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• How to restore your production database without needing additional storage

  - by David Atkinson

  Production databases can get very large. This in itself is to be expected, but when a copy of the database is needed the database must be restored, requiring additional and costly storage.  For example, if you want to give each developer a full copy of your production server, you’ll need n times the storage cost for your n-developer team. The same is true for any test databases that are created during the course of your project lifecycle. If you’ve read my previous blog posts, you’ll be aware that I’ve been focusing on the database continuous integration theme. In my CI setup I create a “production”-equivalent database directly from its source control representation, and use this to test my upgrade scripts. Despite this being a perfectly valid and practical thing to do as part of a CI setup, it’s not the exact equivalent to running the upgrade script on a copy of the actual production database. So why shouldn’t I instead simply restore the most recent production backup as part of my CI process? There are two reasons why this would be impractical. 1. My CI environment isn’t an exact copy of my production environment. Indeed, this would be the case in a perfect world, and it is strongly recommended as a good practice if you follow Jez Humble and David Farley’s “Continuous Delivery” teachings, but in practical terms this might not always be possible, especially where storage is concerned. It may just not be possible to restore a huge production database on the environment you’ve been allotted. 2. It’s not just about the storage requirements, it’s also the time it takes to do the restore. The whole point of continuous integration is that you are alerted as early as possible whether the build (yes, the database upgrade script counts!) is broken. If I have to run an hour-long restore each time I commit a change to source control I’m just not going to get the feedback quickly enough to react. So what’s the solution? Red Gate has a technology, SQL Virtual Restore, that is able to restore a database without using up additional storage. Although this sounds too good to be true, the explanation is quite simple (although I’m sure the technical implementation details under the hood are quite complex!) Instead of restoring the backup in the conventional sense, SQL Virtual Restore will effectively mount the backup using its HyperBac technology. It creates a data and log file, .vmdf, and .vldf, that becomes the delta between the .bak file and the virtual database. This means that both read and write operations are permitted on a virtual database as from SQL Server’s point of view it is no different from a conventional database. Instead of doubling the storage requirements upon a restore, there is no ‘duplicate’ storage requirements, other than the trivially small virtual log and data files (see illustration below). The benefit is magnified the more databases you mount to the same backup file. This technique could be used to provide a large development team a full development instance of a large production database. It is also incredibly easy to set up. Once SQL Virtual Restore is installed, you simply run a conventional RESTORE command to create the virtual database. This is what I have running as part of a nightly “release test” process triggered by my CI tool. RESTORE DATABASE WidgetProduction_Virtual FROM DISK=N'D:\VirtualDatabase\WidgetProduction.bak' WITH MOVE N'WidgetProduction' TO N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction_WidgetProduction_Virtual.vmdf', MOVE N'WidgetProduction_log' TO N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction_log_WidgetProduction_Virtual.vldf', NORECOVERY, STATS=1, REPLACE GO RESTORE DATABASE WidgetProduction_Virtual WITH RECOVERY   Note the only change from what you would do normally is the naming of the .vmdf and .vldf files. SQL Virtual Restore intercepts this by monitoring the extension and applies its magic, ensuring the ‘virtual’ restore happens rather than the conventional storage-heavy restore. My automated release test then applies the upgrade scripts to the virtual production database and runs some validation tests, giving me confidence that were I to run this on production for real, all would go smoothly. For illustration, here is my 8Gb production database: And its corresponding backup file: Here are the .vldf and .vmdf files, which represent the only additional used storage for the new database following the virtual restore.   The beauty of this product is its simplicity. Once it is installed, the interaction with the backup and virtual database is exactly the same as before, as the clever stuff is being done at a lower level. SQL Virtual Restore can be downloaded as a fully functional 14-day trial. Technorati Tags: SQL Server

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• How to restore your production database without needing additional storage

  - by David Atkinson

  Production databases can get very large. This in itself is to be expected, but when a copy of the database is needed the database must be restored, requiring additional and costly storage.  For example, if you want to give each developer a full copy of your production server, you'll need n times the storage cost for your n-developer team. The same is true for any test databases that are created during the course of your project lifecycle. If you've read my previous blog posts, you'll be aware that I've been focusing on the database continuous integration theme. In my CI setup I create a "production"-equivalent database directly from its source control representation, and use this to test my upgrade scripts. Despite this being a perfectly valid and practical thing to do as part of a CI setup, it's not the exact equivalent to running the upgrade script on a copy of the actual production database. So why shouldn't I instead simply restore the most recent production backup as part of my CI process? There are two reasons why this would be impractical. 1. My CI environment isn't an exact copy of my production environment. Indeed, this would be the case in a perfect world, and it is strongly recommended as a good practice if you follow Jez Humble and David Farley's "Continuous Delivery" teachings, but in practical terms this might not always be possible, especially where storage is concerned. It may just not be possible to restore a huge production database on the environment you've been allotted. 2. It's not just about the storage requirements, it's also the time it takes to do the restore. The whole point of continuous integration is that you are alerted as early as possible whether the build (yes, the database upgrade script counts!) is broken. If I have to run an hour-long restore each time I commit a change to source control I'm just not going to get the feedback quickly enough to react. So what's the solution? Red Gate has a technology, SQL Virtual Restore, that is able to restore a database without using up additional storage. Although this sounds too good to be true, the explanation is quite simple (although I'm sure the technical implementation details under the hood are quite complex!) Instead of restoring the backup in the conventional sense, SQL Virtual Restore will effectively mount the backup using its HyperBac technology. It creates a data and log file, .vmdf, and .vldf, that becomes the delta between the .bak file and the virtual database. This means that both read and write operations are permitted on a virtual database as from SQL Server's point of view it is no different from a conventional database. Instead of doubling the storage requirements upon a restore, there is no 'duplicate' storage requirements, other than the trivially small virtual log and data files (see illustration below). The benefit is magnified the more databases you mount to the same backup file. This technique could be used to provide a large development team a full development instance of a large production database. It is also incredibly easy to set up. Once SQL Virtual Restore is installed, you simply run a conventional RESTORE command to create the virtual database. This is what I have running as part of a nightly "release test" process triggered by my CI tool. RESTORE DATABASE WidgetProduction_virtual FROM DISK=N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction.bak' WITH MOVE N'WidgetProduction' TO N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction_WidgetProduction_Virtual.vmdf', MOVE N'WidgetProduction_log' TO N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction_log_WidgetProduction_Virtual.vldf', NORECOVERY, STATS=1, REPLACE GO RESTORE DATABASE mydatabase WITH RECOVERY   Note the only change from what you would do normally is the naming of the .vmdf and .vldf files. SQL Virtual Restore intercepts this by monitoring the extension and applies its magic, ensuring the 'virtual' restore happens rather than the conventional storage-heavy restore. My automated release test then applies the upgrade scripts to the virtual production database and runs some validation tests, giving me confidence that were I to run this on production for real, all would go smoothly. For illustration, here is my 8Gb production database: And its corresponding backup file: Here are the .vldf and .vmdf files, which represent the only additional used storage for the new database following the virtual restore.   The beauty of this product is its simplicity. Once it is installed, the interaction with the backup and virtual database is exactly the same as before, as the clever stuff is being done at a lower level. SQL Virtual Restore can be downloaded as a fully functional 14-day trial. Technorati Tags: SQL Server

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• NTFS Issues in Windows 7 and 2008 R2 - 'Is it a Bug?'

  - by renewieldraaijer

  I have been using the various versions of the Microsoft Windows product line since NT4 and I really thought I knew the ins and outs about the NTFS filesystem by now. There were always a few rules of thumb to understand what happens if you move data around. These rules were: "If you copy data, the copied data will inherit the permissions of the location it is being copied to. The same goes for moving data between disk partitions. Only when you move data within the same partition, the permissions are kept."  Recently I was asked to assist in troubleshooting some NTFS related issues. This forced me to have another good look at this theory. To my surprise I found out that this theory does not completely stand anymore. Apparently some things have changed since the release of Windows Vista / Windows 2008. Since the release of these Operating Systems, a move within the same disk partition results in the data inheriting the permissions of the location it is being copied into. A major change in the NTFS filesystem you would think!  Not quite! The above only counts when the move operation is being performed by using Windows Explorer. A move by using the 'move' command from within a cmd prompt for example, retains the NTFS permissions, just like before in Windows XP and older systems. Conclusion: The Windows Explorer is responsible for changing the ACL's of the moved data. This is a remarkable change, but if you follow this theory, the resulting ACL after a move operation is still predictable.  We could say that since Windows Vista and Windows 2008, a new rule set applies: "If you copy data, the copied data will inherit the permissions of the location it is being copied to. Same goes for moving data between disk partitions and within disk partitions. Only when you move data within the same partition by using something else than the Windows Explorer, the permissions are kept." The above behavior should be unchanged in Windows 7 / Windows 2008 R2, compared to Windows Vista / 2008. But somehow the NTFS permissions are not so predictable in Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2. Moving data within the same disk partition the one time results in the permissions being kept and the next time results in inherited permissions from the destination location. I will try to demonstrate this in a few examples: Example 1 (Incorrect behavior): Consider two folders, 'Folder A' and 'Folder B' with the following permissions configured.                    Now we create the test file 'test file 1.txt' in 'Folder A' and afterwards move this file to 'Folder B' using Windows Explorer.                       According to the new theory, the file should inherit the permissions of 'Folder B' and therefore 'Group B' should appear in the ACL of 'test file 1.txt'. In the screenshot below the resulting permissions are displayed. The permissions from the originating location are kept, while the permissions of 'Folder B' should be inherited.                   Example 2 (Correct behavior): Again, consider the same two folders. This time we make a small modification to the ACL of 'Folder A'. We add 'Group C' to the ACL and again we create a file in 'Folder A' which we name 'test file 2.txt'.                    Next, we move 'test file 2.txt' to 'Folder B'.                       Again, we check the permissions of 'test file 2.txt' at the target location. We can now see that the permissions are inherited. This is what should be happening, and can be considered 'correct behavior' for Windows Vista / 2008 / 7 / 2008 R2. It remains uncertain why this behavior is so inconsistent. At this time, this is under investigation with Microsoft Support. The investigation has been going for the last two weeks and it is beginning to look like there is no rational reason for this, other than a bug in the Windows Explorer in Windows 7 and 2008 R2. As soon as there is any certainty on this, I will note it here in this blog.                   The examples above are harmless tests, by using my own laptop. If you would create the same set of folders and groups, and configure exactly the same permissions, you will see exactly the same behavior. Be sure to use Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2.   Initially the problem arose at a customer site where move operations on data on the fileserver by users would result in unpredictable results. This resulted in the wrong set of people having àccess permissions on data that they should not have permissions to. Off course this is something we want to prevent at all costs.   I have also done several tests with move operations by using the move command in a cmd prompt. This way the behavior is always consistent. The inconsistent behavior is only exposed when using the Windows Explorer to initiate the move operation, and only when using Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 systems. It is evident that this behavior changes when the ACL of a folder has been changed, for example by adding an extra entry. The reason for this remains uncertain though. To be continued…. A dutch version of this post can be found at: http://blogs.platani.nl/?p=612

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• Why does setting a geometry shader cause my sprites to vanish?

