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• Pure Server-Side Filtering with RadGridView and WCF RIA Services

  Those of you who are familiar with WCF RIA Services know that the DomainDataSource control provides a FilterDescriptors collection that enables you to filter data returned by the query on the server. We have been using this DomainDataSource feature in our RIA Services with DomainDataSource online example for almost an year now. In the example, we are listening for RadGridViews Filtering event in order to intercept any filtering that is performed on the client and translate it to something that the DomainDataSource will understand, in this case a System.Windows.Data.FilterDescriptor being added or removed from its FilterDescriptors collection. Think of RadGridView.FilterDescriptors as client-side filtering and of DomainDataSource.FilterDescriptors as server-side filtering. We no longer need the client-side one. With the introduction of the Custom Filtering Controls feature many new possibilities have opened. With these custom controls we no longer need to do any filtering on the client. I have prepared a very small project that demonstrates how to filter solely on the server by using a custom filtering control. As I have already mentioned filtering on the server is done through the FilterDescriptors collection of the DomainDataSource control. This collection holds instances of type System.Windows.Data.FilterDescriptor. The FilterDescriptor has three important properties: PropertyPath: Specifies the name of the property that we want to filter on (the left operand). Operator: Specifies the type of comparison to use when filtering. An instance of FilterOperator Enumeration. Value: The value to compare with (the right operand). An instance of the Parameter Class. By adding filters, you can specify that only entities which meet the condition in the filter are loaded from the domain context. In case you are not familiar with these concepts you might find Brad Abrams blog interesting. Now, our requirements are to create some kind of UI that will manipulate the DomainDataSource.FilterDescriptors collection. When it comes to collections, my first choice of course would be RadGridView. If you are not familiar with the Custom Filtering Controls concept I would strongly recommend getting acquainted with my step-by-step tutorial Custom Filtering with RadGridView for Silverlight and checking the online example out. I have created a simple custom filtering control that contains a RadGridView and several buttons. This control is aware of the DomainDataSource instance, since it is operating on its FilterDescriptors collection. In fact, the RadGridView that is inside it is bound to this collection. In order to display filters that are relevant for the current column only, I have applied a filter to the grid. This filter is a Telerik.Windows.Data.FilterDescriptor and is used to filter the little grid inside the custom control. It should not be confused with the DomainDataSource.FilterDescriptors collection that RadGridView is actually bound to. These are the RIA filters. Additionally, I have added several other features. For example, if you have specified a DataFormatString on your original column, the Value column inside the custom control will pick it up and format the filter values accordingly. Also, I have transferred the data type of the column that you are filtering to the Value column of the custom control. This will help the little RadGridView determine what kind of editor to show up when you begin edit, for example a date picker for DateTime columns. Finally, I have added four buttons two of them can be used to add or remove filters and the other two will communicate the changes you have made to the server. Here is the full source code of the DomainDataSourceFilteringControl. The XAML: <UserControl x:Class="PureServerSideFiltering.DomainDataSourceFilteringControl"    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"     xmlns:telerikGrid="clr-namespace:Telerik.Windows.Controls;assembly=Telerik.Windows.Controls.GridView"     xmlns:telerik="clr-namespace:Telerik.Windows.Controls;assembly=Telerik.Windows.Controls"     Width="300">     <Border x:Name="LayoutRoot"             BorderThickness="1"             BorderBrush="#FF8A929E"             Padding="5"             Background="#FFDFE2E5">           <Grid>             <Grid.RowDefinitions>                 <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>                 <RowDefinition Height="150"/>                 <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>             </Grid.RowDefinitions>               <StackPanel Grid.Row="0"                         Margin="2"                         Orientation="Horizontal"                         HorizontalAlignment="Center">                 <telerik:RadButton Name="addFilterButton"                                   Click="OnAddFilterButtonClick"                                   Content="Add Filter"                                   Margin="2"                                   Width="96"/>                 <telerik:RadButton Name="removeFilterButton"                                   Click="OnRemoveFilterButtonClick"                                   Content="Remove Filter"                                   Margin="2"                                   Width="96"/>             </StackPanel>               <telerikGrid:RadGridView Name="filtersGrid"                                     Grid.Row="1"                                     Margin="2"                                     ItemsSource="{Binding FilterDescriptors}"                                     AddingNewDataItem="OnFilterGridAddingNewDataItem"                                     ColumnWidth="*"                                     ShowGroupPanel="False"                                     AutoGenerateColumns="False"                                     CanUserResizeColumns="False"                                     CanUserReorderColumns="False"                                     CanUserFreezeColumns="False"                                     RowIndicatorVisibility="Collapsed"                                     IsFilteringAllowed="False"                                     CanUserSortColumns="False">                 <telerikGrid:RadGridView.Columns>                     <telerikGrid:GridViewComboBoxColumn DataMemberBinding="{Binding Operator}"                                                         UniqueName="Operator"/>                     <telerikGrid:GridViewDataColumn Header="Value"                                                     DataMemberBinding="{Binding Value.Value}"                                                     UniqueName="Value"/>                 </telerikGrid:RadGridView.Columns>             </telerikGrid:RadGridView>               <StackPanel Grid.Row="2"                         Margin="2"                         Orientation="Horizontal"                         HorizontalAlignment="Center">                 <telerik:RadButton Name="filterButton"                                   Click="OnApplyFiltersButtonClick"                                   Content="Apply Filters"                                   Margin="2"                                   Width="96"/>                 <telerik:RadButton Name="clearButton"                                   Click="OnClearFiltersButtonClick"                                   Content="Clear Filters"                                   Margin="2"                                   Width="96"/>             </StackPanel>           </Grid>       </Border> </UserControl>   And the code-behind: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Net; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Documents; using System.Windows.Input; using System.Windows.Media; using System.Windows.Media.Animation; using System.Windows.Shapes; using Telerik.Windows.Controls.GridView; using System.Windows.Data; using Telerik.Windows.Controls; using Telerik.Windows.Data;   namespace PureServerSideFiltering {     /// <summary>     /// A custom filtering control capable of filtering purely server-side.     /// </summary>     public partial class DomainDataSourceFilteringControl : UserControl, IFilteringControl     {         // The main player here.         DomainDataSource domainDataSource;           // This is the name of the property that this column displays.         private string dataMemberName;           // This is the type of the property that this column displays.         private Type dataMemberType;           /// <summary>         /// Identifies the <see cref="IsActive"/> dependency property.         /// </summary>         /// <remarks>         /// The state of the filtering funnel (i.e. full or empty) is bound to this property.         /// </remarks>         public static readonly DependencyProperty IsActiveProperty =             DependencyProperty.Register(                 "IsActive",                 typeof(bool),                 typeof(DomainDataSourceFilteringControl),                 new PropertyMetadata(false));           /// <summary>         /// Gets or sets a value indicating whether the filtering is active.         /// </summary>         /// <remarks>         /// Set this to true if you want to lit-up the filtering funnel.         /// </remarks>         public bool IsActive         {             get { return (bool)GetValue(IsActiveProperty); }             set { SetValue(IsActiveProperty, value); }         }           /// <summary>         /// Gets or sets the domain data source.         /// We need this in order to work on its FilterDescriptors collection.         /// </summary>         /// <value>The domain data source.</value>         public DomainDataSource DomainDataSource         {             get { return this.domainDataSource; }             set { this.domainDataSource = value; }         }           public System.Windows.Data.FilterDescriptorCollection FilterDescriptors         {             get { return this.DomainDataSource.FilterDescriptors; }         }           public DomainDataSourceFilteringControl()         {             InitializeComponent();         }           public void Prepare(GridViewBoundColumnBase column)         {             this.LayoutRoot.DataContext = this;               if (this.DomainDataSource == null)             {                 // Sorry, but we need a DomainDataSource. Can't do anything without it.                 return;             }               // This is the name of the property that this column displays.             this.dataMemberName = column.GetDataMemberName();               // This is the type of the property that this column displays.             // We need this in order to see which FilterOperators to feed to the combo-box column.             this.dataMemberType = column.DataType;               // We will use our magic Type extension method to see which operators are applicable for             // this data type. You can go to the extension method body and see what it does.             ((GridViewComboBoxColumn)this.filtersGrid.Columns["Operator"]).ItemsSource                 = this.dataMemberType.ApplicableFilterOperators();               // This is very nice as well. We will tell the Value column its data type. In this way             // RadGridView will pick up the best editor according to the data type. For example,             // if the data type of the value is DateTime, you will be editing it with a DatePicker.             // Nice!             ((GridViewDataColumn)this.filtersGrid.Columns["Value"]).DataType = this.dataMemberType;               // Yet another nice feature. We will transfer the original DataFormatString (if any) to             // the Value column. In this way if you have specified a DataFormatString for the original             // column, you will see all filter values formatted accordingly.             ((GridViewDataColumn)this.filtersGrid.Columns["Value"]).DataFormatString = column.DataFormatString;               // This is important. Since our little filtersGrid will be bound to the entire collection             // of this.domainDataSource.FilterDescriptors, we need to set a Telerik filter on the             // grid so that it will display FilterDescriptor which are relevane to this column ONLY!             Telerik.Windows.Data.FilterDescriptor columnFilter = new Telerik.Windows.Data.FilterDescriptor("PropertyPath"                 , Telerik.Windows.Data.FilterOperator.IsEqualTo                 , this.dataMemberName);             this.filtersGrid.FilterDescriptors.Add(columnFilter);               // We want to listen for this in order to activate and de-activate the UI funnel.             this.filtersGrid.Items.CollectionChanged += this.OnFilterGridItemsCollectionChanged;         }           /// <summary>         // Since the DomainDataSource is a little bit picky about adding uninitialized FilterDescriptors         // to its collection, we will prepare each new instance with some default values and then         // the user can change them later. Go to the event handler to see how we do this.         /// </summary>         void OnFilterGridAddingNewDataItem(object sender, GridViewAddingNewEventArgs e)         {             // We need to initialize the new instance with some values and let the user go on from here.             System.Windows.Data.FilterDescriptor newFilter = new System.Windows.Data.FilterDescriptor();               // This is a must. It should know what member it is filtering on.             newFilter.PropertyPath = this.dataMemberName;               // Initialize it with one of the allowed operators.             // TypeExtensions.ApplicableFilterOperators method for more info.             newFilter.Operator = this.dataMemberType.ApplicableFilterOperators().First();               if (this.dataMemberType == typeof(DateTime))             {                 newFilter.Value.Value = DateTime.Now;             }             else if (this.dataMemberType == typeof(string))             {                 newFilter.Value.Value = "<enter text>";             }             else if (this.dataMemberType.IsValueType)             {                 // We need something non-null for all value types.                 newFilter.Value.Value = Activator.CreateInstance(this.dataMemberType);             }               // Let the user edit the new filter any way he/she likes.             e.NewObject = newFilter;         }           void OnFilterGridItemsCollectionChanged(object sender, System.Collections.Specialized.NotifyCollectionChangedEventArgs e)         {             // We are active only if we have any filters define. In this case the filtering funnel will lit-up.             this.IsActive = this.filtersGrid.Items.Count > 0;         }           private void OnApplyFiltersButtonClick(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)         {             if (this.DomainDataSource.IsLoadingData)             {                 return;             }               // Comment this if you want the popup to stay open after the button is clicked.             this.ClosePopup();               // Since this.domainDataSource.AutoLoad is false, this will take into             // account all filtering changes that the user has made since the last             // Load() and pull the new data to the client.             this.DomainDataSource.Load();         }           private void OnClearFiltersButtonClick(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)         {             if (this.DomainDataSource.IsLoadingData)             {                 return;             }               // We want to remove ONLY those filters from the DomainDataSource             // that this control is responsible for.             this.DomainDataSource.FilterDescriptors                 .Where(fd => fd.PropertyPath == this.dataMemberName) // Only "our" filters.                 .ToList()                 .ForEach(fd => this.DomainDataSource.FilterDescriptors.Remove(fd)); // Bye-bye!               // Comment this if you want the popup to stay open after the button is clicked.             this.ClosePopup();               // After we did our housekeeping, get the new data to the client.             this.DomainDataSource.Load();         }           private void OnAddFilterButtonClick(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)         {             if (this.DomainDataSource.IsLoadingData)             {                 return;             }               // Let the user enter his/or her requirements for a new filter.             this.filtersGrid.BeginInsert();             this.filtersGrid.UpdateLayout();         }           private void OnRemoveFilterButtonClick(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)         {             if (this.DomainDataSource.IsLoadingData)             {                 return;             }               // Find the currently selected filter and destroy it.             System.Windows.Data.FilterDescriptor filterToRemove = this.filtersGrid.SelectedItem as System.Windows.Data.FilterDescriptor;             if (filterToRemove != null                 && this.DomainDataSource.FilterDescriptors.Contains(filterToRemove))             {                 this.DomainDataSource.FilterDescriptors.Remove(filterToRemove);             }         }           private void ClosePopup()         {             System.Windows.Controls.Primitives.Popup popup = this.ParentOfType<System.Windows.Controls.Primitives.Popup>();             if (popup != null)             {                 popup.IsOpen = false;             }         }     } }   Finally, we need to tell RadGridViews Columns to use this custom control instead of the default one. Here is how to do it: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Net; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows.Documents; using System.Windows.Input; using System.Windows.Media; using System.Windows.Media.Animation; using System.Windows.Shapes; using System.Windows.Data; using Telerik.Windows.Data; using Telerik.Windows.Controls; using Telerik.Windows.Controls.GridView;   namespace PureServerSideFiltering {     public partial class MainPage : UserControl     {         public MainPage()         {             InitializeComponent();             this.grid.AutoGeneratingColumn += this.OnGridAutoGeneratingColumn;               // Uncomment this if you want the DomainDataSource to start pre-filtered.             // You will notice how our custom filtering controls will correctly read this information,             // populate their UI with the respective filters and lit-up the funnel to indicate that             // filtering is active. Go ahead and try it.             this.employeesDataSource.FilterDescriptors.Add(new System.Windows.Data.FilterDescriptor("Title", System.Windows.Data.FilterOperator.Contains, "Assistant"));             this.employeesDataSource.FilterDescriptors.Add(new System.Windows.Data.FilterDescriptor("HireDate", System.Windows.Data.FilterOperator.IsGreaterThan, new DateTime(1998, 12, 31)));             this.employeesDataSource.FilterDescriptors.Add(new System.Windows.Data.FilterDescriptor("HireDate", System.Windows.Data.FilterOperator.IsLessThanOrEqualTo, new DateTime(1999, 12, 31)));               this.employeesDataSource.Load();         }           /// <summary>         /// First of all, we will need to replace the default filtering control         /// of each column with out custom filtering control DomainDataSourceFilteringControl         /// </summary>         private void OnGridAutoGeneratingColumn(object sender, GridViewAutoGeneratingColumnEventArgs e)         {             GridViewBoundColumnBase dataColumn = e.Column as GridViewBoundColumnBase;             if (dataColumn != null)             {                 // We do not like ugly dates.                 if (dataColumn.DataType == typeof(DateTime))                 {                     dataColumn.DataFormatString = "{0:d}"; // Short date pattern.                       // Notice how this format will be later transferred to the Value column                     // of the grid that we have inside the DomainDataSourceFilteringControl.                 }                   // Replace the default filtering control with our.                 dataColumn.FilteringControl = new DomainDataSourceFilteringControl()                 {                     // Let the control know about the DDS, after all it will work directly on it.                     DomainDataSource = this.employeesDataSource                 };                   // Finally, lit-up the filtering funnel through the IsActive dependency property                 // in case there are some filters on the DDS that match our column member.                 string dataMemberName = dataColumn.GetDataMemberName();                 dataColumn.FilteringControl.IsActive =                     this.employeesDataSource.FilterDescriptors                     .Where(fd => fd.PropertyPath == dataMemberName)                     .Count() > 0;             }         }     } } The best part is that we are not only writing filters for the DomainDataSource we can read and load them. If the DomainDataSource has some pre-existing filters (like I have created in the code above), our control will read them and will populate its UI accordingly. Even the filtering funnel will light-up! Remember, the funnel is controlled by the IsActive property of our control. While this is just a basic implementation, the source code is absolutely yours and you can take it from here and extend it to match your specific business requirements. Below the main grid there is another debug grid. With its help you can monitor what filter descriptors are added and removed to the domain data source. Download Source Code. (You will have to have the AdventureWorks sample database installed on the default SQLExpress instance in order to run it.) Enjoy!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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• Trace File Source Adapter

