Search Results

Search found 24194 results on 968 pages for 'recursive call'.

Page 318/968 | < Previous Page | 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325  | Next Page >

• Smart Help with UPK

  - by [email protected]

  A short lesson on how awesome Smart Help is. In Oracle UPK speak, there are targeted and non-targeted applications. Targeted applications are Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, SAP and a few others. Non-targeted applications are either custom built or other third party off the shelf applications. For most targeted applications you'll see better object recognition (during recording) and also Help Integration for that application. Help integration means that someone technical modifies the help link in your application to call up the UPK content that has been created. If you have seen this presented before, this is usually where the term context sensitive help is mentioned and the Do It mode shows off. The fact that UPK builds context sensitive help for its targeted applications automatically is awesome enough, but there is a whole new world out there and it's called "custom and\or third party apps." For the purposes of Smart Help and this discussion, I'm talking about the browser based applications. How does UPK support these apps? It used to be that you had to have your vendor try to modify the Help link to point to UPK or if your company had control over the applications configuration menus, then you get someone on your team to modify this for you. But as you start to use UPK for more than one, two or three applications, the administration of this starts to become daunting. Multiple administrators, multiple player packages, multiple call points, multiple break points, help doesn't always work the same way for every application (picture the black white infomercial with an IT person trying to configure a bunch of wires or something funny like that). Introducing Smart Help! (in color of course, new IT person, probably wearing a blue shirt and smiling). Smart help eliminates the need to configure multiple browser help integration points, and adds a icon to the users browser itself. You're using your browser to read this now correct? Look up at the icons on your browser, you have the home link icon, print icon, maybe an RSS feed icon. Smart Help is icon that gets added to the users browser just like the others. When you click it, it first recognizes which application you're in and then finds the UPK created material for you and returns the best possible match, for (hold on to your seat now) both targeted and non-targeted applications (browser based applications). But wait, there's more. It does this automatically! You don't have to do anything! All you have to do is record content, UPK and Smart Help do the rest! This technology is not new. There are customers out there today that use this for as many as six applications! The real hero here is SMART MATCH. Smart match is the technology that's used to determine which application you're in and where you are when you click on Smart Help. We'll save that for a one-on-one conversation. Like most other awesome features of UPK, it ships with the product. All you have to do is turn it on. To learn more about Smart Help, Smart Match, Targeted and Non-Targeted applications, contact your UPK Sales Consultant or me directly at [email protected]

  Read the article

• What I don&rsquo;t like about WIF&rsquo;s Claims-based Authorization

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  In my last post I wrote about what I like about WIF’s proposed approach to authorization – I also said that I definitely would build upon that infrastructure for my own systems. But implementing such a system is a little harder as it could be. Here’s why (and that’s purely my perspective): First of all WIF’s authorization comes in two “modes” Per-request authorization. When an ASP.NET/WCF request comes in, the registered authorization manager gets called. For SOAP the SOAP action gets passed in. For HTTP requests (ASP.NET, WCF REST) the URL and verb. Imperative authorization This happens when you explicitly call the claims authorization API from within your code. There you have full control over the values for action and resource. In ASP.NET per-request authorization is optional (depends on if you have added the ClaimsAuthorizationHttpModule). In WCF you always get the per-request checks as soon as you register the authorization manager in configuration. I personally prefer the imperative authorization because first of all I don’t believe in URL based authorization. Especially in the times of MVC and routing tables, URLs can be easily changed – but then you also have to adjust your authorization logic every time. Also – you typically need more knowledge than a simple “if user x is allowed to invoke operation x”. One problem I have is, both the per-request calls as well as the standard WIF imperative authorization APIs wrap actions and resources in the same claim type. This makes it hard to distinguish between the two authorization modes in your authorization manager. But you typically need that feature to structure your authorization policy evaluation in a clean way. The second problem (which is somehow related to the first one) is the standard API for interacting with the claims authorization manager. The API comes as an attribute (ClaimsPrincipalPermissionAttribute) as well as a class to use programmatically (ClaimsPrincipalPermission). Both only allow to pass in simple strings (which results in the wrapping with standard claim types mentioned earlier). Both throw a SecurityException when the check fails. The attribute is a code access permission attribute (like PrincipalPermission). That means it will always be invoked regardless how you call the code. This may be exactly what you want, or not. In a unit testing situation (like an MVC controller) you typically want to test the logic in the function – not the security check. The good news is, the WIF API is flexible enough that you can build your own infrastructure around their core. For my own projects I implemented the following extensions: A way to invoke the registered claims authorization manager with more overloads, e.g. with different claim types or a complete AuthorizationContext. A new CAS attribute (with the same calling semantics as the built-in one) with custom claim types. A MVC authorization attribute with custom claim types. A way to use branching – as opposed to catching a SecurityException. I will post the code for these various extensions here – so stay tuned.

  Read the article

• Error Handling Examples(C#)

  “The purpose of reviewing the Error Handling code is to assure that the application fails safely under all possible error conditions, expected and unexpected. No sensitive information is presented to the user when an error occurs.” (OWASP, 2011) No Error Handling The absence of error handling is still a form of error handling. Based on the code in Figure 1, if an error occurred and was not handled within either the ReadXml or BuildRequest methods the error would bubble up to the Search method. Since this method does not handle any acceptations the error will then bubble up the stack trace. If this continues and the error is not handled within the application then the environment in which the application is running will notify the user running the application that an error occurred based on what type of application. Figure 1: No Error Handling public DataSet Search(string searchTerm, int resultCount) { DataSet dt = new DataSet(); dt.ReadXml(BuildRequest(searchTerm, resultCount)); return dt; } Generic Error Handling One simple way to add error handling is to catch all errors by default. If you examine the code in Figure 2, you will see a try-catch block. On April 6th 2010 Louis Lazaris clearly describes a Try Catch statement by defining both the Try and Catch aspects of the statement. “The try portion is where you would put any code that might throw an error. In other words, all significant code should go in the try section. The catch section will also hold code, but that section is not vital to the running of the application. So, if you removed the try-catch statement altogether, the section of code inside the try part would still be the same, but all the code inside the catch would be removed.” (Lazaris, 2010) He also states that all errors that occur in the try section cause it to stops the execution of the try section and redirects all execution to the catch section. The catch section receives an object containing information about the error that occurred so that they system can gracefully handle the error properly. When errors occur they commonly log them in some form. This form could be an email, database entry, web service call, log file, or just an error massage displayed to the user.  Depending on the error sometimes applications can recover, while others force an application to close. Figure 2: Generic Error Handling public DataSet Search(string searchTerm, int resultCount) { DataSet dt = new DataSet(); try { dt.ReadXml(BuildRequest(searchTerm, resultCount)); } catch (Exception ex) { // Handle all Exceptions } return dt; } Error Specific Error Handling Like the Generic Error Handling, Error Specific error handling allows for the catching of specific known errors that may occur. For example wrapping a try catch statement around a soap web service call would allow the application to handle any error that was generated by the soap web service. Now, if the systems wanted to send a message to the web service provider every time a soap error occurred but did not want to notify them if any other type of error occurred like a network time out issue. This would be varying tedious to accomplish using the General Error Handling methodology. This brings us to the use case for using the Error Specific error handling methodology.  The Error Specific Error handling methodology allows for the TryCatch statement to catch various types of errors depending on the type of error that occurred. In Figure 3, the code attempts to handle DataException differently compared to how it potentially handles all other errors. This allows for specific error handling for each type of known error, and still allows for error handling of any unknown error that my occur during the execution of the TryCatch statement. Figure 5: Error Specific Error Handling public DataSet Search(string searchTerm, int resultCount) { DataSet dt = new DataSet(); try { dt.ReadXml(BuildRequest(searchTerm, resultCount)); } catch (TimeoutException ex) { // Handle Timeout TimeoutException Only } catch (Exception) { // Handle all Exceptions } return dt; }