  - by ChaosDev

  My application has multiple screens with different tasks. Once I set a geometry shader to the device context for my custom terrain, it works and I get the desired results. But then when I get back to the main menu, all sprites and text disappear. These sprites don't dissappear when I use pixel and vertex shaders. The sprites are being drawn through D3D11, of course, with specified view and projection matrices as well an input layout, vertex, and pixel shader. I'm trying DeviceContext->ClearState() but it does not help. Any ideas? void gGeometry::DrawIndexedWithCustomEffect(gVertexShader*vs,gPixelShader* ps,gGeometryShader* gs=nullptr) { unsigned int offset = 0; auto context = mp_D3D->mp_Context; //set topology context->IASetPrimitiveTopology(m_Topology); //set input layout context->IASetInputLayout(mp_inputLayout); //set vertex and index buffers context->IASetVertexBuffers(0,1,&mp_VertexBuffer->mp_Buffer,&m_VertexStride,&offset); context->IASetIndexBuffer(mp_IndexBuffer->mp_Buffer,mp_IndexBuffer->m_DXGIFormat,0); //send constant buffers to shaders context->VSSetConstantBuffers(0,vs->m_CBufferCount,vs->m_CRawBuffers.data()); context->PSSetConstantBuffers(0,ps->m_CBufferCount,ps->m_CRawBuffers.data()); if(gs!=nullptr) { context->GSSetConstantBuffers(0,gs->m_CBufferCount,gs->m_CRawBuffers.data()); context->GSSetShader(gs->mp_D3DGeomShader,0,0);//after this call all sprites disappear } //set shaders context->VSSetShader( vs->mp_D3DVertexShader, 0, 0 ); context->PSSetShader( ps->mp_D3DPixelShader, 0, 0 ); //draw context->DrawIndexed(m_indexCount,0,0); } //sprites void gSpriteDrawer::Draw(gTexture2D* texture,const RECT& dest,const RECT& source, const Matrix& spriteMatrix,const float& rotation,Vector2d& position,const Vector2d& origin,const Color& color) { VertexPositionColorTexture* verticesPtr; D3D11_MAPPED_SUBRESOURCE mappedResource; unsigned int TriangleVertexStride = sizeof(VertexPositionColorTexture); unsigned int offset = 0; float halfWidth = ( float )dest.right / 2.0f; float halfHeight = ( float )dest.bottom / 2.0f; float z = 0.1f; int w = texture->Width(); int h = texture->Height(); float tu = (float)source.right/(w); float tv = (float)source.bottom/(h); float hu = (float)source.left/(w); float hv = (float)source.top/(h); Vector2d t0 = Vector2d( hu+tu, hv); Vector2d t1 = Vector2d( hu+tu, hv+tv); Vector2d t2 = Vector2d( hu, hv+tv); Vector2d t3 = Vector2d( hu, hv+tv); Vector2d t4 = Vector2d( hu, hv); Vector2d t5 = Vector2d( hu+tu, hv); float ex=(dest.right/2)+(origin.x); float ey=(dest.bottom/2)+(origin.y); Vector4d v4Color = Vector4d(color.r,color.g,color.b,color.a); VertexPositionColorTexture vertices[] = { { Vector3d( dest.right-ex, -ey, z),v4Color, t0}, { Vector3d( dest.right-ex, dest.bottom-ey , z),v4Color, t1}, { Vector3d( -ex, dest.bottom-ey , z),v4Color, t2}, { Vector3d( -ex, dest.bottom-ey , z),v4Color, t3}, { Vector3d( -ex, -ey , z),v4Color, t4}, { Vector3d( dest.right-ex, -ey , z),v4Color, t5}, }; auto mp_context = mp_D3D->mp_Context; // Lock the vertex buffer so it can be written to. mp_context->Map(mp_vertexBuffer, 0, D3D11_MAP_WRITE_DISCARD, 0, &mappedResource); // Get a pointer to the data in the vertex buffer. verticesPtr = (VertexPositionColorTexture*)mappedResource.pData; // Copy the data into the vertex buffer. memcpy(verticesPtr, (void*)vertices, (sizeof(VertexPositionColorTexture) * 6)); // Unlock the vertex buffer. mp_context->Unmap(mp_vertexBuffer, 0); //set vertex shader mp_context->IASetVertexBuffers( 0, 1, &mp_vertexBuffer, &TriangleVertexStride, &offset); //set texture mp_context->PSSetShaderResources( 0, 1, &texture->mp_SRV); //set matrix to shader mp_context->UpdateSubresource(mp_matrixBuffer, 0, 0, &spriteMatrix, 0, 0 ); mp_context->VSSetConstantBuffers( 0, 1, &mp_matrixBuffer); //draw sprite mp_context->Draw( 6, 0 ); }

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• UserAppDataPath in WPF

  - by psheriff

  In Windows Forms applications you were able to get to your user's roaming profile directory very easily using the Application.UserAppDataPath property. This folder allows you to store information for your program in a custom folder specifically for your program. The format of this directory looks like this: C:\Users\YOUR NAME\AppData\Roaming\COMPANY NAME\APPLICATION NAME\APPLICATION VERSION For example, on my Windows 7 64-bit system, this folder would look like this for a Windows Forms Application: C:\Users\PSheriff\AppData\Roaming\PDSA, Inc.\WindowsFormsApplication1\1.0.0.0 For some reason Microsoft did not expose this property from the Application object of WPF applications. I guess they think that we don't need this property in WPF? Well, sometimes we still do need to get at this folder. You have two choices on how to retrieve this property. Add a reference to the System.Windows.Forms.dll to your WPF application and use this property directly. Or, you can write your own method to build the same path. If you add a reference to the System.Windows.Forms.dll you will need to use System.Windows.Forms.Application.UserAppDataPath to access this property. Create a GetUserAppDataPath Method in WPF If you want to build this path you can do so with just a few method calls in WPF using Reflection. The code below shows this fairly simple method to retrieve the same folder as shown above. C#using System.Reflection; public string GetUserAppDataPath(){  string path = string.Empty;  Assembly assm;  Type at;  object[] r;   // Get the .EXE assembly  assm = Assembly.GetEntryAssembly();  // Get a 'Type' of the AssemblyCompanyAttribute  at = typeof(AssemblyCompanyAttribute);  // Get a collection of custom attributes from the .EXE assembly  r = assm.GetCustomAttributes(at, false);  // Get the Company Attribute  AssemblyCompanyAttribute ct =                 ((AssemblyCompanyAttribute)(r[0]));  // Build the User App Data Path  path = Environment.GetFolderPath(              Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData);  path += @"\" + ct.Company;  path += @"\" + assm.GetName().Version.ToString();   return path;} Visual BasicPublic Function GetUserAppDataPath() As String  Dim path As String = String.Empty  Dim assm As Assembly  Dim at As Type  Dim r As Object()   ' Get the .EXE assembly  assm = Assembly.GetEntryAssembly()  ' Get a 'Type' of the AssemblyCompanyAttribute  at = GetType(AssemblyCompanyAttribute)  ' Get a collection of custom attributes from the .EXE assembly  r = assm.GetCustomAttributes(at, False)  ' Get the Company Attribute  Dim ct As AssemblyCompanyAttribute = _                 DirectCast(r(0), AssemblyCompanyAttribute)  ' Build the User App Data Path  path = Environment.GetFolderPath( _                 Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData)  path &= "\" & ct.Company  path &= "\" & assm.GetName().Version.ToString()   Return pathEnd Function Summary Getting the User Application Data Path folder in WPF is fairly simple with just a few method calls using Reflection. Of course, there is absolutely no reason you cannot just add a reference to the System.Windows.Forms.dll to your WPF application and use that Application object. After all, System.Windows.Forms.dll is a part of the .NET Framework and can be used from WPF with no issues at all. NOTE: Visit http://www.pdsa.com/downloads to get more tips and tricks like this one. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **We frequently offer a FREE gift for readers of my blog. Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for your FREE gift!

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• Gene Hunt Says:

  - by BizTalk Visionary

  "She's as nervous as a very small nun at a penguin shoot"   "He's got fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course" "You so much as belch out of line and I'll have your scrotum on a barbed wire plate" "Let's go play slappyface" "your surrounded by armed barstewards" “Right, get out and find this murdering scum right now!” [pause] “Scratch that, we start 9am sharp tomorrow, it's beer-o-clock.” "So then Cartwright, you're such a good Detective.... Go and Detect me a packet of Garibaldies" "You're not the one who is going to have to knit himself a new arsehole after 25 years of aggressive male love in prison" “A dream for me is Diana Dors and a bottle of chip fat." “A dream for me is Diana Dors and a bottle of chip fat." “They reckon you've got concussion - but personally, I couldn't give a tart's furry cup if half your brains are falling out. Don't ever waltz into my kingdom playing king of the jungle.” “You great... soft... sissy... girlie... nancy... french... bender... Man-United supporting POOF!!” “Drugs eh? What's the point. They make you forget, make you talk funny, make you see things that aren't there. My old grandma got all of that for free when she had a stroke.” “He's Dead! It's quite serious!” “Fanny in the flat...Nice Work” “SoopaDoopa” “Tits in a Jumper!” “Drop your weapons! You are surrounded by armed bastards!” “It's 1973, almost dinnertime. I'm 'avin 'oops!” “Trust the Gene Genie!” “I wanna hump Britt Ekland...What're we gonna do...!” “Was that 'E' and you don't know the rest?! or you going 'Eeee, I Dunno'” “Good Girl! Prostate probe and no jelly. “ “Give over, it's nothing like Spain!” “I'll come over your houses and stamp on all your toys!” “The Wizard will sort it out. It's cos of the wonderful things he does” “Cartwright can jump up and down on his knackers!” “It's not a windup love, he really thinks like this!” “Women! You can't say two words to them” “I was thinking, maybe, a Berni Inn!” “If I wanted a bollocking for drinking too much...!” “Shhhh...hear that...that's the sound of this case being closed! “Chicken!? In a basket!?” “Seems a large quantity of cocaine...” “You probably thought he kept his cock in his keks!” “The tail-end of Rays demotion speech!” “Stephen Warren is gay!?” “You're a smart boy, use your initiative!” “Don't be such a Jessie!” “I find the idea of a bird brushing her teeth...!” “Never been tempted to the Magic talcum powder?” “Make sure she's got nice tits!” “You're more likely to find an ostrich with a plum up it's arse!” “Drink this lot under the table and have a pint on the way home!” “Never be a female Prime Minister!” “Pub? Pub! pub!.....Pub!” “Thou shalt not suck off rent boys!” “The number for the special clinic is on the notice board!” “If me uncle had tits, would he be me auntie!” “Got your vicars in a twist!” “We Done?!” “Your mates got balls...If they were any bigger he'd need a wheelbarrow!” “The Ending - from 'I want to go home' to the end music.”

