threads close down and the app closes. Thus, the failed run does not touch the above files. Followup #2: Figured I'd try to upgrade the oracle client drivers, but 10.2.0.1 is apparently the highest version available for Windows 2003 server and XP clients. Followup #3: Well, we've ended up with a black-box solution. Basically we found that the problem is somewhere related to XPO and Oracle. XPO has a system-table it manages, called XPObjectType, with three columns: Oid, TypeName and AssemblyName. Due to how Oracle is configured in the databases we talk to, the column names were OID, TYPENAME and ASSEMBLYNAME. This would ordinarily not be a problem, except that XPO talks to the schema information directly and checks if the table is there with the right column names, and XPO doesn't handle case differences so it sees a XPObjectType table with three unknown columns and none of those it expects. Exactly what XPO does now I don't really know, but if I dropped this table, and recreated it with the right case, using double quotes around all the column names to get the case right, the problem doesn't crop up. Exactly where the space in the folder name comes into this, I still have no idea, but this problem had two tiers: Stop the application from crashing at our customers, short-term solution Fix the bug, long-term solution Right now tier 1 is solved, tier 2 will be put back into the queue for now and prioritized. We're facing some bigger changes to our data tier anyway so this might not be a problem we need to solve, at least if all our Oracle-customers verify that the table-fix actually gets rid of the problem. I'll accept the answer by Dave Markle since though Process Monitor (the big brother of File Monitor) didn't actually pinpoint the problem, I was able to use it to determine that after my breakpoint in user-code where XPO had built up the query for this table, no I/O happened until all the entries for the application closing down was logged, which led me to believe it was this table that was the culprit, or at least influenced the problem somehow. If I manage to get to the real cause of this, I'll update the post.

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  • Part 4 of 4 : Tips/Tricks for Silverlight Developers.

    - by mbcrump
    Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 I wanted to create a series of blog post that gets right to the point and is aimed specifically at Silverlight Developers. The most important things I want this series to answer is : What is it?  Why do I care? How do I do it? I hope that you enjoy this series. Let’s get started: Tip/Trick #16) What is it? Find out version information about Silverlight and which WebKit it is using by going to http://issilverlightinstalled.com/scriptverify/. Why do I care? I’ve had those users that its just easier to give them a site and say copy/paste the line that says User Agent in order to troubleshoot a Silverlight problem. I’ve also been debugging my own Silverlight applications and needed an easy way to determine if the plugin is disabled or not. How do I do it: Simply navigate to http://issilverlightinstalled.com/scriptverify/ and hit the Verify button. An example screenshot is located below: Results from Chrome 7 Results from Internet Explorer 8 (With Silverlight Disabled) Tip/Trick #17) What is it? Use Lambdas whenever you can. Why do I care?  It is my personal opinion that code is easier to read using Lambdas after you get past the syntax. How do I do it: For example: You may write code like the following: void MainPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { //Check and see if we have a newer .XAP file on the server Application.Current.CheckAndDownloadUpdateAsync(); Application.Current.CheckAndDownloadUpdateCompleted += new CheckAndDownloadUpdateCompletedEventHandler(Current_CheckAndDownloadUpdateCompleted); } void Current_CheckAndDownloadUpdateCompleted(object sender, CheckAndDownloadUpdateCompletedEventArgs e) { if (e.UpdateAvailable) { MessageBox.Show( "An update has been installed. To see the updates please exit and restart the application"); } } To me this style forces me to look for the other Method to see what the code is actually doing. The style located below is much easier to read in my opinion and does the exact same thing. void MainPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { //Check and see if we have a newer .XAP file on the server Application.Current.CheckAndDownloadUpdateAsync(); Application.Current.CheckAndDownloadUpdateCompleted += (s, e) => { if (e.UpdateAvailable) { MessageBox.Show( "An update has been installed. To see the updates please exit and restart the application"); } }; } Tip/Trick #18) What is it? Prevent development Web Service references from breaking when Visual Studio auto generates a new port number. Why do I care?  We have all been there, we are developing a Silverlight Application and all of a sudden our development web services break. We check and find out that the local port number that Visual Studio assigned has changed and now we need up to update all of our service references. We need a way to stop this. How do I do it: This can actually be prevented with just a few mouse click. Right click on your web solution and goto properties. Click the tab that says, Web. You just need to click the radio button and specify a port number. Now you won’t be bothered with that anymore. Tip/Trick #19) What is it? You can disable the Close Button a ChildWindow. Why do I care?  I wouldn’t blog about it if I hadn’t seen it. Devs trying to override keystrokes to prevent users from closing a Child Window. How do I do it: A property exist on the ChildWindow called “HasCloseButton”, you simply change that to false and your close button is gone. You can delete the “Cancel” button and add some logic to the OK button if you want the user to respond before proceeding. Tip/Trick #20) What is it? Cleanup your XAML. Why do I care?  By removing unneeded namespaces, not naming all of your controls and getting rid of designer markup you can improve code quality and readability. How do I do it: (This is a 3 in one tip) Remove unused Designer markup: 1) Have you ever wondered what the following code snippet does? xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="640" d:DesignHeight="480" This code is telling the designer to do something special with this page in “Design mode” Specifically the width and the height of the page. When its running in the browser it will not use this information and it is actually ignored by the XAML parser. In other words, if you don’t need it then delete it. 2) If you are not using a namespace then remove it. In the code sample below, I am using Resharper which will tell me the ones that I’m not using by the grayed out line below. If you don’t have resharper you can look in your XAML and manually remove the unneeded namespaces. 3) Don’t name an control unless you actually need to refer to it in procedural code. If you name a control you will take a slight performance hit that is totally unnecessary if its not being called. <TextBlock Height="23" Text="TextBlock" />   That is the end of the series. I hope that you enjoyed it and please check out Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 if your hungry for more.  Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

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  • "Mega Menus" for SEO [duplicate]

    - by Thought Space Designs
    This question already has an answer here: How do I handle having to many links on a webpage because of my menu 4 answers I'm using the term "Mega Menus" loosely here. I'm redesigning my WordPress site (it's going to be responsive), and as part of the redesign, I was debating incorporating some sort of descriptive menu setup. For example, normal navigation drop down menus come in the form of unordered lists of links like so: <nav> <ul> <li> <a href="#">Link1</a> </li> <li> <a href="#">Link2</a> </li> <li> <a href="#">Link3</a> <ul> <li> <a href="#">Sub Link1</a> </li> <li> <a href="#">Sub Link2</a> </li> <li> <a href="#">Sub Link3</a> </li> </ul> </li> <li> <a href="#">Link4</a> </li> </ul> </nav> What I'm looking to do is build my drop down menus with more information than your standard menu. For example, I have a top level link named "Team", and under that link, I want to make a large drop down that contains head shots, headers (in the form of styled p tags) and brief (<100 words) descriptions of each team member (only 2 currently). I want to accompany this with a "Read More" link that takes you to their actual team page. This is just one example, of course, and the other top level links would also have descriptive drop downs in the same fashion. On mobile, I was planning on hiding the "mega menu", and delivering a standard unordered list of links. Here's what I was thinking for overall structure and syntax: <nav> <ul> <li> <a href="#">Home</a> </li> <li> <a href="#">About</a> </li> <li> <a href="#">Team</a> <ul> <!-- DESKTOP --> <li class="mega-menu row"> <a class="col-sm-6" href="#"> <div class="row"> <div class="col-sm-4"> <img src="#" alt="Team Member 1" /> </div> <div class="col-sm-8"> <p class="header">Team Member 1</p> <p>Short description goes here.</p> </div> </div> </a> <a class="col-sm-6" href="#"> <!-- OTHER TEAM MEMBER INFO --> </a> </li> <!-- END DESKTOP --> <!-- MOBILE --> <li> <a href="#">Team Member 1</a> </li> <li> <a href="#">Team Member 2</a> </li> <!-- END MOBILE --> </ul> </li> <li> <a href="#">Contact</a> </li> </ul> </nav> Can anybody think of any potential SEO ramifications of doing this? I'm not going to be loading these menus full of links, so it shouldn't hurt page rank, but what are the effects of having a good bit of text and maybe even forms within nav elements? Is there such a thing as overloading nav with HTML? EDIT: Here's an example of what the menu would look like rendered on desktop. I'm currently hovering the "Team" menu, but you can't see because my mouse went away when I took the screenshot. EDIT 2: This question is not a duplicate. I'm not going to have "too many" links in my menus. I'm wondering how having images and text inside of header navigation will affect my menus. Also, I don't just want "yes, this is bad" answers. Please cite your sources and be specific with reasoning.

