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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, December 18, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, December 18, 2012Popular Releasessb0t v.5: sb0t 5 Template for Visual Studio: This is the official sb0t 5 template for Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012 for C# programmers. Use this template to create your own sb0t 5 extensions.F# PowerPack with F# Compiler Source Drops: PowerPack for FSharp 3.0 + .NET 4.x + VS2010: This is a release of the old FSharp Power Pack binaries recompiled for F# 3.0, .NET 4.0/4.5 and Silveright 5. NOTE: This is for F# 3.0 & .NET 4.0 or F# 3.0 & Silverlight 5 NOTE: The assemblies are no longer strong named NOTE: The assemblies are not added to the GAC NOTE: In some cases functionality overlaps with F# 3.0, e.g. SI Units of measurecodeSHOW: codeSHOW AppPackage Release 16: This release is a package file built out of Visual Studio that you can side load onto your machine if for some reason you don't have access to the Windows Store. To install it, just unzip and run the .ps1 file using PowerShell (right click | run with PowerShell). Attention: if you want to download the source code for codeSHOW, you're in the wrong place. You need to go to the SOURCE CODE tab.Move Mouse: Move Mouse 2.5.3: FIXED - Issue where it errors on load if the screen saver interval is over 333 minutes.LINUX????????: LINUX????????: LINUX????????cnbeta: cnbeta: cnbetaCSDN ??: CSDN??????: CSDN??????PowerShell Community Extensions: 2.1.1 Production: PowerShell Community Extensions 2.1.1 Release NotesDec 16, 2012 This version of PSCX supports both Windows PowerShell 2.0 and 3.0. Bug fix for HelpUri error with the Get-Help proxy command. See the ReleaseNotes.txt download above for more information.VidCoder: 1.4.11 Beta: Added Hungarian translation, thanks to Brechler Zsolt. Update HandBrake core to SVN 5098. This update should fix crashes on some files. Updated the enqueue split button to fit in better with the active Windows theme. Updated presets to use x264 preset/profile/level.BarbaTunnel: BarbaTunnel 6.0: Check Version History for more information about this release.???: Cnblogs: CNBLOGSSandcastle Help File Builder: SHFB v1.9.6.0 with Visual Studio Package: General InformationIMPORTANT: On some systems, the content of the ZIP file is blocked and the installer may fail to run. Before extracting it, right click on the ZIP file, select Properties, and click on the Unblock button if it is present in the lower right corner of the General tab in the properties dialog. This new release contains bug fixes and feature enhancements. There are some potential breaking changes in this release as some features of the Help File Builder have been moved into...Electricity, Gas and Temperature Monitoring with Netduino Plus: V1.0.1 Netduino Plus Monitoring: This is the first stable release from the Netduino Plus Monitoring program. Bugfixing The code is enhanced at some places in respect to the V0.6.1 version There is a possibility to add multiple S0 meters Website for realtime display of data Website for configuring the Netduino Comments are welcome! Additions will not be made to this version. This is the first and last major Netduino Plus V1 release. The new development will take place with the Netduino Plus V2 development board in mi...CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor (1.3.1116.8): [FIX] Fixed issue not displaying CRM system button images correctly (incorrect path in file VisualRibbonEditor.exe.config)My Expenses Windows Store LOB App Demo: My Expenses Version 1: This is version 1 of the MyExpenses Windows 8 line of business demo app. The app is written in XAML and C#. It calls a WCF service that works with a SQL Server database. The app uses the Callisto toolkit. You can get it at https://github.com/timheuer/callisto. The Expenses.sql file contains the SQL to create the Expenses database. The ExpensesWCFService.zip file contains the WCF service, also written in C#. You should create a WCF service. Create an Entity Framework model and point it to...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.4: 2012.12.13 Ver5.7.4 (1)Web???????、???????????????????????????????????????????VFPX: ssClasses A1.0: My initial release. See https://vfpx.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=ssClasses&referringTitle=Home for a brief description of what is inside this releaseLayered Architecture Solution Guidance (LASG): LASG 1.0.0.8 for Visual Studio 2012: PRE-REQUISITES Open GAX (Please install Oct 4, 2012 version) Microsoft® System CLR Types for Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Shared Management Objects Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 (for the generated code) Windows Azure SDK (for layered cloud applications) Silverlight 5 SDK (for Silverlight applications) THE RELEASE This release only works on Visual Studio 2012. Known Issue If you choose the Database project, the solution unfolding time will be slow....Fiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 2.0: Prva prava produkcijska verzija - Zakon je tu, ova je verzija uskladena sa trenutno važecom Tehnickom specifikacijom (v1.2. od 04.12.2012.) i spremna je za produkcijsko korištenje. Verzije iza ove ce ovisiti o naknadnim izmjenama Zakona i/ili Tehnicke specifikacije, odnosno, o eventualnim greškama u radu/zahtjevima community-a za novim feature-ima. Novosti u v2.0 su: - That assembly does not allow partially trusted callers (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.com/workitem/699) - scheme IznosType...Bootstrap Helpers: Version 1: First releaseNew ProjectsAsh Launcher: The ash launcher is a launcher for the ash modpack for minecraftAsynchronous PowerShell Module: psasync is a PowerShell module containing simple helper functions to allow for multi-threaded operations using Runspaces. ClearVss: ClearVss clear any reference of Visual SourceSafe in yours solution. You'll no longer have to delete and modify solution files by hand. It's developed in C#dewitcher Framework: A rly cool Framework, made for use with COSMOS. - Console-class that supports colored, horizontal- and vertical- centered text printing - more =PGTD Pad: Notepad for GTD TechniqueHTML/JavaScript Rendering Web Part: HTML/JavaScript Render Web Part - replaces the SharePoint Content Editor Web Part (CEWP). Permits flying in script, HTML, etc. to a SharePoint Page.Kracken Generator and Architecture Tool for Visual Studio 2012: Welcome to Kracken a suite of tools for creating code from Architecture models. This program is the pet project of Tracy Rooks.Logica101: Aplicación para visualización de procesos algebraicosManaged DismApi Wrapper: This is a managed wrapper for the native Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) API. This allows .NET developers to call into the native API instead Mvc web-ajax: A Javascript library for displaying lists and editing objects N2F Yverdon InfoBoxes: A simple extension (plus some resources) for managing information boxes on a given page.N2F Yverdon Solar Flare Reflector: The solar flare reflector provides minimal base-range protection for your N2F Yverdon installation against solar flare interference.newplay: goodPhnyx: The project is under re-structuring - look backPigeonCms: Cms made with c# (using NET framework 3.5, SqlServer2005 or Express edition) with many Joomla-like features. Poppæa: Very early version of a c# library for cassandra nosql database. For now it adds support for the new CQL3 protocol in cassandra 1.2+. Proximity Tapper: Proximity Tapper is a developer tool for working with NFC on both Windows Phone and Windows, and allows you to build NFC apps in the Windows Phone emulator.SharePoint 2010 SpellCheck: SharePoint 2010 SpellCheck Project will let you enable spelling check functionality in SharePoint 2010 using SpellCheck.asmxShift8Read Community Credit Tool (DotNetNuke Module): A simple DotNetNuke Module I created for submitting content to Community-Credit.comTempistGamer Client: The tempistgamers game client manager. Includes a cross-platform, cross-game UI to allow for player interactivity. While the program itself manages the games.testtom12122012tfs02: fdstesttom12172012tfs02: uioTEviewer: The Transient Event Viewer is an application designed for visualization and analysis of transient events.trucho-JCI: summaryTypeSharp: TypeSharp is a C# to TypeScript code generatorWeiboWPSdk: To make wp applications about sina weibo more easily.XNA Games Core: XNA Core Game Programming library. Uses interfaces and delegates, in tune with the .NET way, with inheritence used for implementation reuse.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 31, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 31, 2012Popular ReleasesStartComp: Beta Release 1.0.0: Beta Release 1 Featured Content Bing-Search has been removed Window anchor implemented The listview can now be configured to be shown in details view or tile view through the context menu The listview now allows sorting through the context menu The view, sort order and sort column are now saved for each repository The listview now shows the background image in the lower right The listview now shows a background image for the user defined repositories Added a "Tell-A-Friend" bu...SharePoint Column & View Permission: SharePoint Column and View Permission v1.2: Version 1.2 of this project. If you will find any bugs please let me know at enti@zoznam.sk or post your findings in Issue TrackerDotNetNuke® Form and List: 06.00.04: DotNetNuke Form and List 06.00.04 Don't forget to backup your installation before upgrade. Changes in 06.00.04 Fix: Sql Scripts for 6.003 missed object qualifiers within stored procedures Fix: added missing resource "cmdCancel.Text" in form.ascx.resx Changes in 06.00.03 Fix: MakeThumbnail was broken if the application pool was configured to .Net 4 Change: Data is now stored in nvarchar(max) instead of ntext Changes in 06.00.02 The scripts are now compatible with SQL Azure, tested in a ne...DotNetNuke Translator: 01.00.00 Beta: First release of the project.Audio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch And Shift 5.1.0.2: fixed several issues with streaming modeUrlPager: UrlPager 1.2: Fixed bug in which url parameters will lost after paging; ????????url???bug；EntLib.com????????: EntLib.com???????? v3.0: EntLib eCommerce Solution ???Microsoft .Net Framework?????????????????????。Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.24: Add a sample database, and installation instructions.NicAudio: NicAudio 2.0.6: ac3,dts Solved some initialization issues with no-linear decode.ExpressProfiler: Initial release of ExpressProfiler v1.2: This is initial release of ExpressProfilerNabu Library: 2012-08-29, 14: .Net Framework 4.0, .Net Framework 4.5 Debug and Release builds.Math.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.2.1: Major linear algebra rework since v2.1, now available on Codeplex as well (previous versions were only available via NuGet). Since v2.2.0: Student-T density more robust for very large degrees of freedom Sparse Kronecker product much more efficient (now leverages sparsity) Direct access to raw matrix storage implementations for advanced extensibility Now also separate package for signed core library with a strong name (we dropped strong names in v2.2.0) Also available as NuGet packages...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks Databases – 2012, 2008R2 and 2008: About this release This release consolidates AdventureWorks databases for SQL Server 2012, 2008R2 and 2008 versions to one page. Each zip file contains an mdf database file and ldf log file. This should make it easier to find and download AdventureWorks databases since all OLTP versions are on one page. There are no database schema changes. For each release of the product, there is a light-weight and full version of the AdventureWorks sample database. The light-weight version is denoted by ...DotNetNuke® Blog: 05.00.00: Version 5.0.0 - Final This version of the module requires DotNetNuke Core 6.2 or greater. FYI: Developers should be aware that the module uses Visual Studio 2010 only. Release Highlights: Corrected blog comment sorting problem. 20228 - Integrated with the core Journal API. 20789, 21988 - wired in fix submitted by J Sheely around blank author names. 20210 - Updated manifest to 5.0 format (from 3.0). Automated packaging and made project structure more inline with other DotNetNuke m...Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: DotNetNuke Project Templates V1.1 for VS2012: This release is specifically for Visual Studio 2012 Support, distributed through the Visual Studio Extensions gallery at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/ After you build in Release mode the installable packages (source/install) can be found in the INSTALL folder now, within your module's folder, not the packages folder anymore Check out the blog post for all of the details about this release. http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/Blogs/EntryId/3471/New-Visual-Studio-2012-Projec...Home Access Plus+: v8.0: v8.0828.1800 RELEASE CHANGED TO BETA Any issues, please log them on http://www.edugeek.net/forums/home-access-plus/ This is full release, NO upgrade ZIP will be provided as most files require replacing. To upgrade from a previous version, delete everything but your AppData folder, extract all but the AppData folder and run your HAP+ install Documentation is supplied in the Web Zip The Quota Services require executing a script to register the service, this can be found in there install di...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0.0.3406 (September 2012): New features: Extended ReflectionClass libxml error handling, constants DateTime::modify(), DateTime::getOffset() TreatWarningsAsErrors MSBuild option OnlyPrecompiledCode configuration option; allows to use only compiled code Fixes: ArgsAware exception fix accessing .NET properties bug fix ASP.NET session handler fix for OutOfProc mode DateTime methods (WordPress posting fix) Phalanger Tools for Visual Studio: Visual Studio 2010 & 2012 New debugger engine, PHP-like debugging ...MabiCommerce: MabiCommerce 1.0.1: What's NewSetup now creates shortcuts Fix spelling errors Minor enhancement to the Map window.ScintillaNET: ScintillaNET 2.5.2: This release has been built from the 2.5 branch. Version 2.5.2 is functionally identical to the 2.5.1 release but also includes the XML documentation comments file generated by Visual Studio. It is not 100% comprehensive but it will give you Visual Studio IntelliSense for a large part of the API. Just make sure the ScintillaNET.xml file is in the same folder as the ScintillaNET.dll reference you're using in your projects. (The XML file does not need to be distributed with your application)....BlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.1: 2012.08.25 Ver5.7.1 (1)?????·?????LING?????????????? (2)SMTP???（????）????、?????\?????????????????????New ProjectsAbcLibrary: A Library of methods and class types used for ABCAprendendo Windows 8: Não foi feito nada ainda...Auto fill template generator (word): This program was designed to help the automate generation of files using keywords.ClarkTestCodePlex2: clark test Code Razor: This tools translates Razor files to code. This allows the Razor views to be compiled and shared across projects.Contrib.Mod.ChangePassword: It is an evil module that abuses users rights and lets you change anyone's password.CurrentConsumption: CurrentConsumptionDbSettings - An API to store settings in a database: This stores settings in an OleDb/Sql database using an API similar to ApplicationSettingsBase. Settings vary by app, version, user.JCI prototipos: summaryMemberAdminService: This is a test projectMeteor Rendering Engine: The Meteor rendering engine is developed in C# with XNA 4.0, and provides various rendering outputs for 3D scenes.Mod.Colorbox: Orchard module for Mod.ColorboxMogulTestProject1: papaMogulTestTRY: papaosmm: this is a sample test projectServer Survey: Server Survey ScriptShops' Cloud: This project is a Cloud Platform for Mini Shops' Daily Management.Simple Grocery 5: This is a very simple application to help me (or you) out setting up a grocery list and use it on the food market using ALL smart phones or tablets.Tikun Korim: Community site to help people learn to read in Sefer Torah. This project is going to use ASP.NET MVC 4 and as much as open source project as we can. TreeCreeper: TreeCreeper programs (Spatial and NonSpatial) support the taxonomic analysis of species assemblagesVisual Studio Icon Patcher: Visual Studio Icon Patcher allows you to update Visual Studio 2012 with the Solution Explorer icons from Visual Studio 2010.WPT Generator: WPT Generator HTML5 , Google API 3.0, Javascript and CSS 3.0 Web Application for generating a WPT file (Ozi Explorer Format).