  The Trace File Source adapter is a useful addition to your SSIS toolbox.  It allows you to read 2005 and 2008 profiler traces stored as .trc files and read them into the Data Flow.  From there you can perform filtering and analysis using the power of SSIS. There is no need for a SQL Server connection this just uses the trace file. Example Usages Cache warming for SQL Server Analysis Services Reading the flight recorder Find out the longest running queries on a server Analyze statements for CPU, memory by user or some other criteria you choose Properties The Trace File Source adapter has two properties, both of which combine to control the source trace file that is read at runtime. SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 trace files are supported for both the Database Engine (SQL Server) and Analysis Services. The properties are managed by the Editor form or can be set directly from the Properties Grid in Visual Studio. Property Type Description AccessMode Enumeration This property determines how the Filename property is interpreted. The values available are: DirectInput Variable Filename String This property holds the path for trace file to load (*.trc). The value is either a full path, or the name of a variable which contains the full path to the trace file, depending on the AccessMode property. Trace Column Definition Hopefully the majority of you can skip this section entirely, but if you encounter some problems processing a trace file this may explain it and allow you to fix the problem. The component is built upon the trace management API provided by Microsoft. Unfortunately API methods that expose the schema of a trace file have known issues and are unreliable, put simply the data often differs from what was specified. To overcome these limitations the component uses  some simple XML files. These files enable the trace column data types and sizing attributes to be overridden. For example SQL Server Profiler or TMO generated structures define EventClass as an integer, but the real value is a string. TraceDataColumnsSQL.xml  - SQL Server Database Engine Trace Columns TraceDataColumnsAS.xml    - SQL Server Analysis Services Trace Columns The files can be found in the %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents folder, e.g. "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsSQL.xml" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsAS.xml" If at runtime the component encounters a type conversion or sizing error it is most likely due to a discrepancy between the column definition as reported by the API and the actual value encountered. Whilst most common issues have already been fixed through these files we have implemented specific exception traps to direct you to the files to enable you to fix any further issues due to different usage or data scenarios that we have not tested. An example error that you can fix through these files is shown below. Buffer exception writing value to column 'Column Name'. The string value is 999 characters in length, the column is only 111. Columns can be overridden by the TraceDataColumns XML files in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\PipelineComponents\TraceDataColumnsAS.xml". Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Finally you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Trace File Source transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations. Please note that the Microsoft Trace classes used in the component are not supported on 64-bit platforms. To use the Trace File Source on a 64-bit host you need to ensure you have the 32-bit (x86) tools available, and the way you execute your package is setup to use them, please see the help topic 64-bit Considerations for Integration Services for more details. Downloads Trace Sources for SQL Server 2005 -- Trace Sources for SQL Server 2008 Version History SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.382 - SQL Sever 2008 public release. (9 Apr 2009) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.0.0.321 - SQL Server 2005 public release. (18 Nov 2008) -- Screenshots

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• Programmatically use a server as the Build Server for multiple Project Collections

  Important: With this post you create an unsupported scenario by Microsoft. It will break your support for this server with Microsoft. So handle with care. I am the administrator an a TFS environment with a lot of Project Collections. In the supported configuration of Microsoft 2010 you need one Build Controller per Project Collection, and it is not supported to have multiple Build Controllers installed. Jim Lamb created a post how you can modify your system to change this behaviour. But since I have so many Project Collections, I automated this with the API of TFS. When you install a new build server via the UI, you do the following steps Register the build service (with this you hook the windows server into the build server environment) Add a new build controller Add a new build agent So in pseudo code, the code would look like foreach (projectCollection in GetAllProjectCollections) {       CreateNewWindowsService();       RegisterService();       AddNewController();       AddNewAgent(); } The following code fragements show you the most important parts of the method implementations. Attached is the full project. CreateNewWindowsService We create a new windows service with the SC command via the Diagnostics.Process class:             var pi = new ProcessStartInfo("sc.exe")                         {                             Arguments =                                 string.Format(                                     "create \"{0}\" start= auto binpath= \"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\\Tools\\TfsBuildServiceHost.exe              /NamedInstance:{0}\" DisplayName= \"Visual Studio Team Foundation Build Service Host ({1})\"",                                     serviceHostName, tpcName)                         };            Process.Start(pi);             pi.Arguments = string.Format("failure {0} reset= 86400 actions= restart/60000", serviceHostName);            Process.Start(pi); RegisterService The trick in this method is that we set the NamedInstance static property. This property is Internal, so we need to set it through reflection. To get information on these you need nice Microsoft friends and the .Net reflector .             // Indicate which build service host instance we are using            typeof(BuildServiceHostUtilities).Assembly.GetType("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Config.BuildServiceHostProcess").InvokeMember("NamedInstance",              System.Reflection.BindingFlags.NonPublic | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.SetProperty | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Static, null, null, new object[] { serviceName });             // Create the build service host            serviceHost = buildServer.CreateBuildServiceHost(serviceName, endPoint);            serviceHost.Save();             // Register the build service host            BuildServiceHostUtilities.Register(serviceHost, user, password); AddNewController and AddNewAgent Once you have the BuildServerHost, the rest is pretty straightforward. There are methods on the BuildServerHost to modify the controllers and the agents                 controller = serviceHost.CreateBuildController(controllerName);                 agent = controller.ServiceHost.CreateBuildAgent(agentName, buildDirectory, controller);                controller.AddBuildAgent(agent); You have now seen the highlights of the application. If you need it and want to have sample information when you work in this area, download the app TFS2010_RegisterBuildServerToTPCs

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• Rendering ASP.NET MVC Razor Views outside of MVC revisited

  - by Rick Strahl

  Last year I posted a detailed article on how to render Razor Views to string both inside of ASP.NET MVC and outside of it. In that article I showed several different approaches to capture the rendering output. The first and easiest is to use an existing MVC Controller Context to render a view by simply passing the controller context which is fairly trivial and I demonstrated a simple ViewRenderer class that simplified the process down to a couple lines of code. However, if no Controller Context is available the process is not quite as straight forward and I referenced an old, much more complex example that uses my RazorHosting library, which is a custom self-contained implementation of the Razor templating engine that can be hosted completely outside of ASP.NET. While it works inside of ASP.NET, it’s an awkward solution when running inside of ASP.NET, because it requires a bit of setup to run efficiently.Well, it turns out that I missed something in the original article, namely that it is possible to create a ControllerContext, if you have a controller instance, even if MVC didn’t create that instance. Creating a Controller Instance outside of MVCThe trick to make this work is to create an MVC Controller instance – any Controller instance – and then configure a ControllerContext through that instance. As long as an HttpContext.Current is available it’s possible to create a fully functional controller context as Razor can get all the necessary context information from the HttpContextWrapper().The key to make this work is the following method:/// <summary> /// Creates an instance of an MVC controller from scratch /// when no existing ControllerContext is present /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="T">Type of the controller to create</typeparam> /// <returns>Controller Context for T</returns> /// <exception cref="InvalidOperationException">thrown if HttpContext not available</exception> public static T CreateController<T>(RouteData routeData = null) where T : Controller, new() { // create a disconnected controller instance T controller = new T(); // get context wrapper from HttpContext if available HttpContextBase wrapper = null; if (HttpContext.Current != null) wrapper = new HttpContextWrapper(System.Web.HttpContext.Current); else throw new InvalidOperationException( "Can't create Controller Context if no active HttpContext instance is available."); if (routeData == null) routeData = new RouteData(); // add the controller routing if not existing if (!routeData.Values.ContainsKey("controller") && !routeData.Values.ContainsKey("Controller")) routeData.Values.Add("controller", controller.GetType().Name .ToLower() .Replace("controller", "")); controller.ControllerContext = new ControllerContext(wrapper, routeData, controller); return controller; }This method creates an instance of a Controller class from an existing HttpContext which means this code should work from anywhere within ASP.NET to create a controller instance that’s ready to be rendered. This means you can use this from within an Application_Error handler as I needed to or even from within a WebAPI controller as long as it’s running inside of ASP.NET (ie. not self-hosted). Nice.So using the ViewRenderer class from the previous article I can now very easily render an MVC view outside of the context of MVC. Here’s what I ended up in my Application’s custom error HttpModule: protected override void OnDisplayError(WebErrorHandler errorHandler, ErrorViewModel model) { var Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; Response.ContentType = "text/html"; Response.StatusCode = errorHandler.OriginalHttpStatusCode; var context = ViewRenderer.CreateController<ErrorController>().ControllerContext; var renderer = new ViewRenderer(context); string html = renderer.RenderView("~/Views/Shared/GenericError.cshtml", model); Response.Write(html); }That’s pretty sweet, because it’s now possible to use ViewRenderer just about anywhere in any ASP.NET application, not only inside of controller code. This also allows the constructor for the ViewRenderer from the last article to work without a controller context parameter, using a generic view as a base for the controller context when not passed:public ViewRenderer(ControllerContext controllerContext = null) { // Create a known controller from HttpContext if no context is passed if (controllerContext == null) { if (HttpContext.Current != null) controllerContext = CreateController<ErrorController>().ControllerContext; else throw new InvalidOperationException( "ViewRenderer must run in the context of an ASP.NET " + "Application and requires HttpContext.Current to be present."); } Context = controllerContext; }In this case I use the ErrorController class which is a generic controller instance that exists in the same assembly as my ViewRenderer class and that works just fine since ‘generically’ rendered views tend to not rely on anything from the controller other than the model which is explicitly passed.While these days most of my apps use MVC I do still have a number of generic pieces in most of these applications where Razor comes in handy. This includes modules like the above, which when they error often need to display error output. In other cases I need to generate string template output for emailing or logging data to disk. Being able to render simply render an arbitrary View to and pass in a model makes this super nice and easy at least within the context of an ASP.NET application!You can check out the updated ViewRenderer class below to render your ‘generic views’ from anywhere within your ASP.NET applications. Hope some of you find this useful.ResourcesViewRenderer Class in Westwind.Web.Mvc Library (Github)Original ViewRenderer ArticleRazor Hosting Library (GitHub)Original Razor Hosting Article© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in ASP.NET  MVC   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Introducción a ENUM (E.164 Number Mapping)

  - by raul.goycoolea

  E.164 Number Mapping (ENUM o Enum) se diseñó para resolver la cuestión de como se pueden encontrar servicios de internet mediante un número telefónico, es decir cómo se pueden usar los los teléfonos, que solamente tienen 12 teclas, para acceder a servicios de Internet. La parte más básica de ENUM es por tanto la convergencia de las redes del STDP y la IP; ENUM hace que pueda haber una correspondencia entre un número telefónico y un identificador de Internet. En síntesis, Enum es un conjunto de protocolos para convertir números E.164 en URIs, y viceversa, de modo que el sistema de numeración E.164 tenga una función de correspondencia con las direcciones URI en Internet. Esta función es necesaria porque un número telefónico no tiene sentido en el mundo IP, ni una dirección IP tiene sentido en las redes telefónicas. Así, mediante esta técnica, las comunicaciones cuyo destino se marque con un número E.164, puedan terminar en el identificador correcto (número E.164 si termina en el STDP, o URI si termina en redes IP). La solución técnica de mirar en una base de datos cual es el identificador de destino tiene consecuencias muy interesantes, como que la llamada se pueda terminar donde desee el abonado llamado. Esta es una de las características que ofrece ENUM : el destino concreto, el terminal o terminales de terminación, no lo decide quien inicia la llamada o envía el mensaje sino la persona que es llamada o recibe el mensaje, que ha escrito sus preferencias en una base de datos. En otras palabras, el destinatario de la llamada decide cómo quiere ser contactado, tanto si lo que se le comunica es un email, o un sms, o telefax, o una llamada de voz. Cuando alguien quiera llamarle a usted, lo que tiene que hacer el llamante es seleccionar su nombre (el del llamado) en la libreta de direcciones del terminal o marcar su número ENUM. Una aplicación informática obtendrá de una base de datos los datos de contacto y disponibilidad que usted decidió. Y el mensaje le será remitido tal como usted especificó en dicha base de datos. Esto es algo nuevo que permite que usted, como persona llamada, defina sus preferencias de terminación para cualquier tipo de contenido. Por ejemplo, usted puede querer que todos los emails le sean enviados como sms o que los mensajes de voz se le remitan como emails; las comunicaciones ya no dependen de donde esté usted o deque tipo de terminal utiliza (teléfono, pda, internet). Además, con ENUM usted puede gestionar la portabilidad de sus números fijos y móviles. ENUM emplea una técnica de búsqueda indirecta en una base de datos que tiene los registros NAPTR ("Naming Authority Pointer Resource Records" tal como lo define el RFC 2915), y que utiliza el número telefónico Enum como clave de búsqueda, para obtener qué URIs corresponden a cada número telefónico. La base de datos que almacena estos registros es del tipo DNS.Si bien en uno de sus diversos usos sirve para facilitar las llamadas de usuarios de VoIP entre redes tradicionales del STDP y redes IP, debe tenerse en cuenta que ENUM no es una función de VoIP sino que es un mecanismo de conversión entre números/identificadores. Por tanto no debe ser confundido con el uso normal de enrutar las llamadas de VoIP mediante los protocolos SIP y H.323. ENUM puede ser muy útil para aquellas organizaciones que quieran tener normalizada la manera en que las aplicaciones acceden a los datos de comunicación de cada usuario. FundamentosPara que la convergencia entre el Sistema Telefónico Disponible al Público (STDP) y la Telefonía por Internet o Voz sobre IP (VoIP) y que el desarrollo de nuevos servicios multimedia tengan menos obstáculos, es fundamental que los usuarios puedan realizar sus llamadas tal como están acostumbrados a hacerlo, marcando números. Para eso, es preciso que haya un sistema universal de correspondencia de número a direcciones IP (y viceversa) y que las diferentes redes se puedan interconectar. Hay varias fórmulas que permiten que un número telefónico sirva para establecer comunicación con múltiples servicios. Una de estas fórmulas es el Electronic Number Mapping System ENUM, normalizado por el grupo de tareas especiales de ingeniería en Internet (IETF, Internet engineering task force), del que trata este artículo, que emplea la numeración E.164, los protocolos y la infraestructura telefónica para acceder indirectamente a diferentes servicios. Por tanto, se accede a un servicio mediante un identificador numérico universal: un número telefónico tradicional. ENUM permite comunicar las direcciones del mundo IP con las del mundo telefónico, y viceversa, sin problemas. Antes de entrar en mayores profundidades, conviene dar una breve pincelada para aclarar cómo se organiza la correspondencia entre números o URI. Para ello imaginemos una llamada que se inicia desde el servicio telefónico tradicional con destino a un número Enum. En ENUM Público, el abonado o usuario Enum a quien va destinada lallamada, habrá decidido incluir en la base de datos Enum uno o varios URI o números E.164, que forman una lista con sus preferencias para terminar la llamada. Y el sistema como se explica más adelante, elegirá cual es el número o URI adecuado para dicha terminación. Por tanto como resultado de la consulta a la base dedatos Enum siempre se da una relación unívoca entre el número Enum marcado y el de terminación, conforme a los deseos de la persona llamada.Variedades de ENUMUna posible fuente de confusión cuando se trata sobre ENUM es la variedad de soluciones o sistemas que emplean este calificativo. Lo habitual es que cuando se haga una referencia a ENUM se trate de uno de los siguientes casos: ENUM Público: Es la visión original de ENUM, como base de datos pública, parecida a un directorio, donde el abonado "opta" a ser incluido en la base de datos, que está gestionada en el dominio e164.arpa, delegando a cada país la gestión de la base de datos y la numeración. También se conoce como ENUM de usuario. Carrier ENUM, o ENUM Infraestructura, o de Operador: Cuando grupos de operadores proveedores de servicios de comunicaciones electrónicas acuerdan compartir la información de los abonados por medio de ENUM mediante acuerdos privados. En este caso son los operadores quienes controlan la información del abonado en vez de hacerlo (optar) los propios abonados. Carrier ENUM o ENUM de Operador también se conoce como Infrastructure ENUM o ENUM Infraestructura, y está siendo normalizado por IETF para la interconexión de VoIP (mediante acuerdos de peering). Como se explicará en la correspondiente sección, también se puede utilizar para la portabilidad o conservación de número. ENUM Privado: Un operador de telefonía o de VoIP, o un ISP, o un gran usuario, puede utilizar las técnicas de ENUM en sus redes y en las de sus clientes sin emplear DNS públicos, con DNS privados o internos. Resulta fácil imaginar como puede utilizarse esta técnica para que compañías multinacionales, o bancos, o agencias de viajes, tengan planes de numeración muy coherentes y eficaces. Cómo funciona ENUMPara conocer cómo funciona Enum, le remitimos a la página correspondiente a ENUM Público, puesto que esa variedad de Enum es la típica, la que dió lugar a todos los procedimientos y normas de IETF .Más detalles sobre: @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } H4 { margin-bottom: 0.08in } H4.ctl { font-family: "Lohit Hindi" } A:link { so-language: zxx } -- ENUM Público. En esta página se explica con cierto detalle como funciona Enum Carrier ENUM o ENUM de Operador ENUM Privado Normas técnicas: RFC 2915: NAPTR RR. The Naming Authority Pointer (NAPTR) DNS Resource Record RFC 3761: ENUM Protocol. The E.164 to Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) Dynamic Delegation Discovery System (DDDS) Application (ENUM). (obsoletes RFC 2916). RFC 3762: Usage of H323 addresses in ENUM Protocol RFC 3764: Usage of SIP addresses in ENUM Protocol RFC 3824: Using E.164 numbers with SIP RFC 4769: IANA Registration for an Enumservice Containing Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) Signaling Information RFC 3026: Berlin Liaison Statement RFC 3953: Telephone Number Mapping (ENUM) Service Registration for Presence Services RFC 2870: Root Name Server Operational Requirements RFC 3482: Number Portability in the Global Switched Telephone Network (GSTN): An Overview RFC 2168: Resolution of Uniform Resource Identifiers using the Domain Name System Organizaciones relacionadas con ENUM RIPE - Adimistrador del nivel 0 de ENUM e164.arpa. ITU-T TSB - Unión Internacional de Telecomunicaciones ETSI - European Telecommunications Standards Institute VisionNG - Administrador del rango ENUM 878-10 IETF ENUM Chapter