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  • Toorcon14

    - by danx
    Toorcon 2012 Information Security Conference San Diego, CA, http://www.toorcon.org/ Dan Anderson, October 2012 It's almost Halloween, and we all know what that means—yes, of course, it's time for another Toorcon Conference! Toorcon is an annual conference for people interested in computer security. This includes the whole range of hackers, computer hobbyists, professionals, security consultants, press, law enforcement, prosecutors, FBI, etc. We're at Toorcon 14—see earlier blogs for some of the previous Toorcon's I've attended (back to 2003). This year's "con" was held at the Westin on Broadway in downtown San Diego, California. The following are not necessarily my views—I'm just the messenger—although I could have misquoted or misparaphrased the speakers. Also, I only reviewed some of the talks, below, which I attended and interested me. MalAndroid—the Crux of Android Infections, Aditya K. Sood Programming Weird Machines with ELF Metadata, Rebecca "bx" Shapiro Privacy at the Handset: New FCC Rules?, Valkyrie Hacking Measured Boot and UEFI, Dan Griffin You Can't Buy Security: Building the Open Source InfoSec Program, Boris Sverdlik What Journalists Want: The Investigative Reporters' Perspective on Hacking, Dave Maas & Jason Leopold Accessibility and Security, Anna Shubina Stop Patching, for Stronger PCI Compliance, Adam Brand McAfee Secure & Trustmarks — a Hacker's Best Friend, Jay James & Shane MacDougall MalAndroid—the Crux of Android Infections Aditya K. Sood, IOActive, Michigan State PhD candidate Aditya talked about Android smartphone malware. There's a lot of old Android software out there—over 50% Gingerbread (2.3.x)—and most have unpatched vulnerabilities. Of 9 Android vulnerabilities, 8 have known exploits (such as the old Gingerbread Global Object Table exploit). Android protection includes sandboxing, security scanner, app permissions, and screened Android app market. The Android permission checker has fine-grain resource control, policy enforcement. Android static analysis also includes a static analysis app checker (bouncer), and a vulnerablity checker. What security problems does Android have? User-centric security, which depends on the user to grant permission and make smart decisions. But users don't care or think about malware (the're not aware, not paranoid). All they want is functionality, extensibility, mobility Android had no "proper" encryption before Android 3.0 No built-in protection against social engineering and web tricks Alternative Android app markets are unsafe. Simply visiting some markets can infect Android Aditya classified Android Malware types as: Type A—Apps. These interact with the Android app framework. For example, a fake Netflix app. Or Android Gold Dream (game), which uploads user files stealthy manner to a remote location. Type K—Kernel. Exploits underlying Linux libraries or kernel Type H—Hybrid. These use multiple layers (app framework, libraries, kernel). These are most commonly used by Android botnets, which are popular with Chinese botnet authors What are the threats from Android malware? These incude leak info (contacts), banking fraud, corporate network attacks, malware advertising, malware "Hackivism" (the promotion of social causes. For example, promiting specific leaders of the Tunisian or Iranian revolutions. Android malware is frequently "masquerated". That is, repackaged inside a legit app with malware. To avoid detection, the hidden malware is not unwrapped until runtime. The malware payload can be hidden in, for example, PNG files. Less common are Android bootkits—there's not many around. What they do is hijack the Android init framework—alteering system programs and daemons, then deletes itself. For example, the DKF Bootkit (China). Android App Problems: no code signing! all self-signed native code execution permission sandbox — all or none alternate market places no robust Android malware detection at network level delayed patch process Programming Weird Machines with ELF Metadata Rebecca "bx" Shapiro, Dartmouth College, NH https://github.com/bx/elf-bf-tools @bxsays on twitter Definitions. "ELF" is an executable file format used in linking and loading executables (on UNIX/Linux-class machines). "Weird machine" uses undocumented computation sources (I think of them as unintended virtual machines). Some examples of "weird machines" are those that: return to weird location, does SQL injection, corrupts the heap. Bx then talked about using ELF metadata as (an uintended) "weird machine". Some ELF background: A compiler takes source code and generates a ELF object file (hello.o). A static linker makes an ELF executable from the object file. A runtime linker and loader takes ELF executable and loads and relocates it in memory. The ELF file has symbols to relocate functions and variables. ELF has two relocation tables—one at link time and another one at loading time: .rela.dyn (link time) and .dynsym (dynamic table). GOT: Global Offset Table of addresses for dynamically-linked functions. PLT: Procedure Linkage Tables—works with GOT. The memory layout of a process (not the ELF file) is, in order: program (+ heap), dynamic libraries, libc, ld.so, stack (which includes the dynamic table loaded into memory) For ELF, the "weird machine" is found and exploited in the loader. ELF can be crafted for executing viruses, by tricking runtime into executing interpreted "code" in the ELF symbol table. One can inject parasitic "code" without modifying the actual ELF code portions. Think of the ELF symbol table as an "assembly language" interpreter. It has these elements: instructions: Add, move, jump if not 0 (jnz) Think of symbol table entries as "registers" symbol table value is "contents" immediate values are constants direct values are addresses (e.g., 0xdeadbeef) move instruction: is a relocation table entry add instruction: relocation table "addend" entry jnz instruction: takes multiple relocation table entries The ELF weird machine exploits the loader by relocating relocation table entries. The loader will go on forever until told to stop. It stores state on stack at "end" and uses IFUNC table entries (containing function pointer address). The ELF weird machine, called "Brainfu*k" (BF) has: 8 instructions: pointer inc, dec, inc indirect, dec indirect, jump forward, jump backward, print. Three registers - 3 registers Bx showed example BF source code that implemented a Turing machine printing "hello, world". More interesting was the next demo, where bx modified ping. Ping runs suid as root, but quickly drops privilege. BF modified the loader to disable the library function call dropping privilege, so it remained as root. Then BF modified the ping -t argument to execute the -t filename as root. It's best to show what this modified ping does with an example: $ whoami bx $ ping localhost -t backdoor.sh # executes backdoor $ whoami root $ The modified code increased from 285948 bytes to 290209 bytes. A BF tool compiles "executable" by modifying the symbol table in an existing ELF executable. The tool modifies .dynsym and .rela.dyn table, but not code or data. Privacy at the Handset: New FCC Rules? "Valkyrie" (Christie Dudley, Santa Clara Law JD candidate) Valkyrie talked about mobile handset privacy. Some background: Senator Franken (also a comedian) became alarmed about CarrierIQ, where the carriers track their customers. Franken asked the FCC to find out what obligations carriers think they have to protect privacy. The carriers' response was that they are doing just fine with self-regulation—no worries! Carriers need to collect data, such as missed calls, to maintain network quality. But carriers also sell data for marketing. Verizon sells customer data and enables this with a narrow privacy policy (only 1 month to opt out, with difficulties). The data sold is not individually identifiable and is aggregated. But Verizon recommends, as an aggregation workaround to "recollate" data to other databases to identify customers indirectly. The FCC has regulated telephone privacy since 1934 and mobile network privacy since 2007. Also, the carriers say mobile phone privacy is a FTC responsibility (not FCC). FTC is trying to improve mobile app privacy, but FTC has no authority over carrier / customer relationships. As a side note, Apple iPhones are unique as carriers have extra control over iPhones they don't have with other smartphones. As a result iPhones may be more regulated. Who are the consumer advocates? Everyone knows EFF, but EPIC (Electrnic Privacy Info Center), although more obsecure, is more relevant. What to do? Carriers must be accountable. Opt-in and opt-out at any time. Carriers need incentive to grant users control for those who want it, by holding them liable and responsible for breeches on their clock. Location information should be added current CPNI privacy protection, and require "Pen/trap" judicial order to obtain (and would still be a lower standard than 4th Amendment). Politics are on a pro-privacy swing now, with many senators and the Whitehouse. There will probably be new regulation soon, and enforcement will be a problem, but consumers will still have some benefit. Hacking Measured Boot and UEFI Dan Griffin, JWSecure, Inc., Seattle, @JWSdan Dan talked about hacking measured UEFI boot. First some terms: UEFI is a boot technology that is replacing BIOS (has whitelisting and blacklisting). UEFI protects devices against rootkits. TPM - hardware security device to store hashs and hardware-protected keys "secure boot" can control at firmware level what boot images can boot "measured boot" OS feature that tracks hashes (from BIOS, boot loader, krnel, early drivers). "remote attestation" allows remote validation and control based on policy on a remote attestation server. Microsoft pushing TPM (Windows 8 required), but Google is not. Intel TianoCore is the only open source for UEFI. Dan has Measured Boot Tool at http://mbt.codeplex.com/ with a demo where you can also view TPM data. TPM support already on enterprise-class machines. UEFI Weaknesses. UEFI toolkits are evolving rapidly, but UEFI has weaknesses: assume user is an ally trust TPM implicitly, and attached to computer hibernate file is unprotected (disk encryption protects against this) protection migrating from hardware to firmware delays in patching and whitelist updates will UEFI really be adopted by the mainstream (smartphone hardware support, bank support, apathetic consumer support) You Can't Buy Security: Building the Open Source InfoSec Program Boris Sverdlik, ISDPodcast.com co-host Boris talked about problems typical with current security audits. "IT Security" is an oxymoron—IT exists to enable buiness, uptime, utilization, reporting, but don't care about security—IT has conflict of interest. There's no Magic Bullet ("blinky box"), no one-size-fits-all solution (e.g., Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs)). Regulations don't make you secure. The cloud is not secure (because of shared data and admin access). Defense and pen testing is not sexy. Auditors are not solution (security not a checklist)—what's needed is experience and adaptability—need soft skills. Step 1: First thing is to Google and learn the company end-to-end before you start. Get to know the management team (not IT team), meet as many people as you can. Don't use arbitrary values such as CISSP scores. Quantitive risk assessment is a myth (e.g. AV*EF-SLE). Learn different Business Units, legal/regulatory obligations, learn the business and where the money is made, verify company is protected from script kiddies (easy), learn sensitive information (IP, internal use only), and start with low-hanging fruit (customer service reps and social engineering). Step 2: Policies. Keep policies short and relevant. Generic SANS "security" boilerplate policies don't make sense and are not followed. Focus on acceptable use, data usage, communications, physical security. Step 3: Implementation: keep it simple stupid. Open source, although useful, is not free (implementation cost). Access controls with authentication & authorization for local and remote access. MS Windows has it, otherwise use OpenLDAP, OpenIAM, etc. Application security Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel—use existing static analysis tools. Review high-risk apps and major revisions. Don't run different risk level apps on same system. Assume host/client compromised and use app-level security control. Network security VLAN != segregated because there's too many workarounds. Use explicit firwall rules, active and passive network monitoring (snort is free), disallow end user access to production environment, have a proxy instead of direct Internet access. Also, SSL certificates are not good two-factor auth and SSL does not mean "safe." Operational Controls Have change, patch, asset, & vulnerability management (OSSI is free). For change management, always review code before pushing to production For logging, have centralized security logging for business-critical systems, separate security logging from administrative/IT logging, and lock down log (as it has everything). Monitor with OSSIM (open source). Use intrusion detection, but not just to fulfill a checkbox: build rules from a whitelist perspective (snort). OSSEC has 95% of what you need. Vulnerability management is a QA function when done right: OpenVas and Seccubus are free. Security awareness The reality is users will always click everything. Build real awareness, not compliance driven checkbox, and have it integrated into the culture. Pen test by crowd sourcing—test with logging COSSP http://www.cossp.org/ - Comprehensive Open Source Security Project What Journalists Want: The Investigative Reporters' Perspective on Hacking Dave Maas, San Diego CityBeat Jason Leopold, Truthout.org The difference between hackers and investigative journalists: For hackers, the motivation varies, but method is same, technological specialties. For investigative journalists, it's about one thing—The Story, and they need broad info-gathering skills. J-School in 60 Seconds: Generic formula: Person or issue of pubic interest, new info, or angle. Generic criteria: proximity, prominence, timeliness, human interest, oddity, or consequence. Media awareness of hackers and trends: journalists becoming extremely aware of hackers with congressional debates (privacy, data breaches), demand for data-mining Journalists, use of coding and web development for Journalists, and Journalists busted for hacking (Murdock). Info gathering by investigative journalists include Public records laws. Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is good, but slow. California Public Records Act is a lot stronger. FOIA takes forever because of foot-dragging—it helps to be specific. Often need to sue (especially FBI). CPRA is faster, and requests can be vague. Dumps and leaks (a la Wikileaks) Journalists want: leads, protecting ourselves, our sources, and adapting tools for news gathering (Google hacking). Anonomity is important to whistleblowers. They want no digital footprint left behind (e.g., email, web log). They don't trust encryption, want to feel safe and secure. Whistleblower laws are very weak—there's no upside for whistleblowers—they have to be very passionate to do it. Accessibility and Security or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Halting Problem Anna Shubina, Dartmouth College Anna talked about how accessibility and security are related. Accessibility of digital content (not real world accessibility). mostly refers to blind users and screenreaders, for our purpose. Accessibility is about parsing documents, as are many security issues. "Rich" executable content causes accessibility to fail, and often causes security to fail. For example MS Word has executable format—it's not a document exchange format—more dangerous than PDF or HTML. Accessibility is often the first and maybe only sanity check with parsing. They have no choice because someone may want to read what you write. Google, for example, is very particular about web browser you use and are bad at supporting other browsers. Uses JavaScript instead of links, often requiring mouseover to display content. PDF is a security nightmare. Executible format, embedded flash, JavaScript, etc. 15 million lines of code. Google Chrome doesn't handle PDF correctly, causing several security bugs. PDF has an accessibility checker and PDF tagging, to help with accessibility. But no PDF checker checks for incorrect tags, untagged content, or validates lists or tables. None check executable content at all. The "Halting Problem" is: can one decide whether a program will ever stop? The answer, in general, is no (Rice's theorem). The same holds true for accessibility checkers. Language-theoretic Security says complicated data formats are hard to parse and cannot be solved due to the Halting Problem. W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines: "Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust" Not much help though, except for "Robust", but here's some gems: * all information should be parsable (paraphrasing) * if not parsable, cannot be converted to alternate formats * maximize compatibility in new document formats Executible webpages are bad for security and accessibility. They say it's for a better web experience. But is it necessary to stuff web pages with JavaScript for a better experience? A good example is The Drudge Report—it has hand-written HTML with no JavaScript, yet drives a lot of web traffic due to good content. A bad example is Google News—hidden scrollbars, guessing user input. Solutions: Accessibility and security problems come from same source Expose "better user experience" myth Keep your corner of Internet parsable Remember "Halting Problem"—recognize false solutions (checking and verifying tools) Stop Patching, for Stronger PCI Compliance Adam Brand, protiviti @adamrbrand, http://www.picfun.com/ Adam talked about PCI compliance for retail sales. Take an example: for PCI compliance, 50% of Brian's time (a IT guy), 960 hours/year was spent patching POSs in 850 restaurants. Often applying some patches make no sense (like fixing a browser vulnerability on a server). "Scanner worship" is overuse of vulnerability scanners—it gives a warm and fuzzy and it's simple (red or green results—fix reds). Scanners give a false sense of security. In reality, breeches from missing patches are uncommon—more common problems are: default passwords, cleartext authentication, misconfiguration (firewall ports open). Patching Myths: Myth 1: install within 30 days of patch release (but PCI §6.1 allows a "risk-based approach" instead). Myth 2: vendor decides what's critical (also PCI §6.1). But §6.2 requires user ranking of vulnerabilities instead. Myth 3: scan and rescan until it passes. But PCI §11.2.1b says this applies only to high-risk vulnerabilities. Adam says good recommendations come from NIST 800-40. Instead use sane patching and focus on what's really important. From NIST 800-40: Proactive: Use a proactive vulnerability management process: use change control, configuration management, monitor file integrity. Monitor: start with NVD and other vulnerability alerts, not scanner results. Evaluate: public-facing system? workstation? internal server? (risk rank) Decide:on action and timeline Test: pre-test patches (stability, functionality, rollback) for change control Install: notify, change control, tickets McAfee Secure & Trustmarks — a Hacker's Best Friend Jay James, Shane MacDougall, Tactical Intelligence Inc., Canada "McAfee Secure Trustmark" is a website seal marketed by McAfee. A website gets this badge if they pass their remote scanning. The problem is a removal of trustmarks act as flags that you're vulnerable. Easy to view status change by viewing McAfee list on website or on Google. "Secure TrustGuard" is similar to McAfee. Jay and Shane wrote Perl scripts to gather sites from McAfee and search engines. If their certification image changes to a 1x1 pixel image, then they are longer certified. Their scripts take deltas of scans to see what changed daily. The bottom line is change in TrustGuard status is a flag for hackers to attack your site. Entire idea of seals is silly—you're raising a flag saying if you're vulnerable.