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• Auto-hydrate your objects with ADO.NET

  - by Jake Rutherford

  Recently while writing the monotonous code for pulling data out of a DataReader to hydrate some objects in an application I suddenly wondered "is this really necessary?" You've probably asked yourself the same question, and many of you have: - Used a code generator - Used a ORM such as Entity Framework - Wrote the code anyway because you like busy work     In most of the cases I've dealt with when making a call to a stored procedure the column names match up with the properties of the object I am hydrating. Sure that isn't always the case, but most of the time it's 1 to 1 mapping.  Given that fact I whipped up the following method of hydrating my objects without having write all of the code. First I'll show the code, and then explain what it is doing.      /// <summary>     /// Abstract base class for all Shared objects.     /// </summary>     /// <typeparam name="T"></typeparam>     [Serializable, DataContract(Name = "{0}SharedBase")]     public abstract class SharedBase<T> where T : SharedBase<T>     {         private static List<PropertyInfo> cachedProperties;         /// <summary>         /// Hydrates derived class with values from record.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="dataRecord"></param>         /// <param name="instance"></param>         public static void Hydrate(IDataRecord dataRecord, T instance)         {             var instanceType = instance.GetType();                         //Caching properties to avoid repeated calls to GetProperties.             //Noticable performance gains when processing same types repeatedly.             if (cachedProperties == null)             {                 cachedProperties = instanceType.GetProperties().ToList();             }                         foreach (var property in cachedProperties)             {                 if (!dataRecord.ColumnExists(property.Name)) continue;                 var ordinal = dataRecord.GetOrdinal(property.Name);                 var isNullable = property.PropertyType.IsGenericType &&                                  property.PropertyType.GetGenericTypeDefinition() == typeof (Nullable<>);                 var isNull = dataRecord.IsDBNull(ordinal);                 var propertyType = property.PropertyType;                 if (isNullable)                 {                     if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(propertyType.FullName))                     {                         var nullableType = Type.GetType(propertyType.FullName);                         propertyType = nullableType != null ? nullableType.GetGenericArguments()[0] : propertyType;                     }                 }                 switch (Type.GetTypeCode(propertyType))                 {                     case TypeCode.Int32:                         property.SetValue(instance,                                           (isNullable && isNull) ? (int?) null : dataRecord.GetInt32(ordinal), null);                         break;                     case TypeCode.Double:                         property.SetValue(instance,                                           (isNullable && isNull) ? (double?) null : dataRecord.GetDouble(ordinal),                                           null);                         break;                     case TypeCode.Boolean:                         property.SetValue(instance,                                           (isNullable && isNull) ? (bool?) null : dataRecord.GetBoolean(ordinal),                                           null);                         break;                     case TypeCode.String:                         property.SetValue(instance, (isNullable && isNull) ? null : isNull ? null : dataRecord.GetString(ordinal),                                           null);                         break;                     case TypeCode.Int16:                         property.SetValue(instance,                                           (isNullable && isNull) ? (int?) null : dataRecord.GetInt16(ordinal), null);                         break;                     case TypeCode.DateTime:                         property.SetValue(instance,                                           (isNullable && isNull)                                               ? (DateTime?) null                                               : dataRecord.GetDateTime(ordinal), null);                         break;                 }             }         }     }   Here is a class which utilizes the above: [Serializable] [DataContract] public class foo : SharedBase<foo> {     [DataMember]     public int? ID { get; set; }     [DataMember]     public string Name { get; set; }     [DataMember]     public string Description { get; set; }     [DataMember]     public string Subject { get; set; }     [DataMember]     public string Body { get; set; }            public foo(IDataRecord record)     {         Hydrate(record, this);                }     public foo() {} }   Explanation: - Class foo inherits from SharedBase specifying itself as the type. (NOTE SharedBase is abstract here in the event we want to provide additional methods which could be overridden by the instance class) public class foo : SharedBase<foo> - One of the foo class constructors accepts a data record which then calls the Hydrate method on SharedBase passing in the record and itself. public foo(IDataRecord record) {      Hydrate(record, this); } - Hydrate method on SharedBase will use reflection on the object passed in to determine its properties. At the same time, it will effectively cache these properties to avoid repeated expensive reflection calls public static void Hydrate(IDataRecord dataRecord, T instance) {      var instanceType = instance.GetType();      //Caching properties to avoid repeated calls to GetProperties.      //Noticable performance gains when processing same types repeatedly.      if (cachedProperties == null)      {           cachedProperties = instanceType.GetProperties().ToList();      } . . . - Hydrate method on SharedBase will iterate each property on the object and determine if a column with matching name exists in data record foreach (var property in cachedProperties) {      if (!dataRecord.ColumnExists(property.Name)) continue;      var ordinal = dataRecord.GetOrdinal(property.Name); . . . NOTE: ColumnExists is an extension method I put on IDataRecord which I’ll include at the end of this post. - Hydrate method will determine if the property is nullable and whether the value in the corresponding column of the data record has a null value var isNullable = property.PropertyType.IsGenericType && property.PropertyType.GetGenericTypeDefinition() == typeof (Nullable<>); var isNull = dataRecord.IsDBNull(ordinal); var propertyType = property.PropertyType; . . .  - If Hydrate method determines the property is nullable it will determine the underlying type and set propertyType accordingly - Hydrate method will set the value of the property based upon the propertyType   That’s it!!!   The magic here is in a few places. First, you may have noticed the following: public abstract class SharedBase<T> where T : SharedBase<T> This says that SharedBase can be created with any type and that for each type it will have it’s own instance. This is important because of the static members within SharedBase. We want this behavior because we are caching the properties for each type. If we did not handle things in this way only 1 type could be cached at a time, or, we’d need to create a collection that allows us to cache the properties for each type = not very elegant.   Second, in the constructor for foo you may have noticed this (literally): public foo(IDataRecord record) {      Hydrate(record, this); } I wanted the code for auto-hydrating to be as simple as possible. At first I wasn’t quite sure how I could call Hydrate on SharedBase within an instance of the class and pass in the instance itself. Fortunately simply passing in “this” does the trick. I wasn’t sure it would work until I tried it out, and fortunately it did.   So, to actually use this feature when utilizing ADO.NET you’d do something like the following:        public List<foo> GetFoo(int? fooId)         {             List<foo> fooList;             const string uspName = "usp_GetFoo";             using (var conn = new SqlConnection(_dbConnection))             using (var cmd = new SqlCommand(uspName, conn))             {                 cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;                 cmd.Parameters.Add(new SqlParameter("@FooID", SqlDbType.Int)                                        {Direction = ParameterDirection.Input, Value = fooId});                 conn.Open();                 using (var dr = cmd.ExecuteReader())                 {                     fooList= (from row in dr.Cast<DbDataRecord>()                                             select                                                 new foo(row)                                            ).ToList();                 }             }             return fooList;         }   Nice! Instead of having line after line manually assigning values from data record to an object you simply create a new instance and pass in the data record. Note that there are certainly instances where columns returned from stored procedure do not always match up with property names. In this scenario you can still use the above method and simply do your manual assignments afterward.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 20, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 20, 2014Popular ReleasesEdiFabric: Release 3.1: Fixed parse tree generation for the latest validation schemasCompare .NET Objects: Version 2.03.0.0: Support for System.Drawing.Font type New Option to Ignore Unknown Object TypesQuickMon: Version 3.11: This release adds some major changes to the core monitoring engine. 1. Polling overrides: Each collector entry can specify a minimum time updating is allowed for it and dependent collector entries. 2. Polling frequency sliding: Additional to polling overrides a collector entry can specify 'sliding' polling frequency if the state remains the same. This means the frequency slows down reducing overhead of polling on a stagnant resource. 3. The monitor pack has an overriding frequency. If used...Family Tree Analyzer: Version 3.7.2.3-beta2: Small beta test to determine issue with Lost Cousins facts with census with no country.AST - a tool for exploring windows kernel: Ast-0.2.20140519-win8.1x86: symbol form, supports any symbol query like dt/x command in windbg symbol form, supports loading pdb file pe form, visualizer of pe info (dos/optional header, sections, directories, import/export table)Mini SQL Query: Mini SQL Query (1.0.72.457): Apologies for the previous update! FK issue fixed and also a template data cache issue.Endomondo Export: First Release: This is the first release, it might be buggy, so I'll eventually try to improve it over time. I did it quick and dirty as I didn't have much spare time to develop it, but again it works for me. ;-) If I see people use it and there are reasonable requests I might add more stuff to it. Hope you guys like it!FileTable Services for Lightswitch: FileTable Services for Lightswitch 1.0.0: 19 MAY 2014 v.1.0.0 Initial releaseWordMat: WordMat v. 1.06: Check WordMat.blogspot.com for a complete description of new features.Visual F# Tools: Daily Builds Preview 05-16-2014: This preview is released for use under a proprietary license.Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.3.1405.17: Add Russian translation (thanks to VSharmanov) Fix a bug that make WPP to crash if the user click on "Connect/Reload" while the Report Tab is loading. Enhance the way WPP store the password for remote computers command.MoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): More Terra 1.12.9: =========== = Compatibility = =========== Updated to account for new format 1.2.4.1 =========== = Issues = =========== all items have not been added. Some colors for new tiles may be off. I wanted to get this out so people have a usable program.LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v3.0.3: Supports .NET 4.5x, Windows Phone 8.x, Windows 8.x, Windows Azure, Xamarin.Android, and Xamarin.iOS. New features include Status/Lookup, Mute APIs, and bug fixes. 100% Twitter API v1.1 coverage, Async, Portable Class Library (PCL).ConEmu - Windows console with tabs: ConEmu 140519 [Alpha]: ConEmu - developer build x86 and x64 versions. Written in C++, no additional packages required. Run "ConEmu.exe" or "ConEmu64.exe". Some useful information you may found: http://superuser.com/questions/tagged/conemu http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/ConEmuFAQ http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/wiki/TableOfContents If you want to use ConEmu in portable mode, just create empty "ConEmu.xml" file near to "ConEmu.exe" CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.26.0: Added access to the Release Notes during 'Check for Updates...'' Debug panels Added support for generic types members Members are grouped into 'Raw View' and 'Non-Public members' categories Implemented dedicated (array-like) view for Lists and Dictionaries http://download-codeplex.sec.s-msft.com/Download?ProjectName=csscriptnpp&DownloadId=846498ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.70.0: A lot of fixes. See history.SFDL.NET: SFDL.NET (2.2.9.2): Changelog: Neues Icon Xup.in CnL Plugin BugfixSEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.030.008 Release 1: Fixed cube editor failing to apply color to cubes. Added to cube editor, replace cube dialog, and Build Percent dialog. Corrected for hidden asteroid ore, allowing rare ore to show when importing an asteroid, or converting a 3d model to an asteroid (still appears to be limitations on rare ore in small asteroids). Allowed ore selection to Asteroid file import. (Can copy/import and convert existing asteroid to another ore). Added progress bars to common long running operations. Fixed ...Better Robocopy GUI: Command Line GUI for Robocopy: Better Robocopy GUI had become the primary plugin in Command Line GUI built on .NET 4TFS Planning and Disaster Recovery Avoidance Guide: v1.4.BETA - TFS, DR and Azure IaaS Planning Guides: Welcome to the TFS Planning and DR Avoidance Guidance What is new? A new crisper, more compact style, which is easier to consume on multiple devices without sacrificing any content. Also included are the new TFS on Azure IaaS guide and supplementary guides. Note Capacity planning workbook and posters are included in the Everything Zip package. Quality-Bar Detail Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has been through an independent technical review ...New ProjectsBizTalk Port Info Query Tool: This tool is capable of retrieving BizTalk send and receive port information, through which can be searched.C5_StyleCopped: The C5 project while an excellent set of collections suffers from being very non StyleCop compliant.Channel 9 RSS Reader (Universal / WinPhone 8): Channel 9 RSS Reader Code Share Sample- A simple RSS reader app for the Channel 9 RSS feed sharing code across 3 apps.CRM Web API Yelp Example: Sample Visual Studio 2013 project that provides an example of how you could use Web API and Microsoft Azure to integrate with Yelp.ERP Accounting System: ERP Accounting SystemEssIL: Essential classes written in CIL.FileTable Services for Lightswitch: Integrates SQL Server 2012 and later FileTable functionality with Lightswitch rapid application development tools. Works with ALL types of Lightswitch clients.freeasyDMS: A free and easy to use DMS for everyone. Without any cloud restrictions. All information about added Documents are stored lokaly at XML files.FreelancerCreateReport: Freelancer_CreateReportInstituto Superior de Ciencias Comerciales: esta es una pruebaMVC Blogger: Under TestingMVC Bootstrap Timepicker: ASP.NET MVC html helper for Bootstrap 3 time picker. This helper makes it easy to use a time picker with the bootstrap look 'n feel in your web site.NextGen: NextGen FrameworkPlato 2D Framework: Plato Windows Runtime App canvas oriented MVVM framework.Promotion Planner Pro: Trade Promotion Management and Analytic suitSharePoint Managed Metadata List Filter: This managed metadata list filter webpart provides the ability to filter multiple list view webparts that contain the same Managed metadata site column on the sSurfwave: A Windows Store (Windows Runtime) library that provides multi-touch tracking and normalized interpretation capabilities.Torrent Description Generator: A simple WPF application to generate a robust torrent description for movies in text or bbcode. Includes file info, thumbs, imdb/RT links and poster.Trang's Project: Qu?n lý thông tin khách hàng trong ho?t d?ng vay v?nWebSniffer: A bot written in C# to play a hangman game and intelligently make decisions about what to pick next.WorldBankBBS: BBS Package designed for use with ASCII, ANSI and PETSCII (Commodore) users. All resources are shared between differing clients. WPF Password Generator with Prism 5 and Moq (2014): This is a WPF reference implementation for developing an MVVM application that uses Prism (5) and Moq.????-????【??】????????: ??????????????,??????????????????,?????????????。?????????,????????????。 ?????-?????【??】?????????: ?????????????????,????,????,?????????.?????,?????!?????,?????????、??、??! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????,???????,??????。??????????,????,????,?????,????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????、???????,?????????,???????????????。?????????????,???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,???????????????????????????,????:????,????,????,?????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????,?????????????? ??。??????????、????、????、?????????? ???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,???、???!???????,????????????????,????????????,???! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????,????,???????、???????????,???????????,????,?????,???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????????,?????????,??????????,????????,?????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????,????????,??????????????,?????????,????,????,??????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????、?????????,?????????,????,????????,????????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????:??????、????、????、????、????、??????、??????，???????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????、?????,????????????????????,????,????,??????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????，???????、???????????，????????、????、????