  Read the article

• Collaborate10 &ndash; THEconference

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  After spending a few days in Mandalay Bay's THEHotel, I guess I now call everything THE... Seriously, they even tag their toilet paper with THEtp... I guess the brand builders in Vegas thought that once you are on to something you keep on doing it, and granted it is a nice hotel with nice rooms. THEanalytics Most of my collab10 experience was in a room called Reef C, where the BIWA bootcamp was held. Two solid days of BI, Warehousing and Analytics organized by the BIWA SIG at IOUG. Didn't get to see all sessions, but what struck me was the high interest in Analytics. Marty Gubar's OLAP session was full and he did some very nice things with the OLAP option. The cool bit was that he actually gets all the advanced calculations in OLAP to show up in OBI EE without any effort. It was nice to see that the idea from OWB where you generate an RPD is now also in AWM. I think it makes life so much simpler to generate these RPD's from your data model. Even if the end RPD needs some tweaking, it is all a lot less effort to get something going. You can see this stuff for yourself in this demo (click here). OBI EE uses just SQL to get to the calculations, and so, if you prefer APEX, you can build you application there and get the same nice calculations in an APEX application. Marty also showed the Simba MDX driver used with Excel. I guess we should call that THEcoolone... and it is very slick and wonderfully useful for all of you who actually know Excel. The nice thing is that you leverage pure Excel for all operations (no plug-ins). That means no new tools to learn, no new controls, all just pure Excel. THEdatabasemachine Got some very good questions in my "what makes Exadata fast" session and overall, the interest in Exadata is overwhelming. One of the things that I did try to do in my session is to get people to think in new patterns rather than in patterns based on Oracle 9i running on some random hardware configuration. We talked a little bit about the often over-indexing and how everyone has to unlearn all of that on Exadata. The main thing however is that everyone needs to get used to the shear size of some of the components in a Database machine V2. 5TB of flash cache is a lot of very fast data storage, half a TB of memory gets quite interesting as well. So what I did there was really focus on some of the content in these earlier posts on Upward ILM and In-Memory processing. In short, I do believe the these newer media point out a trend. In-memory and other fast media will get cheaper and will see more use. Some of that we do automatically by adding new functionality, but in some cases I think the end user of the system needs to start thinking about how to leverage all this new hardware. I think most people got very excited about these new capabilities and opportunities. THEcoolkids One of the cool things about the BIWA track was the hand-on track. Very cool to see big crowds for both OLAP and OWB hands-on. Also quite nice to see that the folks at RittmanMead spent so much time on preparing for that session. While all of them put down cool stuff, none was more cool that seeing Data Mining on an Apple iPAD... it all just looks great on an iPAD! Very disappointing to see that Mark Rittman still wasn't showing OWB on his iPAD ;-) THEend All in all this was a great set of sessions in the BIWA track. Lots of value to our guests (we hope) and we hope they all come again next year!

  Read the article

• Windows Phone appointment task

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dvroegop/archive/2014/08/10/windows-phone-appointment-task.aspxI am currently working on a new version of my AgeInDays app for Windows Phone. This app calculates how old you are in days (or weeks, depending on your preferences). The inspiration for this app came from my father, who once told me he proposed to my mother when she was 1000 weeks old. That left me wondering: how old in weeks or days am I? And being the geek I am, I wrote an app for it. If you have a Windows Phone, you can find it at http://www.windowsphone.com/en-in/store/app/age-in-days/7ed03603-0e00-4214-ad04-ce56773e5dab A new version of the app was published quite quickly, adding the possibility to mark a date in your agenda when you would have reached a certain age. Of course the logic behind this if extremely simple. Just take a DateTime, populate it with the given date from the DatePicker, then call AddDays(numDays) and voila, you have the date. Now all I had to do was implement a way to store this in the users calendar so he would get a reminder when that date occurred. Luckily, the Windows Phone SDK makes that extremely simple: public void PublishTask(DateTime occuranceDate, string message) { var task = new SaveAppointmentTask() { StartTime = occuranceDate, EndTime = occuranceDate, Subject = message, Location = string.Empty, IsAllDayEvent = true, Reminder = Reminder.None, AppointmentStatus = AppointmentStatus.Free };   task.Show(); }  And that's it. Whenever I call the PublishTask Method an appointment will be made and put in the calendar. Well, not exactly: a template will be made for that appointment and the user will see that template, giving him the option to either discard or save the reminder. The user can also make changes before submitting this to the calendar: it would be useful to be able to change the text in the agenda and that's exactly what this allows you to do. Now, see at the bottom of the screen the option "Occurs". This tiny field is what this post is about. You cannot set it from the code. I want to be able to have repeating items in my agenda. Say for instance you're counting down to a certain date, I want to be able to give you that option as well. However, I cannot. The field "occurs" is not part of the Task you create in code. Of course, you could create a whole series of events yourself. Have the "Occurs" field in your own user interface and make all the appointments. But that's not the same. First, the system doesn't recognize them as part of a series. That means if you want to change the text later on on one of the occurrences it will not ask you if you want to open this one or the whole series. More important however, is that the user has to acknowledge each and every single occurrence and save that into the agenda. Now, I understand why they implemented the system in such a way that the user has to approve an entry. You don't want apps to automatically fill your agenda with messages such as "Remember to pay for my app!". But why not include the "Occurs" option? The user can still opt out if they see this happening. I hope an update will fix this soon. But for now: you just have to countdown to your birthday yourself. My app won't support this.

  Read the article

• asynchrony is viral

  - by Daniel Moth

  It is becoming hard to write code today without introducing some form of asynchrony and, if you are using .NET (e.g. for Windows Phone 8 or Windows Store apps), that means sooner or later you have to await something and mark your method as async. My most recent examples included introducing speech recognition in my Translator By Moth phone app where I had to await mySpeechRecognizerUI.RecognizeWithUIAsync() and when moving that code base to a Windows Store project just to show a MessageBox I had to await myMessageDialog.ShowAsync(). Any time you need to invoke an asynchronous method in your code, you have a choice to make: kick off the operation but don’t wait for it to complete (otherwise known as fire-and-forget), synchronously wait for it to complete (which will entail blocking, which can be bad, especially on a UI thread), or asynchronously wait for it to complete before continuing on with the rest of the method’s work. In most cases, you want the latter, and the await keyword makes that trivial to implement.  When you use the magical await keyword in front of an API call, then you typically have to make additional changes to your code: This await usage is within a method of course, and now you have to annotate that method with async. Furthermore, you have to change the return type of the method you just annotated so it returns a Task (if it previously returned void), or Task<myOldReturnType> (if it previously returned myOldReturnType). Note that if it returns void, in some cases you could cheat and stop there. Furthermore, any method that called this method you just annotated with async will now also be invoking an asynchronous operation, so you have to make that change in the body of the caller method to introduce the await keyword before the call to the method. …you guessed it, you now have to change this caller method to be annotated with async and have its return types tweaked... …and it goes on virally… At some point you reach the root of your user code, e.g. a GUI event handler, and whoever calls that void method can already deal with the fact that you marked it as async and the viral introduction of the keywords stops there… This is all wonderful progress and a very powerful mechanism, and I just wish someone had written a refactoring tool to take care of this… anyone? I mentioned earlier that you have a choice when invoking an asynchronous operation. If the first time you encounter this you wish to localize the impact of all these changes and essentially try to turn the asynchronous behavior into synchronous by blocking - don't! For reasons why you don't want to do that, read Toub's excellent blog post (and check out the rest of his blog with gems on async programming starting with the Async FAQ). Just embrace the pattern knowing that when you use one instance of an await, you'll propagate the change all the way to the root user code method, e.g. typically an event handler. Related aside: I just finished re-writing my MessageBox wrapper class for Phone projects, including making it work in Windows Store projects, and it does expect you to use it with an await :-). I'll share that in an upcoming post for those of you that have the same need… Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

  Read the article

• Dude, what’s up with POP Forums vNext?

  - by Jeff

  Yeah, it has been awhile. I posted v9.2 back in January, about five months ago. That’s a real change from the release pace I had there for awhile. Let me explain what’s going on. First off, in the interim, I re-launched CoasterBuzz, which required a lot of my attention for about two of those months. That’s a good thing though, because that site is just about the best test bed I could ask for. The other thing is that I committed to make the next version use ASP.NET MVC 4, which is now at the RC stage. I didn’t think much about when they’d hit their RTW point, but RC is good enough for me. To that end, there is enough change in the next version that I recently decided to make it a major version upgrade, and finish up the loose ends and science projects to make it whole. Here’s what’s in store… Mobile views: I sat on this or a long time. Originally, I was going to use jQuery Mobile, and waited and waited for a new release, but in the end, decided against using it. Sometimes buttons would unexplainably not work, I felt like I was fighting it at times, and the CSS just felt too heavy. I rolled my own mobile sugar at a fraction of the size, and I think you’ll find it easy to modify. And it’s Metro-y, of course! Re-do of background services: A number of things run in the background, and I did quite a bit of “reimagining” of that code. It’s the weirdness of running services in a Web site context, because so many folks can’t run a bona fide service on their host’s box. The biggest change here is that these service no longer start up by default. You’ll need to call a new method from global.asax called PopForumsActivation.StartServices(). This is also a precursor to running the app in a Web farm (new data layer and caching is the second part of that). I learned about this the hard way when I had three apps using the forum library code but only one was actually the forum. The services were all running three times as often with race conditions and hits on the same data. That was particularly bad for e-mail. CSS clean up: It’s still not ideal, but it’s getting better. That’s one of those things that comes with integrating to a real site… you discover all of the dumb things you did. The mobile CSS is particularly easier to live with. Bug fixes: There are a whole lot of them. Most were minor, but it’s feeling pretty solid now. So that’s where I am. I’m going to call it v10.0, and I’m going to really put forth some effort toward finishing the mobile experience and getting through the remaining bugs. The roadmap beyond that will likely not be feature oriented, but rather work on some other things, like making it run in Azure, perhaps using SQL CE, a better install experience, etc. As usual, I’ll post the latest here. Stay tuned!