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• doubleTwist is an iTunes Alternative that Supports Several Devices

  - by Mysticgeek

  There are a lot of iTunes users out there, but unfortunately you can’t use it with all of your portable devices. Today we take a look at doubleTwist, which allows you to sync your media with a multitude of portable devices and easily share it as well. Note: You can run doubleTwist on Windows or Mac, and here we take a look at the Windows version. Install & Setup doubleTwist Download and install doubleTwist using the defaults in the wizard… Installation takes several moments and you’ll see the progress while it finishes up. After installation is complete, sign up for an account if you don’t already have one. If you do have an account you can login right away. Enter in your username, email address, and password then click Sign Up.   You’ll get an confirmation email and need to activate the account before you can sign in. Once you’re all signed up, launch doubleTwist and you’ll be ready to start using it. doubleTwist Music The default music store is Amazon MP3 store which might appeal to those of you who are tired of the iTunes music store. A lot of times the music is cheaper and available at higher bit rates. You can start searching for music in the Amazon Music Store and previewing songs. To purchase anything though you will need to sign into your Amazon account.   Under Playlists it allows you to import your playlists from iTunes and Windows Media Player, which is a handy feature if you don’t want to set them up again. Of course you can play your songs through the music player on your desktop. Devices One of the coolest things about doubleTwist is that it supports a lot of different portable media devices including iPod, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android, PSP, Smartphones, and much more. Unfortunately for Zune users…there isn’t any support for the Zune of Zune HD yet. Here we have a Creative Zen attached and can sync songs, pictures, and podcasts. An HTC-S620 Smartphone running Windows Mobile… Even a simple USB drive will be recognized and you can transfer your media to it as well.   Podcasts Finding your favorite audio and video podcasts is easy with the search feature. You can easily manage and subscribe to podcasts in the subscriptions section.   You can watch the video podcasts directly in doubleTwist. Sharing Media Also you can share digital media with your friends or add it to Flickr and YouTube. You can send any pictures, videos, or music in your library to other people by dragging it over. You can email users individually… Or access contacts from your Gmail and Yahoo accounts. There is a limit to how much you can send of video podcasts… only the first 10 minutes. The person you send it to will get a link in their email that points to your My Feed page on the doubleTwist site.   There they can access the media you sent…in this example it’s a video podcast but you can share any media. Other Features Under My Profile you can change your avatar and personal information.   In Preferences you can choose where media is stored, its startup actions, podcast subscriptions, and manage device syncing. Conclusion It’s still in beta stage so expect some bugs, but overall doubleTwist is a solid media player that is easy to use with a clean interface. It’s simple and doesn’t try to do too much so is fairly easy on system resources. The main annoyance is it tries to catalog all of your media out of the box. Which may be alright for some users with smaller media collections, but very irritating to advanced users with large collections. Also there is currently no support for the Zune, but according to their forums, it’s on the way. At the time of this writing it’s in public beta and can be downloaded for XP, Vista, Windows 7 (32 & 64 bit), and Mac OSX. If you’re looking for an iTunes alternative that works with several different portable devices, you might want to give DoubleTwist a try. Download DoubleTwist Public Beta See If Your Media Device is Supported by doubleTwist Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips MusicBee is a Fast and Powerful Music ManagerAvoid the Apple QuickTime Bloat with QT LiteBeginner Geek: Set Default Programs in Windows 7 and VistaBeginner Geeks: OpenOffice is a Free Cross Platform Alternative to MS OfficeManage Devices the Easy Way with Device Stage in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more

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• Personal search – the future of search

  - by jamiet

  [Four months ago I wrote a meandering blog post on another blogging site entitled Personal search – the future of search. The points I made therein are becoming more relevant to what I'm reading about and hoping to get involved in in the future so I'm re-posting here to a wider audience to hopefully get some more feedback and guage reaction to it. This has been prompted by the book Pull by David Siegel that is forming my current holiday reading (recommended to me by a commenter on my previous post Interesting things – Twitter annotations and your phone as a web server) and in particular by Siegel's notion of us all in the future having a personal online data vault.] My one-time colleague Paul Dawson recently wrote an article called The Future of Search and in it he proposed some interesting ideas. Some choice quotes: The growth of Chinese search giant Baidu is an indicator that fully localised and tailored content and offerings have great traction with local audiences This trend is already driving an increase in the use of specialist searches … Look at how Farecast is now integrated into Bing for example, or how Flightstats is now integrated into Google. Search does not necessarily have to begin with a keyword, but could start instead with a click or a touch. Take a look at Retrievr. Start drawing a picture in the box and see what happens. This is certainly search without the need for typing in keywords search technology has advanced greatly in recent years. The recent launch of Microsoft Live Labs’ Pivot has given us a taste of what we can expect to see in the future This really got me thinking about where search might go in the future and as my mind wandered I realised that as the amount of data that we collect about ourselves increases so too will the need and the desire to search it. The amount of electronic data that exists about each and every person is increasing and in the near future I fully expect that we are going to be able to store personal data such as: A history of our location (in fact Google Latitude already offers this facility) Recordings of all our phone conversations Health information history (weight, blood pressure etc…) Energy usage Spending history What films we watch, what radio stations we listen to Voting history Of course, most of this stuff is already stored somewhere but crucially we don’t have easy access to it. My utilities supplier knows how much electricity I’m using but if I want to know for myself I have to go and dig through my statements (assuming I have kept them). Similarly my doctor probably has ready access to all of my health records, my bank knows exactly what I have spent my money on, my cable supplier knows what I watch on TV and my mobile phone supplier probably knows exactly where I am and where I’ve been for the past few years. Strange then that none of this electronic information is available to me in a way that I can really make use of it; after all, its MY information. Its MY data. I created it. That is set to change. As technologies mature and customers become more technically cognizant they will demand more access to the data that companies hold about them. The companies themselves will realise the benefit that they derive from giving users what they want and will embrace ways of providing it. As a result the amount of data that we store about ourselves is going to increase exponentially and the desire to search and derive value from that data is going to grow with it; we are about to enter the era of the “personal datastore” and we will want, and need, to search through it in order to make sense of it all. Its interesting then that today when we think of search we think of search engines and yet in these personal datastores we’re referring to data that search engines can’t touch because WE own it and we (hopefully) choose to keep it private. Someone, I know not who, is going to lead in this space by making it easy for us to search our data and retrieve information that we have either forgotten or maybe didn’t even know in the first place. We will learn new things about ourselves and about our habits; we will share these findings with whomever we choose; we will compare what we discover with others; we will collaborate for mutual benefit and, most of all, we will educate ourselves as to how to live our lives better. Search will be the means to that end, it will enable us to make sense of the wealth of information that we will collect day in day out. The future of search is personal, why would we be interested in anything else? @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• OpenWorld: Spotlight on Fusion CRM

  - by Tony Berk

  Oracle OpenWorld is less than 2 weeks away, so you need to start figuring out how you are going to maximize your week. I don't want to discourage you, but I'm pretty sure it is impossible to attend all 2000+ sessions. So you need to focus on what's important to you. Many of our CRM customers will be interested in Fusion CRM, since they have already started Fusion implementations or determining when to start. If that's you, or you are just looking for an overview of Fusion CRM, we've got you covered! Let's start at the top! For an overview of what is in Fusion CRM and where it is going, you should attend the general session and roadmap session: General Session: Oracle Fusion CRM—Improving Sales Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Ease of Use (Session ID: GEN9674) - Oct 2, 11:45 AM. Anthony Lye, Senior VP, Oracle leads this general session focused on Oracle Fusion CRM. Oracle Fusion CRM optimizes territories, combines quota management and incentive compensation, integrates sales and marketing, and cleanses and enriches data—all within a single application platform. Oracle Fusion can be configured, changed, and extended at runtime by end users, business managers, IT, and developers. Oracle Fusion CRM can be used from the Web, from a smartphone, from Microsoft Outlook, or from an iPad. Deloitte, sponsor of the CRM Track, will also present key concepts on CRM implementations. Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management: Overview/Strategy/Customer Experiences/Roadmap (CON9407) - Oct 1, 3:15PM. In this session, learn how Oracle Fusion CRM enables companies to create better sales plans, generate more quality leads, and achieve higher win rates and find out why customers are adopting Oracle Fusion CRM. Gain a deeper understanding of the unique capabilities only Oracle Fusion CRM provides, and learn how Oracle’s commitment to CRM innovation is driving a wide range of future enhancements. There is also a General Session for all Fusion Applications providing insight into the current strategy of the full product line and a high-level roadmap for each product area: Oracle Fusion Applications—Overview, Strategy, and Roadmap (GEN9433) - Oct 1, 10:45AM. This session will be repeated on Oct 3, 10:15AM. Now, if you want to drill down into some more detail, there are a lot more sessions with Oracle product management and customers. I'll highlight a few, but suggest you review the Fusion CRM Focus On document, or the search in the Content Catalog or Session Builder.  Driving Sales Performance with Oracle Fusion CRM (CON9744) - Oct 3, 10:15AM. Demonstrates how sales executives can gain instant visibility into their business, deliver pervasive coaching to their reps, maximize their sales pipeline, and drive team alignment. The result is increased sales performance that enables sales executives to deliver more revenue without increasing their resources or expenses. Maximize Your Revenue Potential with Oracle Fusion CRM Sales Planning (CON9751) - Oct 2, 1:15PM. Learn how Oracle Fusion CRM helps companies intelligently optimize sales planning and manage sales performance including the ability to predict their future sales opportunities and use those predictions in conjunction with past sales data to optimally define their sales territories, sales quotas, and incentive compensation plans. Boost Marketing’s Contribution to Revenue with Oracle Fusion CRM Marketing (CON9746) - Oct 3, 11:45AM. Learn how Oracle Fusion CRM can help your organization integrate sales and marketing, using one CRM platform. See how Oracle Fusion CRM can help your organization learn where to invest its precious marketing dollars; drive more revenue with cross-channel marketing and prospecting capabilities, including and not limited to e-mail, Web, and social media; improve lead conversion with integrated lead management functionality; and do more with less by automating many manual tasks. Oracle Fusion CRM: Social Marketing (CON11559) - Oct 1, 3:15PM. Learn how Oracle’s acquisition of Collective Intellect, Vitrue, and Involver extends Oracle Fusion Marketing as a world-class social marketing solution. Oracle Fusion Social CRM Strategy and Roadmap: Future of Collaboration and Social Engagement (CON9750) - Oct 4, 11:15AM. Hear how Oracle can help you know your customers better, encourage brand affinity, and improve collaboration within your ecosystem. This session reviews Oracle's social media solution and shows how you can discover hidden insights buried in your enterprise and social data. Also learn how Oracle Social Network revolutionizes how enterprise users work, collaborate, and share to achieve successful outcomes. Of course, we recommend you hear from the current Fusion CRM customers too. So, don't miss Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management: Customer Adoption and Experiences (CON9415) on Oct 3 at 10:15AM for panel of customers discussing implementation experiences, best practices and benefits.  After listening to all of this great information, you are probably going to have questions. Well, the experts will be on hand to help answer your questions and plan how your organization can get going with Fusion CRM. Be sure to head down to the DEMOgrounds and CRM Pavilion in the Moscone West Exhibit Hall. And finally, there is the always popular Meet the Experts session focused on Fusion CRM (MTE9658) on Oct 2 at 5PM (pre-registration via Schedule Builder is recommended.) In addition, there are more sessions on Mobility, Extensibility, Incentive Compensation, Fusion Customer Hub and other key components of the Fusion Applications infrastructure, Oracle Cloud and much, much more! For a full list, utilize the Fusion CRM Focus On document and Content Catalog. Enjoy!