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• Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization!

  - by mbcrump

  Infragistics recently released their new Silverlight Data Visualization Controls. I saw a couple of samples and had to take a look. I headed over to their website and downloaded the controls. I first noticed the hospital floor-plan demo shown on their site and started thinking of ways that I could use this in my own organization. I emailed them asking if I could give away the Silverlight Data Visualization controls on my site and they said, Yes! They also wanted to throw in the standard Silverlight Line of Business controls. (combined they are worth about $3000 US). I am very thankful they were willing to help the Silverlight community with this giveaway. So some quick rules below: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization ($3000 Value) Random winner will be announced on January 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) For extra entries simply: Retweet a link to this page using the following URL [ http://mcrump.me/iscfree ]. It does not matter what the tweet says, just as long as the URL is the same. Unlimited tweets, but please don’t go crazy! This URL will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit Infragistics because they made this possible. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark: The Silverlight Line of Business Control page is here. You can also check out the live demos here. The Data Visualization page is here. You can also check out the live demos here. Don’t worry about the Samples/Help Documentation. You can install all of that to your local HDD when you are installing it. I am going to walk you through the Silverlight Controls recently released by Infragistics. Begin by downloading the trial version and running the executable. If you downloaded the Complete bundle then you will have the following options to pick from. I like having help documentation and samples on my local HDD in case I do not have access to the internet and want to code. After it is installed, you may want to take a look at your Toolbox in Visual Studio 2010. Look for NetAdvantage 10.3 Silverlight and you will see that you now have access to all of these controls. At this point, to use the controls it’s as simple as drag/drop onto your Silverlight container. It will create the proper Namespaces for you. I wanted to highlight a few of the controls that I liked the most: Grid – After using the Infragistics grid you will wonder how you ever survived using the grid supplied by Microsoft standard controls.  This grid was designed to get your application up and running very fast. It’s simple to bind, it handles LARGE DataSets, easy to filter and allows endless possibilities of formatting data. The screenshot below is an example of the grid. For a real-time updating demo click here. SpellChecker- If your users are creating emails or performing any other function that requires Spell Checking then this control is great. Check out the screenshots below: In this first screen, I have a word that is not in the dictionary [DotNet]. The Spell Checker finds the word and allows the user to correct it. What is so great about Infragistics controls is that it only takes a few lines of code to have a full-featured Spell Checker in your application. TagCloud – This is a control that I haven’t seen anywhere else. It allows you to create keywords for popular search terms. This is very similar to TagCloud seen all over the internet.  Below is a screenshot that shows “Facebook” being a very popular item in the cloud. You can link these items to a hyperlink if you wanted. Importing/Exporting from Excel – I work with data a majority of the time. We all know the importance of Excel in our organizations, its used a lot. With Infragistics controls it make importing and exporting data from a Grid into Excel a snap. One of the things that I liked most about this control was the option to choose the Excel format (2003 or 2007). I haven’t seen this feature in other controls. Creating/Saving/Extracting/Uploading Zip Files – This is another control that I haven’t seen many others making. It allows you to basically manipulate a zip file in any way you like. You can even create a password on the zip file. Schedule – The Schedule that Infragistics provides resembles Outlook’s calendar. I think that it’s important for a user to see your app for the first time and immediately be able to start using because they are already familiar with the UI. The Schedule control accomplishes that in my opinion. I have just barely scratched the surface with the Infragistics Silverlight Line of Business controls. To check all of them then click here. A quick thing to note is that this giveaway also comes with the following Silverlight Data Visualization Controls. Below is a screenshot that list all of them:   I wanted to highlight 2 of the controls that I liked the most: xamBarcode– The xamBarcode supports the following Symbologies: Below is an example of the barcode generated by Infragistics controls. This is a high resolution barcode that you will not have to wonder if your scanner can read it. As long as you have ink in your printer your barcode will read it. I used a Symbol barcode reader to test this barcode. xamTreemap– I’ve never seen a way of displaying data like this before, but I like it. You can style this anyway that you like of course and it also comes with an Office 2010 Theme. Thanks to Infragistics for providing the controls to one lucky reader. I hope that you enjoyed this post and good luck to those that entered the contest.  Subscribe to my feed

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• Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script

  In the series the following parts have been published Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Add arguments and variables Part 3: Use more complex arguments Part 4: Create your own activity Part 5: Increase AssemblyVersion Part 6: Use custom type for an argument Part 7: How is the custom assembly found Part 8: Send information to the build log Part 9: Impersonate activities (run under other credentials) Part 10: Include Version Number in the Build Number Part 11: Speed up opening my build process template Part 12: How to debug my custom activities Part 13: Get control over the Build Output Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script Part 15: Fail a build based on the exit code of a console application With PowerShell you can add powerful scripting to your build to for example execute a deployment. If you want more information on PowerShell, please refer to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa973757.aspx For this example we will create a simple PowerShell script that prints “Hello world!”. To create the script, create a new text file and name it “HelloWorld.ps1”. Add to the contents of the script: Write-Host “Hello World!” To test the script do the following: Open the command prompt To run the script you must change the execution policy. To do this execute in the command prompt: powershell set-executionpolicy remotesigned Now go to the directory where you have saved the PowerShell script Execute the following command powershell .\HelloWorld.ps1 In this example I use a relative path, but when the path to the PowerShell script contains spaces, you need to change the syntax to powershell "& '<full path to script>' " for example: powershell "& ‘C:\sources\Build Customization\SolutionToBuild\PowerShell Scripts\HellloWorld.ps1’ " In this blog post, I create a new solution and that solution includes also this PowerShell script. I want to create an argument on the Build Process Template that holds the path to the PowerShell script. In the Build Process Template I will add an InvokeProcess activity to execute the PowerShell command. This InvokeProcess activity needs the location of the script as an argument for the PowerShell command. Since you don’t know the full path at the build server of this script, you can either specify in the argument the relative path of the script, but it is hard to find out what the relative path is. I prefer to specify the location of the script in source control and then convert that server path to a local path. To do this conversion you can use the ConvertWorkspaceItem activity. So to complete the task, open the Build Process Template CustomTemplate.xaml that we created in earlier parts, follow the following steps Add a new argument called “DeploymentScript” and set the appropriate settings in the metadata. See Part 2: Add arguments and variables  for more information. Scroll down beneath the TryCatch activity called “Try Compile, Test, and Associate Changesets and Work Items” Add a new If activity and set the condition to "Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(DeploymentScript)" to ensure it will only run when the argument is passed. Add in the Then branch of the If activity a new Sequence activity and rename it to “Start deployment” Click on the activity and add a new variable called DeploymentScriptFilename (scoped to the “Start deployment” Sequence Add a ConvertWorkspaceItem activity on the “Start deployment” Sequence Add a InvokeProcess activity beneath the ConvertWorkspaceItem activity in the “Start deployment” Sequence Click on the ConvertWorkspaceItem activity and change the properties DisplayName = Convert deployment script filename Input = DeploymentScript Result = DeploymentScriptFilename Workspace = Workspace Click on the InvokeProcess activity and change the properties Arguments = String.Format(" ""& '{0}' "" ", DeploymentScriptFilename) DisplayName = Execute deployment script FileName = "PowerShell" To see results from the powershell command drop a WriteBuildMessage activity on the "Handle Standard Output" and pass the stdOutput variable to the Message property. Do the same for a WriteBuildError activity on the "Handle Error Output" To publish it, check in the Build Process Template This leads to the following result We now go to the build definition that depends on the template and set the path of the deployment script to the server path to the HelloWorld.ps1. (If you want to see the result of the PowerShell script, change the Logging verbosity to Detailed or Diagnostic). Save and run the build. A lot of the deployment scripts you have will have some kind of arguments (like username / password or environment variables) that you want to define in the Build Definition. To make the PowerShell configurable, you can follow the following steps. Create a new script and give it the name "HelloWho.ps1". In the contents of the file add the following lines: param (         $person     ) $message = [System.String]::Format(“Hello {0}!", $person) Write-Host $message When you now run the script on the command prompt, you will see the following So lets change the Build Process Template to accept one parameter for the deployment script. You can of course make it configurable to add a for-loop that reads through a collection of parameters but that is out of scope of this blog post. Add a new Argument called DeploymentScriptParameter In the InvokeProcess activity where the PowerShell command is executed, modify the Arguments property to String.Format(" ""& '{0}' '{1}' "" ", DeploymentScriptFilename, DeploymentScriptParameter) Check in the Build Process Template Now modify the build definition and set the Parameter of the deployment to any value and run the build. You can download the full solution at BuildProcess.zip. It will include the sources of every part and will continue to evolve.

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• SnagIt Live Writer Plug-in Updated

  - by Rick Strahl

  Ah, I love SnagIt from TechSmith and I use the heck out of it almost every day. So no surprise that I've decided some time ago to integrate SnagIt into a few applications that require screen shots extensively. It's been a while since I've posted an update to my small SnagIt Windows Live Writer plug-in. There have been a few nagging issues that have crept up with recent changes in the way SnagIt handles captures in recent versions and they have been addressed in this update of SnagIt. Personally I love SnagIt and use it extensively mostly for blogging, but also for writing documentation and articles etc. While there are many other (and also free) tools out there to do basic screen captures, SnagIt continues to be the most convenient tool for me with its nice built in capture and effects editor that makes creating professional looking captures childishly simple. And maybe even more importantly: SnagIt has a COM interface that can be automated and  makes it super easy to embed into other applications. I've built plugins for SnagIt as well as for one of my company's own tools, Html Help Builder. If you use the Windows Live Writer offline WebLog Editor to write blog posts and have a copy of SnagIt it's probably worth your while to check this out if you haven't already. In case you haven't, this plugin integrates SnagIt with Live Writer so you can easily capture and edit content and embed it into a post. Captures are shown in the SnagIt Preview editor where you can edit the image and apply image markup or effects, before selecting Finish (or Cancel). The final image can then be pasted directly into your Live Writer post. When installed the SnagIt plug-in shows up on the PlugIn list or in the Plug-Ins toolbar shortcut: Once you select the Plug in you get the capture window that allows you to customize the capture process which includes most of the useful SnagIt capture options: Once you're done capturing the image shows up in the SnagIt Image Editor and you can crop, mark up and apply effects. When done you click the Finish button and the image is embedded right into your blog post. Easy - how do you think the images in this blog entry got in here? The beauty of SnagIt is that it's all easily integrated - Capturing, editing and embedding, it only takes a few seconds to do it all especially if you save image effect presets in SnagIt. What's updated The main issue addressed in this update has to do with the plug-in updates the Live Writer window. When a capture starts Live Writer gets minimized to get out of the way to let you pick your capture source. When the capture is complete and the image has been embedded Live Writer is activated once again. Recent versions of SnagIt however had changed the Window positioning of SnagIt so that Live Writer ended up popping up back behind the SnagIt window which was pretty annoying. This update pushes Live Writer back to the top of the window stack using some delaying tactics in the code. There have also been a few small changes to the way the code interacts with the COM object which is more reliable if a capture fails or SnagIt blows up or is locked because it's already in a capture outside of the automation interface. Source Code SnagIt Automation is something I actually use a lot. As mentioned I've integrated this automation into Live Writer as well as my documentation tool Html Help Builder, which I use just about daily. The SnagIt integration has a similar interface in that application and provides similar functionality. It's quite useful to integrate SnagIt into other applications. Because it's quite useful to embed SnagIt into other apps there's source code that you can download and embed into your own applications. The code includes both the dialog class that is automated from Live Writer, as well as the basic capture component that captures images to a disk file. Resources Download the SnagIt Capture Plug-in Installer An MSI installer that you can run that will install the plug-in into Live Writer's PlugIns directory. Source Code to the SnagIt Capture Plug-in Contains the plug-in assembly, as well as the source code to the plug-in and the setup project.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in Live Writer  WebLog   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Robotic Arm &ndash; Hardware