  Read the article

• OSB and Coherence Integration

  - by mark.ms.smith

  Anyone who has tried to manage Coherence nodes or tried to cache results in OSB, will appreciate the new functionality now available. As of WebLogic Server 10.3.4, you can use the WebLogic Administration Server, via the Administration Console or WLST, and java-based Node Manager to manage and monitor the life cycle of stand-alone Coherence cache servers. This is a great step forward as the previous options mainly involved writing your own scripts to do this. You can find an excellent description of how this works at James Bayer’s blog. You can also find the WebLogic documentation here.As of Oracle Service Bus 11gR1 (11.1.1.3.0), OSB now supports service result caching for Business Bervices with Coherence. If you use Business Services that return somewhat static results that do not change often, you can configure those Business Services to cache results. For Business Services that use result caching, you can control the time to live for the cached result. After the cached result expires, the next Business Service call results in invoking the back-end service to get the result. This result is then stored in the cache for future requests to access. I’m thinking that this caching functionality would be perfect for some sort of cross reference data that was refreshed nightly by batch. You can find the OSB Business Service documentation here.Result Caching in a dedicated JVMThis example demonstrates these new features by configuring a OSB Business Service to cache results in a separate Coherence JVM managed by WebLogic. The reason why you may want to use a separate, dedicated JVM is that the result cache data could potentially be quite large and you may want to protect your OSB java heap.In this example, the client will call an OSB Proxy Service to get Employee data based on an Employee Id. Using a Business Service, OSB calls an external system. The results are automatically cached and when called again, the respective results are retrieved from the cache rather than the external system.Step 1 – Set up your Coherence Server Via the OSB Administration Server Console, create your Coherence Server to be used as the results cache.Here are the configured Coherence Server arguments from the Server Start tab. Note that I’m using the default Cache Config and Override files in the domain.-Xms256m -Xmx512m -XX:PermSize=128m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Dtangosol.coherence.override=/app/middleware/jdev_11.1.1.4/user_projects/domains/osb_domain2/config/osb/coherence/osb-coherence-override.xml -Dtangosol.coherence.cluster=OSB-cluster -Dtangosol.coherence.cacheconfig=/app/middleware/jdev_11.1.1.4/user_projects/domains/osb_domain2/config/osb/coherence/osb-coherence-cache-config.xml -Dtangosol.coherence.distributed.localstorage=true -Dtangosol.coherence.management=all -Dtangosol.coherence.management.remote=true -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote Just incase you need it, here is my Coherence Server classpath:/app/middleware/jdev_11.1.1.4/oracle_common/modules/oracle.coherence_3.6/coherence.jar: /app/middleware/jdev_11.1.1.4/modules/features/weblogic.server.modules.coherence.server_10.3.4.0.jar: /app/middleware/jdev_11.1.1.4/oracle_osb/lib/osb-coherence-client.jarBy default, OSB will try and create a local result cache instance. You need to disable this by adding the following JVM parameters to each of the OSB Managed Servers:-Dtangosol.coherence.distributed.localstorage=false -DOSB.coherence.cluster=OSB-clusterIf you need more information on configuring a remote result cache, have a look at the configuration documentration under the heading Using an Out-of-Process Coherence Cache Server.Step 2 – Configure your Business Service Under the respective Business Service Message Handling Configuration (Advanced Properties), you need to enable “Result Caching”. Additionally, you need to determine what the cache data will be keyed on. In the example below, I’m keying it on the unique Employee Id.The Results As this test was on my laptop, the actual timings are just an indication that there is a benefit to caching results. Using my test harness, I sent 10,000 requests to OSB, all with the same Employee Id. In this case, I had result caching disabled.You can see that this caused the back end Business Service (BS_GetEmployeeData) to be called for each request. Then after enabling result caching, I sent the same number of identical requests.You can now see the Business Service was only invoked once on the first request. All subsequent requests used the Results Cache.

  Read the article

• Avoiding new operator in JavaScript -- the better way

  - by greengit

  Warning: This is a long post. Let's keep it simple. I want to avoid having to prefix the new operator every time I call a constructor in JavaScript. This is because I tend to forget it, and my code screws up badly. The simple way around this is this... function Make(x) { if ( !(this instanceof arguments.callee) ) return new arguments.callee(x); // do your stuff... } But, I need this to accept variable no. of arguments, like this... m1 = Make(); m2 = Make(1,2,3); m3 = Make('apple', 'banana'); The first immediate solution seems to be the 'apply' method like this... function Make() { if ( !(this instanceof arguments.callee) ) return new arguments.callee.apply(null, arguments); // do your stuff } This is WRONG however -- the new object is passed to the apply method and NOT to our constructor arguments.callee. Now, I've come up with three solutions. My simple question is: which one seems best. Or, if you have a better method, tell it. First – use eval() to dynamically create JavaScript code that calls the constructor. function Make(/* ... */) { if ( !(this instanceof arguments.callee) ) { // collect all the arguments var arr = []; for ( var i = 0; arguments[i]; i++ ) arr.push( 'arguments[' + i + ']' ); // create code var code = 'new arguments.callee(' + arr.join(',') + ');'; // call it return eval( code ); } // do your stuff with variable arguments... } Second – Every object has __proto__ property which is a 'secret' link to its prototype object. Fortunately this property is writable. function Make(/* ... */) { var obj = {}; // do your stuff on 'obj' just like you'd do on 'this' // use the variable arguments here // now do the __proto__ magic // by 'mutating' obj to make it a different object obj.__proto__ = arguments.callee.prototype; // must return obj return obj; } Third – This is something similar to second solution. function Make(/* ... */) { // we'll set '_construct' outside var obj = new arguments.callee._construct(); // now do your stuff on 'obj' just like you'd do on 'this' // use the variable arguments here // you have to return obj return obj; } // now first set the _construct property to an empty function Make._construct = function() {}; // and then mutate the prototype of _construct Make._construct.prototype = Make.prototype; eval solution seems clumsy and comes with all the problems of "evil eval". __proto__ solution is non-standard and the "Great Browser of mIsERY" doesn't honor it. The third solution seems overly complicated. But with all the above three solutions, we can do something like this, that we can't otherwise... m1 = Make(); m2 = Make(1,2,3); m3 = Make('apple', 'banana'); m1 instanceof Make; // true m2 instanceof Make; // true m3 instanceof Make; // true Make.prototype.fire = function() { // ... }; m1.fire(); m2.fire(); m3.fire(); So effectively the above solutions give us "true" constructors that accept variable no. of arguments and don't require new. What's your take on this. -- UPDATE -- Some have said "just throw an error". My response is: we are doing a heavy app with 10+ constructors and I think it'd be far more wieldy if every constructor could "smartly" handle that mistake without throwing error messages on the console.

  Read the article

• JDBC Triggers

  - by Tim Dexter

  Received a question from a customer last week, they were using the new rollup patch on top of 10.1.3.4.1. What are these boxes for? Don't you know? Surely? Well, they are for ... that new functionality, you know it's in the user docs, that thingmabobby doodah. OK, I dont know either, I can have a guess but let me check first. Serveral IM sessions, emails and a dig through the readme for the new patch and I had my answer. Its not in the official documentation, yet. Leslie is on the case. The two fields were designed to allow an Admin to set a users context attributes before a connection is made to a database and for un-setting the attributes after the connection is broken by the extraction engine. We got a sample from the Enterprise Manager team on how they will be using it with their VPD connections. FUNCTION bip_to_em_user (user_name_in IN VARCHAR2) RETURN BOOLEAN IS BEGIN SETEMUSERCONTEXT(user_name_in, MGMT_USER.OP_SET_IDENTIFIER); return TRUE; END bip_to_em_user; And used in the jdbc data source definition like this (pre-process function): sysman.mgmt_bip.bip_to_em_user(:xdo_user_name) You, of course can call any function that is going to return a boolean value, another example might be. FUNCTION set_per_process_username (username_in IN VARCHAR2) RETURN BOOLEAN IS BEGIN SETUSERCONTEXT(username_in); return TRUE; END set_per_process_username Just use your own function/package to set some user context. Very grateful for the mail from Leslie on the EM team's usage but I had to try it out. Rather than set up a VPD, I opted for a simpler test. Can I log the comings and goings of users and their queries using the same pre-process text box. Reaching back into the depths of my developer brain to remember some pl/sql, it was not that deep and I came up with: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION BIPTEST (user_name_in IN VARCHAR2, smode IN VARCHAR2) RETURN BOOLEAN AS BEGIN INSERT INTO LOGTAB VALUES(user_name_in, sysdate,smode); RETURN true; END BIPTEST; To call it in the pre-fetch trigger. BIPTEST(:xdo_user_name) Not going to set the pl/sql world alight I know, but you get the idea. As a new connection is made to the database its logged in the LOGTAB table. The SMODE value just sets if its an entry or an exit. I used the pre- and post- boxes. NAME UPDATE_DATE S_FLAG oracle 14-MAY-10 09.51.34.000000000 AM Start oracle 14-MAY-10 10.23.57.000000000 AM Finish administrator 14-MAY-10 09.51.38.000000000 AM Start administrator 14-MAY-10 09.51.38.000000000 AM Finish oracle 14-MAY-10 09.51.42.000000000 AM Start oracle 14-MAY-10 09.51.42.000000000 AM Finish It works very well, I had some fun trying to find a nasty query for the extraction engine so that the timestamps from in to out actually had a difference. That engine is fast! The only derived value you can pass from BIP is :xdo_user_name. None of the other server values are available. Connection pools are not currently supported but planned for a future release. Now you know what those fields are for and look for some official documentation, rather than my ramblings, coming soon!