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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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• Code Metrics: Number of IL Instructions

  - by DigiMortal

  In my previous posting about code metrics I introduced how to measure LoC (Lines of Code) in .NET applications. Now let’s take a step further and let’s take a look how to measure compiled code. This way we can somehow have a picture about what compiler produces. In this posting I will introduce you code metric called number of IL instructions. NB! Number of IL instructions is not something you can use to measure productivity of your team. If you want to get better idea about the context of this metric and LoC then please read my first posting about LoC. What are IL instructions? When code written in some .NET Framework language is compiled then compiler produces assemblies that contain byte code. These assemblies are executed later by Common Language Runtime (CLR) that is code execution engine of .NET Framework. The byte code is called Intermediate Language (IL) – this is more common language than C# and VB.NET by example. You can use ILDasm tool to convert assemblies to IL assembler so you can read them. As IL instructions are building blocks of all .NET Framework binary code these instructions are smaller and highly general – we don’t want very rich low level language because it executes slower than more general language. For every method or property call in some .NET Framework language corresponds set of IL instructions. There is no 1:1 relationship between line in high level language and line in IL assembler. There are more IL instructions than lines in C# code by example. How much instructions there are? I have no common answer because it really depends on your code. Here you can see some metrics from my current community project that is developed on SharePoint Server 2007. As average I have about 7 IL instructions per line of code. This is not metric you should use, it is just illustrative example so you can see the differences between numbers of lines and IL instructions. Why should I measure the number of IL instructions? Just take a look at chart above. Compiler does something that you cannot see – it compiles your code to IL. This is not intuitive process because you usually cannot say what is exactly the end result. You know it at greater plain but you don’t know it exactly. Therefore we can expect some surprises and that’s why we should measure the number of IL instructions. By example, you may find better solution for some method in your source code. It looks nice, it works nice and everything seems to be okay. But on server under load your fix may be way slower than previous code. Although you minimized the number of lines of code it ended up with increasing the number of IL instructions. How to measure the number of IL instructions? My choice is NDepend because Visual Studio is not able to measure this metric. Steps to make are easy. Open your NDepend project or create new and add all your application assemblies to project (you can also add Visual Studio solution to project). Run project analysis and wait until it is done. You can see over-all stats form global summary window. This is the same window I used to read the LoC and the number of IL instructions metrics for my chart. Meanwhile I made some changes to my code (enabled advanced caching for events and event registrations module) and then I ran code analysis again to get results for this section of this posting. NDepend is also able to tell you exactly what parts of code have problematically much IL instructions. The code quality section of CQL Query Explorer shows you how much problems there are with members in analyzed code. If you click on the line Methods too big (NbILInstructions) you can see all the problematic members of classes in CQL Explorer shown in image on right. In my case if have 10 methods that are too big and two of them have horrible number of IL instructions – just take a look at first two methods in this TOP10. Also note the query box. NDepend has easy and SQL-like query language to query code analysis results. You can modify these queries if you like and also you can define your own ones if default set is not enough for you. What is good result? As you can see from query window then the number of IL instructions per member should have maximally 200 IL instructions. Of course, like always, the less instructions you have, the better performing code you have. I don’t mean here little differences but big ones. By example, take a look at my first method in warnings list. The number of IL instructions it has is huge. And believe me – this method looks awful. Conclusion The number of IL instructions is useful metric when optimizing your code. For analyzing code at general level to find out too long methods you can use the number of LoC metric because it is more intuitive for you and you can therefore handle the situation more easily. Also you can use NDepend as code metrics tool because it has a lot of metrics to offer.

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• Exitus Acta Probat: The Post-Processing Module

  - by Phil Factor

  Sometimes, one has to make certain ethical compromises to ensure the success of a corporate IT project. Exitus Acta Probat (literally 'the result validates the deeds' meaning that the ends justify the means)It was a while back, whilst working as a Technical Architect for a well-known international company, that I was given the task of designing the architecture of a rather specialized accounting system. We'd tried an off-the-shelf (OTS) Windows-based solution which crashed with dispiriting regularity, and didn't quite do what the business required. After a great deal of research and planning, we commissioned a Unux-based system that used X-terminals for the desktops of  the participating staff. X terminals are now obsolete, but were then hot stuff; stripped-down Unix workstations that provided client GUIs for networked applications long before the days of AJAX, Flash, Air and DHTML. I've never known a project go so smoothly: I'd been initially rather nervous about going the Unix route, believing then that  Unix programmers were excitable creatures who were prone to  indulge in role-play enactments of elves and wizards at the weekend, but the programmers I met from the company that did the work seemed to be rather donnish, earnest, people who quickly grasped our requirements and were faultlessly professional in their work.After thinking lofty thoughts for a while, there was considerable pummeling of keyboards by our suppliers, and a beautiful robust application was delivered to us ahead of dates.Soon, the department who had commissioned the work received shiny new X Terminals to replace their rather depressing lavatory-beige PCs. I modestly hung around as the application was commissioned and deployed to the department in order to receive the plaudits. They didn't come. Something was very wrong with the project. I couldn't put my finger on the problem, and the users weren't doing any more than desperately and futilely searching the application to find a fault with it.Many times in my life, I've come up against a predicament like this: The roll-out of an application goes wrong and you are hearing nothing that helps you to discern the cause but nit-*** noise. There is a limit to the emotional heat you can pack into a complaint about text being in the wrong font, or an input form being slightly cramped, but they tried their best. The answer is, of course, one that every IT executive should have tattooed prominently where they can read it in emergencies: In Vino Veritas (literally, 'in wine the truth', alcohol loosens the tongue. A roman proverb) It was time to slap the wallet and get the department down the pub with the tab in my name. It was an eye-watering investment, but hedged with an over-confident IT director who relished my discomfort. To cut a long story short, The real reason gushed out with the third round. We had deprived them of their PCs, which had been good for very little from the pure business perspective, but had provided them with many hours of happiness playing computer-based minesweeper and solitaire. There is no more agreeable way of passing away the interminable hours of wage-slavery than minesweeper or solitaire, and the employees had applauded the munificence of their employer who had provided them with the means to play it. I had, unthinkingly, deprived them of it.I held an emergency meeting with our suppliers the following day. I came over big with the notion that it was in their interests to provide a solution. They played it cool, probably knowing that it was my head on the block, not theirs. In the end, they came up with a compromise. they would temporarily descend from their lofty, cerebral stamping grounds  in order to write a server-based Minesweeper and Solitaire game for X Terminals, and install it in a concealed place within the system. We'd have to pay for it, though. I groaned. How could we do that? "Could we call it a 'post-processing module?" suggested their account executive.And so it came to pass. The application was a resounding success. Every now and then, the staff were able to indulge in some 'post-processing', with what turned out to be a very fine implementation of both minesweeper and solitaire. There were several refinements: A single click in a 'boss' button turned the games into what looked just like a financial spreadsheet.  They even threw in a multi-user version of Battleships. The extra payment for the post-processing module went through the change-control process without anyone untoward noticing, and peace once more descended. Only one thing niggles. Those games were good. Do they still survive, somewhere in a Linux library? If so, I'd like to claim a small part in their production.

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• ASP.NET Web Forms Extensibility: Control Adapters