  - by Szymon Kobalczyk

  This is first in series of articles about project I've been building  in my spare time since last Summer. Actually it all began when I was researching a topic of modeling human motion kinematics in order to create gesture recognition library for Kinect. This ties heavily into motion theory of robotic manipulators so I also glanced at some designs of robotic arms. Somehow I stumbled upon this cool looking open source robotic arm: It was featured on Thingiverse and published by user jjshortcut (Jan-Jaap). Since for some time I got hooked on toying with microcontrollers, robots and other electronics, I decided to give it a try and build it myself. In this post I will describe the hardware build of the arm and in later posts I will be writing about the software to control it. Another reason to build the arm myself was the cost factor. Even small commercial robotic arms are quite expensive – products from Lynxmotion and Dagu look great but both cost around USD $300 (actually there is one cheap arm available but it looks more like a toy to me). In comparison this design is quite cheap. It uses seven hobby grade servos and even the cheapest ones should work fine. The structure is build from a set of laser cut parts connected with few metal spacers (15mm and 47mm) and lots of M3 screws. Other than that you’d only need a microcontroller board to drive the servos. So in total it comes a lot cheaper to build it yourself than buy an of the shelf robotic arm. Oh, and if you don’t like this one there are few more robotic arm projects at Thingiverse (including one by oomlout). Laser cut parts Some time ago I’ve build another robot using laser cut parts so I knew the process already. You can grab the design files in both DXF and EPS format from Thingiverse, and there are also 3D models of each part in STL. Actually the design is split into a second project for the mini servo gripper (there is also a standard servo version available but it won’t fit this arm).  I wanted to make some small adjustments, layout, and add measurements to the parts before sending it for cutting. I’ve looked at some free 2D CAD programs, and finally did all this work using QCad 3 Beta with worked great for me (I also tried LibreCAD but it didn’t work that well). All parts are cut from 4 mm thick material. Because I was worried that acrylic is too fragile and might break, I also ordered another set cut from plywood. In the end I build it from plywood because it was easier to glue (I was told acrylic requires a special glue). Btw. I found a great laser cutter service in Kraków and highly recommend it (www.ebbox.com.pl). It cost me only USD $26 for both sets ($16 acrylic + $10 plywood). Metal parts I bought all the M3 screws and nuts at local hardware store. Make sure to look for nylon lock (nyloc) nuts for the gripper because otherwise it unscrews and comes apart quickly. I couldn’t find local store with metal spacers and had to order them online (you’d need 11 x 47mm and 3 x 15mm). I think I paid less than USD $10 for all metal parts. Servos This arm uses five standards size servos to drive the arm itself, and two micro servos are used on the gripper. Author of the project used Modelcraft RS-2 Servo and Modelcraft ES-05 HT Servo. I had two Futaba S3001 servos laying around, and ordered additional TowerPro SG-5010 standard size servos and TowerPro SG90 micro servos. However it turned out that the SG90 won’t fit in the gripper so I had to replace it with a slightly smaller E-Sky EK2-0508 micro servo. Later it also turned out that Futaba servos make some strange noise while working so I swapped one with TowerPro SG-5010 which has higher torque (8kg / cm). I’ve also bought three servo extension cables. All servos cost me USD $45. Assembly The build process is not difficult but you need to think carefully about order of assembling it. You can do the base and upper arm first. Because two servos in the base are close together you need to put first with one piece of lower arm already connected before you put the second servo. Then you connect the upper arm and finally put the second piece of lower arm to hold it together. Gripper and base require some gluing so think it through too. Make sure to look closely at all the photos on Thingiverse (also other people copies) and read additional posts on jjshortcust’s blog: My mini servo grippers and completed robotic arm  Multiply the robotic arm and electronics Here is also Rob’s copy cut from aluminum My assembled arm looks like this – I think it turned out really nice: Servo controller board The last piece of hardware I needed was an electronic board that would take command from PC and drive all seven servos. I could probably use Arduino for this task, and in fact there are several Arduino servo shields available (for example from Adafruit or Renbotics).  However one problem is that most support only up to six servos, and second that their accuracy is limited by Arduino’s timer frequency. So instead I looked for dedicated servo controller and found a series of Maestro boards from Pololu. I picked the Pololu Mini Maestro 12-Channel USB Servo Controller. It has many nice features including native USB connection, high resolution pulses (0.25µs) with no jitter, built-in speed and acceleration control, and even scripting capability. Another cool feature is that besides servo control, each channel can be configured as either general input or output. So far I’m using seven channels so I still have five available to connect some sensors (for example distance sensor mounted on gripper might be useful). And last but important factor was that they have SDK in .NET – what more I could wish for! The board itself is very small – half of the size of Tic-Tac box. I picked one for about USD $35 in this store. Perhaps another good alternative would be the Phidgets Advanced Servo 8-Motor – but it is significantly more expensive at USD $87.30. The Maestro Controller Driver and Software package includes Maestro Control Center program with lets you immediately configure the board. For each servo I first figured out their move range and set the min/max limits. I played with setting the speed an acceleration values as well. Big issue for me was that there are two servos that control position of lower arm (shoulder joint), and both have to be moved at the same time. This is where the scripting feature of Pololu board turned out very helpful. I wrote a script that synchronizes position of second servo with first one – so now I only need to move one servo and other will follow automatically. This turned out tricky because I couldn’t find simple offset mapping of the move range for each servo – I had to divide it into several sub-ranges and map each individually. The scripting language is bit assembler-like but gets the job done. And there is even a runtime debugging and stack view available. Altogether I’m very happy with the Pololu Mini Maestro Servo Controller, and with this final piece I completed the build and was able to move my arm from the Meastro Control program.   The total cost of my robotic arm was: $10 laser cut parts $10 metal parts $45 servos $35 servo controller ----------------------- $100 total So here you have all the information about the hardware. In next post I’ll start talking about the software that I wrote in Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4. Stay tuned!

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• Running Jetty under Windows Azure Using RoleEntryPoint in a Worker Role

  - by Shawn Cicoria

  This post is built upon the work of Mario Kosmiskas and David C. Chou’s prior postings – from here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mariok/archive/2011/01/05/deploying-java-applications-in-azure.aspx  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dachou/archive/2010/03/21/run-java-with-jetty-in-windows-azure.aspx As Mario points out in his post, when you need to have more control over the process that starts, it generally is better left to a RoleEntryPoint capability that as of now, requires the use of a CLR based assembly that is deployed as part of the package to Azure. There were things I liked especially about Mario’s post – specifically, the ability to pull down the JRE and Jetty runtimes at role startup and instantiate the process using the extracted bits.  The way Mario initialized the java process (and Jetty) was to take advantage of a role startup task configured as part of the service definition.  This is a great quick way to kick off processes or tasks prior to your role entry point.  However, if you need access to service configuration values or role events, that’s where RoleEntryPoint comes in.  For this PoC sample I moved the logic for retrieving the bits for the jre and jetty to the worker roles OnStart – in addition to moving the process kickoff to the OnStart method.  The Run method at this point is there to loop and just report the status of the java process. Beyond just making things more parameterized, both Mario’s and David’s articles still form the essence of the approach. The solution that accompanies this post provides all the necessary .NET based Visual Studio project.  In addition, you’ll need: 1. Jetty 7 runtime http://www.eclipse.org/jetty/downloads.php 2. JRE http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html Once you have these the first step is to create archives (zips) of the distributions.  For this PoC, the structure of the archive requires that the root of the archive looks as follows: JRE6.zip jetty---.zip Upload the contents to a storage container (block blob), and for this example I used /archives as the location.  The service configuration has several settings that allow, which is the advantage of using RoleEntryPoint, the ability to provide these things via native configuration support from Azure in a worker role. Storage Explorer You can use development storage for testing this out – the zipped version of the solution is configured for development storage.  When you’re ready to deploy, you update the two settings – 1 for diagnostics and the other for the storage container where the /archives are going to be stored. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="HostedJetty" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="JettyWorker"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <!--<Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=<accountName>;AccountKey=<accountKey>" />--> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="JettyArchive" value="jetty-distribution-7.3.0.v20110203b.zip" /> <Setting name="StartRole" value="true" /> <Setting name="BlobContainer" value="archives" /> <Setting name="JreArchive" value="jre6.zip" /> <!--<Setting name="StorageCredentials" value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=<accountName>;AccountKey=<accountKey>"/>--> <Setting name="StorageCredentials" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" />   For interacting with Storage you can use several tools – one tool that I like is from the Windows Azure CAT team located here: http://appfabriccat.com/2011/02/exploring-windows-azure-storage-apis-by-building-a-storage-explorer-application/  and shown in the prior picture At runtime, during role initialization and startup, Azure will call into your RoleEntryPoint.  At that time the code will do a dynamic pull of the 2 archives and extract – using the Sharp Zip Lib <link> as Mario had demonstrated in his sample.  The only different here is the use of CLR code vs. PowerShell (which is really CLR, but that’s another discussion). At this point, once the 2 zips are extracted, the Role’s file system looks as follows: Worker Role approot From there, the OnStart method (which also does the download and unzip using a simple StorageHelper class) kicks off the Java path and now you have Java! Task Manager Jetty Sample Page A couple of things I’m working on to enhance this is to extract the jre and jetty bits not to the appRoot but to a resource location defined as part of the service definition. ServiceDefinition.csdef <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="HostedJetty" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="JettyWorker"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteAccess" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteForwarder" /> </Imports> <Endpoints> <InputEndpoint name="JettyPort" protocol="tcp" port="80" localPort="8080" /> </Endpoints> <LocalResources> <LocalStorage name="Archives" cleanOnRoleRecycle="false" sizeInMB="100" /> </LocalResources>   As the concept matures a bit, being able to update dynamically the content or jar files as part of a running java solution is something that is possible through continued enhancement of this simple model. The Visual Studio 2010 Solution is located here: HostingJavaSln_NDA.zip

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• Review of ComponentOne Silverlight Controls (Free License Giveaway).

  - by mbcrump

  ComponentOne has several great products that target Silverlight Developers. One of them is their Silverlight Controls and the other is the XAP Optimizer. I decided that I would check out the controls and Xap Optimizer and feature them on my blog. After talking with ComponentOne, they agreed to take part in my Monthly Silverlight giveaway. The details are listed below: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of ComponentOne Silverlight Controls + XAP Optimizer! (the winner also gets a license to Silverlight Spy) Random winner will be announced on March 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) Retweet the following : I just entered to win free #Silverlight controls from @mbcrump and @ComponentOne http://mcrump.me/fTSmB8 ! Don’t change the URL because this will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit ComponentOne because they made this possible. MichaelCrump.Net provides Silverlight Giveaways every month. You can also see the latest giveaway by bookmarking http://giveaways.michaelcrump.net . ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark: The Live Demos of the Silverlight Controls is located here. The XAP Optimizer page is here. One thing that I liked about the help documentation is that you can grab a PDF that only contains documentation for that control. This allows you to get the information you need without going through several hundred pages. You can also download the full documentation from their site.  ComponentOne Silverlight Controls I recently built a hobby project and decided to use ComponentOne Silverlight Controls. The main reason for this is that the controls are heavily documented, they look great and getting help was just a tweet or forum click away. So, the first question that you may ask is, “What is included?” Here is the official list below. I wanted to show several of the controls that I think developers will use the most. 1) ComponentOne’s Image Control – Display animated GIF images on your Silverlight pages as you would in traditional Web apps. Add attractive visuals with minimal effort. 2) HTML Host - Render HTML and arbitrary URI content from within Silverlight. 3) Chart3D - Create 3D surface charts with options for contour levels, zones, a chart legend and more. 4) PDFViewer - View PDF files in Silverlight! That is just a fraction of the controls available. If you want to check out several of them in a “real” application then check out my Silverlight page at http://michaelcrump.info. This brings me to the second part of the giveaway. XAP Optimizer – Is designed to reduce the size of your XAP File. It also includes built-in obfuscation and signing. With my personal project, I decided to use the XAP Optimizer by ComponentOne. It was so easy to use. You basically give it your .XAP file and it provides an output file. If you prefer to prune unused references manually then you can prune your XAP file manually by selecting the option below. I went ahead and added Obfuscation just to try it out and it worked great. You may notice from the screenshot below that I only obfuscated assemblies that I built. The other dlls anyone can grab off the net so we have no reason to obfuscate them. You also have the option to automatically sign your .xap with the SN.exe tool. So how did it turn out? Well, I reduced my XAP size from 2.4 to 1.8 with simply a click of a button. I added obfuscation with a click of a button: Screenshot of no obfuscation on my XAP File   Screenshot of obfuscation on my XAP File with XAP Optimizer.   So, with 2 button clicks, I reduce my XAP file and obfuscated my assembly. What else can you want? Well, they provide a nice HTML report that gives you an optimization summary. So what if you don’t want to launch this tool every time you deploy a Silverlight application? Well the official documentation provided a way to do it in your built event in Visual Studio. Click the Build Events tab on the left side of the Properties window. Enter the following command in the Post-build event command line: $Program Files\ComponentOne\XapOptimizer\XapOptimizer.exe /cmd /p:$(ProjectDir)$(ProjectName).xoproj In the end, this is a great product. I love code that I don’t have to write and utilities that just work. ComponentOne delivers with both the Silverlight Controls and the XAP Optimizer. Don’t forget to leave a comment below in order to win a set of the controls! Subscribe to my feed

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• SQL SERVER – Powershell – Importing CSV File Into Database – Video

  - by pinaldave

  Laerte Junior is my very dear friend and Powershell Expert. On my request he has agreed to share Powershell knowledge with us. Laerte Junior is a SQL Server MVP and, through his technology blog and simple-talk articles, an active member of the Microsoft community in Brasil. He is a skilled Principal Database Architect, Developer, and Administrator, specializing in SQL Server and Powershell Programming with over 8 years of hands-on experience. He holds a degree in Computer Science, has been awarded a number of certifications (including MCDBA), and is an expert in SQL Server 2000 / SQL Server 2005 / SQL Server 2008 technologies. Let us read the blog post in his own words. I was reading an excellent post from my great friend Pinal about loading data from CSV files, SQL SERVER – Importing CSV File Into Database – SQL in Sixty Seconds #018 – Video,   to SQL Server and was honored to write another guest post on SQL Authority about the magic of the PowerShell. The biggest stuff in TechEd NA this year was PowerShell. Fellows, if you still don’t know about it, it is better to run. Remember that The Core Servers to SQL Server are the future and consequently the Shell. You don’t want to be out of this, right? Let’s see some PowerShell Magic now. To start our tour, first we need to download these two functions from Powershell and SQL Server Master Jedi Chad Miller.Out-DataTable and Write-DataTable. Save it in a module and add it in your profile. In my case, the module is called functions.psm1. To have some data to play, I created 10 csv files with the same content. I just put the SQL Server Errorlog into a csv file and created 10 copies of it. #Just create a CSV with data to Import. Using SQLErrorLog [reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(“Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo”) $ServerInstance=new-object (“Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server“) $Env:Computername $ServerInstance.ReadErrorLog() | export-csv-path“c:\SQLAuthority\ErrorLog.csv”-NoTypeInformation for($Count=1;$Count-le 10;$count++)  {       Copy-Item“c:\SQLAuthority\Errorlog.csv”“c:\SQLAuthority\ErrorLog$($count).csv” } Now in my path c:\sqlauthority, I have 10 csv files : Now it is time to create a table. In my case, the SQL Server is called R2D2 and the Database is SQLServerRepository and the table is CSV_SQLAuthority. CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CSV_SQLAuthority]( [LogDate] [datetime] NULL, [Processinfo] [varchar](20) NULL, [Text] [varchar](MAX) NULL ) Let’s play a little bit. I want to import synchronously all csv files from the path to the table: #Importing synchronously $DataImport=Import-Csv-Path ( Get-ChildItem“c:\SQLAuthority\*.csv”) $DataTable=Out-DataTable-InputObject$DataImport Write-DataTable-ServerInstanceR2D2-DatabaseSQLServerRepository-TableNameCSV_SQLAuthority-Data$DataTable Very cool, right? Let’s do it asynchronously and in background using PowerShell  Jobs: #If you want to do it to all asynchronously Start-job-Name‘ImportingAsynchronously‘ ` -InitializationScript  {IpmoFunctions-Force-DisableNameChecking} ` -ScriptBlock {    ` $DataImport=Import-Csv-Path ( Get-ChildItem“c:\SQLAuthority\*.csv”) $DataTable=Out-DataTable-InputObject$DataImport Write-DataTable   -ServerInstance“R2D2″`                   -Database“SQLServerRepository“`                   -TableName“CSV_SQLAuthority“`                   -Data$DataTable             } Oh, but if I have csv files that are large in size and I want to import each one asynchronously. In this case, this is what should be done: Get-ChildItem“c:\SQLAuthority\*.csv” | % { Start-job-Name“$($_)” ` -InitializationScript  {IpmoFunctions-Force-DisableNameChecking} ` -ScriptBlock { $DataImport=Import-Csv-Path$args[0]                $DataTable=Out-DataTable-InputObject$DataImport                Write-DataTable-ServerInstance“R2D2″`                               -Database“SQLServerRepository“`                               -TableName“CSV_SQLAuthority“`                               -Data$DataTable             } -ArgumentList$_.fullname } How cool is that? Let’s make the funny stuff now. Let’s schedule it on an SQL Server Agent Job. If you are using SQL Server 2012, you can use the PowerShell Job Step. Otherwise you need to use a CMDexec job step calling PowerShell.exe. We will use the second option. First, create a ps1 file called ImportCSV.ps1 with the script above and save it in a path. In my case, it is in c:\temp\automation. Just add the line at the end: Get-ChildItem“c:\SQLAuthority\*.csv” | % { Start-job-Name“$($_)” ` -InitializationScript  {IpmoFunctions-Force-DisableNameChecking} ` -ScriptBlock { $DataImport=Import-Csv-Path$args[0]                $DataTable=Out-DataTable-InputObject$DataImport                Write-DataTable-ServerInstance“R2D2″`                               -Database“SQLServerRepository“`                               -TableName“CSV_SQLAuthority“`                               -Data$DataTable             } -ArgumentList$_.fullname } Get-Job | Wait-Job | Out-Null Remove-Job -State Completed Why? See my post Dooh PowerShell Trick–Running Scripts That has Posh Jobs on a SQL Agent Job Remember, this trick is for  ALL scripts that will use PowerShell Jobs and any kind of schedule tool (SQL Server agent, Windows Schedule) Create a Job Called ImportCSV and a step called Step_ImportCSV and choose CMDexec. Then you just need to schedule or run it. I did a short video (with matching good background music) and you can see it at: That’s it guys. C’mon, join me in the #PowerShellLifeStyle. You will love it. If you want to check what we can do with PowerShell and SQL Server, don’t miss Laerte Junior LiveMeeting on July 18. You can have more information in : LiveMeeting VC PowerShell PASS–Troubleshooting SQL Server With PowerShell–English Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology, Video Tagged: Powershell