  Read the article

• concurrency::accelerator_view

  - by Daniel Moth

  Overview We saw previously that accelerator represents a target for our C++ AMP computation or memory allocation and that there is a notion of a default accelerator. We ended that post by introducing how one can obtain accelerator_view objects from an accelerator object through the accelerator class's default_view property and the create_view method. The accelerator_view objects can be thought of as handles to an accelerator. You can also construct an accelerator_view given another accelerator_view (through the copy constructor or the assignment operator overload). Speaking of operator overloading, you can also compare (for equality and inequality) two accelerator_view objects between them to determine if they refer to the same underlying accelerator. We'll see later that when we use concurrency::array objects, the allocation of data takes place on an accelerator at array construction time, so there is a constructor overload that accepts an accelerator_view object. We'll also see later that a new concurrency::parallel_for_each function overload can take an accelerator_view object, so it knows on what target to execute the computation (represented by a lambda that the parallel_for_each also accepts). Beyond normal usage, accelerator_view is a quality of service concept that offers isolation to multiple "consumers" of an accelerator. If in your code you are accessing the accelerator from multiple threads (or, in general, from different parts of your app), then you'll want to create separate accelerator_view objects for each thread. flush, wait, and queuing_mode When you create an accelerator_view via the create_view method of the accelerator, you pass in an option of immediate or deferred, which are the two members of the queuing_mode enum. At any point you can access this value from the queuing_mode property of the accelerator_view. When the queuing_mode value is immediate (which is the default), any commands sent to the device such as kernel invocations and data transfers (e.g. parallel_for_each and copy, as we'll see in future posts), will get submitted as soon as the runtime sees fit (that is the definition of immediate). When the value of queuing_mode is deferred, the commands will be batched up. To send all buffered commands to the device for execution, there is a non-blocking flush method that you can call. If you wish to block until all the commands have been sent, there is a wait method you can call. Deferring is a more advanced scenario aimed at performance gains when you are submitting many device commands and you want to avoid the tiny overhead of flushing/submitting each command separately. Querying information Just like accelerator, accelerator_view exposes the is_debug and version properties. In fact, you can always access the accelerator object from the accelerator property on the accelerator_view class to access the accelerator interface we looked at previously. Interop with D3D (aka DX) In a later post I'll show an example of an app that uses C++ AMP to compute data that is used in pixel shaders. In those scenarios, you can benefit by integrating C++ AMP into your graphics pipeline and one of the building blocks for that is being able to use the same device context from both the compute kernel and the other shaders. You can do that by going from accelerator_view to device context (and vice versa), through part of our interop API in amp.h: *get_device, create_accelerator_view. More on those in a later post. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

  Read the article

• Autoscaling in a modern world&hellip;. Part 4

  - by Steve Loethen

  Now that I have the rules and services XML files in the cloud, it is time to sever the bounds of earth and live totally in the cloud.  I have to host the Autoscaling object in Azure as well, point it to the rules, tell it the management certs and get out of the way. A couple of questions.  Where to host?  The most obvious place to me was a worker role.  A simple, single purpose worker role, doing nothing but watching my app.  Here are the steps I used. 1) Created a project.  Separate project from my web site.  I wanted to be able to run the web in the cloud and the autoscaler local for debugging purposes.  Seemed like the easiest way.  2) Add the Wasabi block to the project. 3) Configure the settings.  I used the same settings used for the console app.  It points to the same web role, uses the same rules file.  4) Make sure the certification needed to manage the role is added to the cert store in the sky (“LocalMachine” and “My” are default locations). I ran the worker role in the local fabric.  It worked.  I then published to the cloud, and verified it worked again.  Here is what my code looked like. public override bool OnStart() { Trace.WriteLine("Set Default Connection Limit", "Information"); // Set the maximum number of concurrent connections ServicePointManager.DefaultConnectionLimit = 12; Trace.WriteLine("Set up configuration change code", "Information"); // set up config CloudStorageAccount.SetConfigurationSettingPublisher((configName, configSetter) => configSetter(RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue(configName))); Trace.WriteLine("Get current diagnostic configuration", "Information"); // Get current diagnostic configuration DiagnosticMonitorConfiguration dmc = DiagnosticMonitor.GetDefaultInitialConfiguration(); Trace.WriteLine("Set Diagnostic Buffer Size", "Information"); // Set Diagnostic Buffer size dmc.Logs.BufferQuotaInMB = 4; Trace.WriteLine("Set log transfer period", "Information"); // Set log transfer period dmc.Logs.ScheduledTransferPeriod = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1); Trace.WriteLine("Set log verbosity", "Information"); // Set log filter to verbose dmc.Logs.ScheduledTransferLogLevelFilter = LogLevel.Verbose; Trace.WriteLine("Start the diagnostic monitor", "Information"); // Start the diagnostic monitor DiagnosticMonitor.Start("Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString", dmc); Trace.WriteLine("Get the current Autoscaler from the EntLib Container", "Information"); // Get the current Autoscaler from the EntLib Container scaler = EnterpriseLibraryContainer.Current.GetInstance<Autoscaler>(); Trace.WriteLine("Start the autoscaler", "Information"); // Start the autoscaler scaler.Start(); Trace.WriteLine("call the base class OnStart", "Information"); // call the base class OnStart return base.OnStart(); } public override void OnStop() { Trace.WriteLine("Stop the Autoscaler", "Information"); // Stop the Autoscaler scaler.Stop(); } I did have to turn on some basic logging for wasabi, which will cover in the next post.  This let me figure out that I hadn’t done the certificate step.

  Read the article

• Windows Azure Use Case: New Development

  - by BuckWoody

  This is one in a series of posts on when and where to use a distributed architecture design in your organization's computing needs. You can find the main post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx Description: Computing platforms evolve over time. Originally computers were directed by hardware wiring - that, the “code” was the path of the wiring that directed an electrical signal from one component to another, or in some cases a physical switch controlled the path. From there software was developed, first in a very low machine language, then when compilers were created, computer languages could more closely mimic written statements. These language statements can be compiled into the lower-level machine language still used by computers today. Microprocessors replaced logic circuits, sometimes with fewer instructions (Reduced Instruction Set Computing, RISC) and sometimes with more instructions (Complex Instruction Set Computing, CISC). The reason this history is important is that along each technology advancement, computer code has adapted. Writing software for a RISC architecture is significantly different than developing for a CISC architecture. And moving to a Distributed Architecture like Windows Azure also has specific implementation details that our code must follow. But why make a change? As I’ve described, we need to make the change to our code to follow advances in technology. There’s no point in change for its own sake, but as a new paradigm offers benefits to our users, it’s important for us to leverage those benefits where it makes sense. That’s most often done in new development projects. It’s a far simpler task to take a new project and adapt it to Windows Azure than to try and retrofit older code designed in a previous computing environment. We can still use the same coding languages (.NET, Java, C++) to write code for Windows Azure, but we need to think about the architecture of that code on a new project so that it runs in the most efficient, cost-effective way in a Distributed Architecture. As we receive new requests from the organization for new projects, a distributed architecture paradigm belongs in the decision matrix for the platform target. Implementation: When you are designing new applications for Windows Azure (or any distributed architecture) there are many important details to consider. But at the risk of over-simplification, there are three main concepts to learn and architect within the new code: Stateless Programming - Stateless program is a prime concept within distributed architectures. Rather than each server owning the complete processing cycle, the information from an operation that needs to be retained (the “state”) should be persisted to another location c(like storage) common to all machines involved in the process.  An interesting learning process for Stateless Programming (although not unique to this language type) is to learn Functional Programming. Server-Side Processing - Along with developing using a Stateless Design, the closer you can locate the code processing to the data, the less expensive and faster the code will run. When you control the network layer, this is less important, since you can send vast amounts of data between the server and client, allowing the client to perform processing. In a distributed architecture, you don’t always own the network, so it’s performance is unpredictable. Also, you may not be able to control the platform the user is on (such as a smartphone, PC or tablet), so it’s imperative to deliver only results and graphical elements where possible.  Token-Based Authentication - Also called “Claims-Based Authorization”, this code practice means instead of allowing a user to log on once and then running code in that context, a more granular level of security is used. A “token” or “claim”, often represented as a Certificate, is sent along for a series or even one request. In other words, every call to the code is authenticated against the token, rather than allowing a user free reign within the code call. While this is more work initially, it can bring a greater level of security, and it is far more resilient to disconnections. Resources: See the references of “Nondistributed Deployment” and “Distributed Deployment” at the top of this article for more information with graphics:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658120.aspx  Stack Overflow has a good thread on functional programming: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/844536/advantages-of-stateless-programming  Another good discussion on Stack Overflow on server-side processing is here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3064018/client-side-or-server-side-processing Claims Based Authorization is described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee335707.aspx