  - by Ricardo Peres

  All ASP.NET controls from version 2.0 can be associated with a control adapter. A control adapter is a class that inherits from ControlAdapter and it has the chance to interact with the control(s) it is targeting so as to change some of its properties or alter its output. I talked about control adapters before and they really a cool feature. The ControlAdapter class exposes virtual methods for some well known lifecycle events, OnInit, OnLoad, OnPreRender and OnUnload that closely match their Control counterparts, but are fired before them. Because the control adapter has a reference to its target Control, it can cast it to its concrete class and do something with it before its lifecycle events are actually fired. The adapter is also notified before the control is rendered (BeginRender), after their children are renderes (RenderChildren) and after itself is rendered (Render): this way the adapter can modify the control’s output. Control adapters may be specified for any class inheriting from Control, including abstract classes, web server controls and even pages. You can, for example, specify a control adapter for the WebControl and UserControl classes, but, curiously, not for Control itself. When specifying a control adapter for a page, it must inherit from PageAdapter instead of ControlAdapter. The adapter for a control, if specified, can be found on the protected Adapter property, and for a page, on the PageAdapter property. The first use of control adapters that came to my attention was for changing the output of standard ASP.NET web controls so that they were more based on CSS and less on HTML tables: it was the CSS Friendly Control Adapters project, now available at http://code.google.com/p/aspnetcontroladapters/. They are interesting because you specify them in one location and they apply anywhere a control of the target type is created. Mind you, it applies to controls declared on markup as well as controls created by code with the new operator. So, how do you use control adapters? The most usual way is through a browser definition file. In it, you specify a set of control adapters and their target controls, for a given browser. This browser definition file is a XML file with extension .Browser, and can either be global (%WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\vXXXX\Config\Browsers) or local to the web application, in which case, it must be placed inside the App_Browsers folder at the root of the web site. It looks like this: 1: <browsers> 2: <browser refID="Default"> 3: <controlAdapters> 4: <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.TextBox" adapterType="MyNamespace.TextBoxAdapter, MyAssembly" /> 5: </controlAdapters> 6: </browser> 7: </browsers> A browser definition file targets a specific browser, so you can have different definitions for Chrome, IE, Firefox, Opera, as well as for specific version of each of those (like IE8, Firefox3). Alternatively, if you set the target to Default, it will apply to all. The reason to pick a specific browser and version might be, for example, in order to circumvent some limitation present in that specific version, so that on markup you don’t need to be concerned with that. Another option is through the the current Browser object of the request: 1: this.Context.Request.Browser.Adapters.Add(typeof(TextBox).FullName, typeof(TextBoxAdapter).FullName); This must go very early on the page lifecycle, for example, on the OnPreInit event, or even on Application_Start. You have to specify the full class name for both the target control and the adapter. Of course, you have to do this for every request, because it won’t be persisted. As an example, you may know that the classic TextBox control renders an HTML input tag if its TextMode is set to SingleLine and a textarea if set to MultiLine. Because the textarea has no notion of maximum length, unlike the input, something must be done in order to enforce this. Here’s a simple suggestion: 1: public class TextBoxControlAdapter : ControlAdapter 2: { 3: protected TextBox Target 4: { 5: get 6: { 7: return (this.Control as TextBox); 8: } 9: } 10:  11: protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e) 12: { 13: if ((this.Target.MaxLength > 0) && (this.Target.TextMode == TextBoxMode.MultiLine)) 14: { 15: if (this.Target.Page.ClientScript.IsClientScriptBlockRegistered("TextBox_KeyUp") == false) 16: { 17: if (this.Target.Page.ClientScript.IsClientScriptBlockRegistered(this.Target.Page.GetType(), "TextBox_KeyUp") == false) 18: { 19: String script = String.Concat("function TextBox_KeyUp(sender) { if (sender.value.length > ", this.Target.MaxLength, ") { sender.value = sender.value.substr(0, ", this.Target.MaxLength, "); } }\n"); 20:  21: this.Target.Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this.Target.Page.GetType(), "TextBox_KeyUp", script, true); 22: } 23:  24: this.Target.Attributes["onkeyup"] = "TextBox_KeyUp(this)"; 25: } 26: } 27: 28: base.OnLoad(e); 29: } 30: } What it does is, for every TextBox control, if it is set for multi line and has a defined maximum length, it injects some JavaScript that will filter out any content that exceeds this maximum length. This will occur for any TextBox that you may have on your site, or any class that inherits from it. You can use any of the previous options to register this adapter. Stay tuned for more ASP.NET Web Forms extensibility tips!

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• Spolskism or Twitterism: A Doctor writes...

  - by Phil Factor

  "I never realized I had a problem. I just 'twittered' because it was a social thing to do. All my mates were doing it. It made me feel good to have 'followers'; it bolstered my self-esteem. Of course, you don't think of the long-term effects on your work and on the way you think. There's no denying that it impairs your judgment…" Yes, this story is typical. Hundreds of people are waking up to the long term effects of twittering, and seeking help. Dave, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our reporter… "I started using Twitter at work. Just a few minutes now and then, throughout the day. A lot of my colleagues were doing it and I thought 'Well, that's cool; it must be part of what I should be doing at work'. Soon, I was avidly reading every twitter that came my way, and counting the minutes between my own twitters. I tried to kid myself that it was all about professional development and getting other people to help you with work-related problems, but in truth I had become addicted to the buzz of the social network. The worse thing was that it made me seem busy even when I was really just frittering my time away. Inevitably, I started to get behind with my real work." Experts have identified the syndrome and given it a name: 'Twitterism', sometimes referred to as 'Spolskism', after the person who first drew attention to the pernicious damage to well-being that the practice caused, and who had the courage to take the pledge of rejecting it. According to one expert… "The occasional Twitter does little harm to the participant, and can be an adaptive way of dealing with stress. Unfortunately, it rarely stops there. The addictive qualities of the practice have put a strain on the caring professions who are faced with a flood of people making that first bold step to seeking help". Dave is one of those now seeking help for his addiction… "I had lost touch with reality. Even though I twittered my work colleagues constantly, I found I actually spoke to them less and less. Even when out socializing, I would frequently disengage from the conversation, in order to twitter. I stopped blogging. I stopped responding to emails; the only way to reach me was through the world of Twitter. Unfortunately, my denial about the harm that twittering was doing to me, my friends, and my work-colleagues was so strong that I truly couldn't see that I had a problem." Like other addictions, the help and support of others who are 'taking the cure' is important. There is a common bond between those who have 'been through hell and back' and are once more able to experience the joys of actually conversing and socializing, rather than the false comfort of solitary 'twittering'. Complete abstinence is essential to the cure. Most of those who risk even an occasional twitter face a headlong slide back into 'binge' twittering. Tom, another twitterer who has managed to kick the habit explains… "My twittering addiction now seems more like a bad dream. You get to work, and switch on the PC. You say to yourself, just open up the browser, just for a minute, just to see what people are saying on Twitter. The next thing you know, half the day has gone by. The worst thing is that when you're addicted, you get good at covering up the habit; I spent so much time looking at the screen and typing on the keyboard, people just assumed I was working hard.I know that I must never forget what it was like then, and what it's like now that I've kicked the habit. I now have more time for productive work and a real social life." Like many addictions, Spolskism has its most detrimental effects on family, friends and workmates, rather than the addict. So often nowadays, we hear the sad stories of Twitter-Widows; tales of long lonely evenings spent whilst their partners are engrossed in their twittering into their 'mobiles' or indulging in their solitary spolskistic habits in privacy, under cover of 'having to do work at home'. Workmates suffer too, when the addicts even take their laptops or mobiles into meetings in order to 'twitter' with their fellow obsessives, even stooping to complain to their followers how boring the meeting is. No; The best advice is to leave twittering to the birds. You know it makes sense.

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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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• Advanced donut caching: using dynamically loaded controls

  - by DigiMortal

  Yesterday I solved one caching problem with local community portal. I enabled output cache on SharePoint Server 2007 to make site faster. Although caching works fine I needed to do some additional work because there are some controls that show different content to different users. In this example I will show you how to use “donut caching” with user controls – powerful way to drive some content around cache. About donut caching Donut caching means that although you are caching your content you have some holes in it so you can still affect the output that goes to user. By example you can cache front page on your site and still show welcome message that contains correct user name. To get better idea about donut caching I suggest you to read ScottGu posting Tip/Trick: Implement "Donut Caching" with the ASP.NET 2.0 Output Cache Substitution Feature. Basically donut caching uses ASP.NET substitution control. In output this control is replaced by string you return from static method bound to substitution control. Again, take a look at ScottGu blog posting I referred above. Problem If you look at Scott’s example it is pretty plain and easy by its output. All it does is it writes out current user name as string. Here are examples of my login area for anonymous and authenticated users:    It is clear that outputting mark-up for these views as string is pretty lame to implement in code at string level. Every little change in design will end up with new version of controls library because some parts of design “live” there. Solution: using user controls I worked out easy solution to my problem. I used cache substitution and user controls together. I have three user controls: LogInControl – this is the proxy control that checks which “real” control to load. AnonymousLogInControl – template and logic for anonymous users login area. AuthenticatedLogInControl – template and logic for authenticated users login area. This is the control we render for each user separately because it contains user name and user profile fill percent. Anonymous control is not very interesting because it is only about keeping mark-up in separate file. Interesting parts are LogInControl and AuthenticatedLogInControl. Creating proxy control The first thing was to create control that has substitution area where “real” control is loaded. This proxy control should also be available to decide which control to load. The definition of control is very primitive. <%@ Control EnableViewState="false" Inherits="MyPortal.Profiles.LogInControl" %> <asp:Substitution runat="server" MethodName="ShowLogInBox" /> But code is a little bit tricky. Based on current user instance we decide which login control to load. Then we create page instance and load our control through it. When control is loaded we will call DataBind() method. In this method we evaluate all fields in loaded control (it was best choice as Load and other events will not be fired). Take a look at the code. public static string ShowLogInBox(HttpContext context) {     var user = SPContext.Current.Web.CurrentUser;     string controlName;       if (user != null)         controlName = "AuthenticatedLogInControl.ascx";     else         controlName = "AnonymousLogInControl.ascx";       var path = "~/_controltemplates/" + controlName;     var output = new StringBuilder(10000);       using(var page = new Page())     using(var ctl = page.LoadControl(path))     using(var writer = new StringWriter(output))     using(var htmlWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(writer))     {         ctl.DataBind();         ctl.RenderControl(htmlWriter);     }     return output.ToString(); } When control is bound to data we ask to render it its contents to StringBuilder. Now we have the output of control as string and we can return it from our method. Of course, notice how correct I am with resources disposing. :) The method that returns contents for substitution control is static method that has no connection with control instance because hen page is read from cache there are no instances of controls available. Conclusion As you saw it was not very hard to use donut caching with user controls. Instead of writing mark-up of controls to static method that is bound to substitution control we can still use our user controls.

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• A C# implementation of the CallStream pattern

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  Dusan published this interesting post a couple of weeks ago about a novel JavaScript chaining pattern: http://dbj.org/dbj/?p=514 It’s similar to many existing patterns, but the syntax is extraordinarily terse and it provides a new form of friction-free, plugin-less extensibility mechanism. Here’s a JavaScript example from Dusan’s post: CallStream("#container") (find, "div") (attr, "A", 1) (css, "color", "#fff") (logger); The interesting thing here is that the functions that are being passed as the first argument are arbitrary, they don’t need to be declared as plug-ins. Compare that with a rough jQuery equivalent that could look something like this: $.fn.logger = function () { /* ... */ } $("selector") .find("div") .attr("A", 1) .css("color", "#fff") .logger(); There is also the “each” method in jQuery that achieves something similar, but its syntax is a little more verbose. Of course, that this pattern can be expressed so easily in JavaScript owes everything to the extraordinary way functions are treated in that language, something Douglas Crockford called “the very best part of JavaScript”. One of the first things I thought while reading Dusan’s post was how I could adapt that to C#. After all, with Lambdas and delegates, C# also has its first-class functions. And sure enough, it works really really well. After about ten minutes, I was able to write this: CallStreamFactory.CallStream (p => Console.WriteLine("Yay!")) (Dump, DateTime.Now) (DumpFooAndBar, new { Foo = 42, Bar = "the answer" }) (p => Console.ReadKey()); Where the Dump function is: public static void Dump(object options) { Console.WriteLine(options.ToString()); } And DumpFooAndBar is: public static void DumpFooAndBar(dynamic options) { Console.WriteLine("Foo is {0} and bar is {1}.", options.Foo, options.Bar); } So how does this work? Well, it really is very simple. And not. Let’s say it’s not a lot of code, but if you’re like me you might need an Advil after that. First, I defined the signature of the CallStream method as follows: public delegate CallStream CallStream (Action<object> action, object options = null); The delegate define a call stream as something that takes an action (a function of the options) and an optional options object and that returns a delegate of its own type. Tricky, but that actually works, a delegate can return its own type. Then I wrote an implementation of that delegate that calls the action and returns itself: public static CallStream CallStream (Action<object> action, object options = null) { action(options); return CallStream; } Pretty nice, eh? Well, yes and no. What we are doing here is to execute a sequence of actions using an interesting novel syntax. But for this to be actually useful, you’d need to build a more specialized call stream factory that comes with some sort of context (like Dusan did in JavaScript). For example, you could write the following alternate delegate signature that takes a string and returns itself: public delegate StringCallStream StringCallStream(string message); And then write the following call stream (notice the currying): public static StringCallStream CreateDumpCallStream(string dumpPath) { StringCallStream str = null; var dump = File.AppendText(dumpPath); dump.AutoFlush = true; str = s => { dump.WriteLine(s); return str; }; return str; } (I know, I’m not closing that stream; sure; bad, bad Bertrand) Finally, here’s how you use it: CallStreamFactory.CreateDumpCallStream(@".\dump.txt") ("Wow, this really works.") (DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString()) ("And that is all."); Next step would be to combine this contextual implementation with the one that takes an action parameter and do some really fun stuff. I’m only scratching the surface here. This pattern could reveal itself to be nothing more than a gratuitous mind-bender or there could be applications that we hardly suspect at this point. In any case, it’s a fun new construct. Or is this nothing new? You tell me… Comments are open :)