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• OpenCV install problems on Studio 12.04 - broken dependencies

  - by Will

  I'm trying to follow the Ubuntu OpenCV documentation at OpenCV. The provided script has a line which executed for some time, taking away more packages than I expected (such as ubuntu-studio video); sudo apt-get -qq remove ffmpeg x264 libx264-dev When the script gets to the line below, it bombs; sudo apt-get -qq install libopencv-dev build-essential checkinstall cmake pkg-config yasm libtiff4-dev libjpeg-dev libjasper-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev libdc1394-22-dev libxine-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libv4l-dev python-dev python-numpy libtbb-dev libqt4-dev libgtk2.0-dev libfaac-dev libmp3lame-dev libopencore-amrnb-dev libopencore-amrwb-dev libtheora-dev libvorbis-dev libxvidcore-dev x264 v4l-utils ffmpeg The error msg is; E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. I've since run Update-Manager, run sudo apt-get updates, rebooted, tried the above script line manually, and still no change. I've just run sudo apt-get install -f and nothing seemed to change. It did mention that some packages were no longer needed and could be removed by apt-get autoremove, so I ran that. It removed a number of packages, so I reran the install command above. Still same problem of held broken packages. I just ran sudo apt-get -u dist-upgrade Part of the response was; The following packages have been kept back: gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg I'm not sure what that means. I do know that it shows up in my Update-Manager and cannot be checked I then ran sudo dpkg --configure -a and then reran sudo apt-get -f install and the package was still not upgraded, though there was this very interesting comment; Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg : Depends: libavcodec53 (< 5:0) but it is not going to be installed or libavcodec-extra-53 (< 5:0) but 5:0.7.2-1ubuntu1+codecs1~oneiric2 is to be installed E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages. Then I ran sudo apt-get -u dist-upgrade It showed I had one held package, so I ran; sudo apt-get -o Debug::pkgProblemResolver=yes dist-upgrade It also exited without upgrading the package, so I ran; sudo apt-get remove --dry-run gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg:i386 And it gave me; *The following packages will be REMOVED: arista gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Remv arista [0.9.7-3ubuntu1] Remv gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg [0.10.12-1ubuntu1]* But when I reran sudo apt-get -u dist-upgrade It showed the package was still there. *The following packages have been kept back: gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.* Update: Just went into Synaptic PM and completely removed gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg Reran sudo apt-get -u dist-upgrade And was told; 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. However, when I ran the original apt-get to install opencv (first code at the top of this question), it still gave me the same broken package errors. So I tried $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list # # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu-Studio 11.10 _Oneiric Ocelot_ - Release i386 (20111011.1)]/ oneiric main multiverse restricted universe # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu-Studio 11.10 _Oneiric Ocelot_ - Release i386 (20111011.1)]/ oneiric main multiverse restricted universe # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates main restricted deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates main restricted ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise universe deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise universe deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates universe deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise multiverse deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise multiverse deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates multiverse deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates multiverse ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security main restricted deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security main restricted deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security universe deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security universe deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security multiverse deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner # deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu oneiric partner ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Ubuntu's ## 'extras' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software. # deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu oneiric main # deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu oneiric main # deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/popinet/xUbuntu_11.04 ./ # disabled on upgrade to precise and then; $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/* But I don't have enough reputation to post the results here (it says I need at least 10 reputation points to post more than 2 links), so I don't know how to provide the requested feedback. Then tried; $ sudo apt-get check [sudo] password for <abcd>: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done However, no resolution of the problem yet. What else do I need to do? Will an upgrade to Ubuntu Studio 13.xx solve this problem (or compound it)?

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• top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – March 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send us your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity and follow us on twitter http://twitter.com/wlscommunity PeterPaul ? RT @JDeveloper: EJB 3 Deployment guide for WebLogic Server Version: 10.3.4.0 dlvr.it/1J5VcV Andrejus Baranovskis ?Open ADF PopUp on Page Load fb.me/1Rx9LP3oW Sten Vesterli ? RT @OracleBlogs: Using the Oracle E-Business Suite SDK for Java on ADF Applications ow.ly/1hVKbB <- Neat! No more WS calls Java Buddy ?JavaFX 2.0: Example of MediaPlay java-buddy.blogspot.com/2012/03/javafx… Georges Saab Build improvements coming to #openJDK for #jdk8 mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/buil… NetBeans Team Share your #Java experience! JavaOne 2012 India call for papers: ow.ly/9xYg0 GlassFish ? GlassFish 3.1.2 Screencasts & Videos – bit.ly/zmQjn2 chriscmuir ?G+: New blog post: ADF Runtimes vs WLS versions as of JDeveloper 11.1.1.6.0 – bit.ly/y8tkgJ Michael Heinrichs New article: Creating a Sprite Animation with JavaFX blog.netopyr.com/2012/03/09/cre… Oracle WebLogic ? #WebLogic Devcast Webinar Series for March: Enterprise Java Scale Out, JPA, Distributed Grid Data Cache bit.ly/zeUXEV #Coherence Andrejus Baranovskis ?Extending Application Module for ADF BC Proxy User DB Connection fb.me/Bj1hLUqm OTNArchBeat ? Oracle Fusion Middleware on JDK 7 | Mark Nelson bit.ly/w7IroZ OTNArchBeat ? Java Champion Jonas Bonér Explains the Akka Platform bit.ly/x2GbXm Adam Bien ? (Java) FX Experience Tools–Feels Like Native Mac App: FX Experience Tools application comes with a native Mac O… bit.ly/waHF3H GlassFish ? GlassFish new recruit and Eclipse integration progress – bit.ly/y5eEkk JDeveloper & ADF Prototyping ADF Libraries dlvr.it/1Hhnw0 Eric Elzinga ?Oracle Fusion Middleware on JDK 7, bit.ly/xkphFQ ADF EMG ? Working with ADF in Arabic, Hebrew or other right-to-left-written language? Oracle UX asks for your help. groups.google.com/forum/?fromgro… Java ? A simple #JavaFX Login Form with a TRON like effect ow.ly/9n9AG JDeveloper & ADF ? Logging in Oracle ADF Applications dlvr.it/1HZhcX OTNArchBeat ? Oracle Cloud Conference: dates and locations worldwide bit.ly/ywXydR UK Oracle User Group ? Simon Haslam, ACE Director present on #WebLogic for DBAs at #oug_ire2012 j.mp/zG6vz3 @oraclewebcenter @oracleace #dublin Steven Davelaar ? Working with ADF and not a member of ADF EMG? You miss lots of valuable info, join now! sites.google.com/site/oracleemg… Simon Haslam @MaciejGruszka: Oracle plans to provide Forms & Reports plug-in for OVAB next year to help deployment. #ukoug MW SIG GlassFish ? Introducing JSR 357: Social Media API – bit.ly/yC8vez JAX London ? Are you coming to Java EE workshops by @AdamBien at JAX Days? Save £100 by registering today. #jaxdays #javaee jaxdays.com WebLogic Community ?Welcome to our Munich WebLogic 12c Bootcamp in Munich! If you also want to attend a training register for the Community oracle.com/partners/goto/… chriscmuir ? My first webcast for Oracle! (be kind) Basing ADF Business Component View Objects on More that one Entity Object bit.ly/ArKija OTNArchBeat ? Oracle Weblogic Server 12c is available on Oracle Solaris 11 (SPARC and x86) bit.ly/xE3TLg JDeveloper & ADF ? Basing ADF Business Component View Objects on More that one Entity Object – YouTube dlvr.it/1H93Qr OTNArchBeat ? Application-Driven Virtualization with Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder | Ronen Kofman bit.ly/wF1C1N Oracle WebLogic ? Steve Button’s blog: WebLogic Server Singleton Services ow.ly/1hOu4U Barbara Ann May ?@oracledevtools: New update: #NetBeans IDE 7.1.1, with support for #GlassFish 3.1.2 bit.ly/mOLcQd #java #developer OTNArchBeat ? Using Coherence with JDeveloper: bit.ly/AkoEQb WebLogic Community ? WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter February 2012 wp.me/p1LMIb-f3 GlassFish ? GlassFish 3.1.2 – new Podcast episode : bit.ly/wc6oBE Frank Nimphius ?Cool! Open JDeveloper 11.1.1.5, go help–>check for updates. First thing shown is that 11.1.1.6 is available. Never miss a new release Adam Bien ?5 Minutes (Video) With Java EE …Or With NetBeans + GlassFish: This screencast covers a 5-minute development of a… bit.ly/xkOJMf WebLogic Community ? Free Oracle WebLogic Certification Application Grid Implementation Specialist wp.me/p1LMIb-eT OTNArchBeat ?Oracle Coherence: First Steps Using Clusters and Basic API Usage | Ricardo Ferreira bit.ly/yYQ3Wz GlassFish ? JMS 2.0 Early Draft is here – bit.ly/ygT1VN OTNArchBeat ? Exalogic Networking Part 2 | The Old Toxophilist bit.ly/xuYMIi OTNArchBeat ?New Release: GlassFish Server 3.1.2. Read All About It! | Paul Davies bit.ly/AtlGxo Oracle WebLogic ?OTN Virtual Developer Day: #WebLogic 12c & #Coherence ost-conference on-demand page live with bonus #Virtualbox lab – bit.ly/xUy6BJ Oracle WebLogic ? Steve Button’s blog: WebLogic Server 11g (10.3.6) Documentation ow.ly/1hJgUB Lucas Jellema ? Just published an article on the AMIS blog: technology.amis.nl/2012/03/adf-11… ADF 11g – programmatically sorting rich table columns. Java Certification ? New Course! Learn how to create mobile applications using Java ME: bit.ly/xZj1Jh Simon Haslam ? @MaciejGruszka WebLogic 12c can run against 11g domain config without changes …and can rollback to 11. #ukoug MW SIG Justin Kestelyn ? Learn Advanced ADF, free and online bit.ly/wEKSRc WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: twitter,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,OPN,Oracle,Jürgen Kress,WebLogic 12c

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• Implementing an Interceptor Using NHibernate’s Built In Dynamic Proxy Generator

  - by Ricardo Peres

  NHibernate 3.2 came with an included proxy generator, which means there is no longer the need – or the possibility, for that matter – to choose Castle DynamicProxy, LinFu or Spring. This is actually a good thing, because it means one less assembly to deploy. Apparently, this generator was based, at least partially, on LinFu. As there are not many tutorials out there demonstrating it’s usage, here’s one, for demonstrating one of the most requested features: implementing INotifyPropertyChanged. This interceptor, of course, will still feature all of NHibernate’s functionalities that you are used to, such as lazy loading, and such. We will start by implementing an NHibernate interceptor, by inheriting from the base class NHibernate.EmptyInterceptor. This class does not do anything by itself, but it allows us to plug in behavior by overriding some of its methods, in this case, Instantiate: 1: public class NotifyPropertyChangedInterceptor : EmptyInterceptor 2: { 3: private ISession session = null; 4:  5: private static readonly ProxyFactory factory = new ProxyFactory(); 6:  7: public override void SetSession(ISession session) 8: { 9: this.session = session; 10: base.SetSession(session); 11: } 12:  13: public override Object Instantiate(String clazz, EntityMode entityMode, Object id) 14: { 15: Type entityType = Type.GetType(clazz); 16: IProxy proxy = factory.CreateProxy(entityType, new _NotifyPropertyChangedInterceptor(), typeof(INotifyPropertyChanged)) as IProxy; 17: 18: _NotifyPropertyChangedInterceptor interceptor = proxy.Interceptor as _NotifyPropertyChangedInterceptor; 19: interceptor.Proxy = this.session.SessionFactory.GetClassMetadata(entityType).Instantiate(id, entityMode); 20:  21: this.session.SessionFactory.GetClassMetadata(entityType).SetIdentifier(proxy, id, entityMode); 22:  23: return (proxy); 24: } 25: } Then we need a class that implements the NHibernate dynamic proxy behavior, let’s place it inside our interceptor, because it will only need to be used there: 1: class _NotifyPropertyChangedInterceptor : NHibernate.Proxy.DynamicProxy.IInterceptor 2: { 3: private PropertyChangedEventHandler changed = delegate { }; 4:  5: public Object Proxy 6: { 7: get; 8: set;} 9:  10: #region IInterceptor Members 11:  12: public Object Intercept(InvocationInfo info) 13: { 14: Boolean isSetter = info.TargetMethod.Name.StartsWith("set_") == true; 15: Object result = null; 16:  17: if (info.TargetMethod.Name == "add_PropertyChanged") 18: { 19: PropertyChangedEventHandler propertyChangedEventHandler = info.Arguments[0] as PropertyChangedEventHandler; 20: this.changed += propertyChangedEventHandler; 21: } 22: else if (info.TargetMethod.Name == "remove_PropertyChanged") 23: { 24: PropertyChangedEventHandler propertyChangedEventHandler = info.Arguments[0] as PropertyChangedEventHandler; 25: this.changed -= propertyChangedEventHandler; 26: } 27: else 28: { 29: result = info.TargetMethod.Invoke(this.Proxy, info.Arguments); 30: } 31:  32: if (isSetter == true) 33: { 34: String propertyName = info.TargetMethod.Name.Substring("set_".Length); 35: this.changed(this.Proxy, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); 36: } 37:  38: return (result); 39: } 40:  41: #endregion 42: } What this does for every interceptable method (those who are either virtual or from the INotifyPropertyChanged) is: For methods that came from the INotifyPropertyChanged interface, add_PropertyChanged and remove_PropertyChanged (yes, events are methods ), we add an implementation that adds or removes the event handlers to the delegate which we declared as changed; For all the others, we direct them to the place where they are actually implemented, which is the Proxy field; If the call is setting a property, it fires afterwards the PropertyChanged event. In order to use this, we need to add the interceptor to the Configuration before building the ISessionFactory: 1: using (ISessionFactory factory = cfg.SetInterceptor(new NotifyPropertyChangedInterceptor()).BuildSessionFactory()) 2: { 3: using (ISession session = factory.OpenSession()) 4: using (ITransaction tx = session.BeginTransaction()) 5: { 6: Customer customer = session.Get<Customer>(100); //some id 7: INotifyPropertyChanged inpc = customer as INotifyPropertyChanged; 8: inpc.PropertyChanged += delegate(Object sender, PropertyChangedEventArgs e) 9: { 10: //fired when a property changes 11: }; 12: customer.Address = "some other address"; //will raise PropertyChanged 13: customer.RecentOrders.ToList(); //will trigger the lazy loading 14: } 15: } Any problems, questions, do drop me a line!