  Read the article

• Using 3G/UMTS in Mauritius

  After some conversation, threads in online forum and mailing lists I thought about writing this article on how to setup, configure and use 3G/UMTS connections on Linux here in Mauritius. Personally, I can only share my experience with Emtel Ltd. but try to give some clues about how to configure Orange as well. Emtel 3G/UMTS surf stick Emtel provides different surf sticks from Huawei. Back in 2007, I started with an E220 that wouldn't run on Windows Vista either. Nowadays, you just plug in the surf stick (ie. E169) and usually the Network Manager will detect the new broadband modem. Nothing to worry about. The Linux Network Manager even provides a connection profile for Emtel here in Mauritius and establishing the Internet connection is done in less than 2 minutes... even quicker. Using wvdial Old-fashioned Linux users might not take Network Manager into consideration but feel comfortable with wvdial. Although that wvdial is primarily used with serial port attached modems, it can operate on USB ports as well. Following is my configuration from /etc/wvdial.conf: [Dialer Defaults]Phone = *99#Username = emtelPassword = emtelNew PPPD = yesStupid Mode = 1Dial Command = ATDT[Dialer emtel]Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0Baud = 3774000Init2 = ATZInit3 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0Init4 = AT+cgdcont=1,"ip","web"ISDN = 0Modem Type = Analog Modem The values of user name and password are optional and can be configured as you like. In case that your SIM card is protected by a pin - which is highly advised, you might another dialer section in your configuration file like so: [Dialer pin]Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0Init1 = AT+CPIN=0000 This way you can "daisy-chain" your command to establish your Internet connection like so: wvdial pin emtel And it works auto-magically. Depending on your group assignments (dialout), you might have to sudo the wvdial statement like so: sudo wvdial pin emtel Orange parameters As far as I could figure out without really testing it myself, it is also necessary to set the Access Point (AP) manually with Orange. Well, although it is pretty obvious a lot of people seem to struggle. The AP value is "orange". [Dialer orange]Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0Baud = 3774000Init2 = ATZInit3 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0Init4 = AT+cgdcont=1,"ip","orange"ISDN = 0Modem Type = Analog Modem And you are done. Official Linux support from providers It's just simple: Forget it! The people at the Emtel call center are completely focused on the hardware and Mobile Connect software application provided by Huawei and are totally lost in case that you confront them with other constellations. For example, my wife's netbook has an integrated 3G/UMTS modem from Ericsson. Therefore, no need to use the Huawei surf stick at all and of course we use the existing software named Wireless Manager instead of. Now, imagine to mention at the help desk: "Ehm, sorry but what's Mobile Connect?" And Linux after all might give the call operator sleepless nights... Who knows? Anyways, I hope that my article and configuration could give you a helping hand and that you will be able to connect your Linux box with 3G/UMTS surf sticks here in Mauritius.

  Read the article

• Error:couldn't read file-Kernel panic

  - by Thanos

  I have just installed ubuntu 12.04.1. To be honest I had to run installation several times until it was finished fine. When I finally managed to install it properly, I power on the laptop and the grub shoed up! I selected ubuntu generic. It takes some time to load and when it does I get an error message stating that error: couldn't read file Press any key to continue If I press any button nothing happens. If a leave it there, in a short while there is a black screen loading which gives some weird messages [0.946710] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0) [0.946755] Pid: 1, comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 3.2.0-29-generic #46-Ubuntu [0.946792] Call Trace: [0.946831] [<ffffffff81640ec8>] panic+0x91/0x1a4 [0.946869] [<ffffffff81cfc01e>] mount_block_root+0xdc/0x18e [0.946909] [<ffffffff81002930>] ? populate_rootfs_wait+0x300/0x9d0 [0.946947] [<ffffffff81cfc257>] mount_root+0x54/0x59 [0.946982] [<ffffffff81cfcec9>] prepare_namespace+0x16d/0x1a6 [0.947019] [<ffffffff81cfbd63>] kernel_init+0x153/0x158 [0.947094] [<ffffffff81cfbc10>] ? start_kernel+0x3bd/0x3bd [0.947129] [<ffffffff81664030>] ? gs_change+0x13/0x13 The thing is that the laptop isn't mine. A friend tried to dual boot ubuntu alongside windows 7 but he didn't succeed. Ubuntu option was in grub, but when you tried to boot it rebooted from the start. So from a Live CD I erased ubuntu, started windows to check if something went wrong, and fortunately everything was OK. Windows started normally! So I tried to install ubuntu. Before installation was completed the installer crashed! I was afraid that he would lost windows, something that was true... At that point I tried to install windows but whichever distro(XP, 7{home, proffessional, ultimate},8) I tried it could never reach the end. So I tried to reinstall ubuntu but I was facing those weird messages. What can I do to move on? ______________________________________________________________________ EDIT1: I tried to check and fix(if possible) with GParted it took a lot of hours,although gparted displays only 01:14, I restarted the system and now I get not exactly the same messages. Numbers in braces [ ] are different [0.818189] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0) [0.818235] Pid: 1, comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 3.2.0-29-generic #46-Ubuntu [0.818272] Call Trace: [0.818312] [<ffffffff81640ec8>] panic+0x91/0x1a4 [0.818351] [<ffffffff81cfc01e>] mount_block_root+0xdc/0x18e [0.818391] [<ffffffff81002930>] ? populate_rootfs_wait+0x300/0x9d0 [0.818428] [<ffffffff81cfc257>] mount_root+0x54/0x59 [0.818464] [<ffffffff81cfcec9>] prepare_namespace+0x16d/0x1a6 [0.818501] [<ffffffff81cfbd63>] kernel_init+0x153/0x158 [0.818574] [<ffffffff81cfbc10>] ? start_kernel+0x3bd/0x3bd [0.818610] [<ffffffff81664030>] ? gs_change+0x13/0x13 What on earth is going on? ______________________________________________________________________ EDIT2: I forgot to mention that my friend gave a punch to his laptop during a game. After that his cooler became to make a weird noise so I checked and it is a bit tortuous but it is working. What I beleive must be wrong is that his HDD makes a weird noise while trying to load ubuntu, which means he might need a new HDD. Could that be true?

  Read the article

• problem with network-manager-pptp

  - by Riuzaki90

  I've a problema with the VPA CAble connection of my university... on the website of the university there's a .sh file that set all the variables of the connection in ETC/PPP/PEERS and another .sh file that call the connection...I'm on ubuntu 11.10 and when I run the setup.sh I have this error: impossible to find network-manager-pptp these are the two file that I had talk about: #!/bin/bash echo "Creazione della connessione in corso attendere........." apt-get update apt-get install pptp-linux network-manager-pptp echo -n "Digitare la propria Username: " read USERNAME echo -n "Digitare la propria Password: " read PASSWORD pptpsetup --create UNICAL_Campus_Access --server 160.97.73.253 --username $USERNAME --password $PASSWORD echo 'pty "pptp 160.97.73.253 --nolaunchpppd"' >/etc/ppp/peers/UNICAL_Campus_Access echo 'require-mppe-128' >>/etc/ppp/peers/UNICAL_Campus_Access echo 'file /etc/ppp/options.pptp'>>/etc/ppp/peers/UNICAL_Campus_Access echo 'name '$USERNAME''>>/etc/ppp/peers/UNICAL_Campus_Access echo 'remotename PPTP'>>/etc/ppp/peers/UNICAL_Campus_Access echo 'ipparam UNICAL_Campus_Access'>>/etc/ppp/peers/UNICAL_Campus_Access echo $USERNAME' PPTP '$PASSWORD' *'>>/etc/ppp/chap-secrets rm /etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '###############################################################################'>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# $Id: options.pptp,v 1.3 2006/03/26 23:11:05 quozl Exp $'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Sample PPTP PPP options file /etc/ppp/options.pptp'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Options used by PPP when a connection is made by a PPTP client.'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# This file can be referred to by an /etc/ppp/peers file for the tunnel.'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Changes are effective on the next connection. See "man pppd".'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# You are expected to change this file to suit your system. As'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# packaged, it requires PPP 2.4.2 or later from http://ppp.samba.org/'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# and the kernel MPPE module available from the CVS repository also on'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# http://ppp.samba.org/, which is packaged for DKMS as kernel_ppp_mppe.'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '###############################################################################'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Lock the port'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'lock'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Authentication'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# We do not need the tunnel server to authenticate itself'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'noauth'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#We won"t do PAP, EAP, CHAP, or MSCHAP, but we will accept MSCHAP-V2'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#(you may need to remove these refusals if the server is not using MPPE)'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'refuse-pap'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'refuse-eap'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'refuse-chap'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'refuse-mschap'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Compression Turn off compression protocols we know won"t be used'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'nobsdcomp'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo 'nodeflate'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Encryption'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# (There have been multiple versions of PPP with encryption support,'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# choose with of the following sections you will use. Note that MPPE'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# requires the use of MSCHAP-V2 during authentication)'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# http://ppp.samba.org/ the PPP project version of PPP by Paul Mackarras'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# ppp-2.4.2 or later with MPPE only, kernel module ppp_mppe.o'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#{{{'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Require MPPE 128-bit encryption'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#require-mppe-128'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#}}}'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# http://polbox.com/h/hs001/ fork from PPP project by Jan Dubiec'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#ppp-2.4.2 or later with MPPE and MPPC, kernel module ppp_mppe_mppc.o'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#{{{'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# Require MPPE 128-bit encryption'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '#mppe required,stateless'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo '# }}}'>>/etc/ppp/options.pptp echo "setup di 'UNICAL Campus Access' terminato correttamente" echo "per connettersi eseguire lo script 'UNICAL_Campus_Access.sh' " and the second: #!/bin/bash echo "Connessione alla Rete del Centro Residenziale in corso attendere........." modprobe ppp_mppe pppd call UNICAL_Campus_Access sleep 30 tail -n 8 /var/log/messages echo "Connessione Stabilita" echo -n "Per terminare la connessione premere invio (in alternativa eseguire il commando 'killall pppd'):----> " read CONN killall pppd echo "Connessione terminata" I've correctly installed network-manager-pptp to the latest version...help?