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• HTML5 and Visual Studio 2010

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  All of us work with Visual Studio (or the free Visual Web Developer Express Edition) for developing web applications targeting ASP.NET / ASP.NET MVC or Silverlight etc.,  Over the years, Visual Studio has grown to a great extent.  From being a simple limited functionality tool in VS.NET 2002 to the multi-faceted, MEF driven Visual Studio 2010, it has come a long way.  And as much as Visual Studio supports rapid web development by generating HTML mark up, it also added intellisense for some of the HTML specifications that one has otherwise monotonously type every time.  Ex.- In Visual Studio 2010, one can just type the angular bracket “<” and then the first keyword “h” or “x” for html or xhtml respectively and then press tab twice and it would render the entire markup required for XHTML or HTML 1.0/1.1 strict/transitional and the fully qualified W3C URL. The same holds good for specifying HTML type declaration.  Now, the difference between HTML and XHTML has been discussed in detail already, though, if you are interested to know, you can read it from http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_html.asp But, the industry trend or the buzz around is HTML5.  With browsers like IE9 Beta, Google Chrome, Firefox 4 etc., supporting HTML5 standards big time, everyone wants to start developing HTML5 based websites. VS developers (like me) often get the question around when would VS start supporting HTML5.  VS 2010 was released last year and HTML5 is still specifications under development.  Clearly, with the timelines we started developing Visual Studio (way back in 2008), HTML5 specs were almost non-existent.  Even today, the HTML5 body recommends not to fully depend on the entire mark up set as they are still under development specs and might change in the future. However, with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 beta, there is quite a bit of support for HTML5 based web development.  In fact, one of my colleagues pointed out that SP1 beta’s major enhancement is its ability to support HTML5 tags and even add server mode to them. Lets look at the existing validation schema available in Visual Studio (Tools – Options – Validation) This is before installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta.  Clearly, the validation options are restricted to HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1 transitional and below. Also, lets consider using some of the new HTML5 input type elements.  (I found out this, just today from my friend, also an, ASP.NET team member) <input type=”email”> is one of the new input type elements according to the HTML5 specification.  Now, this works well if you type it as is  in Visual Studio and the page renders without any issue (since the default behaviour is, if there is an “undefined” type specified to input tag, it would fall back on the default mode, which is text. The moment you add <input type=”email” runat=”server” >, you get an error Naturally you don’t get intellisense support as well for these new tags.  Once you install Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta from here (it takes a while so you need to be patient for the installation to complete), you will start getting additional Validation templates for HTML5, as below:- Once you set this, you can start using HTML5 elements in your web page without getting errors/warnings.  Look at the screen shot below, for the new “video” tag which is showing up in intellisense (video is a part of the new HTML5 specifications)     note that, you still need to hook up the <!DOCTYPE html /> on the top manually as it doesn’t change automatically  (from the default XHTML 1.0 strict) when you create a new page. Also, the new input type tags in HTML5 are also supported One, can also use the <asp:TextBox type=”email” which would in turn generate the <input type=”email”> markup when the page is rendered.  In fact, as of SP1 beta, this is the only way to put the new input type tags with the runat=”server” attribute (otherwise you will get the parser error mentioned above.  This issue would be fixed by the final release of SP1 beta) Going further, there may be more support for having server tags for some of the common HTML5 elements, but this is work in progress currently. So, other than not having runat=”server” support for the new HTML5  input tags, you can pretty much build and target HTML5 websites with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta, today.  For those who are running Visual Studio 2008, you also have the “HTML5 intellisense for Visual Studio 2010 and 2008” available for download, from http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/d771cbc8-d60a-40b0-a1d8-f19fc393127d/ Note that, if you are running Visual Studio 2010, the recommended approach is to install the SP1 beta which would be the way forward for HTML5 support in Visual Studio. Of course, you need to test these on a browser supporting HTML5 such as IE9 Beta or Chrome or FireFox 4.  You can download IE9 Beta from here You can also follow the Visual Web Developer Team Blog for more updates on the stuff they are building. Cheers !!!

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• SQL SERVER – SmallDateTime and Precision – A Continuous Confusion

  - by pinaldave

  Some kinds of confusion never go away. Here is one of the ancient confusing things in SQL. The precision of the SmallDateTime is one concept that confuses a lot of people, proven by the many messages I receive everyday relating to this subject. Let me start with the question: What is the precision of the SMALLDATETIME datatypes? What is your answer? Write it down on your notepad. Now if you do not want to continue reading the blog post, head to my previous blog post over here: SQL SERVER – Precision of SMALLDATETIME. A Social Media Question Since the increase of social media conversations, I noticed that the amount of the comments I receive on this blog is a bit staggering. I receive lots of questions on facebook, twitter or Google+. One of the very interesting questions yesterday was asked on Facebook by Raghavendra. I am re-organizing his script and asking all of the questions he has asked me. Let us see if we could help him with his question: CREATE TABLE #temp (name VARCHAR(100),registered smalldatetime) GO DECLARE @test smalldatetime SET @test=GETDATE() INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value1',@test) INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value2',@test) GO SELECT * FROM #temp ORDER BY registered DESC GO DROP TABLE #temp GO Now when the above script is ran, we will get the following result: Well, the expectation of the query was to have the following result. The row which was inserted last was expected to return as first row in result set as the ORDER BY descending. Side note: Because the requirement is to get the latest data, we can’t use any  column other than smalldatetime column in order by. If we use name column in the order by, we will get an incorrect result as it can be any name. My Initial Reaction My initial reaction was as follows: 1) DataType DateTime2: If file precision of the column is expected from the column which store date and time, it should not be smalldatetime. The precision of the column smalldatetime is One Minute (Read Here) for finer precision use DateTime or DateTime2 data type. Here is the code which includes above suggestion: CREATE TABLE #temp (name VARCHAR(100), registered datetime2) GO DECLARE @test datetime2 SET @test=GETDATE() INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value1',@test) INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value2',@test) GO SELECT * FROM #temp ORDER BY registered DESC GO DROP TABLE #temp GO 2) Tie Breaker Identity: There are always possibilities that two rows were inserted at the same time. In that case, you may need a tie breaker. If you have an increasing identity column, you can use that as a tie breaker as well. CREATE TABLE #temp (ID INT IDENTITY(1,1), name VARCHAR(100),registered datetime2) GO DECLARE @test datetime2 SET @test=GETDATE() INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value1',@test) INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value2',@test) GO SELECT * FROM #temp ORDER BY ID DESC GO DROP TABLE #temp GO Those two were the quick suggestions I provided. It is not necessary that you should use both advices. It is possible that one can use only DATETIME datatype or Identity column can have datatype of BIGINT or have another tie breaker. An Alternate NO Solution In the facebook thread this was also discussed as one of the solutions: CREATE TABLE #temp (name VARCHAR(100),registered smalldatetime) GO DECLARE @test smalldatetime SET @test=GETDATE() INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value1',@test) INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value2',@test) GO SELECT name, registered, ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY registered DESC) AS "Row Number" FROM #temp ORDER BY 3 DESC GO DROP TABLE #temp GO However, I believe it is not the solution and can be further misleading if used in a production server. Here is the example of why it is not a good solution: CREATE TABLE #temp (name VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,registered smalldatetime) GO DECLARE @test smalldatetime SET @test=GETDATE() INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value1',@test) INSERT INTO #temp VALUES ('Value2',@test) GO -- Before Index SELECT name, registered, ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY registered DESC) AS "Row Number" FROM #temp ORDER BY 3 DESC GO -- Create Index ALTER TABLE #temp ADD CONSTRAINT [PK_#temp] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (name DESC) GO -- After Index SELECT name, registered, ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY registered DESC) AS "Row Number" FROM #temp ORDER BY 3 DESC GO DROP TABLE #temp GO Now let us examine the resultset. You will notice that an index which is created on the base table which is (indeed) schema change the table but can affect the resultset. As you can see, an index can change the resultset, so this method is not yet perfect to get the latest inserted resultset. No Schema Change Requirement After giving these two suggestions, I was waiting for the feedback of the asker. However, the requirement of the asker was there can’t be any schema change because the application was used by many other applications. I validated again, and of course, the requirement is no schema change at all. No addition of the column of change of datatypes of any other columns. There is no further help as well. This is indeed an interesting question. I personally can’t think of any solution which I could provide him given the requirement of no schema change. Can you think of any other solution to this? Need of Database Designer This question once again brings up another ancient question:  “Do we need a database designer?” I often come across databases which are facing major performance problems or have redundant data. Normalization is often ignored when a database is built fast under a very tight deadline. Often I come across a database which has table with unnecessary columns and performance problems. While working as Developer Lead in my earlier jobs, I have seen developers adding columns to tables without anybody’s consent and retrieving them as SELECT *.  There is a lot to discuss on this subject in detail, but for now, let’s discuss the question first. Do you have any suggestions for the above question? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: CodeProject, Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL DateTime, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• BizTalk 2009 - Installing BizTalk Server 2009 on XP for Development