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  • Scripting with the Sun ZFS Storage 7000 Appliance

    - by Geoff Ongley
    The Sun ZFS Storage 7000 appliance has a user friendly and easy to understand graphical web based interface we call the "BUI" or "Browser User Interface".This interface is very useful for many tasks, but in some cases a script (or workflow) may be more appropriate, such as:Repetitive tasksTasks which work on (or obtain information about) a large number of shares or usersTasks which are triggered by an alert threshold (workflows)Tasks where you want a only very basic input, but a consistent output (workflows)The appliance scripting language is based on ECMAscript 3 (close to javascript). I'm not going to cover ECMAscript 3 in great depth (I'm far from an expert here), but I would like to show you some neat things you can do with the appliance, to get you started based on what I have found from my own playing around.I'm making the assumption you have some sort of programming background, and understand variables, arrays, functions to some extent - but of course if something is not clear, please let me know so I can fix it up or clarify it.Variable Declarations and ArraysVariablesECMAScript is a dynamically and weakly typed language. If you don't know what that means, google is your friend - but at a high level it means we can just declare variables with no specific type and on the fly.For example, I can declare a variable and use it straight away in the middle of my code, for example:projects=list();Which makes projects an array of values that are returned from the list(); function (which is usable in most contexts). With this kind of variable, I can do things like:projects.length (this property on array tells you how many objects are in it, good for for loops etc). Alternatively, I could say:projects=3;and now projects is just a simple number.Should we declare variables like this so loosely? In my opinion, the answer is no - I feel it is a better practice to declare variables you are going to use, before you use them - and given them an initial value. You can do so as follows:var myVariable=0;To demonstrate the ability to just randomly assign and change the type of variables, you can create a simple script at the cli as follows (bold for input):fishy10:> script("." to run)> run("cd /");("." to run)> run ("shares");("." to run)> var projects;("." to run)> projects=list();("." to run)> printf("Number of projects is: %d\n",projects.length);("." to run)> projects=152;("." to run)> printf("Value of the projects variable as an integer is now: %d\n",projects);("." to run)> .Number of projects is: 7Value of the projects variable as an integer is now: 152You can also confirm this behaviour by checking the typeof variable we are dealing with:fishy10:> script("." to run)> run("cd /");("." to run)> run ("shares");("." to run)> var projects;("." to run)> projects=list();("." to run)> printf("var projects is of type %s\n",typeof(projects));("." to run)> projects=152;("." to run)> printf("var projects is of type %s\n",typeof(projects));("." to run)> .var projects is of type objectvar projects is of type numberArraysSo you likely noticed that we have already touched on arrays, as the list(); (in the shares context) stored an array into the 'projects' variable.But what if you want to declare your own array? Easy! This is very similar to Java and other languages, we just instantiate a brand new "Array" object using the keyword new:var myArray = new Array();will create an array called "myArray".A quick example:fishy10:> script("." to run)> testArray = new Array();("." to run)> testArray[0]="This";("." to run)> testArray[1]="is";("." to run)> testArray[2]="just";("." to run)> testArray[3]="a";("." to run)> testArray[4]="test";("." to run)> for (i=0; i < testArray.length; i++)("." to run)> {("." to run)>    printf("Array element %d is %s\n",i,testArray[i]);("." to run)> }("." to run)> .Array element 0 is ThisArray element 1 is isArray element 2 is justArray element 3 is aArray element 4 is testWorking With LoopsFor LoopFor loops are very similar to those you will see in C, java and several other languages. One of the key differences here is, as you were made aware earlier, we can be a bit more sloppy with our variable declarations.The general way you would likely use a for loop is as follows:for (variable; test-case; modifier for variable){}For example, you may wish to declare a variable i as 0; and a MAX_ITERATIONS variable to determine how many times this loop should repeat:var i=0;var MAX_ITERATIONS=10;And then, use this variable to be tested against some case existing (has i reached MAX_ITERATIONS? - if not, increment i using i++);for (i=0; i < MAX_ITERATIONS; i++){ // some work to do}So lets run something like this on the appliance:fishy10:> script("." to run)> var i=0;("." to run)> var MAX_ITERATIONS=10;("." to run)> for (i=0; i < MAX_ITERATIONS; i++)("." to run)> {("." to run)>    printf("The number is %d\n",i);("." to run)> }("." to run)> .The number is 0The number is 1The number is 2The number is 3The number is 4The number is 5The number is 6The number is 7The number is 8The number is 9While LoopWhile loops again are very similar to other languages, we loop "while" a condition is met. For example:fishy10:> script("." to run)> var isTen=false;("." to run)> var counter=0;("." to run)> while(isTen==false)("." to run)> {("." to run)>    if (counter==10) ("." to run)>    { ("." to run)>            isTen=true;   ("." to run)>    } ("." to run)>    printf("Counter is %d\n",counter);("." to run)>    counter++;    ("." to run)> }("." to run)> printf("Loop has ended and Counter is %d\n",counter);("." to run)> .Counter is 0Counter is 1Counter is 2Counter is 3Counter is 4Counter is 5Counter is 6Counter is 7Counter is 8Counter is 9Counter is 10Loop has ended and Counter is 11So what do we notice here? Something has actually gone wrong - counter will technically be 11 once the loop completes... Why is this?Well, if we have a loop like this, where the 'while' condition that will end the loop may be set based on some other condition(s) existing (such as the counter has reached 10) - we must ensure that we  terminate this iteration of the loop when the condition is met - otherwise the rest of the code will be followed which may not be desirable. In other words, like in other languages, we will only ever check the loop condition once we are ready to perform the next iteration, so any other code after we set "isTen" to be true, will still be executed as we can see it was above.We can avoid this by adding a break into our loop once we know we have set the condition - this will stop the rest of the logic being processed in this iteration (and as such, counter will not be incremented). So lets try that again:fishy10:> script("." to run)> var isTen=false;("." to run)> var counter=0;("." to run)> while(isTen==false)("." to run)> {("." to run)>    if (counter==10) ("." to run)>    { ("." to run)>            isTen=true;   ("." to run)>            break;("." to run)>    } ("." to run)>    printf("Counter is %d\n",counter);("." to run)>    counter++;    ("." to run)> }("." to run)> printf("Loop has ended and Counter is %d\n", counter);("." to run)> .Counter is 0Counter is 1Counter is 2Counter is 3Counter is 4Counter is 5Counter is 6Counter is 7Counter is 8Counter is 9Loop has ended and Counter is 10Much better!Methods to Obtain and Manipulate DataGet MethodThe get method allows you to get simple properties from an object, for example a quota from a user. The syntax is fairly simple:var myVariable=get('property');An example of where you may wish to use this, is when you are getting a bunch of information about a user (such as quota information when in a shares context):var users=list();for(k=0; k < users.length; k++){     user=users[k];     run('select ' + user);     var username=get('name');     var usage=get('usage');     var quota=get('quota');...Which you can then use to your advantage - to print or manipulate infomation (you could change a user's information with a set method, based on the information returned from the get method). The set method is explained next.Set MethodThe set method can be used in a simple manner, similar to get. The syntax for set is:set('property','value'); // where value is a string, if it was a number, you don't need quotesFor example, we could set the quota on a share as follows (first observing the initial value):fishy10:shares default/test-geoff> script("." to run)> var currentQuota=get('quota');("." to run)> printf("Current Quota is: %s\n",currentQuota);("." to run)> set('quota','30G');("." to run)> run('commit');("." to run)> currentQuota=get('quota');("." to run)> printf("Current Quota is: %s\n",currentQuota);("." to run)> .Current Quota is: 0Current Quota is: 32212254720This shows us using both the get and set methods as can be used in scripts, of course when only setting an individual share, the above is overkill - it would be much easier to set it manually at the cli using 'set quota=3G' and then 'commit'.List MethodThe list method can be very powerful, especially in more complex scripts which iterate over large amounts of data and manipulate it if so desired. The general way you will use list is as follows:var myVar=list();Which will make "myVar" an array, containing all the objects in the relevant context (this could be a list of users, shares, projects, etc). You can then gather or manipulate data very easily.We could list all the shares and mountpoints in a given project for example:fishy10:shares another-project> script("." to run)> var shares=list();("." to run)> for (i=0; i < shares.length; i++)("." to run)> {("." to run)>    run('select ' + shares[i]);("." to run)>    var mountpoint=get('mountpoint');("." to run)>    printf("Share %s discovered, has mountpoint %s\n",shares[i],mountpoint);("." to run)>    run('done');("." to run)> }("." to run)> .Share and-another discovered, has mountpoint /export/another-project/and-anotherShare another-share discovered, has mountpoint /export/another-project/another-shareShare bob discovered, has mountpoint /export/another-projectShare more-shares-for-all discovered, has mountpoint /export/another-project/more-shares-for-allShare yep discovered, has mountpoint /export/another-project/yepWriting More Complex and Re-Usable CodeFunctionsThe best way to be able to write more complex code is to use functions to split up repeatable or reusable sections of your code. This also makes your more complex code easier to read and understand for other programmers.We write functions as follows:function functionName(variable1,variable2,...,variableN){}For example, we could have a function that takes a project name as input, and lists shares for that project (assuming we're already in the 'project' context - context is important!):function getShares(proj){        run('select ' + proj);        shares=list();        printf("Project: %s\n", proj);        for(j=0; j < shares.length; j++)        {                printf("Discovered share: %s\n",shares[i]);        }        run('done'); // exit selected project}Commenting your CodeLike any other language, a large part of making it readable and understandable is to comment it. You can use the same comment style as in C and Java amongst other languages.In other words, sngle line comments use://at the beginning of the comment.Multi line comments use:/*at the beginning, and:*/ at the end.For example, here we will use both:fishy10:> script("." to run)> // This is a test comment("." to run)> printf("doing some work...\n");("." to run)> /* This is a multi-line("." to run)> comment which I will span across("." to run)> three lines in total */("." to run)> printf("doing some more work...\n");("." to run)> .doing some work...doing some more work...Your comments do not have to be on their own, they can begin (particularly with single line comments this is handy) at the end of a statement, for examplevar projects=list(); // The variable projects is an array containing all projects on the system.Try and Catch StatementsYou may be used to using try and catch statements in other languages, and they can (and should) be utilised in your code to catch expected or unexpected error conditions, that you do NOT wish to stop your code from executing (if you do not catch these errors, your script will exit!):try{  // do some work}catch(err) // Catch any error that could occur{ // do something here under the error condition}For example, you may wish to only execute some code if a context can be reached. If you can't perform certain actions under certain circumstances, that may be perfectly acceptable.For example if you want to test a condition that only makes sense when looking at a SMB/NFS share, but does not make sense when you hit an iscsi or FC LUN, you don't want to stop all processing of other shares you may not have covered yet.For example we may wish to obtain quota information on all shares for all users on a share (but this makes no sense for a LUN):function getShareQuota(shar) // Get quota for each user of this share{        run('select ' + shar);        printf("  SHARE: %s\n", shar);        try        {                run('users');                printf("    %20s        %11s    %11s    %3s\n","Username","Usage(G)","Quota(G)","Quota(%)");                printf("    %20s        %11s    %11s    %4s\n","--------","--------","--------","----");                                users=list();                for(k=0; k < users.length; k++)                {                        user=users[k];                        getUserQuota(user);                }                run('done'); // exit user context        }        catch(err)        {                printf("    SKIPPING %s - This is NOT a NFS or CIFs share, not looking for users\n", shar);        }        run('done'); // done with this share}Running Scripts Remotely over SSHAs you have likely noticed, writing and running scripts for all but the simplest jobs directly on the appliance is not going to be a lot of fun.There's a couple of choices on what you can do here:Create scripts on a remote system and run them over sshCreate scripts, wrapping them in workflow code, so they are stored on the appliance and can be triggered under certain circumstances (like a threshold being reached)We'll cover the first one here, and then cover workflows later on (as these are for the most part just scripts with some wrapper information around them).Creating a SSH Public/Private SSH Key PairLog on to your handy Solaris box (You wouldn't be using any other OS, right? :P) and use ssh-keygen to create a pair of ssh keys. I'm storing this separate to my normal key:[geoff@lightning ~] ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 