、??????、????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????????????????,???????????????????????,???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????、????、????、??????、????、???????,?????,?????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????、????、??????、????????,????????????,???????????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????,?????????????????????,?????,????,???????. ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????、???????,?????????,???????????????,?????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????、??、???????????,??????,????????,??????????????????...????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????，?????????/?,,???????????,??????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????,????????????????????????,???????????????,?????????????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????,????????,?????,???,???????????,???????????,?????,??????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????????????????、??????????????,??????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????"????,????"???,????????????????????????,??????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,????:????,????,????,??????,?????,???????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????????????,???????????,????????,?????????????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????、????、????、??????、????、????????,????????、?????????,?????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,?????????????。????????????,???????,???????,?????,?????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????,?????????、??、??、????,??????????,?????????????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????、????、????、??????????,???,?????,???????????????. ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????????,?????, ... ????????????,????,????,?????,???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????????、??????,????、?????、????， ?????????，?????????????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????,??????,?????????????????????,???????????????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????????、????、????、??????、???????,??????、??????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????【.????.????.????.????.】??【??】:、??、??、??、??、??、??、??、??、??、??、?????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,????,??.??.??.??.??.??.??.???，????，???????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????、????????、????????、????????、???????,????????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????,?????,???????,???????????,??????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????、??????、????、?????、?????!????,????????????????!????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????,??,????????。 ... ??????????????????、??????????????????... ???????-???????【??】???????????: ???????????????????????????,???????????????,????????????????！ ???????-???????【??】???????????: ???????????????:????,????,????,???????,????????,??????:????????,?????! ???????-???????【??】???????????: ???????,?????????,?????????????。?????????????,?????????,???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????,???????、???????????,????????,????,?????????,??????,??????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,????????????,?????????????????,??????,????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,???????、????、????、??????、???????,??????,???????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????,??,??,??,??? ?,??,,??,??,??,??,??,??,????????,??????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????????????:???????,??????,????,????,????,?????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????????????,????,????,????,???????,?????,?????.??????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????????,?????????????,???????????.????????????,????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,??:??????,????,????,????,?????,??????????????. ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,???????????????。?????????????,???????,?????????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????,????(??)????????，??????，????，???，????，???????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????,?????????????,?????????????,??????,????,????,??????????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????????,????????,????:???????,??????,????,????,?????,?????,??????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????????,????,????,??????????。???????????????,??,??,??????????,??????... ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,??????????????、???????、???????、???????、?????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ???????????,?????????????? ??。????????、????、????、?????????? ???????。 ??????-??????【??】??????????: ????????????、?????、?????、?????、?????、????,???????????,?????,??????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????、?????、?????、????、?????,??????????。????????????????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,????????????,?????、??、????,?????,??????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ?????????????????,???????????????。???????????,??????:????、????、???????！ ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????,?????????????,????,?????????,?????????????,?????,?????! ??????-??????【??】??????????: ??????????????????,???????????,??????????????,??????????，??????????????！

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, July 25, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, July 25, 2013Popular ReleasesEnglish Practice Helper: English Practice Helper Demo v1.0: The first demoTweetinvi a friendly C# Twitter API: Alpha 0.8.0.1: This is the first release of Tweetinvi. Please report any issue in the discussion or issues. Sincerely, LinviKartris E-commerce: Kartris v2.5003: This fixes an issue where search engines appear to identify as IE and so trigger the noIE page if there is not a non-responsive skin specified.VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.45: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImgBabes.com" links NEW: Added Support for "ImagesIon.com" linksMagelia WebStore Open-source Ecommerce software: Magelia WebStore 2.4: Magelia WebStore version 2.4 introduces new and improved features: Basket and order calculation have been redesigned with a more modular approach geographic zone algorithms for tax and shipping calculations have been re-developed. The Store service has been split in three services (store, basket, order). Product start and end dates have been added. For variant products a unique code has been introduced for the top (variable) product, product attributes can now be defined at the top ...LogicCircuit: LogicCircuit 2.13.07.22: Logic Circuit - is educational software for designing and simulating logic circuits. Intuitive graphical user interface, allows you to create unrestricted circuit hierarchy with multi bit buses, debug circuits behavior with oscilloscope, and navigate running circuits hierarchy. Changes of this versionYou can make visual elements of the circuit been visible on its symbols. This way you can build composite displays, keyboards and reuse them. Please read about displays for more details http://ww...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v2.1.08: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Windows Phone 8, Client Profile, Windows 8, and Windows Azure. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also supports Twitter API v1.1! Also on NuGet.AcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.4.3: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ??v4.4.3 ?? ??Bilibili????????????? ???????????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???，????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??2.10?...Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.6.601: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.6.6. These zip files are also available as a NuGet package: https://nuget.org/profiles/dlemstra/C# Intellisense for Notepad++: Initial release: Members auto-complete Integration with native Notepad++ Auto-Completion Auto "open bracket" for methods Right-arrow to accept suggestions51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.19.4: One Click Install from NuGet This release introduces the 51Degrees.mobi IIS Vary Header Fix. When Compression and Caching is used in IIS, the Vary header is overwritten, making intelligent caching with dynamic content impossible. Find out more about installing the Vary Header fix. Changes to Version 2.1.19.4Handlers now have a ‘Count’ property. This is an integer value that shows how many devices in the dataset that use that handler. Provider.cs -> GetDeviceInfoByID to address a problem w...SMSGateWay: SMSGateWayLaunch: CMPP,SGIP,SMGP ????SP?? ??,????,????,????,VPS??,?????,???. ??????,????,?????,????......????? ????SPID ,MsgSrc,???,???IP,?????? ?????,?????,??,???? ??QQ:3483305Centrify DirectControl PowerShell Module: 1.5.709: -fix- Computer password is correctly set when preparing Computer account for Self-Service join and hostname is longer than 14 charsDLog: DLog v1.0: Log v1.0SalarDbCodeGenerator: SalarDbCodeGenerator v2.1.2013.0719: Version 2.1.2013.0719 2013/7/19 Pattern Changes: * DapperContext pattern is added. * All patterns are updated to work with one-to-one relations. Changes: * One-to-one relation is supported. * Minor bug fixes.PantheR's GraphX for .NET: GraphX for .NET v0.9.5 BETA: BETA 0.9.5 + Added GraphArea.SaveAsImage() method that supports different image formats + Added GraphArea.UseNativeObjectArrange property. True by default. If set to False it will use different coordinates handling that helps to soften vertex drag issues to the top and left area sides. + Added GraphArea.Translation property. It is needed to get correct translation coordinates when determining object position from the mouse coordinates. + Added new VertexControl.PositionChanged event along wit....NET Code Migrator for Dynamics CRM: v1.0.12: Combined the main macros, generated macros from a sample organization, and the CreateVisualStudioMacros utility into a single package.Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows and WP (v1.3 beta 2): Includes all changes in v1.3 beta 1 Additional support for Windows 8.1 Preview New API (JS): addTextTrack New API (JS): msKeys New API (JS): msPlayToPreferredSourceUri New API (JS): msSetMediaKeys New API (JS): onmsneedkey New API (Xaml): SetMediaStreamSource method New API (Xaml): Stretch property New API (Xaml): StretchChanged event New API (Xaml): AreTransportControlsEnabled property New API (Xaml): IsFullWindow property New API (Xaml): PlayToPreferredSourceUri proper...CodeGen Code Generator: CodeGen 4.2.11: Changes in this release include: Added several new alternate forms of the <FIELD_SELWND> token to provide template developers better control over the case of field selection window names. Also added a new token <FIELD_SELWND_ORIGINAL> to preserve the case of selection window names in the same way that <FIELD_SELWND> used to. Enhanced UI Toolkit window script selection window processing (-ws) so that selection window names are no longer case sensitive (they aren't in UI Toolkit). Also the -w...Outlook 2013 Add-In: Multiple Calendars: As per popular request, this new version includes: - Support for multiple calendars. This can be enabled in the configuration by choosing which ones to show/hide appointments from. In some cases (public folders) it may time out and crash, and so far it only supports "My Calendars", so not shared ones yet. Also they're currently shown in the same font/color so there are no confusions with color categories, but please drop me a line on any suggestions you'd like to see implemented. - Added fri...New ProjectsActive Directory Web App Availability Monitor for SCOM 2012: Extend the web application availability monitoring in System Center Operations Manager 2012 with the ability to monitor Active Directory Authenticated Web SitesArgoWinform: ArgoWinform ASP.NET Routing Optional Parameters in body of Urls: This library allows ASP.NET MVC developers to have custom parameters in the body of Urls. Routes that are defined by this library accepts a LookupService that wAutomate Variations in SharePoint 2013 using C#: Automating variations settings and configuration so whenever a deployment is needed, you will be ready with your PowerShell scripts.Automate Variations in SharePoint 2013 using PowerShell: Automating variations settings and configuration so whenever a deployment is needed, you will be ready with your PowerShell scripts.BingosoftSwimming: ?????????ContentCreator for Orchard: Orchard Module that is suposed to replace the Orchard.ContentPicker module by letting you create contentItems directlyGET - General Emitter Templates: GET: General Emitter Templates. Language: C# Given a data file (in xml format), it models the data according with the directives specified in the template file.GTS Project: This project is a private personal educational project to study and learn DNN and ASP.NET MVCJustCompare: Just Compare is human made tool to help humans to compare two digital files. We are now concentrating on source code files only. Media Tool: A collection of tool to manage media files (Pictures and videos)MVVMlight Navigation Service for Windows Phone 8: A simple project to make navigation in MVVMlight on windows phone faster.Qibla Compass for Windows Phone: Qibla compass is one of the mostly used community applications/utility among Muslims. It allows users to determine the correct location / direction of Ka’aba.QuickWebLauncherWP: Una aplicación para windows phone para leer fuentes de sindicación y coleccionar enlaces a los artículos que se desean leerSimpleBingWallpaper: It's a simple project for get bingwallpaper. if you like it. please +1.. ThanksStyrApp: Template Application for technology testingTataFm: Tata FM for Windows 8 app.TimeZoneInfoForm: Exercises timezone related classes and methods in .NET. It can be used as sample code or to troubleshoot suspected timezone issues in .NET.Wix Test: *WIX Test Solution* - is a simple WIX solution for learning some new features. This project is currently in setup mode and free.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, October 30, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, October 30, 2013Popular ReleasesSuperSocket, an extensible socket server framework: SuperSocket 1.6 stable: Changes included in this release: Process level isolation SuperSocket ServerManager (include server and client) Connect to client from server side initiatively Client certificate validation New configuration attributes "textEncoding", "defaultCulture", and "storeLocation" (certificate node) Many bug fixes http://docs.supersocket.net/v1-6/en-US/New-Features-and-Breaking-ChangesBarbaTunnel: BarbaTunnel 8.1: Check Version History for more information about this release.Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V53 (LiveConnect): This is the first release which can be used with the new LiveConnect authentication. Small bugfix: The article URL is now at the end of the article...Mugen MVVM Toolkit: Mugen MVVM Toolkit 2.1: v 2.1 Added the 'Should' class instead of the 'Validate' class. The 'Validate' class is now obsolete. Added 'Toolkit.Annotations' to support the Mugen MVVM Toolkit ReSharper plugin. Updated JetBrains annotations within the project. Added the 'GlobalSettings.DefaultActivationPolicy' property to represent the default activation policy. Removed the 'GetSettings' method from the 'ViewModelBase' class. Instead of it, the 'GlobalSettings.DefaultViewModelSettings' property is used. Updated...NAudio: NAudio 1.7: full release notes available at http://mark-dot-net.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/naudio-17-release-notes.htmlHandJS: Hand.js v1.1.3: New configuration: HANDJS.doNotProcessCSS to disable CSS scanning.Layered Architecture Solution Guidance (LASG): LASG 1.0.1.0 for Visual Studio 2012: PRE-REQUISITES Open GAX (Please install Oct 4, 2012 version) Microsoft® System CLR Types for Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Shared Management Objects Microsoft Enterprise Library 6.0 (for the generated code) Windows Azure SDK (for layered cloud applications) Silverlight 5 SDK (for Silverlight applications) THE RELEASE This release only works on Visual Studio 2012. Known Issue If you choose the Database project, the solution unfolding time will be slow....DirectX Tool Kit: October 2013: October 28, 2013 Updated for Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 SDK RTM Added DGSLEffect, DGSLEffectFactory, VertexPositionNormalTangentColorTexture, and VertexPositionNormalTangentColorTextureSkinning Model loading and effect factories support loading skinned models MakeSpriteFont now has a smooth vs. sharp antialiasing option: /sharp Model loading from CMOs now handles UV transforms for texture coordinates A number of small fixes for EffectFactory Minor code and project cleanup ...WPF Extended DataGrid: WPF Extended DataGrid 2.0.0.8 binaries: Fixed issue with auto filter select all checkbox was getting checked automatically after reopening the filter.ExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v4.0beta1: +2013-10-28 v4.0 beta1 +?????Collapsed???????????????。 -????：window/group_panel.aspx??，???????，???????，?????????。 +??????SelectedNodeIDArray???????????????。 -????：tree/checkbox/tree_checkall.aspx??，?????，?????，????????????。 -??TimerPicker???????（????、????ing）。 -??????????????????????（???）。 -?????????????，??type=text/css（??~`）。 -MsgTarget???MessageTarget，???None。 -FormOffsetRight?????20px??5px。 -?Web.config?PageManager??FormLabelAlign???。 -ToolbarPosition??Left/Right。 -??Web.conf...CODE Framework: 4.0.31028.0: See change notes in the documentation section for details on what's new. Note: If you download the class reference help file with, you have to right-click the file, pick "Properties", and then unblock the file, as many browsers flag the file as blocked during download (for security reasons) and thus hides all content.VidCoder: 1.5.10 Beta: Broke out all the encoder-specific passthrough options into their own dropdown. This should make what they do a bit more clear and clean up the codec list a bit. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5855.Indent Guides for Visual Studio: Indent Guides v14: ImportantThis release has a separate download for Visual Studio 2010. The first link is for VS 2012 and later. Version History Changed in v14 Improved performance when scrolling and editing Fixed potential crash when Resharper is installed Fixed highlight of guides split around pragmas in C++/C# Restored VS 2010 support as a separate download Changed in v13 Added page width guide lines Added guide highlighting options Fixed guides appearing over collapsed blocks Fixed guides not...ASP.net MVC Awesome - jQuery Ajax Helpers: 3.5.3 (mvc5): version 3.5.3 - support for mvc5 version 3.5.2 - fix for setting single value to multivalue controls - datepicker min max date offset fix - html encoding for keys fix - enable Column.ClientFormatFunc to be a function call that will return a function version 3.5.1 ========================== - fixed html attributes rendering - fixed loading animation rendering - css improvements version 3.5 ========================== - autosize for all popups ( can be turned off by calling in js...Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.585b: IMDB plot scraping Fixed. New* Movie - Rename Folder using Movie Set, option to move ignored articles to end of Movie Set, only for folder renaming. Fixed* Media Companion - Fixed if using profiles, config files would blown up in size due to some settings duplicating. * Ignore Article of An was cutting of last character of movie title. * If Rescraping title, sort title changed depending on 'Move article to end of Sort Title' setting. * Movie - If changing Poster source order, list would beco...MoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): MoreTerra 1.11.4: Release 1.11.4 =========== = Compatibility = =========== Updated to add the new tiles/walls in 1.2.1PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit: PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit v3.0.7: This is a bug fix release, containing some important fixes! Fixed issue where Session 0 was not detected correctly, resulting in issues when attempting to display a UI when none was allowed Fixed Installation Prompt and Installation Restart Prompt appearing when deploy mode was non-interactive or silent Fixed issue where defer prompt is displayed after force closing multiple applications Fixed issue executing blocked app execution dialog from UNC path (executed instead from local tempo...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.7: 2013.10.24 Ver5.9.7 (1)FTP???????、２?????????????shift-jis????????????? (2)????HTTP????、???????POST??????????????????CtrlAltStudio Viewer: CtrlAltStudio Viewer 1.1.0.34322 Alpha 4: This experimental release of the CtrlAltStudio Viewer includes the following significant features: Oculus Rift support. Stereoscopic 3D display support. Based on Firestorm viewer 4.4.2 codebase. For more details, see the release notes linked to below. Release notes: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/release-notes/1-1-0-34322-alpha-4 Support info: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/support Privacy policy: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/privacy Disclaimer: This software is not provided or sup...VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 32 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) This release has been tested with Visual Studio 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013, using TortoiseSVN 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8. It should also still work with Visual Studio 2005, but I couldn't find anyone to test it in VS2005. Build 32 (beta) changelogNew: Added Visual Studio 2013 support New: Added Visual Studio 2012 support New: Added SVN 1.8 support New: Added 'Ch...New Projects.NET Bio Structure: .NET Bio Structure is an extension of .NET Bio, an open source library of common bioinformatics functions..NET Micro Framework Tiny File System: Tiny File System provides a lightweight file system that can be overlaid on external memory peripherals such as Flash memory or anything you write a driver for.AccOct2013 Liquidaciones MVC3 EF: Proyecto en MVC3 con Razor y Entity Framework para la liquidacion de sueldos.AccOct2013 Tienda MVC3 EF: Ejemplo entity framework con layouts en mvc3 con razor para visual studio 2010AsterNET-Project Templates: A project to help create a set of Visual Studio templates, published via the Visual Studio Gallery to help developers get started even quicker using AsterNET.Clothing: Clothing ERP.ePub Factory PCL: Generates ePub packages (i.e. eBooks).eztvReader: Simple desktop application to read latest RSS torrent feed with magnet links.Formula Calculation Toolkit: Simple calculator for formulas.Gadgeteer.Interfaces.Samples: Project with sample projects for the Gadgeteer. Attempt at creating composable and testable samples, for this a dependency on GadgeteerInterface.codeplex.comGerente EBD: Projeto em WPF e SQLite para controle de frequência na Escola Bíblica Dominical.Google Contacts: With this project you can get your google contacts. Remember you need Application-specific password from here: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1173270?hINdT j2me Framework: This project is a lightweight Framework for Nokia s40 and Asha platform. Here you'll find a lot of classes that will help you and turn your life more easy ;-)KDG's Simple Messaging App (C#): Simple messaging application.LegendsNeverDie: ITs a Projekt who can every join and help me, but the first step i make it alone :DLibros VBOnline: Libreria Online para clientesMapAround: .NET tools for developing web and desktop mapping applicationsMSSQL Compressed Backup: SQL Server Compressed Backup is a command line utility for backing up and restoring SQL Server 2005+ with compression(zip,bzip2,gzip,lz4) and encryption(AES).netext: Debugger Extension (WinDbg) to enaeble SQL-like queries for .NET managed heapPagina Ajedrez: Pagina diseñada para el juego de partidas y torneos de Ajedrez.Pescar2013Shop-MarianaMatias: Pagina estilo Garbarinoplungerjs: Framework javascript não obstrusivoProMotion: Mirror for https://github.com/clearsightstudio/ProMotion.ProyectoImagenes: Jugar con imagenesRawb: High performance, simple, composable web UI controls (grid, scrollbar, splitters, etc.) for use with Knockout.Sea Dragon AJAX Viewer Web Part: This project provides a SharePoint 2010 Web Part that allows you to surface a Deep Zoom image anywhere within a SharePoint Site Collection.SimpleMapper: Maps objects in Dot Net: A mapper tool developed in C# that helps mapping object of same type and different. Also maps Proxy objects to POCO classes.Sparta Game Framework: Sparta is a framework with a focus on game development on Windows Phone. Currently we're supporting 2D games.????????: ????????

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, October 31, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, October 31, 2013Popular ReleasesTCPEssentials: TCPEssentials 1.0.0.1: Changed the name of method SplitArray to Split. Standardization is important...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V54 (LiveConnect): This is the first release which can be used with the new LiveConnect authentication. Fixes the problem that the authentication will not work after 1 hour. Also a logfile will now be stored in "%AppData%\Community\CommunityForumsNNTPServer". If you have any problems please feel free to sent me the file "LogFile.txt".WPF Extended DataGrid: WPF Extended DataGrid 2.0.0.9 binaries: Fixed issue with ICollectionView containg null values (AutoFilter issue)Community TFS Build Extensions: October 2013: The October 2013 release contains Scripts - a new addition to our delivery. These are a growing library of PowerShell scripts to use with VS2013. See our documentation for more on scripting. VS2010 Activities(target .NET 4.0) VS2012 Activities (target .NET 4.5) VS2013 Activities (target .NET 4.5.1) Community TFS Build Manager VS2012 Community TFS Build Manager VS2013 The Community TFS Build Managers for VS2010, 2012 and 2013 can also be found in the Visual Studio Gallery where upda...SuperSocket, an extensible socket server framework: SuperSocket 1.6 stable: Changes included in this release: Process level isolation SuperSocket ServerManager (include server and client) Connect to client from server side initiatively Client certificate validation New configuration attributes "textEncoding", "defaultCulture", and "storeLocation" (certificate node) Many bug fixes http://docs.supersocket.net/v1-6/en-US/New-Features-and-Breaking-ChangesBarbaTunnel: BarbaTunnel 8.1: Check Version History for more information about this release.Mugen MVVM Toolkit: Mugen MVVM Toolkit 2.1: v 2.1 Added the 'Should' class instead of the 'Validate' class. The 'Validate' class is now obsolete. Added 'Toolkit.Annotations' to support the Mugen MVVM Toolkit ReSharper plugin. Updated JetBrains annotations within the project. Added the 'GlobalSettings.DefaultActivationPolicy' property to represent the default activation policy. Removed the 'GetSettings' method from the 'ViewModelBase' class. Instead of it, the 'GlobalSettings.DefaultViewModelSettings' property is used. Updated...NAudio: NAudio 1.7: full release notes available at http://mark-dot-net.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/naudio-17-release-notes.htmlLayered Architecture Solution Guidance (LASG): LASG 1.0.1.0 for Visual Studio 2012: PRE-REQUISITES Open GAX (Please install Oct 4, 2012 version) Microsoft® System CLR Types for Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Shared Management Objects Microsoft Enterprise Library 6.0 (for the generated code) Windows Azure SDK (for layered cloud applications) Silverlight 5 SDK (for Silverlight applications) THE RELEASE This release only works on Visual Studio 2012. Known Issue If you choose the Database project, the solution unfolding time will be slow....DirectX Tool Kit: October 2013: October 28, 2013 Updated for Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 SDK RTM Added DGSLEffect, DGSLEffectFactory, VertexPositionNormalTangentColorTexture, and VertexPositionNormalTangentColorTextureSkinning Model loading and effect factories support loading skinned models MakeSpriteFont now has a smooth vs. sharp antialiasing option: /sharp Model loading from CMOs now handles UV transforms for texture coordinates A number of small fixes for EffectFactory Minor code and project cleanup ...ExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v4.0beta1: +2013-10-28 v4.0 beta1 +?????Collapsed???????????????。 -????：window/group_panel.aspx??，???????，???????，?????????。 +??????SelectedNodeIDArray???????????????。 -????：tree/checkbox/tree_checkall.aspx??，?????，?????，????????????。 -??TimerPicker???????（????、????ing）。 -??????????????????????（???）。 -?????????????，??type=text/css（??~`）。 -MsgTarget???MessageTarget，???None。 -FormOffsetRight?????20px??5px。 -?Web.config?PageManager??FormLabelAlign???。 -ToolbarPosition??Left/Right。 -??Web.conf...CODE Framework: 4.0.31028.0: See change notes in the documentation section for details on what's new. Note: If you download the class reference help file with, you have to right-click the file, pick "Properties", and then unblock the file, as many browsers flag the file as blocked during download (for security reasons) and thus hides all content.VidCoder: 1.5.10 Beta: Broke out all the encoder-specific passthrough options into their own dropdown. This should make what they do a bit more clear and clean up the codec list a bit. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 5855.Indent Guides for Visual Studio: Indent Guides v14: ImportantThis release has a separate download for Visual Studio 2010. The first link is for VS 2012 and later. Version History Changed in v14 Improved performance when scrolling and editing Fixed potential crash when Resharper is installed Fixed highlight of guides split around pragmas in C++/C# Restored VS 2010 support as a separate download Changed in v13 Added page width guide lines Added guide highlighting options Fixed guides appearing over collapsed blocks Fixed guides not...ASP.net MVC Awesome - jQuery Ajax Helpers: 3.5.3 (mvc5): version 3.5.3 - support for mvc5 version 3.5.2 - fix for setting single value to multivalue controls - datepicker min max date offset fix - html encoding for keys fix - enable Column.ClientFormatFunc to be a function call that will return a function version 3.5.1 ========================== - fixed html attributes rendering - fixed loading animation rendering - css improvements version 3.5 ========================== - autosize for all popups ( can be turned off by calling in js...Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.585b: IMDB plot scraping Fixed. New* Movie - Rename Folder using Movie Set, option to move ignored articles to end of Movie Set, only for folder renaming. Fixed* Media Companion - Fixed if using profiles, config files would blown up in size due to some settings duplicating. * Ignore Article of An was cutting of last character of movie title. * If Rescraping title, sort title changed depending on 'Move article to end of Sort Title' setting. * Movie - If changing Poster source order, list would beco...MoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): MoreTerra 1.11.4: Release 1.11.4 =========== = Compatibility = =========== Updated to add the new tiles/walls in 1.2.1Emptycanvas: Emptycanvas v21: Maintenant plusieurs lumières possibles.PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit: PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit v3.0.7: This is a bug fix release, containing some important fixes! Fixed issue where Session 0 was not detected correctly, resulting in issues when attempting to display a UI when none was allowed Fixed Installation Prompt and Installation Restart Prompt appearing when deploy mode was non-interactive or silent Fixed issue where defer prompt is displayed after force closing multiple applications Fixed issue executing blocked app execution dialog from UNC path (executed instead from local tempo...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.7: 2013.10.24 Ver5.9.7 (1)FTP???????、２?????????????shift-jis????????????? (2)????HTTP????、???????POST??????????????????New ProjectsBF4Rcon.NET: BF4Rcon.NET is a .NET library for Battlefield 4's remote server administration interface.Command Processor: Command Processor with "Command Query Responsibility" prencipleDqyt.sk: a solution for sk project.Edit Visual Studio LoadTest Results' Name and Description: A simple addin to Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2010, which enables a LoadTest user to be able to give custom name and description for their loadtest.Grauers Set Metadata Properties: Use this to automatically set ISSUE, APPROVED BY and APPROVED DATEIkeCode WP7.1+ Toolkit: IkeCode WP7.1+ Toolkit is an initiative to create methods that facilitate the development of application.MongoDAO: MongoDB C#NB_Store Payment On Delivery Gateway: NB_Store Payment On Delivery Gateway allows you to add "Paymeny On Delivery" to your NB_Store webshop on DNN.occupie: // to doOffice and PDF API for .NET Components: As an independent .NET component, Spire.Office doesn't need Microsoft Office to be installed on System. It supports C# word, C# Excel and C# PDF.SharePoint Workflow Manager | Bulk Start or Terminate workflows: SharePoint Workflow Manager allows you bulk start or terminate SharePoint workflows on all items in a list.System App: The System App is a sleek, smart and open-source IT mapping and monitoring tool by Zalando.TCPEssentials: TCPEssentials is a C# Library that helps simplify the task of managing TCP connections, and also gives you a few tools that may be useful.Wangls: ???WindowSMART: WindowSMART 2013 and Home Server SMART 2013 are powerful hard disk and SSD health monitoring, reporting and alerting tools for Windows.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, July 21, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, July 21, 2013Popular ReleasesMagick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.6.601: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.6.6.MISAO: Ver. 5.33: Latest app and add-insC# Intellisense for Notepad++: Initial release: Members auto-complete Integration with native Notepad++ Auto-Completion Auto "open bracket" for methods Right-arrow to accept suggestions51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.19.4: One Click Install from NuGet This release introduces the 51Degrees.mobi IIS Vary Header Fix. When Compression and Caching is used in IIS, the Vary header is overwritten, making intelligent caching with dynamic content impossible. Find out more about installing the Vary Header fix. Changes to Version 2.1.19.4Handlers now have a ‘Count’ property. This is an integer value that shows how many devices in the dataset that use that handler. Provider.cs -> GetDeviceInfoByID to address a problem w...SalarDbCodeGenerator: SalarDbCodeGenerator v2.1.2013.0719: Version 2.1.2013.0719 2013/7/19 Pattern Changes: * DapperContext pattern is added. * All patterns are updated to work with one-to-one relations. Changes: * One-to-one relation is supported. * Minor bug fixes.Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows and WP (v1.3 beta 2): Includes all changes in v1.3 beta 1 Additional support for Windows 8.1 Preview New API (JS): addTextTrack New API (JS): msKeys New API (JS): msPlayToPreferredSourceUri New API (JS): msSetMediaKeys New API (JS): onmsneedkey New API (Xaml): SetMediaStreamSource method New API (Xaml): Stretch property New API (Xaml): StretchChanged event New API (Xaml): AreTransportControlsEnabled property New API (Xaml): IsFullWindow property New API (Xaml): PlayToPreferredSourceUri proper...Outlook 2013 Add-In: Multiple Calendars: As per popular request, this new version includes: - Support for multiple calendars. This can be enabled in the configuration by choosing which ones to show/hide appointments from. In some cases (public folders) it may time out and crash, and so far it only supports "My Calendars", so not shared ones yet. Also they're currently shown in the same font/color so there are no confusions with color categories, but please drop me a line on any suggestions you'd like to see implemented. - Added fri...Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Beta 2: New in this release: Show grid in editor Cut/copy/paste support Bug fixesDaRenamer: Renamer 2.1.0.5: Version 2.1.0.5 -fixed minor bugInstall Verify Tool: Install Verify Tool V 1.0: Win Service Web Service Win Service Client Web Service ClientOrchard Project: Orchard 1.7 RC: Planning releasedTerminals: Version 3.1 - Release: Changes since version 3.0:15992 Unified usage of icons in user interface Added context menu in Organize favorites grid Fixed:34219 34210 34223 33981 34209 Install notes:No changes in database (use database from release 3.0) No upgrade of configuration, passwords, credentials or favorites See also upgrade notes for release 3.0PMU Connection Tester: PMU Connection Tester v4.4.0: This is the current release build of the PMU Connection Tester, version 4.4.0 This version of the connection tester was released with openPDC 1.5 SP1 and openPDC 2.0 BETA. This application requires that .NET 4.0 already be installed on your system. Note this is the last release of the PMU Connection Tester that will built on .NET 4.0 using the TVA Code Library and the Time-series Framework. Future releases of the PMU Connection Tester will be built on .NET 4.5 (or later) using the Grid Sol...HiUpdateTools - easy publish and update your app: HiUpdateTools Add-in 1.0.0.5: - Generate ClientConfig.xml and adding to the project - Set ClientConfig.xml option "CopyToOutputDirectory"= Copy if newer - Fix client path not ending the backslash - Add Client assembly to VSX package - On first use, the tool is added to the reference to the client assembly - Fix client application - Multi-instance application - Run single instance of update applicationopen gaze and mouse analyzer: Ogama 4.4 BETA: This beta was published on 16.07.2013 and includes fixes and improvements since last 4.3 release, mainly in the recording section which solves problems with tobii and mirametrix devices, see the source code tab for details. Please test it, if you have one of this devices and give me feedback using the issue tracker or discussion tabs. Don´t forget to install .Net 4 framework and SQL Express before installing Ogama. When using Tobii tracking devices, you have to install apple bonjour also. On...SpaceFlight: SpaceFlight_v1.1: Added VCRedist.exe , run this first if you get the "MSVCP100.dll is missing" issueAdvanced Resource Tab for Blend: Advanced Resource Tab 2.0: Added filtering of (sub)-resource items and collapsing / expanding of all resource dictionaries.Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.573b: XBMC Link - Let MC update your XBMC Library Fixes in place, Enjoy the XBMC Link function Well, Phil's been busy in the background, and come up with a Great new feature for Media Companion. Currently only implemented for movies. Once we're happy that's working with no issues, we'll extend the functionality to include TV shows. All the help for this is build into the application. Go to General Preferences - XBMC Link for details. Help us make it better* Currently only tested on local and ...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1307.15: Fix a bug where WPP crash if 'ShowPendingUpdates' is start with wrong credentials. Fix a bug where WPP crash if ArrivalDateAfter and ArrivalDateBefore is equal in the ComputerView. Add a filter in the ComputerView. (Thanks to NorbertFe for this feature request) Add an option, when right-clicking on a computer, you can ask for display the current logon user of the remote computer. Add an option in settings to choose if WPP ping remote computers using IPv4, IPv6 or IPv6 and, if fail, IP...Lab Of Things: vBeta1: Initial release of LoTNew ProjectsBlindspot: This project aims to create a fully-functional windowless desktop application allowing blind/visually impaired music fans the chance to access Spotify.HelloReading: ???????MonteMediaCC: The Monte Media Library is a Java library for processing media data. Supported media formats include still images, video, audio and meta-data. NETDeob: Deobfuscator and Unpacker for .NET Files.NthCatalanNumber: Write a program to calculate the Nth Catalan number by given N. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_numberPokemon Battle Online 0791: ???????project site: the-west minimapPSeG Server FIles: PSeG Server FilesSample VariableSizedWrapGrid: This is an example of the use of particular VariableSizedWrapGrid GridView control. Where we can set the size of each item as needed It can make an appearance oServices Monitoring Management Pack: La supervision des services automatiques est un élément qui est déficient dans Operations Manager. Ce « Management Pack » sert à surveiller les services automatSinaIsTestingHisNewProject: this project is only for testing this site and any copying without my permission will be sewed by me and will be tracked by CIA and FBI and will be HeadShotSum of a sequence: Write a program that, for a given two integer numbers N and X, calculates the sumS = 1 + 1!/X + 2!/X2 + … + N!/XN Synchrophasor Analytics: Synchrophasor Analytics is a front end data processing and conditioning for downstream phasor based applications and an extension for development and analysis.tcp-bridge: a tcp bridge service to redirect incoming connections to another machine by using another incoming or outgoing connectionTypeScript Class Library: The TypeScript Class Library WPDialog: Library for developing app dialogs for Windows phone similar to Monotouch.DialogWPF File Renamer: Simple file renaming application made to brush up on my WPF data binding and MVVM skills.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, July 20, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, July 20, 2013Popular ReleasesC# Intellisense for Notepad++: Initial release: Members auto-complete Integration with native Notepad++ Auto-Completion Auto "open bracket" for methods Right-arrow to accept suggestions51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.19.4: One Click Install from NuGet This release introduces the 51Degrees.mobi IIS Vary Header Fix. When Compression and Caching is used in IIS, the Vary header is overwritten, making intelligent caching with dynamic content impossible. Find out more about installing the Vary Header fix. Changes to Version 2.1.19.4Handlers now have a ‘Count’ property. This is an integer value that shows how many devices in the dataset that use that handler. Provider.cs -> GetDeviceInfoByID to address a problem w...SalarDbCodeGenerator: SalarDbCodeGenerator v2.1.2013.0719: Version 2.1.2013.0719 2013/7/19 Pattern Changes: * DapperContext pattern is added. * All patterns are updated to work with one-to-one relations. Changes: * One-to-one relation is supported. * Minor bug fixes.Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows and WP (v1.3 beta 2): Includes all changes in v1.3 beta 1 Additional support for Windows 8.1 Preview New API (JS): addTextTrack New API (JS): msKeys New API (JS): msPlayToPreferredSourceUri New API (JS): msSetMediaKeys New API (JS): onmsneedkey New API (Xaml): SetMediaStreamSource method New API (Xaml): Stretch property New API (Xaml): StretchChanged event New API (Xaml): AreTransportControlsEnabled property New API (Xaml): IsFullWindow property New API (Xaml): PlayToPreferredSourceUri proper...Outlook 2013 Add-In: Multiple Calendars: As per popular request, this new version includes: - Support for multiple calendars. This can be enabled in the configuration by choosing which ones to show/hide appointments from. In some cases (public folders) it may time out and crash, and so far it only supports "My Calendars", so not shared ones yet. Also they're currently shown in the same font/color so there are no confusions with color categories, but please drop me a line on any suggestions you'd like to see implemented. - Added fri...Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Beta 2: New in this release: Show grid in editor Cut/copy/paste support Bug fixesCommunity TFS Build Extensions: July 2013: The July 2013 release contains VS2010 Activities(target .NET 4.0) VS2012 Activities (target .NET 4.5) VS2013 Activities (target .NET 4.5.1) Community TFS Build Manager VS2012 The Community TFS Build Manager can also be found in the Visual Studio Gallery here where updates will first become available. A version supporting VS2010 is also available in the Gallery here.DaRenamer: Renamer 2.1.0.5: Version 2.1.0.5 -fixed minor bugInstall Verify Tool: Install Verify Tool V 1.0: Win Service Web Service Win Service Client Web Service ClientOrchard Project: Orchard 1.7 RC: Planning releasedTerminals: Version 3.1 - Release: Changes since version 3.0:15992 Unified usage of icons in user interface Added context menu in Organize favorites grid Fixed:34219 34210 34223 33981 34209 Install notes:No changes in database (use database from release 3.0) No upgrade of configuration, passwords, credentials or favorites See also upgrade notes for release 3.0PMU Connection Tester: PMU Connection Tester v4.4.0: This is the current release build of the PMU Connection Tester, version 4.4.0 This version of the connection tester was released with openPDC 1.5 SP1 and openPDC 2.0 BETA. This application requires that .NET 4.0 already be installed on your system. Note this is the last release of the PMU Connection Tester that will built on .NET 4.0 using the TVA Code Library and the Time-series Framework. Future releases of the PMU Connection Tester will be built on .NET 4.5 (or later) using the Grid Sol...HiUpdateTools - easy publish and update your app: HiUpdateTools Add-in 1.0.0.5: - Generate ClientConfig.xml and adding to the project - Set ClientConfig.xml option "CopyToOutputDirectory"= Copy if newer - Fix client path not ending the backslash - Add Client assembly to VSX package - On first use, the tool is added to the reference to the client assembly - Fix client application - Multi-instance application - Run single instance of update applicationopen gaze and mouse analyzer: Ogama 4.4 BETA: This beta was published on 16.07.2013 and includes fixes and improvements since last 4.3 release, mainly in the recording section which solves problems with tobii and mirametrix devices, see the source code tab for details. Please test it, if you have one of this devices and give me feedback using the issue tracker or discussion tabs. Don´t forget to install .Net 4 framework and SQL Express before installing Ogama. When using Tobii tracking devices, you have to install apple bonjour also. On...SpaceFlight: SpaceFlight_v1.1: Added VCRedist.exe , run this first if you get the "MSVCP100.dll is missing" issueAdvanced Resource Tab for Blend: Advanced Resource Tab 2.0: Added filtering of (sub)-resource items and collapsing / expanding of all resource dictionaries.Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.573b: XBMC Link - Let MC update your XBMC Library Fixes in place, Enjoy the XBMC Link function Well, Phil's been busy in the background, and come up with a Great new feature for Media Companion. Currently only implemented for movies. Once we're happy that's working with no issues, we'll extend the functionality to include TV shows. All the help for this is build into the application. Go to General Preferences - XBMC Link for details. Help us make it better* Currently only tested on local and ...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1307.15: Fix a bug where WPP crash if 'ShowPendingUpdates' is start with wrong credentials. Fix a bug where WPP crash if ArrivalDateAfter and ArrivalDateBefore is equal in the ComputerView. Add a filter in the ComputerView. (Thanks to NorbertFe for this feature request) Add an option, when right-clicking on a computer, you can ask for display the current logon user of the remote computer. Add an option in settings to choose if WPP ping remote computers using IPv4, IPv6 or IPv6 and, if fail, IP...Lab Of Things: vBeta1: Initial release of LoTVidCoder: 1.4.23: New in 1.4.23 Added French translation. Fixed non-x264 video encoders not sticking in video tab. New in 1.4 Updated HandBrake core to 0.9.9 Blu-ray subtitle (PGS) support Additional framerates: 30, 50, 59.94, 60 Additional sample rates: 8, 11.025, 12 and 16 kHz Additional higher bitrates for audio Same as Source Constant Framerate 24-bit FLAC encoding Added Windows Phone 8 and Apple TV 3 presets Introduced process isolation for encodes. Now if HandBrake crashes, VidCoder will ...New ProjectsAIDE (Automata-Identification Engine): AIDE is a automata-identification engine.CalligraphyMVVM: MVVM Calligraphy Windows Phone, Web ASP.NET MVCCentrify DirectControl PowerShell Module: The Centrify DirectControl PowerShell Module is based on Centrify API to give management control on Centrify data store into Active Directory.Cleveland Free Clinic: Cleveland Free Clinicfacebook???????????: facebook????????????????????Functional Reach: A Microsoft Kinect activity that using skeletal tracking to run a randomized stretching activity for patients that have prescribed home exercises for stroke.HR Project: This is a HR Project for Place company.OfflineBrowser: Offline browser for jw.org.ricerca-docs: Sphinx documentation for ricerca.Sample EventAgregator: Sample EventAgregator This is an example of using EventAgregator on WinRT / Windows 8 with the C # programming language. EventAgregator itself is part of PrismSMSGateWay: CMPP,SGIP,SMGP ????SP?? ??,????,?????,???. ??????,????,?????,????......?????,????? ????SPID ,MsgSrc,???,???IP,?????? ?????,?????,??,????vimrc file: vimrc file

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• Parsing Concerns

  - by Jesse

  If you’ve ever written an application that accepts date and/or time inputs from an external source (a person, an uploaded file, posted XML, etc.) then you’ve no doubt had to deal with parsing some text representing a date into a data structure that a computer can understand. Similarly, you’ve probably also had to take values from those same data structure and turn them back into their original formats. Most (all?) suitably modern development platforms expose some kind of parsing and formatting functionality for turning text into dates and vice versa. In .NET, the DateTime data structure exposes ‘Parse’ and ‘ToString’ methods for this purpose. This post will focus mostly on parsing, though most of the examples and suggestions below can also be applied to the ToString method. The DateTime.Parse method is pretty permissive in the values that it will accept (though apparently not as permissive as some other languages) which makes it pretty easy to take some text provided by a user and turn it into a proper DateTime instance. Here are some examples (note that the resulting DateTime values are shown using the RFC1123 format): DateTime.Parse("3/12/2010"); //Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT DateTime.Parse("2:00 AM"); //Sat, 01 Jan 2011 02:00:00 GMT (took today's date as date portion) DateTime.Parse("5-15/2010"); //Sat, 15 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT DateTime.Parse("7/8"); //Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT DateTime.Parse("Thursday, July 1, 2010"); //Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT Dealing With Inaccuracy While the DateTime struct has the ability to store a date and time value accurate down to the millisecond, most date strings provided by a user are not going to specify values with that much precision. In each of the above examples, the Parse method was provided a partial value from which to construct a proper DateTime. This means it had to go ahead and assume what you meant and fill in the missing parts of the date and time for you. This is a good thing, especially when we’re talking about taking input from a user. We can’t expect that every person using our software to provide a year, day, month, hour, minute, second, and millisecond every time they need to express a date. That said, it’s important for developers to understand what assumptions the software might be making and plan accordingly. I think the assumptions that were made in each of the above examples were pretty reasonable, though if we dig into this method a little bit deeper we’ll find that there are a lot more assumptions being made under the covers than you might have previously known. One of the biggest assumptions that the DateTime.Parse method has to make relates to the format of the date represented by the provided string. Let’s consider this example input string: ‘10-02-15’. To some people. that might look like ‘15-Feb-2010’. To others, it might be ‘02-Oct-2015’. Like many things, it depends on where you’re from. This Is America! Most cultures around the world have adopted a “little-endian” or “big-endian” formats. (Source: Date And Time Notation By Country) In this context,  a “little-endian” date format would list the date parts with the least significant first while the “big-endian” date format would list them with the most significant first. For example, a “little-endian” date would be “day-month-year” and “big-endian” would be “year-month-day”. It’s worth nothing here that ISO 8601 defines a “big-endian” format as the international standard. While I personally prefer “big-endian” style date formats, I think both styles make sense in that they follow some logical standard with respect to ordering the date parts by their significance. Here in the United States, however, we buck that trend by using what is, in comparison, a completely nonsensical format of “month/day/year”. Almost no other country in the world uses this format. I’ve been fortunate in my life to have done some international travel, so I’ve been aware of this difference for many years, but never really thought much about it. Until recently, I had been developing software for exclusively US-based audiences and remained blissfully ignorant of the different date formats employed by other countries around the world. The web application I work on is being rolled out to users in different countries, so I was recently tasked with updating it to support different date formats. As it turns out, .NET has a great mechanism for dealing with different date formats right out of the box. Supporting date formats for different cultures is actually pretty easy once you understand this mechanism. Pulling the Curtain Back On the Parse Method Have you ever taken a look at the different flavors (read: overloads) that the DateTime.Parse method comes in? In it’s simplest form, it takes a single string parameter and returns the corresponding DateTime value (if it can divine what the date value should be). You can optionally provide two additional parameters to this method: an ‘System.IFormatProvider’ and a ‘System.Globalization.DateTimeStyles’. Both of these optional parameters have some bearing on the assumptions that get made while parsing a date, but for the purposes of this article I’m going to focus on the ‘System.IFormatProvider’ parameter. The IFormatProvider exposes a single method called ‘GetFormat’ that returns an object to be used for determining the proper format for displaying and parsing things like numbers and dates. This interface plays a big role in the globalization capabilities that are built into the .NET Framework. The cornerstone of these globalization capabilities can be found in the ‘System.Globalization.CultureInfo’ class. To put it simply, the CultureInfo class is used to encapsulate information related to things like language, writing system, and date formats for a certain culture. Support for many cultures are “baked in” to the .NET Framework and there is capacity for defining custom cultures if needed (thought I’ve never delved into that). While the details of the CultureInfo