  Read the article

• Fake It Easy On Yourself

  - by Lee Brandt

  I have been using Rhino.Mocks pretty much since I started being a mockist-type tester. I have been very happy with it for the most part, but a year or so ago, I got a glimpse of some tests using Moq. I thought the little bit I saw was very compelling. For a long time, I had been using: 1: var _repository = MockRepository.GenerateMock<IRepository>(); 2: _repository.Expect(repo=>repo.SomeCall()).Return(SomeValue); 3: var _controller = new SomeKindaController(_repository); 4:  5: ... some exercising code 6: _repository.AssertWasCalled(repo => repo.SomeCall()); I was happy with that syntax. I didn’t go looking for something else, but what I saw was: 1: var _repository = new Mock(); And I thought, “That looks really nice!” The code was very expressive and easier to read that the Rhino.Mocks syntax. I have gotten so used to the Rhino.Mocks syntax that it made complete sense to me, but to developers I was mentoring in mocking, it was sometimes to obtuse. SO I thought I would write some tests using Moq as my mocking tool. But I discovered something ugly once I got into it. The way Mocks are created makes Moq very easy to read, but that only gives you a Mock not the object itself, which is what you’ll need to pass to the exercising code. So this is what it ends up looking like: 1: var _repository = new Mock<IRepository>(); 2: _repository.SetUp(repo=>repo.SomeCall).Returns(SomeValue); 3: var _controller = new SomeKindaController(_repository.Object); 4: .. some exercizing code 5: _repository.Verify(repo => repo.SomeCall()); Two things jump out at me: 1) when I set up my mocked calls, do I set it on the Mock or the Mock’s “object”? and 2) What am I verifying on SomeCall? Just that it was called? that it is available to call? Dealing with 2 objects, a “Mock” and an “Object” made me have to consider naming conventions. Should I always call the mock _repositoryMock and the object _repository? So I went back to Rhino.Mocks. It is the most widely used framework, and show other how to use it is easier because there is one natural object to use, the _repository. Then I came across a blog post from Patrik Hägne, and that led me to a post about FakeItEasy. I went to the Google Code site and when I saw the syntax, I got very excited. Then I read the wiki page where Patrik stated why he wrote FakeItEasy, and it mirrored my own experience. So I began to play with it a bit. So far, I am sold. the syntax is VERY easy to read and the fluent interface is super discoverable. It basically looks like this: 1: var _repository = A.Fake<IRepository>(); 2: a.CallTo(repo=>repo.SomeMethod()).Returns(SomeValue); 3: var _controller = new SomeKindaController(_repository); 4: ... some exercising code 5: A.CallTo(() => _repository.SOmeMethod()).MustHaveHappened(); Very nice. But is it mature? It’s only been around a couple of years, so will I be giving up some thing that I use a lot because it hasn’t been implemented yet? I doesn’t seem so. As I read more examples and posts from Patrik, he has some pretty complex scenarios. He even has support for VB.NET! So if you are looking for a mocking framework that looks and feels very natural, try out FakeItEasy!

  Read the article

• Windows Azure Use Case: New Development

  - by BuckWoody

  This is one in a series of posts on when and where to use a distributed architecture design in your organization's computing needs. You can find the main post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx Description: Computing platforms evolve over time. Originally computers were directed by hardware wiring - that, the “code” was the path of the wiring that directed an electrical signal from one component to another, or in some cases a physical switch controlled the path. From there software was developed, first in a very low machine language, then when compilers were created, computer languages could more closely mimic written statements. These language statements can be compiled into the lower-level machine language still used by computers today. Microprocessors replaced logic circuits, sometimes with fewer instructions (Reduced Instruction Set Computing, RISC) and sometimes with more instructions (Complex Instruction Set Computing, CISC). The reason this history is important is that along each technology advancement, computer code has adapted. Writing software for a RISC architecture is significantly different than developing for a CISC architecture. And moving to a Distributed Architecture like Windows Azure also has specific implementation details that our code must follow. But why make a change? As I’ve described, we need to make the change to our code to follow advances in technology. There’s no point in change for its own sake, but as a new paradigm offers benefits to our users, it’s important for us to leverage those benefits where it makes sense. That’s most often done in new development projects. It’s a far simpler task to take a new project and adapt it to Windows Azure than to try and retrofit older code designed in a previous computing environment. We can still use the same coding languages (.NET, Java, C++) to write code for Windows Azure, but we need to think about the architecture of that code on a new project so that it runs in the most efficient, cost-effective way in a Distributed Architecture. As we receive new requests from the organization for new projects, a distributed architecture paradigm belongs in the decision matrix for the platform target. Implementation: When you are designing new applications for Windows Azure (or any distributed architecture) there are many important details to consider. But at the risk of over-simplification, there are three main concepts to learn and architect within the new code: Stateless Programming - Stateless program is a prime concept within distributed architectures. Rather than each server owning the complete processing cycle, the information from an operation that needs to be retained (the “state”) should be persisted to another location c(like storage) common to all machines involved in the process.  An interesting learning process for Stateless Programming (although not unique to this language type) is to learn Functional Programming. Server-Side Processing - Along with developing using a Stateless Design, the closer you can locate the code processing to the data, the less expensive and faster the code will run. When you control the network layer, this is less important, since you can send vast amounts of data between the server and client, allowing the client to perform processing. In a distributed architecture, you don’t always own the network, so it’s performance is unpredictable. Also, you may not be able to control the platform the user is on (such as a smartphone, PC or tablet), so it’s imperative to deliver only results and graphical elements where possible.  Token-Based Authentication - Also called “Claims-Based Authorization”, this code practice means instead of allowing a user to log on once and then running code in that context, a more granular level of security is used. A “token” or “claim”, often represented as a Certificate, is sent along for a series or even one request. In other words, every call to the code is authenticated against the token, rather than allowing a user free reign within the code call. While this is more work initially, it can bring a greater level of security, and it is far more resilient to disconnections. Resources: See the references of “Nondistributed Deployment” and “Distributed Deployment” at the top of this article for more information with graphics:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658120.aspx  Stack Overflow has a good thread on functional programming: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/844536/advantages-of-stateless-programming  Another good discussion on Stack Overflow on server-side processing is here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3064018/client-side-or-server-side-processing Claims Based Authorization is described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee335707.aspx