1024Generating public/private rsa key pair.Enter file in which to save the key (/export/home/geoff/.ssh/id_rsa): /export/home/geoff/.ssh/nas_key_rsaEnter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): Enter same passphrase again: Your identification has been saved in /export/home/geoff/.ssh/nas_key_rsa.Your public key has been saved in /export/home/geoff/.ssh/nas_key_rsa.pub.The key fingerprint is:7f:3d:53:f0:2a:5e:8b:2d:94:2a:55:77:66:5c:9b:14 geoff@lightningInstalling the Public Key on the ApplianceOn your Solaris host, observe the public key:[geoff@lightning ~] cat .ssh/nas_key_rsa.pub ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAvYfK3RIaAYmMHBOvyhKM41NaSmcgUMC3igPN5gUKJQvSnYmjuWG6CBr1CkF5UcDji7v19jG3qAD5lAMFn+L0CxgRr8TNaAU+hA4/tpAGkjm+dKYSyJgEdMIURweyyfUFXoerweR8AWW5xlovGKEWZTAfvJX9Zqvh8oMQ5UJLUUc= geoff@lightningNow, copy and paste everything after "ssh-rsa" and before "user@hostname" - in this case, geoff@lightning. That is, this bit:AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAvYfK3RIaAYmMHBOvyhKM41NaSmcgUMC3igPN5gUKJQvSnYmjuWG6CBr1CkF5UcDji7v19jG3qAD5lAMFn+L0CxgRr8TNaAU+hA4/tpAGkjm+dKYSyJgEdMIURweyyfUFXoerweR8AWW5xlovGKEWZTAfvJX9Zqvh8oMQ5UJLUUc=Logon to your appliance and get into the preferences -> keys area for this user (root):[geoff@lightning ~] ssh [email protected]: Last login: Mon Dec  6 17:13:28 2010 from 192.168.0.2fishy10:> configuration usersfishy10:configuration users> select rootfishy10:configuration users root> preferences fishy10:configuration users root preferences> keysOR do it all in one hit:fishy10:> configuration users select root preferences keysNow, we create a new public key that will be accepted for this user and set the type to RSA:fishy10:configuration users root preferences keys> createfishy10:configuration users root preferences key (uncommitted)> set type=RSASet the key itself using the string copied previously (between ssh-rsa and user@host), and set the key ensuring you put double quotes around it (eg. set key="<key>"):fishy10:configuration users root preferences key (uncommitted)> set key="AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAIEAvYfK3RIaAYmMHBOvyhKM41NaSmcgUMC3igPN5gUKJQvSnYmjuWG6CBr1CkF5UcDji7v19jG3qAD5lAMFn+L0CxgRr8TNaAU+hA4/tpAGkjm+dKYSyJgEdMIURweyyfUFXoerweR8AWW5xlovGKEWZTAfvJX9Zqvh8oMQ5UJLUUc="Now set the comment for this key (do not use spaces):fishy10:configuration users root preferences key (uncommitted)> set comment="LightningRSAKey" Commit the new key:fishy10:configuration users root preferences key (uncommitted)> commitVerify the key is there:fishy10:configuration users root preferences keys> lsKeys:NAME     MODIFIED              TYPE   COMMENT                                  key-000  2010-10-25 20:56:42   RSA    cycloneRSAKey                           key-001  2010-12-6 17:44:53    RSA    LightningRSAKey                         As you can see, we now have my new key, and a previous key I have created on this appliance.Running your Script over SSH from a Remote SystemHere I have created a basic test script, and saved it as test.ecma3:[geoff@lightning ~] cat test.ecma3 script// This is a test script, By Geoff Ongley 2010.printf("Testing script remotely over ssh\n");.Now, we can run this script remotely with our keyless login:[geoff@lightning ~] ssh -i .ssh/nas_key_rsa root@fishy10 < test.ecma3Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal.Testing script remotely over sshPutting it Together - An Example Completed Quota Gathering ScriptSo now we have a lot of the basics to creating a script, let us do something useful, like, find out how much every user is using, on every share on the system (you will recognise some of the code from my previous examples): script/************************************** Quick and Dirty Quota Check script ** Written By Geoff Ongley            ** 25 October 2010                    **************************************/function getUserQuota(usr){        run('select ' + usr);        var username=get('name');        var usage=get('usage');        var quota=get('quota');        var usage_g=usage / 1073741824; // convert bytes to gigabytes        var quota_g=quota / 1073741824; // as above        var quota_percent=0        if (quota > 0)        {                quota_percent=(usage / quota)*(100/1);        }        printf("    %20s        %8.2f           %8.2f           %d%%\n",username,usage_g,quota_g,quota_percent);        run('done'); // done with this selected user}function getShareQuota(shar){        //printf("DEBUG: selecting share %s\n", shar);        run('select ' + shar);        printf("  SHARE: %s\n", shar);        try        {                run('users');                printf("    %20s        %11s    %11s    %3s\n","Username","Usage(G)","Quota(G)","Quota(%)");                printf("    %20s        %11s    %11s    %4s\n","--------","--------","--------","--------");                                users=list();                for(k=0; k < users.length; k++)                {                        user=users[k];                        getUserQuota(user);                }                run('done'); // exit user context        }        catch(err)        {                printf("    SKIPPING %s - This is NOT a NFS or CIFs share, not looking for users\n", shar);        }        run('done'); // done with this share}function getShares(proj){        //printf("DEBUG: selecting project %s\n",proj);        run('select ' + proj);        shares=list();        printf("Project: %s\n", proj);        for(j=0; j < shares.length; j++)        {                share=shares[j];                getShareQuota(share);        }        run('done'); // exit selected project}function getProjects(){        run('cd /');        run('shares');        projects=list();                for (i=0; i < projects.length; i++)        {                var project=projects[i];                getShares(project);        }        run('done'); // exit context for all projects}getProjects();.Which can be run as follows, and will print information like this:[geoff@lightning ~/FISHWORKS_SCRIPTS] ssh -i ~/.ssh/nas_key_rsa root@fishy10 < get_quota_utilisation.ecma3Pseudo-terminal will not be allocated because stdin is not a terminal.Project: another-project  SHARE: and-another                Username           Usage(G)       Quota(G)    Quota(%)                --------           --------       --------    --------                  nobody            0.00            0.00        0%                 geoffro            0.05            0.00        0%                   Billy            0.10            0.00        0%                    root            0.00            0.00        0%            testing-user            0.05            0.00        0%  SHARE: another-share                Username           Usage(G)       Quota(G)    Quota(%)                --------           --------       --------    --------                    root            0.00            0.00        0%                  nobody            0.00            0.00        0%                 geoffro            0.05            0.49        9%            testing-user            0.05            0.02        249%                   Billy            0.10            0.29        33%  SHARE: bob                Username           Usage(G)       Quota(G)    Quota(%)                --------           --------       --------    --------                  nobody            0.00            0.00        0%                    root            0.00            0.00        0%  SHARE: more-shares-for-all                Username           Usage(G)       Quota(G)    Quota(%)                --------           --------       --------    --------                   Billy            0.10            0.00        0%            testing-user            0.05            0.00        0%                  nobody            0.00            0.00        0%                    root            0.00            0.00        0%                 geoffro            0.05            0.00        0%  SHARE: yep                Username           Usage(G)       Quota(G)    Quota(%)                --------           --------       --------    --------                    root            0.00            0.00        0%                  nobody            0.00            0.00        0%                   Billy            0.10            0.01        999%            testing-user            0.05            0.49        9%                 geoffro            0.05            0.00        0%Project: default  SHARE: Test-LUN    SKIPPING Test-LUN - This is NOT a NFS or CIFs share, not looking for users  SHARE: test-geoff                Username           Usage(G)       Quota(G)    Quota(%)                --------           --------       --------    --------                 geoffro            0.05            0.00        0%                    root            3.18           10.00        31%                    uucp            0.00            0.00        0%                  nobody            0.59            0.49        119%^CKilled by signal 2.Creating a WorkflowWorkflows are scripts that we store on the appliance, and can have the script execute either on request (even from the BUI), or on an event such as a threshold being met.Workflow BasicsA workflow allows you to create a simple process that can be executed either via the BUI interface interactively, or by an alert being raised (for some threshold being reached, for example).The basics parameters you will have to set for your "workflow object" (notice you're creating a variable, that embodies ECMAScript) are as follows (parameters is optional):name: A name for this workflowdescription: A Description for the workflowparameters: A set of input parameters (useful when you need user input to execute the workflow)execute: The code, the script itself to execute, which will be function (parameters)With parameters, you can specify things like this (slightly modified sample taken from the System Administration Guide):          ...parameters:        variableParam1:         {                             label: 'Name of Share',                             type: 'String'                  },                  variableParam2                  {                             label: 'Share Size',                             type: 'size'                  },execute: ....};  Note the commas separating the sections of name, parameters, execute, and so on. This is important!Also - there is plenty of properties you can set on the parameters for your workflow, these are described in the Sun ZFS Storage System Administration Guide.Creating a Basic Workflow from a Basic ScriptTo make a basic script into a basic workflow, you need to wrap the following around your script to create a 'workflow' object:var workflow = {name: 'Get User Quotas',description: 'Displays Quota Utilisation for each user on each share',execute: function() {// (basic script goes here, minus the "script" at the beginning, and "." at the end)}};However, it appears (at least in my experience to date) that the workflow object may only be happy with one function in the execute parameter - either that or I'm doing something wrong. As far as I can tell, after execute: you should only have a basic one function context like so:execute: function(){}To deal with this, and to give an example similar to our script earlier, I have created another simple quota check, to show the same basic functionality, but in a workflow format:var workflow = {name: 'Get User Quotas',description: 'Displays Quota Utilisation for each user on each share',execute: function () {        run('cd /');        run('shares');        projects=list();                for (i=0; i < projects.length; i++)        {                run('select ' + projects[i]);                shares=list('filesystem');                printf("Project: %s\n", projects[i]);                for(j=0; j < shares.length; j++)                {                        run('select ' +shares[j]);                        try                        {                                run('users');                                printf("  SHARE: %s\n", shares[j]);                                printf("    %20s        %11s    %11s    %3s\n","Username","Usage(G)","Quota(G)","Quota(%)");                                printf("    %20s        %11s    %11s    %4s\n","--------","--------","--------","-------");                                users=list();                                for(k=0; k < users.length; k++)                                {                                        run('select ' + users[k]);                                        username=get('name');                                        usage=get('usage');                                        quota=get('quota');                                        usage_g=usage / 1073741824; // convert bytes to gigabytes                                        quota_g=quota / 1073741824; // as above                                        quota_percent=0                                        if (quota > 0)                                        {                                                quota_percent=(usage / quota)*(100/1);                                        }                                        printf("    %20s        %8.2f   %8.2f   %d%%\n",username,usage_g,quota_g,quota_percent);                                        run('done');                                }                                run('done'); // exit user context                        }                        catch(err)                        {                        //      printf("    %s is a LUN, Not looking for users\n", shares[j]);                        }                        run('done'); // exit selected share context                }                run('done'); // exit project context        }        }};SummaryThe Sun ZFS Storage 7000 Appliance offers lots of different and interesting features to Sun/Oracle customers, including the world renowned Analytics. Hopefully the above will help you to think of new creative things you could be doing by taking advantage of one of the other neat features, the internal scripting engine!Some references are below to help you continue learning more, I'll update this post as I do the same! Enjoy...More information on ECMAScript 3A complete reference to ECMAScript 3 which will help you learn more of the details you may be interested in, can be found here:http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST-ARCH/ECMA-262,%203rd%20edition,%20December%201999.pdfMore Information on Administering the Sun ZFS Storage 7000The Sun ZFS Storage 7000 System Administration guide can be a useful reference point, and can be found here:http://wikis.sun.com/download/attachments/186238602/2010_Q3_2_ADMIN.pdf