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• Html.RenderAction Failed when Validation Failed

  - by Shaun

  RenderAction method had been introduced when ASP.NET MVC 1.0 released in its MvcFuture assembly and then final announced along with the ASP.NET MVC 2.0. Similar as RenderPartial, the RenderAction can display some HTML markups which defined in a partial view in any parent views. But the RenderAction gives us the ability to populate the data from an action which may different from the action which populating the main view. For example, in Home/Index.aspx we can invoke the Html.RenderPartial(“MyPartialView”) but the data of MyPartialView must be populated by the Index action of the Home controller. If we need the MyPartialView to be shown in Product/Create.aspx we have to copy (or invoke) the relevant code from the Index action in Home controller to the Create action in the Product controller which is painful. But if we are using Html.RenderAction we can tell the ASP.NET MVC from which action/controller the data should be populated. in that way in the Home/Index.aspx and Product/Create.aspx views we just need to call Html.RenderAction(“CreateMyPartialView”, “MyPartialView”) so it will invoke the CreateMyPartialView action in MyPartialView controller regardless from which main view. But in my current project we found a bug when I implement a RenderAction method in the master page to show something that need to connect to the backend data center when the validation logic was failed on some pages. I created a sample application below.   Demo application I created an ASP.NET MVC 2 application and here I need to display the current date and time on the master page. I created an action in the Home controller named TimeSlot and stored the current date into ViewDate. This method was marked as HttpGet as it just retrieves some data instead of changing anything. 1: [HttpGet] 2: public ActionResult TimeSlot() 3: { 4: ViewData["timeslot"] = DateTime.Now; 5: return View("TimeSlot"); 6: } Next, I created a partial view under the Shared folder to display the date and time string. 1: <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<dynamic>" %> 2:  3: <span>Now: <% 1: : ViewData["timeslot"].ToString() %></span> Then at the master page I used Html.RenderAction to display it in front of the logon link. 1: <div id="logindisplay"> 2: <% 1: Html.RenderAction("TimeSlot", "Home"); %> 3:  4: <% 1: Html.RenderPartial("LogOnUserControl"); %> 5: </div> It’s fairly simple and works well when I navigated to any pages. But when I moved to the logon page and click the LogOn button without input anything in username and password the validation failed and my website crashed with the beautiful yellow page. (I really like its color style and fonts…)   How ASP.NET MVC executes Html.RenderAction In this example all other pages were rendered successful which means the ASP.NET MVC found the TimeSolt action under the Home controller except this situation. The only different is that when I clicked the LogOn button the browser send an HttpPost request to the server. Is that the reason of this bug? I created another action in Home controller with the same action name but for HttpPost. 1: [HttpPost] 2: [ActionName("TimeSlot")] 3: public ActionResult TimeSlot(object dummy) 4: { 5: return TimeSlot(); 6: } Or, I can use the AcceptVerbsAttribute on the TimeSlot action to let it allow both HttpGet and HttpPost. 1: [AcceptVerbs("GET", "POST")] 2: public ActionResult TimeSlot() 3: { 4: ViewData["timeslot"] = DateTime.Now; 5: return View("TimeSlot"); 6: } And then repeat what I did before and this time it worked well. Why we need the action for HttpPost here as it’s just data retrieving? That is because of how ASP.NET MVC executes the RenderAction method. In the source code of ASP.NET MVC we can see when proforming the RenderAction ASP.NET MVC creates a RequestContext instance from the current RequestContext and created a ChildActionMvcHandler instance which inherits from MvcHandler class. Then the ASP.NET MVC processes the handler through the HttpContext.Server.Execute method. That means it performs the action as a stand-alone request asynchronously and flush the result into the  TextWriter which is being used to render the current page. Since when I clicked the LogOn the request was in HttpPost so when ASP.NET MVC processed the ChildActionMvcHandler it would find the action which allow the current request method, which is HttpPost. Then our TimeSlot method in HttpGet would not be matched.   Summary In this post I introduced a bug in my currently developing project regards the new Html.RenderAction method provided within ASP.NET MVC 2 when processing a HttpPost request. In ASP.NET MVC world the underlying Http information became more important than in ASP.NET WebForm world. We need to pay more attention on which kind of request it currently created and how ASP.NET MVC processes.   Hope this helps, Shaun   All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• CLR via C# 3rd Edition is out

  - by Abhijeet Patel

  Time for some book news update. CLR via C#, 3rd Edition seems to have been out for a little while now. The book was released in early Feb this year, and needless to say my copy is on it’s way. I can barely wait to dig in and chew on the goodies that one of the best technical authors and software professionals I respect has in store. The 2nd edition of the book was an absolute treat and this edition promises to be no less. Here is a brief description of what’s new and updated from the 2nd edition. Part I – CLR Basics Chapter 1-The CLR’s Execution Model Added about discussion about C#’s /optimize and /debug switches and how they relate to each other. Chapter 2-Building, Packaging, Deploying, and Administering Applications and Types Improved discussion about Win32 manifest information and version resource information. Chapter 3-Shared Assemblies and Strongly Named Assemblies Added discussion of TypeForwardedToAttribute and TypeForwardedFromAttribute. Part II – Designing Types Chapter 4-Type Fundamentals No new topics. Chapter 5-Primitive, Reference, and Value Types Enhanced discussion of checked and unchecked code and added discussion of new BigInteger type. Also added discussion of C# 4.0’s dynamic primitive type. Chapter 6-Type and Member Basics No new topics. Chapter 7-Constants and Fields No new topics. Chapter 8-Methods Added discussion of extension methods and partial methods. Chapter 9-Parameters Added discussion of optional/named parameters and implicitly-typed local variables. Chapter 10-Properties Added discussion of automatically-implemented properties, properties and the Visual Studio debugger, object and collection initializers, anonymous types, the System.Tuple type and the ExpandoObject type. Chapter 11-Events Added discussion of events and thread-safety as well as showing a cool extension method to simplify the raising of an event. Chapter 12-Generics Added discussion of delegate and interface generic type argument variance. Chapter 13-Interfaces No new topics. Part III – Essential Types Chapter 14-Chars, Strings, and Working with Text No new topics. Chapter 15-Enums Added coverage of new Enum and Type methods to access enumerated type instances. Chapter 16-Arrays Added new section on initializing array elements. Chapter 17-Delegates Added discussion of using generic delegates to avoid defining new delegate types. Also added discussion of lambda expressions. Chapter 18-Attributes No new topics. Chapter 19-Nullable Value Types Added discussion on performance. Part IV – CLR Facilities Chapter 20-Exception Handling and State Management This chapter has been completely rewritten. It is now about exception handling and state management. It includes discussions of code contracts and constrained execution regions (CERs). It also includes a new section on trade-offs between writing productive code and reliable code. Chapter 21-Automatic Memory Management Added discussion of C#’s fixed state and how it works to pin objects in the heap. Rewrote the code for weak delegates so you can use them with any class that exposes an event (the class doesn’t have to support weak delegates itself). Added discussion on the new ConditionalWeakTable class, GC Collection modes, Full GC notifications, garbage collection modes and latency modes. I also include a new sample showing how your application can receive notifications whenever Generation 0 or 2 collections occur. Chapter 22-CLR Hosting and AppDomains Added discussion of side-by-side support allowing multiple CLRs to be loaded in a single process. Added section on the performance of using MarshalByRefObject-derived types. Substantially rewrote the section on cross-AppDomain communication. Added section on AppDomain Monitoring and first chance exception notifications. Updated the section on the AppDomainManager class. Chapter 23-Assembly Loading and Reflection Added section on how to deploy a single file with dependent assemblies embedded inside it. Added section comparing reflection invoke vs bind/invoke vs bind/create delegate/invoke vs C#’s dynamic type. Chapter 24-Runtime Serialization This is a whole new chapter that was not in the 2nd Edition. Part V – Threading Chapter 25-Threading Basics Whole new chapter motivating why Windows supports threads, thread overhead, CPU trends, NUMA Architectures, the relationship between CLR threads and Windows threads, the Thread class, reasons to use threads, thread scheduling and priorities, foreground thread vs background threads. Chapter 26-Performing Compute-Bound Asynchronous Operations Whole new chapter explaining the CLR’s thread pool. This chapter covers all the new .NET 4.0 constructs including cooperative cancelation, Tasks, the aralle class, parallel language integrated query, timers, how the thread pool manages its threads, cache lines and false sharing. Chapter 27-Performing I/O-Bound Asynchronous Operations Whole new chapter explaining how Windows performs synchronous and asynchronous I/O operations. Then, I go into the CLR’s Asynchronous Programming Model, my AsyncEnumerator class, the APM and exceptions, Applications and their threading models, implementing a service asynchronously, the APM and Compute-bound operations, APM considerations, I/O request priorities, converting the APM to a Task, the event-based Asynchronous Pattern, programming model soup. Chapter 28-Primitive Thread Synchronization Constructs Whole new chapter discusses class libraries and thread safety, primitive user-mode, kernel-mode constructs, and data alignment. Chapter 29-Hybrid Thread Synchronization Constructs Whole new chapter discussion various hybrid constructs such as ManualResetEventSlim, SemaphoreSlim, CountdownEvent, Barrier, ReaderWriterLock(Slim), OneManyResourceLock, Monitor, 3 ways to solve the double-check locking technique, .NET 4.0’s Lazy and LazyInitializer classes, the condition variable pattern, .NET 4.0’s concurrent collection classes, the ReaderWriterGate and SyncGate classes.

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• Trash Destination Adapter

  The Trash Destination and this article came from early experiences of using SSIS and community feedback at the time. When developing a package it is very useful to have a destination adapter that does nothing but consume rows with no setup requirement. You often want run a package part way through development, or just add a path so you can set a Data Viewer. There are stock tasks that can be used, but with the Trash Destination all columns are treated as selected automatically (usage type of read-only), so the pipeline knows they are required. It is also obvious that this is for development or diagnostic purposes, and is clearly not a part of the functional design of the package. It is also ideal for just playing around and exploring concepts in SSIS, and is often used in conjunction with the Data Generator Source. Using these two components it is easy to setup a test of an expression in the Derived Column Transformation for example. The Data Generator Source provides some dummy data, and the Trash Destination allows you to anchor the output path and set a Data Viewer to examine the results. It can also be used when performance tuning packages. It is a consistent and known quantity that has no external influences, so it is ideal as a destination when breaking the data flow into sections to isolate a bottleneck. The adapter is really simple to use and requires no setup. Simply drop it onto the pipeline designer and use it to terminate your data flow path. Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Finally, for 2005/2008, you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Trash Destination transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations. Downloads The Trash Destination is available for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 (includes R2) and SQL Server 2012. Please choose the version to match your SQL Server version, or you can install multiple versions and use them side by side if you have more than one version of SQL Server installed. Trash Destination for SQL Server 2005 Trash Destination for SQL Server 2008 Trash Destination for SQL Server 2012 Version History SQL Server 2012 Version 3.0.0.34 - SQL Server 2012 release. Includes upgrade support for both 2005 and 2008 packages to 2012. (5 Jun 2012) SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.33 - SQL Server 2008 release. Includes support for upgrade of 2005 packages. RTM compatible, previously February 2008 CTP. (4 Mar 2008) Version 2.0.0.31 - SQL Server 2008 November 2007 CTP. (14 Feb 2008) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.0.2.18 - SQL Server 2005 RTM Refresh. SP1 Compatibility Testing. (12 Jun 2006) Version 1.0.1.1 - SQL Server 2005 IDW 15 June CTP. Minor enhancements over v1.0.1.0. (11 Jun 2005) Version 1.0.1.0 - SQL Server 2005 IDW 14 April CTP. First Public Release. (30 May 2005) Troubleshooting Make sure you have downloaded the version that matches your version of SQL Server. We offer separate downloads for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2012. If you an error when you try and use the component along the lines of The component could not be added to the Data Flow task. Please verify that this component is properly installed.  ... The data flow object "Konesans ..." is not installed correctly on this computer, this usually indicates that the internal cache of SSIS components needs to be updated. This is held by the SSIS service, so you need restart the the SQL Server Integration Services service. You can do this from the Services applet in Control Panel or Administrative Tools in Windows. You can also restart the computer if you prefer. You may also need to restart any current instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. The full error message is shown below for reference: TITLE: Microsoft Visual Studio ------------------------------ The component could not be added to the Data Flow task. Please verify that this component is properly installed. ------------------------------ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: The data flow object "Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.TrashDestination.Trash, Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.TrashDestination, Version=1.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b8351fe7752642cc" is not installed correctly on this computer. (Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Design) For 2005/2008, once installation is complete you need to manually add the task to the toolbox before you will see it and to be able add it to packages - How do I install a task or transform component? This is not necessary for SQL Server 2012 as the new SSIS toolbox automatically detects components. If you are still having issues then contact us, but please provide as much detail as possible about error, as well as which version of the the task you are using and details of the SSIS tools installed.

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• Remote Debug Windows Azure Cloud Service

  - by Shaun

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/11/02/remote-debug-windows-azure-cloud-service.aspxOn the 22nd of October Microsoft Announced the new Windows Azure SDK 2.2. It introduced a lot of cool features but one of it shocked most, which is the remote debug support for Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. WACS).   Live Debug is Nightmare for Cloud Application When we are developing against public cloud, debug might be the most difficult task, especially after the application had been deployed. In order to minimize the debug effort, Microsoft provided local emulator for cloud service and storage once the Windows Azure platform was announced. By using local emulator developers could be able run their application on local machine with almost the same behavior as running on Windows Azure, and that could be debug easily and quickly. But when we deployed our application to Azure, we have to use log, diagnostic monitor to debug, which is very low efficient. Visual Studio 2012 introduced a new feature named "anonymous remote debug" which allows any workstation under any user could be able to attach the remote process. This is less secure comparing the authenticated remote debug but much easier and simpler to use. Now in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, we could be able to attach our application from our local machine to Windows Azure, and it's very easy.   How to Use Remote Debugger First, let's create a new Windows Azure Cloud Project in Visual Studio and selected ASP.NET Web Role. Then create an ASP.NET WebForm application. Then right click on the cloud project and select "publish". In the publish dialog we need to make sure the application will be built in debug mode, since .NET assembly cannot be debugged in release mode. I enabled Remote Desktop as I will log into the virtual machine later in this post. It's NOT necessary for remote debug. And selected "advanced settings" tab, make sure we checked "Enable Remote Debugger for all roles". In WACS, a cloud service could be able to have one or more roles and each role could be able to have one or more instances. The remote debugger will be enabled for all roles and all instances if we checked. Currently there's no way for us to specify which role(s) and which instance(s) to enable. Finally click "publish" button. In the windows azure activity window in Visual Studio we can find some information about remote debugger. To attache remote process would be easy. Open the "server explorer" window in Visual Studio and expand "cloud services" node, find the cloud service, role and instance we had just published and wanted to debug, right click on the instance and select "attach debugger". Then after a while (it's based on how fast our Internet connect to Windows Azure Data Center) the Visual Studio will be switched to debug mode. Let's add a breakpoint in the default web page's form load function and refresh the page in browser to see what's happen. We can see that the our application was stopped at the breakpoint. The call stack, watch features are all available to use. Now let's hit F5 to continue the step, then back to the browser we will find the page was rendered successfully.   What Under the Hood Remote debugger is a WACS plugin. When we checked the "enable remote debugger" in the publish dialog, Visual Studio will add two cloud configuration settings in the CSCFG file. Since they were appended when deployment, we cannot find in our project's CSCFG file. But if we opened the publish package we could find as below. At the same time, Visual Studio will generate a certificate and included into the package for remote debugger. If we went to the azure management portal we will find there will a certificate under our application which was created, uploaded by remote debugger plugin. Since I enabled Remote Desktop there will be two certificates in the screenshot below. The other one is for remote debugger. When our application was deployed, windows azure system will open related ports for remote debugger. As below you can see there are two new ports opened on my application. Finally, in our WACS virtual machine, windows azure system will copy the remote debug component based on which version of Visual Studio we are using and start. Our application then can be debugged remotely through the visual studio remote debugger. Below is the task manager on the virtual machine of my WACS application.   Summary In this post I demonstrated one of the feature introduced in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, which is Remote Debugger. It allows us to attach our application from local machine to windows azure virtual machine once it had been deployed. Remote debugger is powerful and easy to use, but it brings more security risk. And since it's only available for debug build this means the performance will be worse than release build. Hence we should only use this feature for staging test and bug fix (publish our beta version to azure staging slot), rather than for production.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• BizTalk Envelopes explained