  - by StuartBrierley

  At my previous employer, when developing for BizTalk Server 2004 using Visual Studio 2003, we made use of separate development and deployment environments; developing in Visual Studio on our client PCs and then deploying to a seperate shared BizTalk 2004 Server from there.  This server was part of a multi-server Standard BizTalk environment comprising of separate BizTalk Server 2004 and SQL Server 2000 servers.  This environment was implemented a number of years ago by an outside consulting company, and while it worked it did occasionally cause contention issues with three developers deploying to the same server to carry out unit testing! Now that I am making the design and implementation decisions about the environment that BizTalk will be developed in and deployed to, I have chosen to create a single "server" installation on my development PC, installling SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and BizTalk Server 2009 on a single system.  The client PC in use is actually a MacBook Pro running Windows XP; not the most powerful of systems for high volume processing but it should be powerful enough to allow development and initial unit testing to take place. I did not need to, and so chose not to, install all of the components detailed in the Microsoft guide for installing BizTalk 2009 on Windows XP but I did follow the basics of the procedures detailed within.  Outlined below are the highlights of this process and any details of what choices I made.   Install IIS I had previsouly installed Windows XP, including all current service packs and critical updates.  At the time of installation this included Service Pack 3, the .Net Framework 3.5 and MS Windows Installer 3.1.  Having a running XP system, my first step was to install IIS - this is quite straightforward and posed no difficulties. Install Visual Studio 2008 The next step for me was to install Visual Studio 2008.  Making sure to select a custom installation is crucial at this point, as you need to make sure that you deselect SQL Server 2005 Express Edition as it can cause the BizTalk installation to fail.  The installation guide suggests that you only select Visual C# when selecting features to install, but  I decided that due to some legacy systems I have code for that I would also select the VB and ASP options. Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Following the completion of the installation of Visual Studio itself you should then install the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition The next step before intalling BizTalk Server 2009 itself is to install SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition. On the feature selection screen make sure that you select the follwoing options: Database Engine Services SQL Server Replication Full-Text Search Analysis Services Reporting Services Business Intelligence Development Studio Client Tools Connectivity Integration Services Management Tools Basic and Complete Use the default instance and the same accounts for all SQL server instances - in my case I used the Network Service and Local Service accounts for the two sets of accounts. On the database engine configuration screen I selected windows authentication and added the current user, adding the same user again on the Analysis services Configuration screen.  All other screens were left on the default settings. The SQL Server 2008 installation also included the installation of hotfix for XP KB942288-v3, the Windows Installer 4.5 Redistributable. System Configuration At this stage I took a moment to disable the SQL Server shared memory protocol and enable the Named Pipes and TCP/IP protocols.  These can be found in the SQL Server Configuration Manager > SQL Server Network Configuration > Protocols for MSSQLServer.  I also made sure that the DTC settings were configured correctley.   BizTalk Server 2009 The penultimate step is to install BizTalk Server 2009 Standard Edition. I had previsouly downloaded the redistributable prerequisites as a CAB file so was able to make use of this when carrying out the installation. When selecting which components to install I selected: Server Runtime BizTalk EDI/AS2 Runtime WCF Adapter Runtime Portal Components Administrative Tools WFC Administartion Tools Developer Tools and SDK, Enterprise SSO Administration Module Enterprise SSO Master Secret Server Business Rules Components BAM Alert Provider BAM Client BAM Eventing Once installation has completed clear the launch BizTalk Server Configuration check box and select finish. Verify the Installation Before configuring BizTalk Server it is a good idea to check that BizTalk Server 2009 is installed and that SQL Server 2008 has started correctly.  The easiest way to verify the BizTalk installation is check the Programs and Features in Control panel.  Check that SQL is started by looking in the SQL Server Configuration Manager. Configure BizTalk Server 2009 Finally we are ready to configure BizTalk Server 2009.  To start this I opted for a custom configuration that allowed me to choose in more detail the settings to be used. For all databases I selected the local server and default database names. For all Accounts I used a local account that had been created specifically for the BizTalk Services. For all windows groups I allowed the configuration wizard to create the default local groups. The configuration wizard then ran:   Upon completion you will be presented with a screen detailing the success or failure of the configuration.  If your configuration failed you will need to sort out the issues and try again (it is possible to save the configuration settings for later use if you want too - except passwords of course!).  If you see lots of nice green ticks - congratulations BizTalk Server 2009 on XP is now installed and configured ready for development.

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• Help Prevent Carpal Tunnel Problems with Workrave

  - by Matthew Guay

  Whether for work or leisure, many of us spend entirely too much time on the computer everyday.  This puts us at risk of having or aggravating Carpal Tunnel problems, but thanks to Workrave you can help to divert these problems. Workrave helps Carpal Tunnel problems by reminding you to get away from your computer periodically.  Breaking up your computer time with movement can help alleviate many computer and office related health problems.  Workrave helps by reminding you to take short pauses after several minutes of computer use, and longer breaks after continued use.  You can also use it to keep from using the computer for too much You time in a day.  Since you can change the settings to suit you, this can be a great way to make sure you’re getting the breaks you need. Install Workrave on Windows If you’re using Workrave on Windows, download (link below) and install it with the default settings. One installation setting you may wish to change is the startup.  By default Workrave will run automatically when you start your computer; if you don’t want this, you can simply uncheck the box and proceed with the installation. Once setup is finished, you can run Workrave directly from the installer. Or you can open it from your start menu by entering “workrave” in the search box. Install Workrave in Ubuntu If you wish to use it in Ubuntu, you can install it directly from the Ubuntu Software Center.  Click the Applications menu, and select Ubuntu Software Center. Enter “workrave” into the search box in the top right corner of the Software Center, and it will automatically find it.  Click the arrow to proceed to Workrave’s page. This will give you information about Workrave; simply click Install to install Workrave on your system. Enter your password when prompted. Workrave will automatically download and install.   When finished, you can find Workrave in your Applications menu under Universal Access. Using Workrave Workrave by default shows a small counter on your desktop, showing the length of time until your next Micro break (30 second break), Rest break (10 minute break), and max amount of computer usage for the day. When it’s time for a micro break, Workrave will popup a reminder on your desktop. If you continue working, it will disappear at the end of the timer.  If you stop, it will start a micro-break which will freeze most on-screen activities until the timer is over.  You can click Skip or Postpone if you do not want to take a break right then. After an hour of work, Workrave will give you a 10 minute rest break.  During this it will show you some exercises that can help eliminate eyestrain, muscle tension, and other problems from prolonged computer usage.  You can click through the exercises, or can skip or postpone the break if you wish.   Preferences You can change your Workrave preferences by right-clicking on its icon in your system tray and selecting Preferences. Here you can customize the time between your breaks, and the length of your breaks.  You can also change your daily computer usage limit, and can even turn off the postpone and skip buttons on notifications if you want to make sure you follow Workrave and take your rests! From the context menu, you can also choose Statistics.  This gives you an overview of how many breaks, prompts, and more were shown on a given day.  It also shows a total Overdue time, which is the total length of the breaks you skipped or postponed.  You can view your Workrave history as well by simply selecting a date on the calendar.   Additionally, the Activity tab in the Statics pane shows more info about your computer usage, including total mouse movement, mouse button clicks, and keystrokes. Conclusion Whether you’re suffering with Carpal Tunnel or trying to prevent it, Workrave is a great solution to help remind you to get away from your computer periodically and rest.  Of course, since you can simply postpone or skip the prompts, you’ve still got to make an effort to help your own health.  But it does give you a great way to remind yourself to get away from the computer, and especially for geeks, this may be something that we really need! Download Workrave Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Switch to the Dvorak Keyboard Layout in XPAccess Your MySQL Server Remotely Over SSHHow to Secure Gaim Instant Messenger traffic at Work with SecureCRT and SSHConnect to VMware Server Console Over SSHDisclaimers TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar Explore Google Public Data Visually The Ultimate Excel Cheatsheet Convert the Quick Launch Bar into a Super Application Launcher Automate Tasks in Linux with Crontab Discover New Bundled Feeds in Google Reader

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• SQL Server devs–what source control system do you use, if any? (answer and maybe win free stuff)

  - by jamiet

  Recently I noticed a tweet from notable SQL Server author and community dude-at-large Steve Jones in which he asked how many SQL Server developers were putting their SQL Server source code (i.e. DDL) under source control (I’m paraphrasing because I can’t remember the exact tweet and Twitter’s search functionality is useless). The question surprised me slightly as I thought a more pertinent question would be “how many SQL Server developers are not using source control?” because I have been doing just that for many years now and I simply assumed that use of source control is a given in this day and age. Then I started thinking about it. “Perhaps I’m wrong” I pondered, “perhaps the SQL Server folks that do use source control in their day-to-day jobs are in the minority”. So, dear reader, I’m interested to know a little bit more about your use of source control. Are you putting your SQL Server code into a source control system? If so, what source control server software (e.g. TFS, Git, SVN, Mercurial, SourceSafe, Perforce) are you using? What source control client software are you using (e.g. TFS Team Explorer, Tortoise, Red Gate SQL Source Control, Red Gate SQL Connect, Git Bash, etc…)? Why did you make those particular software choices? Any interesting anecdotes to share in regard to your use of source control and SQL Server? To encourage you to contribute I have five pairs of licenses for Red Gate SQL Source Control and Red Gate SQL Connect to give away to what I consider to be the five best replies (“best” is totally subjective of course but this is my blog so my decision is final ), if you want to be considered don’t forget to leave contact details; email address, Twitter handle or similar will do. To start you off and to perhaps get the brain cells whirring, here are my answers to the questions above: Are you putting your SQL Server code into a source control system? As I think I’ve already said…yes. Always. If so, what source control server software (e.g. TFS, Git, SVN, Mercurial, SourceSafe, Perforce) are you using? I move around a lot between many clients so it changes on a fairly regular basis; my current client uses Team Foundation Server (aka TFS) and as part of a separate project is trialing the use of Team Foundation Service. I have used SVN extensively in the past which I am a fan of (I generally prefer it to TFS) and am trying to get my head around Git by using it for ObjectStorageHelper. What source control client software are you using (e.g. TFS Team Explorer, Tortoise, Red Gate SQL Source Control, Red Gate SQL Connect, Git Bash, etc…)? On my current project, Team Explorer. In the past I have used Tortoise to connect to SVN. Why did you make those particular software choices? I generally use whatever the client uses and given that I work with SQL Server I find that the majority of my clients use TFS, I guess simply because they are Microsoft development shops. Any interesting anecdotes to share in regard to your use of source control and SQL Server? Not an anecdote as such but I am going to share some frustrations about TFS. In many ways TFS is a great product because it integrates many separate functions (source control, work item tracking, build agents) into one whole and I’m firmly of the opinion that that is a good thing if for no reason other than being able to associate your check-ins with a work-item. However, like many people there are aspects to TFS source control that annoy me day-in, day-out. Chief among them has to be the fact that it uses a file’s read-only property to determine if a file should be checked-out or not and, if it determines that it should, it will happily do that check-out on your behalf without you even asking it to. I didn’t realise how ridiculous this was until I first used SVN about three years ago – with SVN you make any changes you wish and then use your source control client to determine which files have changed and thus be checked-in; the notion of “check-out” doesn’t even exist. That sounds like a small thing but you don’t realise how liberating it is until you actually start working that way. Hoping to hear some more anecdotes and opinions in the comments. Remember….free software is up for grabs! @jamiet 