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  • PTLQueue : a scalable bounded-capacity MPMC queue

    - by Dave
    Title: Fast concurrent MPMC queue -- I've used the following concurrent queue algorithm enough that it warrants a blog entry. I'll sketch out the design of a fast and scalable multiple-producer multiple-consumer (MPSC) concurrent queue called PTLQueue. The queue has bounded capacity and is implemented via a circular array. Bounded capacity can be a useful property if there's a mismatch between producer rates and consumer rates where an unbounded queue might otherwise result in excessive memory consumption by virtue of the container nodes that -- in some queue implementations -- are used to hold values. A bounded-capacity queue can provide flow control between components. Beware, however, that bounded collections can also result in resource deadlock if abused. The put() and take() operators are partial and wait for the collection to become non-full or non-empty, respectively. Put() and take() do not allocate memory, and are not vulnerable to the ABA pathologies. The PTLQueue algorithm can be implemented equally well in C/C++ and Java. Partial operators are often more convenient than total methods. In many use cases if the preconditions aren't met, there's nothing else useful the thread can do, so it may as well wait via a partial method. An exception is in the case of work-stealing queues where a thief might scan a set of queues from which it could potentially steal. Total methods return ASAP with a success-failure indication. (It's tempting to describe a queue or API as blocking or non-blocking instead of partial or total, but non-blocking is already an overloaded concurrency term. Perhaps waiting/non-waiting or patient/impatient might be better terms). It's also trivial to construct partial operators by busy-waiting via total operators, but such constructs may be less efficient than an operator explicitly and intentionally designed to wait. A PTLQueue instance contains an array of slots, where each slot has volatile Turn and MailBox fields. The array has power-of-two length allowing mod/div operations to be replaced by masking. We assume sensible padding and alignment to reduce the impact of false sharing. (On x86 I recommend 128-byte alignment and padding because of the adjacent-sector prefetch facility). Each queue also has PutCursor and TakeCursor cursor variables, each of which should be sequestered as the sole occupant of a cache line or sector. You can opt to use 64-bit integers if concerned about wrap-around aliasing in the cursor variables. Put(null) is considered illegal, but the caller or implementation can easily check for and convert null to a distinguished non-null proxy value if null happens to be a value you'd like to pass. Take() will accordingly convert the proxy value back to null. An advantage of PTLQueue is that you can use atomic fetch-and-increment for the partial methods. We initialize each slot at index I with (Turn=I, MailBox=null). Both cursors are initially 0. All shared variables are considered "volatile" and atomics such as CAS and AtomicFetchAndIncrement are presumed to have bidirectional fence semantics. Finally T is the templated type. I've sketched out a total tryTake() method below that allows the caller to poll the queue. tryPut() has an analogous construction. Zebra stripping : alternating row colors for nice-looking code listings. See also google code "prettify" : https://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/ Prettify is a javascript module that yields the HTML/CSS/JS equivalent of pretty-print. -- pre:nth-child(odd) { background-color:#ff0000; } pre:nth-child(even) { background-color:#0000ff; } border-left: 11px solid #ccc; margin: 1.7em 0 1.7em 0.3em; background-color:#BFB; font-size:12px; line-height:65%; " // PTLQueue : Put(v) : // producer : partial method - waits as necessary assert v != null assert Mask = 1 && (Mask & (Mask+1)) == 0 // Document invariants // doorway step // Obtain a sequence number -- ticket // As a practical concern the ticket value is temporally unique // The ticket also identifies and selects a slot auto tkt = AtomicFetchIncrement (&PutCursor, 1) slot * s = &Slots[tkt & Mask] // waiting phase : // wait for slot's generation to match the tkt value assigned to this put() invocation. // The "generation" is implicitly encoded as the upper bits in the cursor // above those used to specify the index : tkt div (Mask+1) // The generation serves as an epoch number to identify a cohort of threads // accessing disjoint slots while s-Turn != tkt : Pause assert s-MailBox == null s-MailBox = v // deposit and pass message Take() : // consumer : partial method - waits as necessary auto tkt = AtomicFetchIncrement (&TakeCursor,1) slot * s = &Slots[tkt & Mask] // 2-stage waiting : // First wait for turn for our generation // Acquire exclusive "take" access to slot's MailBox field // Then wait for the slot to become occupied while s-Turn != tkt : Pause // Concurrency in this section of code is now reduced to just 1 producer thread // vs 1 consumer thread. // For a given queue and slot, there will be most one Take() operation running // in this section. // Consumer waits for producer to arrive and make slot non-empty // Extract message; clear mailbox; advance Turn indicator // We have an obvious happens-before relation : // Put(m) happens-before corresponding Take() that returns that same "m" for T v = s-MailBox if v != null : s-MailBox = null ST-ST barrier s-Turn = tkt + Mask + 1 // unlock slot to admit next producer and consumer return v Pause tryTake() : // total method - returns ASAP with failure indication for auto tkt = TakeCursor slot * s = &Slots[tkt & Mask] if s-Turn != tkt : return null T v = s-MailBox // presumptive return value if v == null : return null // ratify tkt and v values and commit by advancing cursor if CAS (&TakeCursor, tkt, tkt+1) != tkt : continue s-MailBox = null ST-ST barrier s-Turn = tkt + Mask + 1 return v The basic idea derives from the Partitioned Ticket Lock "PTL" (US20120240126-A1) and the MultiLane Concurrent Bag (US8689237). The latter is essentially a circular ring-buffer where the elements themselves are queues or concurrent collections. You can think of the PTLQueue as a partitioned ticket lock "PTL" augmented to pass values from lock to unlock via the slots. Alternatively, you could conceptualize of PTLQueue as a degenerate MultiLane bag where each slot or "lane" consists of a simple single-word MailBox instead of a general queue. Each lane in PTLQueue also has a private Turn field which acts like the Turn (Grant) variables found in PTL. Turn enforces strict FIFO ordering and restricts concurrency on the slot mailbox field to at most one simultaneous put() and take() operation. PTL uses a single "ticket" variable and per-slot Turn (grant) fields while MultiLane has distinct PutCursor and TakeCursor cursors and abstract per-slot sub-queues. Both PTL and MultiLane advance their cursor and ticket variables with atomic fetch-and-increment. PTLQueue borrows from both PTL and MultiLane and has distinct put and take cursors and per-slot Turn fields. Instead of a per-slot queues, PTLQueue uses a simple single-word MailBox field. PutCursor and TakeCursor act like a pair of ticket locks, conferring "put" and "take" access to a given slot. PutCursor, for instance, assigns an incoming put() request to a slot and serves as a PTL "Ticket" to acquire "put" permission to that slot's MailBox field. To better explain the operation of PTLQueue we deconstruct the operation of put() and take() as follows. Put() first increments PutCursor obtaining a new unique ticket. That ticket value also identifies a slot. Put() next waits for that slot's Turn field to match that ticket value. This is tantamount to using a PTL to acquire "put" permission on the slot's MailBox field. Finally, having obtained exclusive "put" permission on the slot, put() stores the message value into the slot's MailBox. Take() similarly advances TakeCursor, identifying a slot, and then acquires and secures "take" permission on a slot by waiting for Turn. Take() then waits for the slot's MailBox to become non-empty, extracts the message, and clears MailBox. Finally, take() advances the slot's Turn field, which releases both "put" and "take" access to the slot's MailBox. Note the asymmetry : put() acquires "put" access to the slot, but take() releases that lock. At any given time, for a given slot in a PTLQueue, at most one thread has "put" access and at most one thread has "take" access. This restricts concurrency from general MPMC to 1-vs-1. We have 2 ticket locks -- one for put() and one for take() -- each with its own "ticket" variable in the form of the corresponding cursor, but they share a single "Grant" egress variable in the form of the slot's Turn variable. Advancing the PutCursor, for instance, serves two purposes. First, we obtain a unique ticket which identifies a slot. Second, incrementing the cursor is the doorway protocol step to acquire the per-slot mutual exclusion "put" lock. The cursors and operations to increment those cursors serve double-duty : slot-selection and ticket assignment for locking the slot's MailBox field. At any given time a slot MailBox field can be in one of the following states: empty with no pending operations -- neutral state; empty with one or more waiting take() operations pending -- deficit; occupied with no pending operations; occupied with one or more waiting put() operations -- surplus; empty with a pending put() or pending put() and take() operations -- transitional; or occupied with a pending take() or pending put() and take() operations -- transitional. The partial put() and take() operators can be implemented with an atomic fetch-and-increment operation, which may confer a performance advantage over a CAS-based loop. In addition we have independent PutCursor and TakeCursor cursors. Critically, a put() operation modifies PutCursor but does not access the TakeCursor and a take() operation modifies the TakeCursor cursor but does not access the PutCursor. This acts to reduce coherence traffic relative to some other queue designs. It's worth noting that slow threads or obstruction in one slot (or "lane") does not impede or obstruct operations in other slots -- this gives us some degree of obstruction isolation. PTLQueue is not lock-free, however. The implementation above is expressed with polite busy-waiting (Pause) but it's trivial to implement per-slot parking and unparking to deschedule waiting threads. It's also easy to convert the queue to a more general deque by replacing the PutCursor and TakeCursor cursors with Left/Front and Right/Back cursors that can move either direction. Specifically, to push and pop from the "left" side of the deque we would decrement and increment the Left cursor, respectively, and to push and pop from the "right" side of the deque we would increment and decrement the Right cursor, respectively. We used a variation of PTLQueue for message passing in our recent OPODIS 2013 paper. ul { list-style:none; padding-left:0; padding:0; margin:0; margin-left:0; } ul#myTagID { padding: 0px; margin: 0px; list-style:none; margin-left:0;} -- -- There's quite a bit of related literature in this area. I'll call out a few relevant references: Wilson's NYU Courant Institute UltraComputer dissertation from 1988 is classic and the canonical starting point : Operating System Data Structures for Shared-Memory MIMD Machines with Fetch-and-Add. Regarding provenance and priority, I think PTLQueue or queues effectively equivalent to PTLQueue have been independently rediscovered a number of times. See CB-Queue and BNPBV, below, for instance. But Wilson's dissertation anticipates the basic idea and seems to predate all the others. Gottlieb et al : Basic Techniques for the Efficient Coordination of Very Large Numbers of Cooperating Sequential Processors Orozco et al : CB-Queue in Toward high-throughput algorithms on many-core architectures which appeared in TACO 2012. Meneghin et al : BNPVB family in Performance evaluation of inter-thread communication mechanisms on multicore/multithreaded architecture Dmitry Vyukov : bounded MPMC queue (highly recommended) Alex Otenko : US8607249 (highly related). John Mellor-Crummey : Concurrent queues: Practical fetch-and-phi algorithms. Technical Report 229, Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester Thomasson : FIFO Distributed Bakery Algorithm (very similar to PTLQueue). Scott and Scherer : Dual Data Structures I'll propose an optimization left as an exercise for the reader. Say we wanted to reduce memory usage by eliminating inter-slot padding. Such padding is usually "dark" memory and otherwise unused and wasted. But eliminating the padding leaves us at risk of increased false sharing. Furthermore lets say it was usually the case that the PutCursor and TakeCursor were numerically close to each other. (That's true in some use cases). We might still reduce false sharing by incrementing the cursors by some value other than 1 that is not trivially small and is coprime with the number of slots. Alternatively, we might increment the cursor by one and mask as usual, resulting in a logical index. We then use that logical index value to index into a permutation table, yielding an effective index for use in the slot array. The permutation table would be constructed so that nearby logical indices would map to more distant effective indices. (Open question: what should that permutation look like? Possibly some perversion of a Gray code or De Bruijn sequence might be suitable). As an aside, say we need to busy-wait for some condition as follows : "while C == 0 : Pause". Lets say that C is usually non-zero, so we typically don't wait. But when C happens to be 0 we'll have to spin for some period, possibly brief. We can arrange for the code to be more machine-friendly with respect to the branch predictors by transforming the loop into : "if C == 0 : for { Pause; if C != 0 : break; }". Critically, we want to restructure the loop so there's one branch that controls entry and another that controls loop exit. A concern is that your compiler or JIT might be clever enough to transform this back to "while C == 0 : Pause". You can sometimes avoid this by inserting a call to a some type of very cheap "opaque" method that the compiler can't elide or reorder. On Solaris, for instance, you could use :"if C == 0 : { gethrtime(); for { Pause; if C != 0 : break; }}". It's worth noting the obvious duality between locks and queues. If you have strict FIFO lock implementation with local spinning and succession by direct handoff such as MCS or CLH,then you can usually transform that lock into a queue. Hidden commentary and annotations - invisible : * And of course there's a well-known duality between queues and locks, but I'll leave that topic for another blog post. * Compare and contrast : PTLQ vs PTL and MultiLane * Equivalent : Turn; seq; sequence; pos; position; ticket * Put = Lock; Deposit Take = identify and reserve slot; wait; extract & clear; unlock * conceptualize : Distinct PutLock and TakeLock implemented as ticket lock or PTL Distinct arrival cursors but share per-slot "Turn" variable provides exclusive role-based access to slot's mailbox field put() acquires exclusive access to a slot for purposes of "deposit" assigns slot round-robin and then acquires deposit access rights/perms to that slot take() acquires exclusive access to slot for purposes of "withdrawal" assigns slot round-robin and then acquires withdrawal access rights/perms to that slot At any given time, only one thread can have withdrawal access to a slot at any given time, only one thread can have deposit access to a slot Permissible for T1 to have deposit access and T2 to simultaneously have withdrawal access * round-robin for the purposes of; role-based; access mode; access role mailslot; mailbox; allocate/assign/identify slot rights; permission; license; access permission; * PTL/Ticket hybrid Asymmetric usage ; owner oblivious lock-unlock pairing K-exclusion add Grant cursor pass message m from lock to unlock via Slots[] array Cursor performs 2 functions : + PTL ticket + Assigns request to slot in round-robin fashion Deconstruct protocol : explication put() : allocate slot in round-robin fashion acquire PTL for "put" access store message into slot associated with PTL index take() : Acquire PTL for "take" access // doorway step seq = fetchAdd (&Grant, 1) s = &Slots[seq & Mask] // waiting phase while s-Turn != seq : pause Extract : wait for s-mailbox to be full v = s-mailbox s-mailbox = null Release PTL for both "put" and "take" access s-Turn = seq + Mask + 1 * Slot round-robin assignment and lock "doorway" protocol leverage the same cursor and FetchAdd operation on that cursor FetchAdd (&Cursor,1) + round-robin slot assignment and dispersal + PTL/ticket lock "doorway" step waiting phase is via "Turn" field in slot * PTLQueue uses 2 cursors -- put and take. Acquire "put" access to slot via PTL-like lock Acquire "take" access to slot via PTL-like lock 2 locks : put and take -- at most one thread can access slot's mailbox Both locks use same "turn" field Like multilane : 2 cursors : put and take slot is simple 1-capacity mailbox instead of queue Borrow per-slot turn/grant from PTL Provides strict FIFO Lock slot : put-vs-put take-vs-take at most one put accesses slot at any one time at most one put accesses take at any one time reduction to 1-vs-1 instead of N-vs-M concurrency Per slot locks for put/take Release put/take by advancing turn * is instrumental in ... * P-V Semaphore vs lock vs K-exclusion * See also : FastQueues-excerpt.java dice-etc/queue-mpmc-bounded-blocking-circular-xadd/ * PTLQueue is the same as PTLQB - identical * Expedient return; ASAP; prompt; immediately * Lamport's Bakery algorithm : doorway step then waiting phase Threads arriving at doorway obtain a unique ticket number Threads enter in ticket order * In the terminology of Reed and Kanodia a ticket lock corresponds to the busy-wait implementation of a semaphore using an eventcount and a sequencer It can also be thought of as an optimization of Lamport's bakery lock was designed for fault-tolerance rather than performance Instead of spinning on the release counter, processors using a bakery lock repeatedly examine the tickets of their peers --