  - by Robert Kokuti

  Recently I've been trying to get some order into an ESB-BizTalk pub/sub scenario, and decided to wrap the payload into standardized envelopes. I have used envelopes before in a 'light weight' fashion, and I found that they can be quite useful and powerful if used systematically. Here is what I learned. The Theory In my experience, Envelopes are often underutilised in a BizTalk solution, and quite often their full potential is not well understood. Here I try to simplify the theory behind the Envelopes within BizTalk.   Envelopes can be used to attach additional data to the ‘real’ data (payload). This additional data can contain all routing and processing information, and allows treating the business data as a ‘black box’, possibly compressed and/or encrypted etc. The point here is that the infrastructure does not need to know anything about the business data content, just as a post man does not need to know the letter within the envelope. BizTalk has built-in support for envelopes through the XMLDisassembler and XMLAssembler pipeline components (these are part of the XMLReceive and XMLSend default pipelines). These components, among other things, perform the following: XMLDisassembler Extracts the payload from the envelope into the Message Body Copies data from the envelope into the message context, as specified by the property schema(s) associated by the envelope schema. Typically, once the envelope is through the XMLDisassembler, the payload is submitted into the Messagebox, and the rest of the envelope data are copied into the context of the submitted message. The XMLDisassembler uses the Property Schemas, referenced by the Envelope Schema, to determine the name of the promoted Message Context element.   XMLAssembler Wraps the Message Body inside the specified envelope schema Populates the envelope values from the message context, as specified by the property schema(s) associated by the envelope schema. Notice that there are no requirements to use the receiving envelope schema when sending. The sent message can be wrapped within any suitable envelope, regardless whether the message was originally received within an envelope or not. However, by sharing Property Schemas between Envelopes, it is possible to pass values from the incoming envelope to the outgoing envelope via the Message Context. The Practice Creating the Envelope Add a new Schema to the BizTalk project:   Envelopes are defined as schemas, with the <Schema> Envelope property set to Yes, and the root node’s Body XPath property pointing to the node which contains the payload. Typically, you’d create an envelope structure similar to this: Click on the <Schema> node and set the Envelope property to Yes. Then, click on the Envelope node, and set the Body XPath property pointing to the ‘Body’ node:   The ‘Body’ node is a Child Element, and its Data Structure Type is set to xs:anyType.  This allows the Body node to carry any payload data. The XMLReceive pipeline will submit the data found in the Body node, while the XMLSend pipeline will copy the message into the Body node, before sending to the destination. Promoting Properties Once you defined the envelope, you may want to promote the envelope data (anything other than the Body) as Property Fields, in order to preserve their value in the message context. Anything not promoted will be lost when the XMLDisassembler extracts the payload from the Body. Typically, this means you promote everything in the Header node. Property promotion uses associated Property Schemas. These are special BizTalk schemas which have a flat field structure. Property Schemas define the name of the promoted values in the Message Context, by combining the Property Schema’s Namespace and the individual Field names. It is worth being systematic when it comes to naming your schemas, their namespace and type name. A coherent method will make your life easier when it comes to referencing the schemas during development, and managing subscriptions (filters) in BizTalk Administration. I developed a fairly coherent naming convention which I’ll probably share in another article. Because the property schema must be flat, I recommend creating one for each level in the envelope header hierarchy. Property schemas are very useful in passing data between incoming as outgoing envelopes. As I mentioned earlier, in/out envelopes do not have to be the same, but you can use the same property schema when you promote the outgoing envelope fields as you used for the incoming schema.  As you can reference many property schemas for field promotion, you can pick data from a variety of sources when you define your outgoing envelope. For example, the outgoing envelope can carry some of the incoming envelope’s promoted values, plus some values from the standard BizTalk message context, like the AdapterReceiveCompleteTime property from the BizTalk message-tracking properties. The values you promote for the outgoing envelope will be automatically populated from the Message Context by the XMLAssembler pipeline component. Using the Envelope Receiving Enveloped messages are automatically recognized by the XMLReceive pipeline, or any other custom pipeline which includes the XMLDisassembler component. The Body Path node will become the Message Body, while the rest of the envelope values will be added to the Message context, as defined by the Property Shemas referenced by the Envelope Schema. Sending The Send Port’s filter expression can use the promoted properties from the incoming envelope. If you want to enclose the sent message within an envelope, the Send Port XMLAssembler component must be configured with the fully qualified envelope name:   One way of obtaining the fully qualified envelope name is copy it off from the envelope schema property page: The full envelope schema name is constructed as <Name>, <Assembly> The outgoing envelope is populated by the XMLAssembler pipeline component. The Message Body is copied to the specified envelope’s Body Path node, while the rest of the envelope fields are populated from the Message Context, according to the Property Schemas associated with the Envelope Schema. That’s all for now, happy enveloping!

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• A New Threat To Web Applications: Connection String Parameter Pollution (CSPP)

  - by eric.maurice

  Hi, this is Shaomin Wang. I am a security analyst in Oracle's Security Alerts Group. My primary responsibility is to evaluate the security vulnerabilities reported externally by security researchers on Oracle Fusion Middleware and to ensure timely resolution through the Critical Patch Update. Today, I am going to talk about a serious type of attack: Connection String Parameter Pollution (CSPP). Earlier this year, at the Black Hat DC 2010 Conference, two Spanish security researchers, Jose Palazon and Chema Alonso, unveiled a new class of security vulnerabilities, which target insecure dynamic connections between web applications and databases. The attack called Connection String Parameter Pollution (CSPP) exploits specifically the semicolon delimited database connection strings that are constructed dynamically based on the user inputs from web applications. CSPP, if carried out successfully, can be used to steal user identities and hijack web credentials. CSPP is a high risk attack because of the relative ease with which it can be carried out (low access complexity) and the potential results it can have (high impact). In today's blog, we are going to first look at what connection strings are and then review the different ways connection string injections can be leveraged by malicious hackers. We will then discuss how CSPP differs from traditional connection string injection, and the measures organizations can take to prevent this kind of attacks. In web applications, a connection string is a set of values that specifies information to connect to backend data repositories, in most cases, databases. The connection string is passed to a provider or driver to initiate a connection. Vendors or manufacturers write their own providers for different databases. Since there are many different providers and each provider has multiple ways to make a connection, there are many different ways to write a connection string. Here are some examples of connection strings from Oracle Data Provider for .Net/ODP.Net: Oracle Data Provider for .Net / ODP.Net; Manufacturer: Oracle; Type: .NET Framework Class Library: - Using TNS Data Source = orcl; User ID = myUsername; Password = myPassword; - Using integrated security Data Source = orcl; Integrated Security = SSPI; - Using the Easy Connect Naming Method Data Source = username/password@//myserver:1521/my.server.com - Specifying Pooling parameters Data Source=myOracleDB; User Id=myUsername; Password=myPassword; Min Pool Size=10; Connection Lifetime=120; Connection Timeout=60; Incr Pool Size=5; Decr Pool Size=2; There are many variations of the connection strings, but the majority of connection strings are key value pairs delimited by semicolons. Attacks on connection strings are not new (see for example, this SANS White Paper on Securing SQL Connection String). Connection strings are vulnerable to injection attacks when dynamic string concatenation is used to build connection strings based on user input. When the user input is not validated or filtered, and malicious text or characters are not properly escaped, an attacker can potentially access sensitive data or resources. For a number of years now, vendors, including Oracle, have created connection string builder class tools to help developers generate valid connection strings and potentially prevent this kind of vulnerability. Unfortunately, not all application developers use these utilities because they are not aware of the danger posed by this kind of attacks. So how are Connection String parameter Pollution (CSPP) attacks different from traditional Connection String Injection attacks? First, let's look at what parameter pollution attacks are. Parameter pollution is a technique, which typically involves appending repeating parameters to the request strings to attack the receiving end. Much of the public attention around parameter pollution was initiated as a result of a presentation on HTTP Parameter Pollution attacks by Stefano Di Paola and Luca Carettoni delivered at the 2009 Appsec OWASP Conference in Poland. In HTTP Parameter Pollution attacks, an attacker submits additional parameters in HTTP GET/POST to a web application, and if these parameters have the same name as an existing parameter, the web application may react in different ways depends on how the web application and web server deal with multiple parameters with the same name. When applied to connections strings, the rule for the majority of database providers is the "last one wins" algorithm. If a KEYWORD=VALUE pair occurs more than once in the connection string, the value associated with the LAST occurrence is used. This opens the door to some serious attacks. By way of example, in a web application, a user enters username and password; a subsequent connection string is generated to connect to the back end database. Data Source = myDataSource; Initial Catalog = db; Integrated Security = no; User ID = myUsername; Password = XXX; In the password field, if the attacker enters "xxx; Integrated Security = true", the connection string becomes, Data Source = myDataSource; Initial Catalog = db; Integrated Security = no; User ID = myUsername; Password = XXX; Intergrated Security = true; Under the "last one wins" principle, the web application will then try to connect to the database using the operating system account under which the application is running to bypass normal authentication. CSPP poses serious risks for unprepared organizations. It can be particularly dangerous if an Enterprise Systems Management web front-end is compromised, because attackers can then gain access to control panels to configure databases, systems accounts, etc. Fortunately, organizations can take steps to prevent this kind of attacks. CSPP falls into the Injection category of attacks like Cross Site Scripting or SQL Injection, which are made possible when inputs from users are not properly escaped or sanitized. Escaping is a technique used to ensure that characters (mostly from user inputs) are treated as data, not as characters, that is relevant to the interpreter's parser. Software developers need to become aware of the danger of these attacks and learn about the defenses mechanism they need to introduce in their code. As well, software vendors need to provide templates or classes to facilitate coding and eliminate developers' guesswork for protecting against such vulnerabilities. Oracle has introduced the OracleConnectionStringBuilder class in Oracle Data Provider for .NET. Using this class, developers can employ a configuration file to provide the connection string and/or dynamically set the values through key/value pairs. It makes creating connection strings less error-prone and easier to manager, and ultimately using the OracleConnectionStringBuilder class provides better security against injection into connection strings. For More Information: - The OracleConnectionStringBuilder is located at http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/win.111/b28375/OracleConnectionStringBuilderClass.htm - Oracle has developed a publicly available course on preventing SQL Injections. The Server Technologies Curriculum course "Defending Against SQL Injection Attacks!" is located at http://st-curriculum.oracle.com/tutorial/SQLInjection/index.htm - The OWASP web site also provides a number of useful resources. It is located at http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page

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• Cross-language Extension Method Calling

  - by Tom Hines

  Extension methods are a concise way of binding functions to particular types. In my last post, I showed how Extension methods can be created in the .NET 2.0 environment. In this post, I discuss calling the extensions from other languages. Most of the differences I find between the Dot Net languages are mainly syntax.  The declaration of Extensions is no exception.  There is, however, a distinct difference with the framework accepting excensions made with C++ that differs from C# and VB.  When calling the C++ extension from C#, the compiler will SOMETIMES say there is no definition for DoCPP with the error: 'string' does not contain a definition for 'DoCPP' and no extension method 'DoCPP' accepting a first argument of type 'string' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) If I recompile, the error goes away. The strangest problem with calling the C++ extension from C# is that I first must make SOME type of reference to the class BEFORE using the extension or it will not be recognized at all.  So, if I first call the DoCPP() as a static method, the extension works fine later.  If I make a dummy instantiation of the class, it works.  If I have no forward reference of the class, I get the same error as before and recompiling does not fix it.  It seems as if this none of this is supposed to work across the languages. I have made a few work-arounds to get the examples to compile and run. Note the following examples: Extension in C# using System; namespace Extension_CS {    public static class CExtension_CS    {  //in C#, the "this" keyword is the key.       public static void DoCS(this string str)       {          Console.WriteLine("CS\t{0:G}\tCS", str);       }    } } Extension in C++ /****************************************************************************\  * Here is the C++ implementation.  It is the least elegant and most quirky,  * but it works. \****************************************************************************/ #pragma once using namespace System; using namespace System::Runtime::CompilerServices;     //<-Essential // Reference: System.Core.dll //<- Essential namespace Extension_CPP {        public ref class CExtension_CPP        {        public:               [Extension] // or [ExtensionAttribute] /* either works */               static void DoCPP(String^ str)               {                      Console::WriteLine("C++\t{0:G}\tC++", str);               }        }; } Extension in VB ' Here is the VB implementation.  This is not as elegant as the C#, but it's ' functional. Imports System.Runtime.CompilerServices ' Public Module modExtension_VB 'Extension methods can be defined only in modules.    <Extension()> _       Public Sub DoVB(ByVal str As String)       Console.WriteLine("VB" & Chr(9) & "{0:G}" & Chr(9) & "VB", str)    End Sub End Module   Calling program in C# /******************************************************************************\  * Main calling program  * Intellisense and VS2008 complain about the CPP implementation, but with a  * little duct-tape, it works just fine. \******************************************************************************/ using System; using Extension_CPP; using Extension_CS; using Extension_VB; // vitual namespace namespace TestExtensions {    public static class CTestExtensions    {       /**********************************************************************\        * For some reason, this needs a direct reference into the C++ version        * even though it does nothing than add a null reference.        * The constructor provides the fake usage to please the compiler.       \**********************************************************************/       private static CExtension_CPP x = null;   // <-DUCT_TAPE!       static CTestExtensions()       {          // Fake usage to stop compiler from complaining          if (null != x) {} // <-DUCT_TAPE       }       static void Main(string[] args)       {          string strData = "from C#";          strData.DoCPP();          strData.DoCS();          strData.DoVB();       }    } }   Calling program in VB  Imports Extension_CPP Imports Extension_CS Imports Extension_VB Imports System.Runtime.CompilerServices Module TestExtensions_VB    <Extension()> _       Public Sub DoCPP(ByVal str As String)       'Framework does not treat this as an extension, so use the static       CExtension_CPP.DoCPP(str)    End Sub    Sub Main()       Dim strData As String = "from VB"       strData.DoCS()       strData.DoVB()       strData.DoCPP() 'fake    End Sub End Module  Calling program in C++ // TestExtensions_CPP.cpp : main project file. #include "stdafx.h" using namespace System; using namespace Extension_CPP; using namespace Extension_CS; using namespace Extension_VB; void main(void) {        /*******************************************************\         * Extension methods are called like static methods         * when called from C++.  There may be a difference in         * syntax when calling the VB extension as VB Extensions         * are embedded in Modules instead of classes        \*******************************************************/     String^ strData = "from C++";     CExtension_CPP::DoCPP(strData);     CExtension_CS::DoCS(strData);     modExtension_VB::DoVB(strData); //since Extensions go in Modules }

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• SQL SERVER – Core Concepts – Elasticity, Scalability and ACID Properties – Exploring NuoDB an Elastically Scalable Database System