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• Allowing Access to HttpContext in WCF REST Services

  - by Rick Strahl

  If you’re building WCF REST Services you may find that WCF’s OperationContext, which provides some amount of access to Http headers on inbound and outbound messages, is pretty limited in that it doesn’t provide access to everything and sometimes in a not so convenient manner. For example accessing query string parameters explicitly is pretty painful: [OperationContract] [WebGet] public string HelloWorld() { var properties = OperationContext.Current.IncomingMessageProperties; var property = properties[HttpRequestMessageProperty.Name] as HttpRequestMessageProperty; string queryString = property.QueryString; var name = StringUtils.GetUrlEncodedKey(queryString,"Name"); return "Hello World " + name; } And that doesn’t account for the logic in GetUrlEncodedKey to retrieve the querystring value. It’s a heck of a lot easier to just do this: [OperationContract] [WebGet] public string HelloWorld() { var name = HttpContext.Current.Request.QueryString["Name"] ?? string.Empty; return "Hello World " + name; } Ok, so if you follow the REST guidelines for WCF REST you shouldn’t have to rely on reading query string parameters manually but instead rely on routing logic, but you know what: WCF REST is a PITA anyway and anything to make things a little easier is welcome. To enable the second scenario there are a couple of steps that you have to take on your service implementation and the configuration file. Add aspNetCompatibiltyEnabled in web.config Fist you need to configure the hosting environment to support ASP.NET when running WCF Service requests. This ensures that the ASP.NET pipeline is fired up and configured for every incoming request. <system.serviceModel>     <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" /> </system.serviceModel> Markup your Service Implementation with AspNetCompatibilityRequirements Attribute Next you have to mark up the Service Implementation – not the contract if you’re using a separate interface!!! – with the AspNetCompatibilityRequirements attribute: [ServiceContract(Namespace = "RateTestService")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class RestRateTestProxyService Typically you’ll want to use Allowed as the preferred option. The other options are NotAllowed and Required. Allowed will let the service run if the web.config attribute is not set. Required has to have it set. All these settings determine whether an ASP.NET host AppDomain is used for requests. Once Allowed or Required has been set on the implemented class you can make use of the ASP.NET HttpContext object. When I allow for ASP.NET compatibility in my WCF services I typically add a property that exposes the Context and Request objects a little more conveniently: public HttpContext Context { get { return HttpContext.Current; } } public HttpRequest Request { get { return HttpContext.Current.Request; } } While you can also access the Response object and write raw data to it and manipulate headers THAT is probably not such a good idea as both your code and WCF will end up writing into the output stream. However it might be useful in some situations where you need to take over output generation completely and return something completely custom. Remember though that WCF REST DOES actually support that as well with Stream responses that essentially allow you to return any kind of data to the client so using Response should really never be necessary. Should you or shouldn’t you? WCF purists will tell you never to muck with the platform specific features or the underlying protocol, and if you can avoid it you definitely should avoid it. Querystring management in particular can be handled largely with Url Routing, but there are exceptions of course. Try to use what WCF natively provides – if possible as it makes the code more portable. For example, if you do enable ASP.NET Compatibility you won’t be able to self host a WCF REST service. At the same time realize that especially in WCF REST there are number of big holes or access to some features are a royal pain and so it’s not unreasonable to access the HttpContext directly especially if it’s only for read-only access. Since everything in REST works of URLS and the HTTP protocol more control and easier access to HTTP features is a key requirement to building flexible services. It looks like vNext of the WCF REST stuff will feature many improvements along these lines with much deeper native HTTP support that is often so useful in REST applications along with much more extensibility that allows for customization of the inputs and outputs as data goes through the request pipeline. I’m looking forward to this stuff as WCF REST as it exists today still is a royal pain (in fact I’m struggling with a mysterious version conflict/crashing error on my machine that I have not been able to resolve – grrrr…).© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  AJAX  WCF  

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• Playing with aspx page cycle using JustMock

  - by mehfuzh

  In this post , I will cover a test code that will mock the various elements needed to complete a HTTP page request and  assert the expected page cycle steps. To begin, i have a simple enumeration that has my predefined page steps: public enum PageStep {     PreInit,     Load,     PreRender,     UnLoad } Once doing so, i  first created the page object [not mocking]. Page page = new Page(); Here, our target is to fire up the page process through ProcessRequest call, now if we take a look inside the method with reflector.net,  the call trace will go like : ProcessRequest –> ProcessRequestWithNoAssert –> SetInstrinsics –> Finallly ProcessRequest. Inside SetInstrinsics ,  it requires calls from HttpRequest, HttpResponse and HttpBrowserCababilities. Using this clue at hand, we can easily know the classes / calls  we need to mock in order to get through the expected call. Accordingly, for  HttpBrowserCapabilities our required mock code will look like: var browser = Mock.Create<HttpBrowserCapabilities>(); // Arrange Mock.Arrange(() => browser.PreferredRenderingMime).Returns("text/html"); Mock.Arrange(() => browser.PreferredResponseEncoding).Returns("UTF-8"); Mock.Arrange(() => browser.PreferredRequestEncoding).Returns("UTF-8"); Now, HttpBrowserCapabilities is get though [Instance]HttpRequest.Browser. Therefore, we create the HttpRequest mock: var request = Mock.Create<HttpRequest>(); Then , add the required get call : Mock.Arrange(() => request.Browser).Returns(browser); As, [instance]Browser.PerferrredResponseEncoding and [instance]Browser.PreferredResponseEncoding  are also set to the request object and to make that they are set properly, we can add the following lines as well [not required though]. bool requestContentEncodingSet = false; Mock.ArrangeSet(() => request.ContentEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("UTF-8")).DoInstead(() =>  requestContentEncodingSet = true); Similarly, for response we can write:  var response = Mock.Create<HttpResponse>();    bool responseContentEncodingSet = false;  Mock.ArrangeSet(() => response.ContentEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("UTF-8")).DoInstead(() => responseContentEncodingSet = true); Finally , I created a mock of HttpContext and set the Request and Response properties that will returns the mocked version. var context = Mock.Create<HttpContext>();   Mock.Arrange(() => context.Request).Returns(request); Mock.Arrange(() => context.Response).Returns(response); As, Page internally calls RenderControl method , we just need to replace that with our one and optionally we can check if  invoked properly: bool rendered = false; Mock.Arrange(() => page.RenderControl(Arg.Any<HtmlTextWriter>())).DoInstead(() => rendered = true); That’s  it, the rest of the code is simple,  where  i asserted the page cycle with the PageSteps that i defined earlier: var pageSteps = new Queue<PageStep>();   page.PreInit +=delegate { pageSteps.Enqueue(PageStep.PreInit); }; page.Load += delegate { pageSteps.Enqueue(PageStep.Load); }; page.PreRender += delegate { pageSteps.Enqueue(PageStep.PreRender);}; page.Unload +=delegate { pageSteps.Enqueue(PageStep.UnLoad);};   page.ProcessRequest(context);   Assert.True(requestContentEncodingSet); Assert.True(responseContentEncodingSet); Assert.True(rendered);   Assert.Equal(pageSteps.Dequeue(), PageStep.PreInit); Assert.Equal(pageSteps.Dequeue(), PageStep.Load); Assert.Equal(pageSteps.Dequeue(), PageStep.PreRender); Assert.Equal(pageSteps.Dequeue(), PageStep.UnLoad);   Mock.Assert(request); Mock.Assert(response); You can get the test class shown in this post here to give a try by yourself with of course JustMock :-). Enjoy!!

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• [Windows 8] Application bar popup button

  - by Benjamin Roux

  Here is a small control to create an application bar button which will display a content in a popup when the button is clicked. Visually it gives this So how to create this? First you have to use the AppBarPopupButton control below.   namespace Indeed.Controls { public class AppBarPopupButton : Button { public FrameworkElement PopupContent { get { return (FrameworkElement)GetValue(PopupContentProperty); } set { SetValue(PopupContentProperty, value); } } public static readonly DependencyProperty PopupContentProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("PopupContent", typeof(FrameworkElement), typeof(AppBarPopupButton), new PropertyMetadata(null, (o, e) => (o as AppBarPopupButton).CreatePopup())); private Popup popup; private SerialDisposable sizeChanged = new SerialDisposable(); protected override void OnTapped(Windows.UI.Xaml.Input.TappedRoutedEventArgs e) { base.OnTapped(e); if (popup != null) { var transform = this.TransformToVisual(Window.Current.Content); var offset = transform.TransformPoint(default(Point)); sizeChanged.Disposable = PopupContent.ObserveSizeChanged().Do(_ => popup.VerticalOffset = offset.Y - (PopupContent.ActualHeight + 20)).Subscribe(); popup.HorizontalOffset = offset.X + 24; popup.DataContext = this.DataContext; popup.IsOpen = true; } } private void CreatePopup() { popup = new Popup { IsLightDismissEnabled = true }; popup.Closed += (o, e) => this.GetParentOfType<AppBar>().IsOpen = false; popup.ChildTransitions = new Windows.UI.Xaml.Media.Animation.TransitionCollection(); popup.ChildTransitions.Add(new Windows.UI.Xaml.Media.Animation.PopupThemeTransition()); var container = new Grid(); container.Children.Add(PopupContent); popup.Child = container; } } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The ObserveSizeChanged method is just an extension method which observe the SizeChanged event (using Reactive Extensions - Rx-Metro package in Nuget). If you’re not familiar with Rx, you can replace this line (and the SerialDisposable stuff) by a simple subscription to the SizeChanged event (using +=) but don’t forget to unsubscribe to it ! public static IObservable<Unit> ObserveSizeChanged(this FrameworkElement element) { return Observable.FromEventPattern<SizeChangedEventHandler, SizeChangedEventArgs>( o => element.SizeChanged += o, o => element.SizeChanged -= o) .Select(_ => Unit.Default); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The GetParentOfType extension method just retrieve the first parent of type (it’s a common extension method that every Windows 8 developer should have created !). You can of course tweak to control (for example if you want to center the content to the button or anything else) to fit your needs. How to use this control? It’s very simple, in an AppBar control just add it and define the PopupContent property. <ic:AppBarPopupButton Style="{StaticResource RefreshAppBarButtonStyle}" HorizontalAlignment="Left"> <ic:AppBarPopupButton.PopupContent> <Grid> [...] </Grid> </ic:AppBarPopupButton.PopupContent> </ic:AppBarPopupButton> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } When the button is clicked the popup is displayed. When the popup is closed, the app bar is closed too. I hope this will help you !

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