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  • Issue 15: Oracle Exadata Marketing Campaigns

    - by rituchhibber
         PARTNER FOCUS Oracle ExadataMarketing Campaign Steve McNickleVP Europe, cVidya Steve McNickle is VP Europe for cVidya, an innovative provider of revenue intelligence solutions for telecom, media and entertainment service providers including AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telecom and Vodafone. The company's product portfolio helps operators and service providers maximise margins, improve customer experience and optimise ecosystem relationships through revenue assurance, fraud and security management, sales performance management, pricing analytics, and inter-carrier services. cVidya has partnered with Oracle for more than a decade. RESOURCES -- Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Oracle Exastack Program Oracle Exastack Optimized Oracle Exastack Labs and Enablement Resources Oracle Engineered Systems Oracle Communications cVidya SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES Are you ready for Oracle OpenWorld this October? -- -- Please could you tell us a little about cVidya's partnering history with Oracle, and expand on your Oracle Exastack accreditations? "cVidya was established just over ten years ago and we've had a strong relationship with Oracle almost since the very beginning. Through our Revenue Intelligence work with some of the world's largest service providers we collect tremendous amounts of information, amounting to billions of records per day. We help our clients to collect, store and analyse that data to ensure that their end customers are getting the best levels of service, are billed correctly, and are happy that they are on the correct price plan. We have been an Oracle Gold level partner for seven years, and crucially just two months ago we were also accredited as Oracle Exastack Optimized for MoneyMap, our core Revenue Assurance solution. Very soon we also expect to be Oracle Exastack Optimized DRMap, our Data Retention solution." What unique capabilities and customer benefits does Oracle Exastack add to your applications? "Oracle Exastack enables us to deliver radical benefits to our customers. A typical mobile operator in the UK might handle between 500 million and two billion call data record details daily. Each transaction needs to be validated, billed correctly and fraud checked. Because of the enormous volumes involved, our clients demand scalable infrastructure that allows them to efficiently acquire, store and process all that data within controlled cost, space and environmental constraints. We have proved that the Oracle Exadata system can process data up to seven times faster and load it as much as 20 times faster than other standard best-of-breed server approaches. With the Oracle Exadata Database Machine they can reduce their datacentre equipment from say, the six or seven cabinets that they needed in the past, down to just one. This dramatic simplification delivers incredible value to the customer by cutting down enormously on all of their significant cost, space, energy, cooling and maintenance overheads." "The Oracle Exastack Program has given our clients the ability to switch their focus from reactive to proactive. Traditionally they may have spent 80 percent of their day processing, and just 20 percent enabling end customers to see advanced analytics, and avoiding issues before they occur. With our solutions and Oracle Exadata they can now switch that balance around entirely, resulting not only in reduced revenue leakage, but a far higher focus on proactive leakage prevention. How has the Oracle Exastack Program transformed your customer business? "We can already see the impact. Oracle solutions allow our delivery teams to achieve successful deployments, happy customers and self-satisfaction, and the power of Oracle's Exa solutions is easy to measure in terms of their transformational ability. We gained our first sale into a major European telco by demonstrating the major performance gains that would transform their business. Clients can measure the ease of organisational change, the early prevention of business issues, the reduction in manpower required to provide protection and coverage across all their products and services, plus of course end customer satisfaction. If customers know that that service is provided accurately and that their bills are calculated correctly, then over time this satisfaction can be attributed to revenue intelligence and the underlying systems which provide it. Combine this with the further integration we have with the other layers of the Oracle stack, including the telecommunications offerings such as NCC, OCDM and BRM, and the result is even greater customer value—not to mention the increased speed to market and the reduced project risk." What does the Oracle Exastack community bring to cVidya, both in terms of general benefits, and also tangible new opportunities and partnerships? "A great deal. We have participated in the Oracle Exastack community heavily over the past year, and have had lots of meetings with Oracle and our peers around the globe. It brings us into contact with like-minded, innovative partners, who like us are not happy to just stand still and want to take fresh technology to their customer base in order to gain enhanced value. We identified three new partnerships in each of two recent meetings, and hope these will open up new opportunities, not only in areas that exactly match where we operate today, but also in some new associative areas that will expand our reach into new business sectors. Notably, thanks to the Exastack community we were invited on stage at last year's Oracle OpenWorld conference. Appearing so publically with Oracle senior VP Judson Althoff elevated awareness and visibility of cVidya and has enabled us to participate in a number of other events with Oracle over the past eight months. We've been involved in speaking opportunities, forums and exhibitions, providing us with invaluable opportunities that we wouldn't otherwise have got close to." How has Exastack differentiated cVidya as an ISV, and helped you to evolve your business to the next level? "When we are selling to our core customer base of Tier 1 telecommunications providers, we know that they want more than just software. They want an enduring partnership that will last many years, they want innovation, and a forward thinking partner who knows how to guide them on where they need to be to meet market demand three, five or seven years down the line. Membership of respected global bodies, such as the Telemanagement Forum enables us to lead standard adherence in our area of business, giving us a lot of credibility, but Oracle is also involved in this forum with its own telecommunications portfolio, strengthening our position still further. When we approach CEOs, CTOs and CIOs at the very largest Tier 1 operators, not only can we easily show them that our technology is fantastic, we can also talk about our strong partnership with Oracle, and our joint embracing of today's standards and tomorrow's innovation." Where would you like cVidya to be in one year's time? "We want to get all of our relevant products Oracle Exastack Optimized. Our MoneyMap Revenue Assurance solution is already Exastack Optimised, our DRMAP Data Retention Solution should be Exastack Optimised within the next month, and our FraudView Fraud Management solution within the next two to three months. We'd then like to extend our Oracle accreditation out to include other members of the Oracle Engineered Systems family. We are moving into the 'Big Data' space, and so we're obviously very keen to work closely with Oracle to conduct pilots, map new technologies onto Oracle Big Data platforms, and embrace and measure the benefits of other Oracle systems, namely Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster. We would also like to examine how the Oracle Database Appliance might benefit our Tier 2 service provider customers. Finally, we'd also like to continue working with the Oracle Communications Global Business Unit (CGBU), furthering our integration with Oracle billing products so that we are able to quickly deploy fraud solutions into Oracle's Engineered System stack, give operational benefits to our clients that are pre-integrated, more cost-effective, and can be rapidly deployed rapidly and producing benefits in three months, not nine months." Chris Baker ,Senior Vice President, Oracle Worldwide ISV-OEM-Java Sales Chris Baker is the Global Head of ISV/OEM Sales responsible for working with ISV/OEM partners to maximise Oracle's business through those partners, whilst maximising those partners' business to their end users. Chris works with partners, customers, innovators, investors and employees to develop innovative business solutions using Oracle products, services and skills. Firstly, could you please explain Oracle's current strategy for ISV partners, globally and in EMEA? "Oracle customers use independent software vendor (ISV) applications to run their businesses. They use them to generate revenue and to fulfil obligations to their own customers. Our strategy is very straight-forward. We want all of our ISV partners and OEMs to concentrate on the things that they do the best – building applications to meet the unique industry and functional requirements of their customer. We want to ensure that we deliver a best in class application platform so the ISV is free to concentrate their effort on their application functionality and user experience We invest over four billion dollars in research and development every year, and we want our ISVs to benefit from all of that investment in operating systems, virtualisation, databases, middleware, engineered systems, and other hardware. By doing this, we help them to reduce their costs, gain more consistency and agility for quicker implementations, and also rapidly differentiate themselves from other application vendors. It's all about simplification because we believe that around 25 to 30 percent of the development costs incurred by many ISVs are caused by customising infrastructure and have nothing to do with their applications. Our strategy is to enable our ISV partners to standardise their application platform using engineered architecture, so they can write once to the Oracle stack and deploy seamlessly in the cloud, on-premise, or in hybrid deployments. It's really important that architecture is the same in order to keep cost and time overheads at a minimum, so we provide standardisation and an environment that enables our ISVs to concentrate on the core business that makes them the most money and brings them success." How do you believe this strategy is helping the ISVs to work hand-in-hand with Oracle to ensure that end customers get the industry-leading solutions that they need? "We work with our ISVs not just to help them be successful, but also to help them market themselves. We have something called the 'Oracle Exastack Ready Program', which enables ISVs to publicise themselves as 'Ready' to run the core software platforms that run on Oracle's engineered systems including Exadata and Exalogic. So, for example, they can become 'Database Ready' which means that they use the latest version of Oracle Database and therefore can run their application without modification on Exadata or the Oracle Database Appliance. Alternatively, they can become WebLogic Ready, Oracle Linux Ready and Oracle Solaris Ready which means they run on the latest release and therefore can run their application, with no new porting work, on Oracle Exalogic. Those 'Ready' logos are important in helping ISVs advertise to their customers that they are using the latest technologies which have been fully tested. We now also have Exadata Ready and Exalogic Ready programmes which allow ISVs to promote the certification of their applications on these platforms. This highlights these partners to Oracle customers as having solutions that run fluently on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud or one of our other engineered systems. This makes it easy for customers to identify solutions and provides ISVs with an avenue to connect with Oracle