  - by pinaldave

  I have been recently exploring Elasticity and Scalability attributes of databases. You can see that in my earlier blog posts about NuoDB where I wanted to look at Elasticity and Scalability concepts. The concepts are very interesting, and intriguing as well. I have discussed these concepts with my friend Joyti M and together we have come up with this interesting read. The goal of this article is to answer following simple questions What is Elasticity? What is Scalability? How ACID properties vary from NOSQL Concepts? What are the prevailing problems in the current database system architectures? Why is NuoDB  an innovative and welcome change in database paradigm? Elasticity This word’s original form is used in many different ways and honestly it does do a decent job in holding things together over the years as a person grows and contracts. Within the tech world, and specifically related to software systems (database, application servers), it has come to mean a few things - allow stretching of resources without reaching the breaking point (on demand). What are resources in this context? Resources are the usual suspects – RAM/CPU/IO/Bandwidth in the form of a container (a process or bunch of processes combined as modules). When it is about increasing resources the simplest idea which comes to mind is the addition of another container. Another container means adding a brand new physical node. When it is about adding a new node there are two questions which comes to mind. 1) Can we add another node to our software system? 2) If yes, does adding new node cause downtime for the system? Let us assume we have added new node, let us see what the new needs of the system are when a new node is added. Balancing incoming requests to multiple nodes Synchronization of a shared state across multiple nodes Identification of “downstate” and resolution action to bring it to “upstate” Well, adding a new node has its advantages as well. Here are few of the positive points Throughput can increase nearly horizontally across the node throughout the system Response times of application will increase as in-between layer interactions will be improved Now, Let us put the above concepts in the perspective of a Database. When we mention the term “running out of resources” or “application is bound to resources” the resources can be CPU, Memory or Bandwidth. The regular approach to “gain scalability” in the database is to look around for bottlenecks and increase the bottlenecked resource. When we have memory as a bottleneck we look at the data buffers, locks, query plans or indexes. After a point even this is not enough as there needs to be an efficient way of managing such large workload on a “single machine” across memory and CPU bound (right kind of scheduling)  workload. We next move on to either read/write separation of the workload or functionality-based sharing so that we still have control of the individual. But this requires lots of planning and change in client systems in terms of knowing where to go/update/read and for reporting applications to “aggregate the data” in an intelligent way. What we ideally need is an intelligent layer which allows us to do these things without us getting into managing, monitoring and distributing the workload. Scalability In the context of database/applications, scalability means three main things Ability to handle normal loads without pressure E.g. X users at the Y utilization of resources (CPU, Memory, Bandwidth) on the Z kind of hardware (4 processor, 32 GB machine with 15000 RPM SATA drives and 1 GHz Network switch) with T throughput Ability to scale up to expected peak load which is greater than normal load with acceptable response times Ability to provide acceptable response times across the system E.g. Response time in S milliseconds (or agreed upon unit of measure) – 90% of the time The Issue – Need of Scale In normal cases one can plan for the load testing to test out normal, peak, and stress scenarios to ensure specific hardware meets the needs. With help from Hardware and Software partners and best practices, bottlenecks can be identified and requisite resources added to the system. Unfortunately this vertical scale is expensive and difficult to achieve and most of the operational people need the ability to scale horizontally. This helps in getting better throughput as there are physical limits in terms of adding resources (Memory, CPU, Bandwidth and Storage) indefinitely. Today we have different options to achieve scalability: Read & Write Separation The idea here is to do actual writes to one store and configure slaves receiving the latest data with acceptable delays. Slaves can be used for balancing out reads. We can also explore functional separation or sharing as well. We can separate data operations by a specific identifier (e.g. region, year, month) and consolidate it for reporting purposes. For functional separation the major disadvantage is when schema changes or workload pattern changes. As the requirement grows one still needs to deal with scale need in manual ways by providing an abstraction in the middle tier code. Using NOSQL solutions The idea is to flatten out the structures in general to keep all values which are retrieved together at the same store and provide flexible schema. The issue with the stores is that they are compromising on mostly consistency (no ACID guarantees) and one has to use NON-SQL dialect to work with the store. The other major issue is about education with NOSQL solutions. Would one really want to make these compromises on the ability to connect and retrieve in simple SQL manner and learn other skill sets? Or for that matter give up on ACID guarantee and start dealing with consistency issues? Hybrid Deployment – Mac, Linux, Cloud, and Windows One of the challenges today that we see across On-premise vs Cloud infrastructure is a difference in abilities. Take for example SQL Azure – it is wonderful in its concepts of throttling (as it is shared deployment) of resources and ability to scale using federation. However, the same abilities are not available on premise. This is not a mistake, mind you – but a compromise of the sweet spot of workloads, customer requirements and operational SLAs which can be supported by the team. In today’s world it is imperative that databases are available across operating systems – which are a commodity and used by developers of all hues. An Ideal Database Ability List A system which allows a linear scale of the system (increase in throughput with reasonable response time) with the addition of resources A system which does not compromise on the ACID guarantees and require developers to learn new paradigms A system which does not force fit a new way interacting with database by learning Non-SQL dialect A system which does not force fit its mechanisms for providing availability across its various modules. Well NuoDB is the first database which has all of the above abilities and much more. In future articles I will cover my hands-on experience with it. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: NuoDB

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• Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service

  - by Elton Stoneman

  We're in the process of delivering an enabling project to expose on-premise WCF services securely to Internet consumers. The Azure Service Bus Relay is doing the clever stuff, we register our on-premise service with Azure, consumers call into our .servicebus.windows.net namespace, and their requests are relayed and serviced on-premise. In theory it's all wonderfully simple; by using the relay we get lots of protocol options, free HTTPS and load balancing, and by integrating to ACS we get plenty of security options. Part of our delivery is a suite of sample consumers for the service - .NET, jQuery, PHP - and this set of posts will cover setting up the service and the consumers. Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service In theory, this is ultra-straightforward. In practice, and on a dev laptop it is - but in a corporate network with firewalls and proxies, it isn't, so we'll walkthrough some of the pitfalls. Note that I'm using the "old" Azure portal which will soon be out of date, but the new shiny portal should have the same steps available and be easier to use. We start with a simple WCF service which takes a string as input, reverses the string and returns it. The Part 1 version of the code is on GitHub here: on GitHub here: IPASBR Part 1. Configuring Azure Service Bus Start by logging into the Azure portal and registering a Service Bus namespace which will be our endpoint in the cloud. Give it a globally unique name, set it up somewhere near you (if you’re in Europe, remember Europe (North) is Ireland, and Europe (West) is the Netherlands), and  enable ACS integration by ticking "Access Control" as a service: Authenticating and authorizing to ACS When we try to register our on-premise service as a listener for the Service Bus endpoint, we need to supply credentials, which means only trusted service providers can act as listeners. We can use the default "owner" credentials, but that has admin permissions so a dedicated service account is better (Neil Mackenzie has a good post On Not Using owner with the Azure AppFabric Service Bus with lots of permission details). Click on "Access Control Service" for the namespace, navigate to Service Identities and add a new one. Give the new account a sensible name and description: Let ACS generate a symmetric key for you (this will be the shared secret we use in the on-premise service to authenticate as a listener), but be sure to set the expiration date to something usable. The portal defaults to expiring new identities after 1 year - but when your year is up *your identity will expire without warning* and everything will stop working. In production, you'll need governance to manage identity expiration and a process to make sure you renew identities and roll new keys regularly. The new service identity needs to be authorized to listen on the service bus endpoint. This is done through claim mapping in ACS - we'll set up a rule that says if the nameidentifier in the input claims has the value serviceProvider, in the output we'll have an action claim with the value Listen. In the ACS portal you'll see that there is already a Relying Party Application set up for ServiceBus, which has a Default rule group. Edit the rule group and click Add to add this new rule: The values to use are: Issuer: Access Control Service Input claim type: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier Input claim value: serviceProvider Output claim type: net.windows.servicebus.action Output claim value: Listen When your service namespace and identity are set up, open the Part 1 solution and put your own namespace, service identity name and secret key into the file AzureConnectionDetails.xml in Solution Items, e.g: <azure namespace="sixeyed-ipasbr">    <!-- ACS credentials for the listening service (Part1):-->   <service identityName="serviceProvider"            symmetricKey="nuR2tHhlrTCqf4YwjT2RA2BZ/+xa23euaRJNLh1a/V4="/>  </azure> Build the solution, and the T4 template will generate the Web.config for the service project with your Azure details in the transportClientEndpointBehavior:           <behavior name="SharedSecret">             <transportClientEndpointBehavior credentialType="SharedSecret">               <clientCredentials>                 <sharedSecret issuerName="serviceProvider"                               issuerSecret="nuR2tHhlrTCqf4YwjT2RA2BZ/+xa23euaRJNLh1a/V4="/>               </clientCredentials>             </transportClientEndpointBehavior>           </behavior> , and your service namespace in the Azure endpoint:         <!-- Azure Service Bus endpoints -->          <endpoint address="sb://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/net"                   binding="netTcpRelayBinding"                   contract="Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services.IFormatService"                   behaviorConfiguration="SharedSecret">         </endpoint> The sample project is hosted in IIS, but it won't register with Azure until the service is activated. Typically you'd install AppFabric 1.1 for Widnows Server and set the service to auto-start in IIS, but for dev just navigate to the local REST URL, which will activate the service and register it with Azure. Testing the service locally As well as an Azure endpoint, the service has a WebHttpBinding for local REST access:         <!-- local REST endpoint for internal use -->         <endpoint address="rest"                   binding="webHttpBinding"                   behaviorConfiguration="RESTBehavior"                   contract="Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services.IFormatService" /> Build the service, then navigate to: http://localhost/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services/FormatService.svc/rest/reverse?string=abc123 - and you should see the reversed string response: If your network allows it, you'll get the expected response as before, but in the background your service will also be listening in the cloud. Good stuff! Who needs network security? Onto the next post for consuming the service with the netTcpRelayBinding.  Setting up network access to Azure But, if you get an error, it's because your network is secured and it's doing something to stop the relay working. The Service Bus relay bindings try to use direct TCP connections to Azure, so if ports 9350-9354 are available *outbound*, then the relay will run through them. If not, the binding steps down to standard HTTP, and issues a CONNECT across port 443 or 80 to set up a tunnel for the relay. If your network security guys are doing their job, the first option will be blocked by the firewall, and the second option will be blocked by the proxy, so you'll get this error: System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException: Unable to reach sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net via TCP (9351, 9352) or HTTP (80, 443) - and that will probably be the start of lots of discussions. Network guys don't really like giving servers special permissions for the web proxy, and they really don't like opening ports, so they'll need to be convinced about this. The resolution in our case was to put up a dedicated box in a DMZ, tinker with the firewall and the proxy until we got a relay connection working, then run some traffic which the the network guys monitored to do a security assessment afterwards. Along the way we hit a few more issues, diagnosed mainly with Fiddler and Wireshark: System.Net.ProtocolViolationException: Chunked encoding upload is not supported on the HTTP/1.0 protocol - this means the TCP ports are not available, so Azure tries to relay messaging traffic across HTTP. The service can access the endpoint, but the proxy is downgrading traffic to HTTP 1.0, which does not support tunneling, so Azure can’t make its connection. We were using the Squid proxy, version 2.6. The Squid project is incrementally adding HTTP 1.1 support, but there's no definitive list of what's supported in what version (here are some hints). System.ServiceModel.Security.SecurityNegotiationException: The X.509 certificate CN=servicebus.windows.net chain building failed. The certificate that was used has a trust chain that cannot be verified. Replace the certificate or change the certificateValidationMode. The evocation function was unable to check revocation because the revocation server was offline. - by this point we'd given up on the HTTP proxy and opened the TCP ports. We got this error when the relay binding does it's authentication hop to ACS. The messaging traffic is TCP, but the control traffic still goes over HTTP, and as part of the ACS authentication the process checks with a revocation server to see if Microsoft’s ACS cert is still valid, so the proxy still needs some clearance. The service account (the IIS app pool identity) needs access to: www.public-trust.com mscrl.microsoft.com We still got this error periodically with different accounts running the app pool. We fixed that by ensuring the machine-wide proxy settings are set up, so every account uses the correct proxy: netsh winhttp set proxy proxy-server="http://proxy.x.y.z" - and you might need to run this to clear out your credential cache: certutil -urlcache * delete If your network guys end up grudgingly opening ports, they can restrict connections to the IP address range for your chosen Azure datacentre, which might make them happier - see Windows Azure Datacenter IP Ranges. After all that you've hopefully got an on-premise service listening in the cloud, which you can consume from pretty much any technology.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #052

  - by Pinal Dave

  Let us continue with the final episode of the Memory Lane Series. Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Set Server Level FILLFACTOR Using T-SQL Script Specifies a percentage that indicates how full the Database Engine should make the leaf level of each index page during index creation or alteration. fillfactor must be an integer value from 1 to 100. The default is 0. Limitation of Online Index Rebuld Operation Online operation means when online operations are happening in the database are in normal operational condition, the processes which are participating in online operations does not require exclusive access to the database. Get Permissions of My Username / Userlogin on Server / Database A few days ago, I was invited to one of the largest database company. I was asked to review database schema and propose changes to it. There was special username or user logic was created for me, so I can review their database. I was very much interested to know what kind of permissions I was assigned per server level and database level. I did not feel like asking Sr. DBA the question about permissions. Simple Example of WHILE Loop With CONTINUE and BREAK Keywords This question is one of those questions which is very simple and most of the users get it correct, however few users find it confusing for the first time. I have tried to explain the usage of simple WHILE loop in the first example. BREAK keyword will exit the stop the while loop and control is moved to the next statement after the while loop. CONTINUE keyword skips all the statement after its execution and control is sent to the first statement of while loop. Forced Parameterization and Simple Parameterization – T-SQL and SSMS When the PARAMETERIZATION option is set to FORCED, any literal value that appears in a SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE statement is converted to a parameter during query compilation. When the PARAMETERIZATION database option is SET to SIMPLE, the SQL Server query optimizer may choose to parameterize the queries. 2008 Transaction and Local Variables – Swap Variables – Update All At Once Concept Summary : Transaction have no effect over memory variables. When UPDATE statement is applied over any table (physical or memory) all the updates are applied at one time together when the statement is committed. First of all I suggest that you read the article listed above about the effect of transaction on local variant. As seen there local variables are independent of any transaction effect. Simulate INNER JOIN using LEFT JOIN statement – Performance Analysis Just a day ago, while I was working with JOINs I find one interesting observation, which has prompted me to create following example. Before we continue further let me make very clear that INNER JOIN should be used where it cannot be used and simulating INNER JOIN using any other JOINs will degrade the performance. If there are scopes to convert any OUTER JOIN to INNER JOIN it should be done with priority. 2009 Introduction to Business Intelligence – Important Terms & Definitions Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of application programs and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data from various data sources, thus providing enterprise users with reliable and timely information and analysis for improved decision making. Difference Between Candidate Keys and Primary Key Candidate Key – A Candidate Key can be any column or a combination of columns that can qualify as unique key in database. There can be multiple Candidate Keys in one table. Each Candidate Key can qualify as Primary Key. Primary Key – A Primary Key is a column or a combination of columns that uniquely identify a record. Only one Candidate Key can be Primary Key. 2010 Taking Multiple Backup of Database in Single Command – Mirrored Database Backup I recently had a very interesting experience. In one of my recent consultancy works, I was told by our client that they are going to take the backup of the database and will also a copy of it at the same time. I expressed that it was surely possible if they were going to use a mirror command. In addition, they told me that whenever they take two copies of the database, the size of the database, is always reduced. Now this was something not clear to me, I said it was not possible and so I asked them to show me the script. Corrupted Backup File and Unsuccessful Restore The CTO, who was also present at the location, got very upset with this situation. He then asked when the last successful restore test was done. As expected, the answer was NEVER.There were no successful restore tests done before. During that time, I was present and I could clearly see the stress, confusion, carelessness and anger around me. I did not appreciate the feeling and I was pretty sure that no one in there wanted the atmosphere like me. 2011 TRACEWRITE – Wait Type – Wait Related to Buffer and Resolution SQL Trace is a SQL Server database engine technology which monitors specific events generated when various actions occur in the database engine. When any event is fired it goes through various stages as well various routes. One of the routes is Trace I/O Provider, which sends data to its final destination either as a file or rowset. DATEDIFF – Accuracy of Various Dateparts If you want to have accuracy in seconds, you need to use a different approach. In the first example, the accurate method is to find the number of seconds first and then divide it by 60 to convert it in minutes. Dedicated Access Control for SQL Server Express Edition http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k00z82u4OI Book Signing at SQLPASS 2012 Who I Am And How I Got Here – True Story as Blog Post If there was a shortcut to success – I want to know. I learnt SQL Server hard way and I am still learning. There are so many things, I have to learn. There is not enough time to learn everything which we want to learn. I am constantly working on it every day. I welcome you to join my journey as well. Please join me in my journey to learn SQL Server – more the merrier. Vacation, Travel and Study – A New Concept Even those who have advanced degrees and went to college for years, or even decades, find studying hard.  There is a difference between studying for a career and studying for a certification.  At least to get a degree there is a variety of subjects, with labs, exams, and practice problems to make things more interesting. Order By Numeric Values Formatted as String We have a table which has a column containing alphanumeric data. The data always has first as an integer and later part as a string. The business need is to order the data based on the first part of the alphanumeric data which is an integer. Now the problem is that no matter how we use ORDER BY the result is not produced as expected. Let us understand this with an example. Resolving SQL Server Connection Errors – SQL in Sixty Seconds #030 – Video One of the most famous errors related to SQL Server is about connecting to SQL Server itself. Here is how it goes, most of the time developers have worked with SQL Server and knows pretty much every error which they face during development language. However, hardly they install fresh SQL Server. As the installation of the SQL Server is a rare occasion unless you are a DBA who is responsible for such an instance – the error faced during installations are pretty rare as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k00z82u4OI Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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