  Read the article

• Do MORE with WebCenter

  - by Michael Snow

  We’ve been extremely busy here on the Oracle WebCenter team. We hope that you’ve all be keeping up with the interesting news each week. Last week was jammed full of GartnerPCC and Gartner360 buzz. If you missed any of the highlights – be sure to check out both Kellsey’s post from last week: Gartner PCC: A Shovel & Some Ah-Ha's and Christie’s overview of Loren Weinberg’s PCC presentation: "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Engage Your Customers or Lose Them"  . This week, we’ll be focusing on “Doing More with WebCenter” leading up to a great webcast scheduled for Thursday, March 22 (invite and registration link below). This is the 2nd in a series of 3 webcasts dedicated to expanding the understanding of the full capabilities of WebCenter. Yes – that might mean that you are not getting the full benefits of the software you already own or the expansion potential via upgrade to the full WebCenter Suite Plus. Tune in on Thursday 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET.  ++++++++++++++ Want to be a Speaker at Oracle OpenWorld 2012? Oracle Open World planning has already kicked off. We know that it is only March and next October is far in the distance. But planning has already started for Oracle OpenWorld 2012. So if you want to be a speaker and propose your own session for this year's event in San Francisco on September 30th - October 4th, starting thinking now!  The annual OpenWorld Call for Papers is now open until April 9th! All of the details to submit a paper are available here. Of course, the WebCenter team here is interested in sessions including case studies, thought-leadership, customer stories around any of the Oracle WebCenter solutions, but the Call for Papers is open to all Oracle topics. When submitting your topic, be sure to describe what you plan to discuss and the value of the presentation to other attendees. Sell your session, because there will be a lot of competition to be selected.  Bonus News: Speakers for selected sessions receive a complimentary full conference pass! Get your papers in and we'll see you in San Francisco! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Webcast Series: Do More with Oracle WebCenter - Expand Beyond Content Management Enable Employees, Partners, and Customers to Do More with Your Content Dear [FIRSTNAME] [LASTNAME],-- Did you know that, in addition to content management, Oracle WebCenter now also includes comprehensive portal, composite application, collaboration, and Web experience management capabilities? Join us for this Webcast and learn how you can provide a new level of user engagement. Learn how Oracle WebCenter: Drives task-specific application data and content to a single screen for executing specific business processes Enables mixed internal and external environments where content can be securely shared and filtered with employees, partners, and customers, based upon role-based security Offers Web experience management, driving contextually relevant, social, and interactive online experiences across multiple channels Provides social features that enable sharing, activity feeds, collaboration, expertise location, and best-practices communities Learn how to do more with Oracle WebCenter. Register now for the Webcast. Register Now Join us for the second Webcast in the series "Do More With Oracle WebCenter". March 22, 2012 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET Presented by: Michelle Huff Senior Director, WebCenter Product Management, Oracle Greg Utecht Project Manager,IT Operations,TIES Copyright © 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Contact Us | Legal Notices | Privacy Oracle Corporation - Worldwide Headquarters, 500 Oracle Parkway, OPL - E-mail Services, Redwood Shores, CA 94065, United States

  Read the article

• LINQ to Twitter Queries with LINQPad

  - by Joe Mayo

  LINQPad is a popular utility for .NET developers who use LINQ a lot.  In addition to standard SQL queries, LINQPad also supports other types of LINQ providers, including LINQ to Twitter.  The following sections explain how to set up LINQPad for making queries with LINQ to Twitter. LINQPad comes in a couple versions and this example uses LINQPad4, which runs on the .NET Framework 4.0. 1. The first thing you'll need to do is set up a reference to the LinqToTwitter.dll. From the Query menu, select query properties. Click the Browse button and find the LinqToTwitter.dll binary. You should see something similar to the Query Properties window below. 2. While you have the query properties window open, add the namespace for the LINQ to Twitter types.  Click the Additional Namespace Imports tab and type in LinqToTwitter. The results are shown below: 3. The default query type, when you first start LINQPad, is C# Expression, but you'll need to change this to support multiple statements.  Change the Language dropdown, on the Main window, to C# Statements. 4. To query LINQ to Twitter, instantiate a TwitterContext, by typing the following into the LINQPad Query window: var ctx = new TwitterContext(); Note: If you're getting syntax errors, go back and make sure you did steps #2 and #3 properly. 5. Next, add a query, but don't materialize it, like this: var tweets = from tweet in ctx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Public select new { tweet.Text, tweet.Geo, tweet.User }; 6. Next, you want the output to be displayed in the LINQPad grid, so do a Dump, like this: tweets.Dump(); The following image shows the final results:   That was an unauthenticated query, but you can also perform authenticated queries with LINQ to Twitter's support of OAuth.  Here's an example that uses the PinAuthorizer (type this into the LINQPad Query window): var auth = new PinAuthorizer { Credentials = new InMemoryCredentials { ConsumerKey = "", ConsumerSecret = "" }, UseCompression = true, GoToTwitterAuthorization = pageLink => Process.Start(pageLink), GetPin = () => { // this executes after user authorizes, which begins with the call to auth.Authorize() below. Console.WriteLine("\nAfter you authorize this application, Twitter will give you a 7-digit PIN Number.\n"); Console.Write("Enter the PIN number here: "); return Console.ReadLine(); } }; // start the authorization process (launches Twitter authorization page). auth.Authorize(); var ctx = new TwitterContext(auth, "https://api.twitter.com/1/", "https://search.twitter.com/"); var tweets = from tweet in ctx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Public select new { tweet.Text, tweet.Geo, tweet.User }; tweets.Dump(); This code is very similar to what you'll find in the LINQ to Twitter downloadable source code solution, in the LinqToTwitterDemo project.  For obvious reasons, I changed the value assigned to ConsumerKey and ConsumerSecret, which you'll have to obtain by visiting http://dev.twitter.com and registering your application. One tip, you'll probably want to make this easier on yourself by creating your own DLL that encapsulates all of the OAuth logic and then call a method or property on you custom class that returns a fully functioning TwitterContext.  This will help avoid adding all this code every time you want to make a query. Now, you know how to set up LINQPad for LINQ to Twitter, perform unauthenticated queries, and perform queries with OAuth. Joe

  Read the article

• Five geeky things you must do with your Android Smartphone

  - by Gopinath

  Android is the Windows of next generation. Its open, free, widely adopted and smart enough to outsmart Apple’s iOS. It’s a stolen product and cheap imitation of iOS, but Steve Job’s once quoted saying good artists copy and great artists steal. Alright, this post is not about Android vs iOS or is it really stolen or not. Android is a great OS for mobile devices and it lets you do amazing through mobiles.  In this post I want to write about the geeky things we can do with an Android Smartphone. Control your computer using mobile Assume that it is a lazy weekend and you are on a couch watching movies on a laptop which is a meter away. Now you want to adjust volume or skip a scene/song. How to control your laptop without moving out of couch? Just install Universal Remote free app on your smartphone and start control your computer using phone. Universal Remove app controls computers over Wifi or Bluetooth networks with dedicated remote controls for various media players and applications like YouTube, VLC & Spotify.  The application is very easy to use and works amazingly well in controlling computers. Few of the remote controls provided in the app are – Mouse, Keyboard, Media Controls, Power, Start, Windows Media Player, VLC Player,  YouTube. There is also paid version of this app with additional remotes, but for most of the users Free version is good enough. Stream YouTube videos playing on you mobile to computer You can stream YouTube videos playing on your mobile to computer/smart tv. This is something similar to Apple’s most popular AirPlay feature, but works only with YouTube videos. To start streaming videos install Google’s YouTube Remote on your smartphone, open youtube.com/leanback on your computer  and pair up mobile with computer. Once the pairing is done, videos played on YouTube Remote app will be streamed on to your computer. Access your mobile using any web browser – send/receive SMS, view photos/call logs, etc. Want to control your mobile phone using a computer? Install AirDroid app on your phone and start controlling your phone using computer browser – send and receive messages, view call logs, play music, upload/download files, edit contacts and many more. At times it’s lot of fun to access mobile using a big screen devices like laptops. Launch a webpage on your mobile browser using your computer With Google Chrome to Phone installed on your computer and mobile, you can send links and other information from Chrome browser to your Android device. With a click on Chrome browser, the current webpage of Chrome browser will be automatically launched on Android device. This is very handy when you want to send links, send driving direction to mobile using Google Maps and launch phone dialer with number selected on webpage. Install Apps on mobile using computer To install apps on your smartphone you really don’t need to touch it. Open any web browser, sing in to Google Play with your Google id that is associated with smartphone and start installing apps on to your phone right from the browser. As you browse apps on Google Play store, you find Install button and all you need to do is to just click Install. Google will automatically installs app on your mobile within few seconds.