customers who are rapidly adopting engineered systems. We have also taken this programme to the next level in the shape of 'Oracle Exastack Optimized' for partners whose applications run best on the Oracle stack and have invested the time to fully optimise application performance. We ensure that Exastack Optimized partner status is promoted and supported by press releases, and we help our ISVs go to market and differentiate themselves through the use our technology and the standardisation it delivers. To date we have had several hundred organisations successfully work through our Exastack Optimized programme." How does Oracle's strategy of offering pre-integrated open platform software and hardware allow ISVs to bring their products to market more quickly? "One of the problems for many ISVs is that they have to think very carefully about the technology on which their solutions will be deployed, particularly in the cloud or hosted environments. They have to think hard about how they secure these environments, whether the concern is, for example, middleware, identity management, or securing personal data. If they don't use the technology that we build-in to our products to help them to fulfil these roles, they then have to build it themselves. This takes time, requires testing, and must be maintained. By taking advantage of our technology, partners will now know that they have a standard platform. They will know that they can confidently talk about implementation being the same every time they do it. Very large ISV applications could once take a year or two to be implemented at an on-premise environment. But it wasn't just the configuration of the application that took the time, it was actually the infrastructure - the different hardware configurations, operating systems and configurations of databases and middleware. Now we strongly believe that it's all about standardisation and repeatability. It's about making sure that our partners can do it once and are then able to roll it out many different times using standard componentry." What actions would you recommend for existing ISV partners that are looking to do more business with Oracle and its customer base, not only to maximise benefits, but also to maximise partner relationships? "My team, around the world and in the EMEA region, is available and ready to talk to any of our ISVs and to explore the possibilities together. We run programmes like 'Excite' and 'Insight' to help us to understand how we can help ISVs with architecture and widen their environments. But we also want to work with, and look at, new opportunities - for example, the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) market or 'The Internet of Things'. Over the next few years, many millions, indeed billions of devices will be collecting massive amounts of data and communicating it back to the central systems where ISVs will be running their applications. The only way that our partners will be able to provide a single vendor 'end-to-end' solution is to use Oracle integrated systems at the back end and Java on the 'smart' devices collecting the data – a complete solution from device to data centre. So there are huge opportunities to work closely with our ISVs, using Oracle's complete M2M platform, to provide the infrastructure that enables them to extract maximum value from the data collected. If any partners don't know where to start or who to contact, then they can contact me directly at [email protected] or indeed any of our teams across the EMEA region. We want to work with ISVs to help them to be as successful as they possibly can through simplification and speed to market, and we also want all of the top ISVs in the world based on Oracle." What opportunities are immediately opened to new ISV partners joining the OPN? "As you know OPN is very, very important. New members will discover a huge amount of content that instantly becomes accessible to them. They can access a wealth of no-cost training and enablement materials to build their expertise in Oracle technology. They can download Oracle software and use it for development projects. They can help themselves become more competent by becoming part of a true community and uncovering new opportunities by working with Oracle and their peers in the Oracle Partner Network. As well as publishing massive amounts of information on OPN, we also hold our global Oracle OpenWorld event, at which partners play a huge role. This takes place at the end of September and the beginning of October in San Francisco. Attending ISV partners have an unrivalled opportunity to contribute to elements such as the OpenWorld / OPN Exchange, at which they can talk to other partners and really begin thinking about how they can move their businesses on and play key roles in a very large ecosystem which revolves around technology and standardisation." Finally, are there any other messages that you would like to share with the Oracle ISV community? "The crucial message that I always like to reinforce is architecture, architecture and architecture! The key opportunities that ISVs have today revolve around standardising their architectures so that they can confidently think: “I will I be able to do exactly the same thing whenever a customer is looking to deploy on-premise, hosted or in the cloud”. The right architecture is critical to being competitive and to really start changing the game. We want to help our ISV partners to do just that; to establish standard architecture and to seize the opportunities it opens up for them. New market opportunities like M2M are enormous - just look at how many devices are all around you right now. We can help our partners to interface with these devices more effectively while thinking about their entire ecosystem, rather than just the piece that they have traditionally focused upon. With standardised architecture, we can help people dramatically improve their speed, reach, agility and delivery of enhanced customer satisfaction and value all the way from the Java side to their centralised systems. All Oracle ISV partners must take advantage of these opportunities, which is why Oracle will continue to invest in and support them." -- Gergely Strbik is Oracle Hardware and Software Product Manager for Avnet in Hungary. Avnet Technology Solutions is an OracleValue Added Distributor focused on the development of the existing Oracle channel. This includes the recruitment and enablement of Oracle partners as well as driving deeper adoption of Oracle's technology and application products within the IT channel. "The main business benefits of ODA for our customers and partners are scalability, flexibility, a great price point for the high performance delivered, and the easily configurable embedded Linux operating system. People welcome a lower point of entry and the ability to grow capacity on demand as their business expands." "Marketing and selling the ODA requires another way of thinking because it is an appliance. We have to transform the ways in which our partners and customers think from buying hardware and software independently to buying complete solutions. Successful early adopters and satisfied customer reactions will certainly help us to sell the ODA. We will have more experience with the product after the first deliveries and installations—end users need to see the power and benefits for themselves." "Our typical ODA customers will be those looking for complete solutions from a single reseller partner who is also able to manage the appliance. They will have enjoyed using Oracle Database but now want a new product that is able to unlock new levels of performance. A higher proportion of potential customers will come from our existing Oracle base, with around 30% from new business, but we intend to evangelise the ODA on the market to see how we can change this balance as all our customers adjust to the concept of 'Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together'. -- Back to the welcome page

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  • How do I install PyYAML into local install of Python?

    - by Daryl Spitzer
    I've installed Python 2.6.4 into (a subdirectory in) my home directory on a Linux machine with Python 2.3.4 pre-installed, because I need to run some code that I've decided would require too much work to make it run on 2.3.4. (I'm not on the sudoers list for that machine.) I was hoping I could run ~/Python-2.6.4/python setup.py install (from the PyYAML directory in my home directory, where I untarred the PyYAML sources) and it would be smart enough to install it into my local Python 2.6.4 install. But it's not. (See the P.S.) Is it possible to install PyYAML into my local Python install, so that "import yaml" will work when I invoke that Python? If so, how do I do that? P.S. Here's the output when I ran ~/Python-2.6.4/python setup.py install: running install running build running build_py creating build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6 creating build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/composer.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/nodes.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/dumper.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/resolver.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/events.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/emitter.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/error.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/loader.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/cyaml.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/scanner.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/__init__.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/serializer.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/reader.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/representer.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/constructor.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/tokens.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml copying lib/yaml/parser.py -> build/lib.linux-ppc64-2.6/yaml running build_ext creating build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6 checking if libyaml is compilable gcc -pthread -fno-strict-aliasing -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fPIC -I/home/dspitzer/Python-2.6.4/Include -I/home/dspitzer/Python-2.6.4 -c build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c -o build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.o build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:2:18: yaml.h: No such file or directory build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c: In function `main': build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: `yaml_parser_t' undeclared (first use in this function) build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: for each function it appears in.) build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: syntax error before "parser" build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:6: error: `yaml_emitter_t' undeclared (first use in this function) build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:8: warning: implicit declaration of function `yaml_parser_initialize' build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:8: error: `parser' undeclared (first use in this function) build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:9: warning: implicit declaration of function `yaml_parser_delete' build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:11: warning: implicit declaration of function `yaml_emitter_initialize' build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:11: error: `emitter' undeclared (first use in this function) build/temp.linux-ppc64-2.6/check_libyaml.c:12: warning: implicit declaration of function `yaml_emitter_delete' libyaml is not found or a compiler error: forcing --without-libyaml (if libyaml is installed correctly, you may need to specify the option --include-dirs or uncomment and modify the parameter include_dirs in setup.cfg) running install_lib creating /usr/local/lib/python2.6 error: could not create '/usr/local/lib/python2.6': Permission denied

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