class are beyond the scope of this post, so for now let me just point out that the CultureInfo class implements the IFormatInfo interface. This means that a CultureInfo instance created for a given culture can be provided to the DateTime.Parse method in order to tell it what date formats it should expect. So what happens when you don’t provide this value? Let’s crack this method open in Reflector: When no IFormatInfo parameter is provided (i.e. we use the simple DateTime.Parse(string) overload), the ‘DateTimeFormatInfo.CurrentInfo’ is used instead. Drilling down a bit further we can see the implementation of the DateTimeFormatInfo.CurrentInfo property: From this property we can determine that, in the absence of an IFormatProvider being specified, the DateTime.Parse method will assume that the provided date should be treated as if it were in the format defined by the CultureInfo object that is attached to the current thread. The culture specified by the CultureInfo instance on the current thread can vary depending on several factors, but if you’re writing an application where a single instance might be used by people from different cultures (i.e. a web application with an international user base), it’s important to know what this value is. Having a solid strategy for setting the current thread’s culture for each incoming request in an internationally used ASP .NET application is obviously important, and might make a good topic for a future post. For now, let’s think about what the implications of not having the correct culture set on the current thread. Let’s say you’re running an ASP .NET application on a server in the United States. The server was setup by English speakers in the United States, so it’s configured for US English. It exposes a web page where users can enter order data, one piece of which is an anticipated order delivery date. Most users are in the US, and therefore enter dates in a ‘month/day/year’ format. The application is using the DateTime.Parse(string) method to turn the values provided by the user into actual DateTime instances that can be stored in the database. This all works fine, because your users and your server both think of dates in the same way. Now you need to support some users in South America, where a ‘day/month/year’ format is used. The best case scenario at this point is a user will enter March 13, 2011 as ‘25/03/2011’. This would cause the call to DateTime.Parse to blow up since that value doesn’t look like a valid date in the US English culture (Note: In all likelihood you might be using the DateTime.TryParse(string) method here instead, but that method behaves the same way with regard to date formats). “But wait a minute”, you might be saying to yourself, “I thought you said that this was the best case scenario?” This scenario would prevent users from entering orders in the system, which is bad, but it could be worse! What if the order needs to be delivered a day earlier than that, on March 12, 2011? Now the user enters ‘12/03/2011’. Now the call to DateTime.Parse sees what it thinks is a valid date, but there’s just one problem: it’s not the right date. Now this order won’t get delivered until December 3, 2011. In my opinion, that kind of data corruption is a much bigger problem than having the Parse call fail. What To Do? My order entry example is a bit contrived, but I think it serves to illustrate the potential issues with accepting date input from users. There are some approaches you can take to make this easier on you and your users: Eliminate ambiguity by using a graphical date input control. I’m personally a fan of a jQuery UI Datepicker widget. It’s pretty easy to setup, can be themed to match the look and feel of your site, and has support for multiple languages and cultures. Be sure you have a way to track the culture preference of each user in your system. For a web application this could be done using something like a cookie or session state variable. Ensure that the current user’s culture is being applied correctly to DateTime formatting and parsing code. This can be accomplished by ensuring that each request has the handling thread’s CultureInfo set properly, or by using the Format and Parse method overloads that accept an IFormatProvider instance where the provided value is a CultureInfo object constructed using the current user’s culture preference. When in doubt, favor formats that are internationally recognizable. Using the string ‘2010-03-05’ is likely to be recognized as March, 5 2011 by users from most (if not all) cultures. Favor standard date format strings over custom ones. So far we’ve only talked about turning a string into a DateTime, but most of the same “gotchas” apply when doing the opposite. Consider this code: someDateValue.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy"); This will output the same string regardless of what the current thread’s culture is set to (with the exception of some cultures that don’t use the Gregorian calendar system, but that’s another issue all together). For displaying dates to users, it would be better to do this: someDateValue.ToString("d"); This standard format string of “d” will use the “short date format” as defined by the culture attached to the current thread (or provided in the IFormatProvider instance in the proper method overload). This means that it will honor the proper month/day/year, year/month/day, or day/month/year format for the culture. Knowing Your Audience The examples and suggestions shown above can go a long way toward getting an application in shape for dealing with date inputs from users in multiple cultures. There are some instances, however, where taking approaches like these would not be appropriate. In some cases, the provider or consumer of date values that pass through your application are not people, but other applications (or other portions of your own application). For example, if your site has a page that accepts a date as a query string parameter, you’ll probably want to format that date using invariant date format. Otherwise, the same URL could end up evaluating to a different page depending on the user that is viewing it. In addition, if your application exports data for consumption by other systems, it’s best to have an agreed upon format that all systems can use and that will not vary depending upon whether or not the users of the systems on either side prefer a month/day/year or day/month/year format. I’ll look more at some approaches for dealing with these situations in a future post. If you take away one thing from this post, make it an understanding of the importance of knowing where the dates that pass through your system come from and are going to. You will likely want to vary your parsing and formatting approach depending on your audience.

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• Microsoft and jQuery

  - by Rick Strahl

  The jQuery JavaScript library has been steadily getting more popular and with recent developments from Microsoft, jQuery is also getting ever more exposure on the ASP.NET platform including now directly from Microsoft. jQuery is a light weight, open source DOM manipulation library for JavaScript that has changed how many developers think about JavaScript. You can download it and find more information on jQuery on www.jquery.com. For me jQuery has had a huge impact on how I develop Web applications and was probably the main reason I went from dreading to do JavaScript development to actually looking forward to implementing client side JavaScript functionality. It has also had a profound impact on my JavaScript skill level for me by seeing how the library accomplishes things (and often reviewing the terse but excellent source code). jQuery made an uncomfortable development platform (JavaScript + DOM) a joy to work on. Although jQuery is by no means the only JavaScript library out there, its ease of use, small size, huge community of plug-ins and pure usefulness has made it easily the most popular JavaScript library available today. As a long time jQuery user, I’ve been excited to see the developments from Microsoft that are bringing jQuery to more ASP.NET developers and providing more integration with jQuery for ASP.NET’s core features rather than relying on the ASP.NET AJAX library. Microsoft and jQuery – making Friends jQuery is an open source project but in the last couple of years Microsoft has really thrown its weight behind supporting this open source library as a supported component on the Microsoft platform. When I say supported I literally mean supported: Microsoft now offers actual tech support for jQuery as part of their Product Support Services (PSS) as jQuery integration has become part of several of the ASP.NET toolkits and ships in several of the default Web project templates in Visual Studio 2010. The ASP.NET MVC 3 framework (still in Beta) also uses jQuery for a variety of client side support features including client side validation and we can look forward toward more integration of client side functionality via jQuery in both MVC and WebForms in the future. In other words jQuery is becoming an optional but included component of the ASP.NET platform. PSS support means that support staff will answer jQuery related support questions as part of any support incidents related to ASP.NET which provides some piece of mind to some corporate development shops that require end to end support from Microsoft. In addition to including jQuery and supporting it, Microsoft has also been getting involved in providing development resources for extending jQuery’s functionality via plug-ins. Microsoft’s last version of the Microsoft Ajax Library – which is the successor to the native ASP.NET AJAX Library – included some really cool functionality for client templates, databinding and localization. As it turns out Microsoft has rebuilt most of that functionality using jQuery as the base API and provided jQuery plug-ins of these components. Very recently these three plug-ins were submitted and have been approved for inclusion in the official jQuery plug-in repository and been taken over by the jQuery team for further improvements and maintenance. Even more surprising: The jQuery-templates component has actually been approved for inclusion in the next major update of the jQuery core in jQuery V1.5, which means it will become a native feature that doesn’t require additional script files to be loaded. Imagine this – an open source contribution from Microsoft that has been accepted into a major open source project for a core feature improvement. Microsoft has come a long way indeed! What the Microsoft Involvement with jQuery means to you For Microsoft jQuery support is a strategic decision that affects their direction in client side development, but nothing stopped you from using jQuery in your applications prior to Microsoft’s official backing and in fact a large chunk of developers did so readily prior to Microsoft’s announcement. Official support from Microsoft brings a few benefits to developers however. jQuery support in Visual Studio 2010 means built-in support for jQuery IntelliSense, automatically added jQuery scripts in many projects types and a common base for client side functionality that actually uses what most developers are already using. If you have already been using jQuery and were worried about straying from the Microsoft line and their internal Microsoft Ajax Library – worry no more. With official support and the change in direction towards jQuery Microsoft is now following along what most in the ASP.NET community had already been doing by using jQuery, which is likely the reason for Microsoft’s shift in direction in the first place. ASP.NET AJAX and the Microsoft AJAX Library weren’t bad technology – there was tons of useful functionality buried in these libraries. However, these libraries never got off the ground, mainly because early incarnations were squarely aimed at control/component developers rather than application developers. For all the functionality that these controls provided for control developers they lacked in useful and easily usable application developer functionality that was easily accessible in day to day client side development. The result was that even though Microsoft shipped support for these tools in the box (in .NET 3.5 and 4.0), other than for the internal support in ASP.NET for things like the UpdatePanel and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit as well as some third party vendors, the Microsoft client libraries were largely ignored by the developer community opening the door for other client side solutions. Microsoft seems to be acknowledging developer choice in this case: Many more developers were going down the jQuery path rather than using the Microsoft built libraries and there seems to be little sense in continuing development of a technology that largely goes unused by the majority of developers. Kudos for Microsoft for recognizing this and gracefully changing directions. Note that even though there will be no further development in the Microsoft client libraries they will continue to be supported so if you’re using them in your applications there’s no reason to start running for the exit in a panic and start re-writing everything with jQuery. Although that might be a reasonable choice in some cases, jQuery and the Microsoft libraries work well side by side so that you can leave existing solutions untouched even as you enhance them with jQuery. The Microsoft jQuery Plug-ins – Solid Core Features One of the most interesting developments in Microsoft’s embracing of jQuery is that Microsoft has started contributing to jQuery via standard mechanism set for jQuery developers: By submitting plug-ins. Microsoft took some of the nicest new features of the unpublished Microsoft Ajax Client Library and re-wrote these components for jQuery and then submitted them as plug-ins to the jQuery plug-in repository. Accepted plug-ins get taken over by the jQuery team and that’s exactly what happened with the three plug-ins submitted by Microsoft with the templating plug-in even getting slated to be published as part of the jQuery core in the next major release (1.5). The following plug-ins are provided by Microsoft: jQuery Templates – a client side template rendering engine jQuery Data Link – a client side databinder that can synchronize changes without code jQuery Globalization – provides formatting and conversion features for dates and numbers The first two are ports of functionality that was slated for the Microsoft Ajax Library while functionality for the globalization library provides functionality that was already found in the original ASP.NET AJAX library. To me all three plug-ins address a pressing need in client side applications and provide functionality I’ve previously used in other incarnations, but with more complete implementations. Let’s take a close look at these plug-ins. jQuery Templates http://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/templates/ Client side templating is a key component for building rich JavaScript applications in the browser. Templating on the client lets you avoid from manually creating markup by creating DOM nodes and injecting them individually into the document via code. Rather you can create markup templates – similar to the way you create classic ASP server markup – and merge data into these templates to render HTML which you can then inject into the document or replace existing content with. Output from templates are rendered as a jQuery matched set and can then be easily inserted into the document as needed. Templating is key to minimize client side code and reduce repeated code for rendering logic. Instead a single template can be used in many places for updating and adding content to existing pages. Further if you build pure AJAX interfaces that rely entirely on client rendering of the initial page content, templates allow you to a use a single markup template to handle all rendering of each specific HTML section/element. I’ve used a number of different client rendering template engines with jQuery in the past including jTemplates (a PHP style templating engine) and a modified version of John Resig’s MicroTemplating engine which I built into my own set of libraries because it’s such a commonly used feature in my client side applications. jQuery templates adds a much richer templating model that allows for sub-templates and access to the data items. Like John Resig’s original Micro Template engine, the core basics of the templating engine create JavaScript code which means that templates can include JavaScript code. To give you a basic idea of how templates work imagine I have an application that downloads a set of stock quotes based on a symbol list then displays them in the document. To do this you can create an ‘item’ template that describes how each of the quotes is renderd as a template inside of the document: <script id="stockTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div id="divStockQuote" class="errordisplay" style="width: 500px;"> <div class="label">Company:</div><div><b>${Company}(${Symbol})</b></div> <div class="label">Last Price:</div><div>${LastPrice}</div> <div class="label">Net Change:</div><div> {{if NetChange > 0}} <b style="color:green" >${NetChange}</b> {{else}} <b style="color:red" >${NetChange}</b> {{/if}} </div> <div class="label">Last Update:</div><div>${LastQuoteTimeString}</div> </div> </script> The ‘template’ is little more than HTML with some markup expressions inside of it that define the template language. Notice the embedded ${} expressions which reference data from the quote objects returned from an AJAX call on the server. You can embed any JavaScript or value expression in these template expressions. There are also a number of structural commands like {{if}} and {{each}} that provide for rudimentary logic inside of your templates as well as commands ({{tmpl}} and {{wrap}}) for nesting templates. You can find more about the full set of markup expressions available in the documentation. To load up this data you can use code like the following: <script type="text/javascript"> //var Proxy = new ServiceProxy("../PageMethods/PageMethodsService.asmx/"); $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnGetQuotes").click(GetQuotes); }); function GetQuotes() { var symbols = $("#txtSymbols").val().split(","); $.ajax({ url: "../PageMethods/PageMethodsService.asmx/GetStockQuotes", data: JSON.stringify({ symbols: symbols }), // parameter map type: "POST", // data has to be POSTed contentType: "application/json", timeout: 10000, dataType: "json", success: function (result) { var quotes = result.d; var jEl = $("#stockTemplate").tmpl(quotes); $("#quoteDisplay").empty().append(jEl); }, error: function (xhr, status) { alert(status + "\r\n" + xhr.responseText); } }); }; </script> In this case an ASMX AJAX service is called to retrieve the stock quotes. The service returns an array of quote objects. The result is returned as an object with the .d property (in Microsoft service style) that returns the actual array of quotes. The template is applied with: var jEl = $("#stockTemplate").tmpl(quotes); which selects the template script tag and uses the .tmpl() function to apply the data to it. The result is a jQuery matched set of elements that can then be appended to the quote display element in the page. The template is merged against an array in this example. When the result is an array the template is automatically applied to each each array item. If you pass a single data item – like say a stock quote – the template works exactly the same way but is applied only once. Templates also have access to a $data item which provides the current data item and information about the tempalte that is currently executing. This makes it possible to keep context within the context of the template itself and also to pass context from a parent template to a child template which is very powerful. Templates can be evaluated by using the template selector and calling the .tmpl() function on the jQuery matched set as shown above or you can use the static $.tmpl() function to provide a template as a string. This allows you to dynamically create templates in code or – more likely – to load templates from the server via AJAX calls. In short there are options The above shows off some of the basics, but there’s much for functionality available in the template engine. Check the documentation link for more information and links to additional examples. The plug-in download also comes with a number of examples that demonstrate functionality. jQuery templates will become a native component in jQuery Core 1.5, so it’s definitely worthwhile checking out the engine today and get familiar with this interface. As much as I’m stoked about templating becoming part of the jQuery core because it’s such an integral part of many applications, there are also a couple shortcomings in the current incarnation: Lack of Error Handling Currently if you embed an expression that is invalid it’s simply not rendered. There’s no error rendered into the template nor do the various  template functions throw errors which leaves finding of bugs as a runtime exercise. I would like some mechanism – optional if possible – to be able to get error info of what is failing in a template when it’s rendered. No String Output Templates are always rendered into a jQuery matched set and there’s no way that I can see to directly render to a string. String output can be useful for debugging as well as opening up templating for creating non-HTML string output. Limited JavaScript Access Unlike John Resig’s original MicroTemplating Engine which was entirely based on JavaScript code generation these templates are limited to a few structured commands that can ‘execute’. There’s no code execution inside of script code which means you’re limited to calling expressions available in global objects or the data item passed in. This may or may not be a big deal depending on the complexity of your template logic. Error handling has been discussed quite a bit and it’s likely there will be some solution to that particualar issue by the time jQuery templates ship. The others are relatively minor issues but something to think about anyway. jQuery Data Link http://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/data-link/ jQuery Data Link provides the ability to do two-way data binding between input controls and an underlying object’s properties. The typical scenario is linking a textbox to a property of an object and have the object updated when the text in the textbox is changed and have the textbox change when the value in the object or the entire object changes. The plug-in also supports converter functions that can be applied to provide the conversion logic from string to some other value typically necessary for mapping things like textbox string input to say a number property and potentially applying additional formatting and calculations. In theory this sounds great, however in reality this plug-in has some serious usability issues. Using the plug-in you can do things like the following to bind data: person = { firstName: "rick", lastName: "strahl"}; $(document).ready( function() { // provide for two-way linking of inputs $("form").link(person); // bind to non-input elements explicitly $("#objFirst").link(person, { firstName: { name: "objFirst", convertBack: function (value, source, target) { $(target).text(value); } } }); $("#objLast").link(person, { lastName: { name: "objLast", convertBack: function (value, source, target) { $(target).text(value); } } }); }); This code hooks up two-way linking between a couple of textboxes on the page and the person object. The first line in the .ready() handler provides mapping of object to form field with the same field names as properties on the object. Note that .link() does NOT bind items into the textboxes when you call .link() – changes are mapped only when values change and you move out of the field. Strike one. The two following commands allow manual binding of values to specific DOM elements which is effectively a one-way bind. You specify the object and a then an explicit mapping where name is an ID in the document. The converter is required to explicitly assign the value to the element. Strike two. You can also detect changes to the underlying object and cause updates to the input elements bound. Unfortunately the syntax to do this is not very natural as you have to rely on the jQuery data object. To update an object’s properties and get change notification looks like this: function updateFirstName() { $(person).data("firstName", person.firstName + " (code updated)"); } This works fine in causing any linked fields to be updated. In the bindings above both the firstName input field and objFirst DOM element gets updated. But the syntax requires you to use a jQuery .data() call for each property change to ensure that the changes are tracked properly. Really? Sure you’re binding through multiple layers of abstraction now but how is that better than just manually assigning values? The code savings (if any) are going to be minimal. As much as I would like to have a WPF/Silverlight/Observable-like binding mechanism in client script, this plug-in doesn’t help much towards that goal in its current incarnation. While you can bind values, the ‘binder’ is too limited to be really useful. If initial values can’t be assigned from the mappings you’re going to end up duplicating work loading the data using some other mechanism. There’s no easy way to re-bind data with a different object altogether since updates trigger only through the .data members. Finally, any non-input elements have to be bound via code that’s fairly verbose and frankly may be more voluminous than what you might write by hand for manual binding and unbinding. Two way binding can be very useful but it has to be easy and most importantly natural. If it’s more work to hook up a binding than writing a couple of lines to do binding/unbinding this sort of thing helps very little in most scenarios. In talking to some of the developers the feature set for Data Link is not complete and they are still soliciting input for features and functionality. If you have ideas on how you want this feature to be more useful get involved and post your recommendations. As it stands, it looks to me like this component needs a lot of love to become useful. For this component to really provide value, bindings need to be able to be refreshed easily and work at the object level, not just the property level. It seems to me we would be much better served by a model binder object that can perform these binding/unbinding tasks in bulk rather than a tool where each link has to be mapped first. I also find the choice of creating a jQuery plug-in questionable – it seems a standalone object – albeit one that relies on the jQuery library – would provide a more intuitive interface than the current forcing of options onto a plug-in style interface. Out of the three Microsoft created components this is by far the least useful and least polished implementation at this point. jQuery Globalization http://github.com/jquery/jquery-global Globalization in JavaScript applications often gets short shrift and part of the reason for this is that natively in JavaScript there’s little support for formatting and parsing of numbers and dates. There are a number of JavaScript libraries out there that provide some support for globalization, but most are limited to a particular portion of globalization. As .NET developers we’re fairly spoiled by the richness of APIs provided in the framework and when dealing with client development one really notices the lack of these features. While you may not necessarily need to localize your application the globalization plug-in also helps with some basic tasks for non-localized applications: Dealing with formatting and parsing of dates and time values. Dates in particular are problematic in JavaScript as there are no formatters whatsoever except the .toString() method which outputs a verbose and next to useless long string. With the globalization plug-in you get a good chunk of the formatting and parsing functionality that the .NET framework provides on the server. You can write code like the following for example to format numbers and dates: var date = new Date(); var output = $.format(date, "MMM. dd, yy") + "\r\n" + $.format(date, "d") + "\r\n" + // 10/25/2010 $.format(1222.32213, "N2") + "\r\n" + $.format(1222.33, "c") + "\r\n"; alert(output); This becomes even more useful if you combine it with templates which can also include any JavaScript expressions. Assuming the globalization plug-in is loaded you can create template expressions that use the $.format function. Here’s the template I used earlier for the stock quote again with a couple of formats applied: <script id="stockTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div id="divStockQuote" class="errordisplay" style="width: 500px;"> <div class="label">Company:</div><div><b>${Company}(${Symbol})</b></div> <div class="label">Last Price:</div> <div>${$.format(LastPrice,"N2")}</div> <div class="label">Net Change:</div><div> {{if NetChange > 0}} <b style="color:green" >${NetChange}</b> {{else}} <b style="color:red" >${NetChange}</b> {{/if}} </div> <div class="label">Last Update:</div> <div>${$.format(LastQuoteTime,"MMM dd, yyyy")}</div> </div> </script> There are also parsing methods that can parse dates and numbers from strings into numbers easily: alert($.parseDate("25.10.2010")); alert($.parseInt("12.222")); // de-DE uses . for thousands separators As you can see culture specific options are taken into account when parsing. The globalization plugin provides rich support for a variety of locales: Get a list of all available cultures Query cultures for culture items (like currency symbol, separators etc.) Localized string names for all calendar related items (days of week, months) Generated off of .NET’s supported locales In short you get much of the same functionality that you already might be using in .NET on the server side. The plugin includes a huge number of locales and an Globalization.all.min.js file that contains the text defaults for each of these locales as well as small locale specific script files that define each of the locale specific settings. It’s highly recommended that you NOT use the huge globalization file that includes all locales, but rather add script references to only those languages you explicitly care about. Overall this plug-in is a welcome helper. Even if you use it with a single locale (like en-US) and do no other localization, you’ll gain solid support for number and date formatting which is a vital feature of many applications. Changes for Microsoft It’s good to see Microsoft coming out of its shell and away from the ‘not-built-here’ mentality that has been so pervasive in the past. It’s especially good to see it applied to jQuery – a technology that has stood in drastic contrast to Microsoft’s own internal efforts in terms of design, usage model and… popularity. It’s great to see that Microsoft is paying attention to what customers prefer to use and supporting the customer sentiment – even if it meant drastically changing course of policy and moving into a more open and sharing environment in the process. The additional jQuery support that has been introduced in the last two years certainly has made lives easier for many developers on the ASP.NET platform. It’s also nice to see Microsoft submitting proposals through the standard jQuery process of plug-ins and getting accepted for various very useful projects. Certainly the jQuery Templates plug-in is going to be very useful to many especially since it will be baked into the jQuery core in jQuery 1.5. I hope we see more of this type of involvement from Microsoft in the future. Kudos!© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery  ASP.NET  

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• E-Business Suite Technology Sessions at OpenWorld 2012

  - by Max Arderius

  Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is almost here! We're looking forward to updating you on our products, strategy, and roadmaps. This year, the E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group (ATG) will participate in 25 speaker sessions, two Meet the Experts round-table discussions, five demoground booths and seven Special Interest Group meetings as guest speakers. We hope to see you at our sessions.  Please join us to hear the latest news and connect with senior ATG development staff. Here's a downloadable listing of all Applications Technology Group-related sessions with times and locations: FOCUS ON Oracle E-Business Suite - Applications Tools and Technology (PDF) General Sessions GEN8474 - Oracle E-Business Suite - Strategy, Update, and RoadmapCliff Godwin, SVP, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM - Moscone West 2002/2004 In this session, hear Oracle E-Business Suite General Manager Cliff Godwin deliver an update on the Oracle E-Business Suite product line. This session covers the value delivered by the current release of Oracle E-Business Suite, the momentum, and how Oracle E-Business Suite applications integrate into Oracle’s overall applications strategy. You’ll come away with an understanding of the value Oracle E-Business Suite applications deliver now and will deliver in the future. GEN9173 - Optimize and Extend Oracle Applications - The Path to Oracle Fusion ApplicationsNadia Bendjedou, Oracle; Corre Curtice, Bhavish Madurai (CSC) Tuesday, Oct 2, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 3002/3004 One of the main objectives of this session is to help organizations build their IT roadmap for the next five years and be aligned with the Oracle Applications strategy in general and the Oracle Fusion Applications strategy in particular. Come hear about some of the common sense, practical steps you can take to optimize the performance of your Oracle Applications today and prepare your path to Oracle Fusion Applications for when your organization is ready to embrace them. Each step you take in adopting Oracle Fusion technology gets you partway to Oracle Fusion Applications. Conference Sessions CON9024 - Oracle E-Business Suite Technology: Latest Features and Roadmap Lisa Parekh, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session provides a comprehensive overview of Oracle’s product strategy for Oracle E-Business Suite technology, the capabilities and associated business benefits of recent releases, and a review of capabilities on the product roadmap. This is the cornerstone session for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack. Come hear about the latest new usability enhancements of the user interface; systems administration and configuration management tools; security-related updates; and tools and options for extending, customizing, and integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. CON9021 - Oracle E-Business Suite Future Directions: Deployment and System AdministrationMax Arderius, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM - Moscone West 2016  What’s coming in the next major version of Oracle E-Business Suite 12? This Oracle Development session covers the latest technology stack, including the use of Oracle WebLogic Server (Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g) and Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2). Topics include an architectural overview of the latest updates, installation and upgrade options, new configuration options, and new tools for hot cloning and automated “lights-out” cloning. Come learn how online patching (based on the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Edition-Based Redefinition feature) will reduce your database patching downtimes to however long it takes to bounce your database server. CON9017 - Desktop Integration in Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Padmaprabodh Ambale, Gustavo Jimenez, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 4:45 PM - 5:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 This presentation covers the latest functional enhancements in Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator and Oracle Report Manager, enhanced Microsoft Office support, and greater support for building custom desktop integration solutions. The session also presents tips and tricks for upgrading from Oracle Applications Desktop Integrator to Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator and Oracle Report Manager. CON9023 - Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification Primer and Roadmap Steven Chan, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 2016  Is your Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack up to date? Are you taking advantage of all the latest options and capabilities? This Oracle development session summarizes the latest certifications and roadmap for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack, including elements such as database releases and options, Java, Oracle Forms, Oracle Containers for J2EE, desktop operating systems, browsers, JRE releases, development and Web authoring tools, user authentication and management, business intelligence, Oracle Application Management Packs, security options, clouds, Oracle VM, and virtualization. The session also covers the most commonly asked questions about tech stack component support dates and upgrade implications. CON9028 - Minimizing Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance DowntimesSantiago Bastidas, Elke Phelps, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session features a survey of the best techniques sysadmins can use to minimize patching downtimes. It starts with an architectural-level review of Oracle E-Business Suite fundamentals and then moves to a practical view of the various tools and approaches for downtimes. Topics include patching shortcuts, merging patches, distributing worker processes across multiple servers, running ADPatch in noninteractive mode, staged APPL_TOPs, shared file systems, deferring systemwide database tasks, avoiding resource bottlenecks, and more. An added bonus: hear about the upcoming Oracle E-Business Suite 12 online patching capabilities based on the groundbreaking Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Edition-Based Redefinition feature. CON9116 - Extending the Use of Oracle E-Business Suite with the Oracle Endeca PlatformOsama Elkady, Muhannad Obeidat, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West 2018 The Oracle Endeca platform includes a leading unstructured data correlation and analytics engine, together with a best-in class catalog search and guided navigation solution, to improve the productivity of all types of users in your enterprise. This development session focuses on the details behind the Oracle Endeca platform’s integration into Oracle E-Business Suite. It demonstrates how easily you can extend the use of the Oracle Endeca platform into other areas of Oracle E-Business Suite and how you can bring in your own data and build new Oracle Endeca applications for Oracle E-Business Suite. CON9005 - Oracle E-Business Suite Integration Best PracticesVeshaal Singh, Oracle, Jeffrey Hand, Zebra Technologies Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 Oracle is investing across applications and technologies to make the application integration experience easier for customers. Today Oracle has certified Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and provides a comprehensive set of integration technologies. Learn about Oracle’s integration offering across data- and process-centric integrations. These technologies can be used to address various application integration challenges and styles. In this session, you will get an understanding of how, when, and where you can leverage Oracle’s integration technologies to connect end-to-end business processes across your enterprise, including your Oracle Applications portfolio.  