  Read the article

• .Net Reflector 6.5 EAP now available

  - by CliveT

  With the release of CLR 4 being so close, we’ve been working hard on getting the new C# and VB language features implemented inside Reflector. The work isn’t complete yet, but we have some of the features working. Most importantly, there are going to be changes to the Reflector object model, and we though it would be useful for people to see the changes and have an opportunity to comment on them. Before going any further, we should tell you what the EAP contains that’s different from the released version. A number of bugs have been fixed, mainly bugs that were raised via the forum. This is slightly offset by the fact that this EAP hasn’t had a whole lot of testing and there may have been new bugs introduced during the development work we’ve been doing. The C# language writer has been changed to display in and out co- and contra-variance markers on interfaces and delegates, and to display default values for optional parameters in method definitions. We also concisely display values passed by reference into COM calls. However, we do not change callsites to display calls using named parameters; this looks like hard work to get right. The forthcoming version of the C# language introduces dynamic types and dynamic calls. The new version of Reflector should display a dynamic call rather than the generated C#: dynamic target = MyTestObject(); target.Hello("Mum"); We have a few bugs in this area where we are not casting to dynamic when necessary. These have been fixed on a branch and should make their way into the next EAP. To support the dynamic features, we’ve added the types IDynamicMethodReferenceExpression, IDynamicPropertyIndexerExpression, and IDynamicPropertyReferenceExpression to the object model. These types, based on the versions without “Dynamic” in the name, reflect the fact that we don’t have full information about the method that is going to be called, but only have its name (as a string). These interfaces are going to change – in an internal version, they have been extended to include information about which parameter positions use runtime types and which use compile time types. There’s also the interface, IDynamicVariableDeclaration, that can be used to determine if a particular variable is used at dynamic call sites as a target. A couple of these language changes have also been added to the Visual Basic language writer. The new features are exposed only when the optimization level is set to .NET 4. When the level is set this high, the other standard language writers will simply display a message to say that they do not handle such an optimization level. Reflector Pro now has 4.0 as an optional compilation target and we have done some work to get the pdb generation right for these new features. The EAP version of Reflector no longer installs the add-in on startup. The first time you run the EAP, it displays the integration options dialog. You can use the checkboxes to select the versions of Visual Studio into which you want to install the EAP version. Note that you can only have one version of Reflector Pro installed in Visual Studio; if you install into a Visual Studio that has another version installed, the previous version will be removed. Please try it out and send your feedback to the EAP forum.

  Read the article

• Using the Script Component as a Conditional Split

  This is a quick walk through on how you can use the Script Component to perform Conditional Split like behaviour, splitting your data across multiple outputs. We will use C# code to decide what does flows to which output, rather than the expression syntax of the Conditional Split transformation. Start by setting up the source. For my example the source is a list of SQL objects from sys.objects, just a quick way to get some data: SELECT type, name FROM sys.objects type name S syssoftobjrefs F FK_Message_Page U Conference IT queue_messages_23007163 Shown above is a small sample of the data you could expect to see. Once you have setup your source, add the Script Component, selecting Transformation when prompted for the type, and connect it up to the source. Now open the component, but don’t dive into the script just yet. First we need to select some columns. Select the Input Columns page and then select the columns we want to uses as part of our filter logic. You don’t need to choose columns that you may want later, this is just the columns used in the script itself. Next we need to add our outputs. Select the Inputs and Outputs page.You get one by default, but we need to add some more, it wouldn’t be much of a split otherwise. For this example we’ll add just one more. Click the Add Output button, and you’ll see a new output is added. Now we need to set some properties, so make sure our new Output 1 is selected. In the properties grid change the SynchronousInputID property to be our input Input 0, and  change the ExclusionGroup property to 1. Now select Ouput 0 and change the ExclusionGroup property to 2. This value itself isn’t important, provided each output has a different value other than zero. By setting this property on both outputs it allows us to split the data down one or the other, making each exclusive. If we left it to 0, that output would get all the rows. It can be a useful feature allowing you to copy selected rows to one output whilst retraining the full set of data in the other. Now we can go back to the Script page and start writing some code. For the example we will do a very simple test, if the value of the type column is U, for user table, then it goes down the first output, otherwise it ends up in the other. This mimics the exclusive behaviour of the conditional split transformation. public override void Input0_ProcessInputRow(Input0Buffer Row) { // Filter all user tables to the first output, // the remaining objects down the other if (Row.type.Trim() == "U") { Row.DirectRowToOutput0(); } else { Row.DirectRowToOutput1(); } } The code itself is very simple, a basic if clause that determines which of the DirectRowToOutput methods we call, there is one for each output. Of course you could write a lot more code to implement some very complex logic, but the final direction is still just a method call. If we now close the script component, we can hook up the outputs and test the package. Your numbers will vary depending on the sample database but as you can see we have clearly split out input data into two outputs. As a final tip, when adding the outputs I would normally rename them, changing the Name in the Properties grid. This means the generated methods follow the pattern as do the path label shown on the design surface, making everything that much easier to recognise.

  Read the article

• Twice as long and half as long

  - by PointsToShare

  We are in a project and we hit some snags. What’s a snag? An activity that takes longer than expected. Actually it takes longer than the time assigned to it by an over pressed PM who accepts an impossible time table and tries his best to make it possible, but I digress (again!).  So we have snags and we also have the opposite. Let’s call these “cinches”. The question is: how does a combination of snags and cinches affect the project timeline? Well, there is no simple answer. It depends on the projects dependencies as we see in the PERT chart. If all the snags are in the critical path and all the cinches are elsewhere then the cinches don’t help at all. In fact any snag in the critical path will delay the project.  Conversely, a cinch in the critical path will expedite it. A snag outside the critical path might be serious enough to even change the critical path. Thus without the PERT chart, we cannot really tell. Still there is a principle involved – Time and speed are non-linear! Twice as long adds a full unit, half as long only takes ½ unit away. Let’s just investigate a simple project. It consists of two activities – S and C - each estimated to take a week. Alas, S is a snag and really needs twice the time allotted and – a sigh of relief – C is a cinch and will take half the time allotted, so everything is Hun-key-dory, or is it?  Even here the PERT chart is important. We have 2 cases: 1: S depends on C (or vice versa) as in when the two activities are assigned to one employee. Here the estimated time was 1 + 1 and the actual time was 2 + ½ and we are ½ week late or 25% late. 2: S and C are done in parallel. Here the estimated time was 1, but the actual time is 2 – we are a whole week or 100% late. Let’s change the equation a little. S need 1.5 and C needs .5 so in case 1, we have the loss fully compensated by the gain, but in case 2 we are still behind. There are cases where this really makes no difference. This is when the critical path is not affected and we have enough slack in the other paths to counteract the difference between its snags and cinches – Let’s call this difference DSC. So if the slack is greater than DSC the project will not suffer. Conclusion: There is no general rule about snags and cinches. We need to examine each case within its project, still as we saw in the 4 examples above; the snag is generally more powerful than the cinch. Long live Murphy! That’s All Folks

  Read the article

• C# 5 Async, Part 2: Asynchrony Today

  - by Reed

  The .NET Framework has always supported asynchronous operations.  However, different mechanisms for supporting exist throughout the framework.  While there are at least three separate asynchronous patterns used through the framework, only the latest is directly usable with the new Visual Studio Async CTP.  Before delving into details on the new features, I will talk about existing asynchronous code, and demonstrate how to adapt it for use with the new pattern. The first asynchronous pattern used in the .NET framework was the Asynchronous Programming Model (APM).  This pattern was based around callbacks.  A method is used to start the operation.  It typically is named as BeginSomeOperation.  This method is passed a callback defined as an AsyncCallback, and returns an object that implements IAsyncResult.  Later, the IAsyncResult is used in a call to a method named EndSomeOperation, which blocks until completion and returns the value normally directly returned from the synchronous version of the operation.  Often, the EndSomeOperation call would be called from the callback function passed, which allows you to write code that never blocks. While this pattern works perfectly to prevent blocking, it can make quite confusing code, and be difficult to implement.  For example, the sample code provided for FileStream’s BeginRead/EndRead methods is not simple to understand.  In addition, implementing your own asynchronous methods requires creating an entire class just to implement the IAsyncResult. Given the complexity of the APM, other options have been introduced in later versions of the framework.  The next major pattern introduced was the Event-based Asynchronous Pattern (EAP).  This provides a simpler pattern for asynchronous operations.  It works by providing a method typically named SomeOperationAsync, which signals its completion via an event typically named SomeOperationCompleted. The EAP provides a simpler model for asynchronous programming.  It is much easier to understand and use, and far simpler to implement.  Instead of requiring a custom class and callbacks, the standard event mechanism in C# is used directly.  For example, the WebClient class uses this extensively.  A method is used, such as DownloadDataAsync, and the results are returned via the DownloadDataCompleted event. While the EAP is far simpler to understand and use than the APM, it is still not ideal.  By separating your code into method calls and event handlers, the logic of your program gets more complex.  It also typically loses the ability to block until the result is received, which is often useful.  Blocking often requires writing the code to block by hand, which is error prone and adds complexity. As a result, .NET 4 introduced a third major pattern for asynchronous programming.  The Task<T> class introduced a new, simpler concept for asynchrony.  Task and Task<T> effectively represent an operation that will complete at some point in the future.  This is a perfect model for thinking about asynchronous code, and is the preferred model for all new code going forward.  Task and Task<T> provide all of the advantages of both the APM and the EAP models – you have the ability to block on results (via Task.Wait() or Task<T>.Result), and you can stay completely asynchronous via the use of Task Continuations.  In addition, the Task class provides a new model for task composition and error and cancelation handling.  This is a far superior option to the previous asynchronous patterns. The Visual Studio Async CTP extends the Task based asynchronous model, allowing it to be used in a much simpler manner.  However, it requires the use of Task and Task<T> for all operations.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325  | Next Page >