CON9026 - Latest Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 User Interface and Usability EnhancementsPadmaprabodh Ambale, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session details the latest UI enhancements to Oracle Application Framework in Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1. Developers will get a detailed look at new features to enhance usability, offer more capabilities for personalization and extensions, and support the development and use of dashboards and Web services. Topics include new rich UI capabilities such as new home page features, Navigator and Favorites pull-down menus, REST interface, embedded widgets for analytics content, Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) task flows, third-party widgets, a look-ahead list of values, inline attachments, pop-ups, personalization and extensibility enhancements, business layer extensions, Oracle ADF integration, and mobile devices. CON8805 - Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from 11i to Release 12.1 and BeyondAnne Carlson, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West 3002/3004 Attend this session to hear the latest Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 upgrade planning tips from Oracle’s support, consulting, development, and IT organizations. You’ll get specific cross-product advice on how to understand the factors that affect your project’s duration, decide on your project’s scope, develop a robust testing strategy, leverage Oracle Support resources, and more. In a nutshell, this session tells you things you need to know before embarking upon your Release 12.1 upgrade project. CON9053 - Advanced Management of Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle Enterprise ManagerAngelo Rosado, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West 2016 The task of managing and monitoring Oracle E-Business Suite environments can be very challenging. Oracle Enterprise Manager is the only product on the market that is designed to monitor and manage all the different technologies that constitute Oracle E-Business Suite applications, including end user, midtier, configuration, host, and database management—to name just a few. Customers that have implemented Oracle Enterprise Manager have experienced dramatic improvements in system visibility and diagnostic capability as well as administrator productivity. The purpose of this session is to highlight the key features and benefits of Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite. CON8809 - Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Upgrade Best Practices: Technical InsightIsam Alyousfi, Udayan Parvate, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 3011 This session is ideal for organizations thinking about upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1. It covers the fundamentals of upgrading to Release 12.1, including the technology stack components and supported upgrade paths. Hear from Oracle Development about the set of best practices for patching in general and executing the Release 12.1 technical upgrade, with special considerations for minimizing your downtime. Also get to know about relatively recent upgrade resources. CON9032 - Upgrading Your Customizations of Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1Sara Woodhull, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 2016 Have you personalized Oracle Forms or Oracle Application Framework screens in Oracle E-Business Suite? Have you used mod_plsql in Release 11i? Have you extended or customized your Release 11i environment with other tools? The technical options for upgrading these customizations as part of your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 upgrade can be bewildering. Come to this Oracle development session to learn about selecting the best upgrade approach for your existing customizations. The session will help you understand customization scenarios and use cases, tools, and technologies to ensure that your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 environment fits your users’ needs closely and that any future customizations will be easy to upgrade. CON9259 - Oracle E-Business Suite Internationalization and Multilingual FeaturesMaher Al-Nubani, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 2018 Oracle E-Business Suite supports more countries, languages, and regions than ever. Come to this Oracle development session to get an overview of internationalization features and capabilities and see new Release 12 features such as calendar support for Hijra and Thai, new group separators, lightweight multilingual support (MLS) setup, new character sets such as AL32UTF, newly supported languages, Mac certifications, Oracle iSetup support for moving MLS setups, new file export options for Unicode, new MLS number spelling options, and more. CON7188 - Mobile Apps for Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle ADF Mobile and Oracle SOA SuiteSrikant Subramaniam, Joe Huang, Veshaal Singh, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 3001 Follow your mobile customers, employees, and partners with Oracle Fusion Middleware. See how native iPhone and iPad applications can easily be built for Oracle E-Business Suite with the new Oracle ADF Mobile and Oracle SOA Suite. Using Oracle ADF Mobile, developers can quickly develop native applications for Apple iOS and other mobile platforms. The Oracle SOA Suite/Oracle ADF Mobile combination can execute business transactions on Oracle E-Business Suite. This session includes a demo in which a mobile user approves a business transaction in Oracle E-Business Suite and a demo of the tools used to build a native on-device solution. These concepts for mobile applications also apply to other Oracle applications.CON9029 - Oracle E-Business Suite Directions: Slashing Downtimes with Online PatchingKevin Hudson, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 Oracle E-Business Suite will soon include online patching (based on the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Edition-Based Redefinition feature), which will reduce your database patching downtimes to however long it takes to bounce your database server. This Oracle development session details how online patching works, with special attention to what’s happening at a database object level when database patches are applied to an Oracle E-Business Suite environment that’s still running. Come learn about the operational and system management implications for minimizing maintenance downtimes when applying database patches with this new technology and the related impact on customizations you might have built on top of Oracle E-Business Suite. CON8806 - Upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1: Technical and Functional PanelAndrew Katz, Komori America Corporation; Sandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. ;Srini Chavali, Cummins Inc.; Amrita Mehrok, Nadia Bendjedou, Anne Carlson Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 In this panel discussion, Oracle experts, customers, and partners share their experiences in upgrading to the latest release of Oracle E-Business Suite, Release 12.1. The panelists cover aspects of a typical Release 12 upgrade, technical (upgrading the technical infrastructure) as well as functional (upgrading to the new financial infrastructure). Hear directly from the experts who either develop the product or support, implement, or upgrade it, and find out how to apply their lessons learned to your organization. CON9027 - Personalize and Extend Oracle E-Business Suite Applications with Rich MashupsGustavo Jimenez, Padmaprabodh Ambale, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This session covers the use of several Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies to personalize and extend your existing Oracle E-Business Suite applications. The Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies covered include Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF), Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Endeca applications, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition with Oracle E-Business Suite Oracle Application Framework applications. CON9036 - Advanced Oracle E-Business Suite Architectures: Maximum Availability, Security, and MoreElke Phelps, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM - Moscone West 2016 This session includes architecture diagrams and configuration instructions for building a maximum availability architecture (MAA) that will help you design a disaster recovery solution that fits the needs of your business. Database and application high-availability features it describes include Oracle Data Guard, Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), Oracle Active Data Guard, load-balancing Web and forms services, parallel concurrent processing, and the use of Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata to provide a highly available environment. The session also covers the latest updates to systems management tools, AutoConfig, cloud computing, virtualization, and Oracle WebLogic Server and provides sneak previews of upcoming functionality. CON9047 - Efficiently Scaling Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Exadata and Oracle ExalogicIsam Alyousfi, Nishit Rao, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West 2016 Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic are designed from the ground up with optimizations in software and hardware to deliver superfast performance for mission-critical applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle E-Business Suite applications run three to eight times as fast on the Oracle Exadata/Oracle Exalogic platform in standard benchmark tests. Besides performance, customers benefit from simplified support, enhanced manageability, and the ability to consolidate multiple Oracle E-Business Suite instances. Attend this session to understand best practices for Oracle E-Business Suite deployment on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata through customer case studies. Learn how adopting the Exa* platform increases efficiency, simplifies scaling, and boosts performance for peak loads. CON8716 - Web Services and SOA Integration Options for Oracle E-Business SuiteRekha Ayothi, Veshaal Singh, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session provides a deep dive into a subset of the Web services and SOA-related integration options available to Oracle E-Business Suite systems integrators. It offers a technical look at Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Application Adapters for Data Integration for Oracle E-Business Suite, and other Web services options for integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. Systems integrators and developers will get an overview of the latest integration capabilities and technologies available out of the box with Oracle E-Business Suite and possibly a sneak preview of upcoming functionality and features. CON9030 - Recommendations for Oracle E-Business Suite Performance TuningIsam Alyousfi, Samer Barakat, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 Need to squeeze more performance out of your existing servers? This packed Oracle development session summarizes practical tips and lessons learned from performance-tuning and benchmarking the world’s largest Oracle E-Business Suite environments. Apps sysadmins will learn concrete tips and techniques for identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks on all layers, with special attention to application- and database-tier servers. Learn about tuning Oracle Forms, Oracle Concurrent Manager, Apache, and Oracle Discoverer. Track down memory leaks and other issues at the Java and JVM layers. The session also covers Oracle E-Business Suite product-level tuning, including Oracle Workflow, Oracle Order Management, Oracle Payroll, and other modules. CON3429 - Using Oracle ADF with Oracle E-Business Suite: The Full Integration ViewSiva Puthurkattil, Lake County; Juan Camilo Ruiz, Sara Woodhull, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - Moscone West 3003 Oracle E-Business Suite delivers functionality for handling the core business of your organization. However, user requirements and new technologies are driving an emerging need to implement new types of user interfaces for these applications. This session provides an overview of how to use Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) to deliver cutting-edge Web 2.0 and mobile rich user interfaces that front existing Oracle E-Business Suite processes, and it also explores all the existing types of integration between the two worlds. CON9020 - Integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle Identity Management SolutionsSunil Ghosh, Elke Phelps, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 Need to integrate Oracle E-Business Suite with Microsoft Windows Kerberos, Active Directory, CA Netegrity SiteMinder, or other third-party authentication systems? Want to understand your options when Oracle Premier Support for Oracle Single Sign-On ends in December 2011? This Oracle Development session covers the latest certified integrations with Oracle Access Manager 11g and Oracle Internet Directory 11g, which can be used individually or as bridges for integrating with third-party authentication solutions. The session presents an architectural overview of how Oracle Access Manager, its WebGate and AccessGate components, and Oracle Internet Directory work together, with implications for Oracle Discoverer, Oracle Portal, and other Oracle Fusion identity management products. CON9019 - Troubleshooting, Diagnosing, and Optimizing Oracle E-Business Suite TechnologyGustavo Jimenez, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This session covers how you can proactively diagnose Oracle E-Business Suite applications, including extensions built with Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies such as Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) and Oracle WebCenter to catch potential issues in the middle tier before they become more serious. Topics include debugging, logging infrastructure, warning signs, performance tuning, information required when logging service requests, general JVM optimization, and an overall picture of all the moving parts that make it possible for Oracle E-Business Suite to isolate and fix problems. Also learn how Oracle Diagnostics Framework will help prevent downtime caused by failures. CON9031 - The Top 10 Things You Can Do to Secure Your Oracle E-Business Suite InstanceEric Bing, Erik Graversen, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 Learn the top 10 things you can do to secure your applications and your sensitive data. This Oracle development session for system administrators and security professionals explores some of the most important and overlooked things you can do to secure your Oracle E-Business Suite instance. It also covers data masking and other mechanisms for protecting sensitive data. Special Interest Groups (SIG) Some of our most senior staff have been invited to participate on the following SIG meetings as guest speakers: SIG10525 - OAUG - Archive & Purge SIGBrian Bent - Pre-Sales Engineer, TierData, Inc. Sunday, Sep 30, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM - Moscone West 3011 The Archive and Purge SIG is an organization in which users can share their experiences and solicit functional and technical advice on archiving and purging data in Oracle E-Business Suite. This session provides an opportunity for users to network and share best practices, tips, and tricks. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Database Performance, Archive & Purging - Q&A SessionIsam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, Oracle SIG10547 - OAUG - Oracle E-Business (EBS) Applications Technology SIGSrini Chavali - IT Director, Cummins Inc Sunday, Sep 30, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM - Moscone West 3018 The general purpose of the EBS Applications Technology SIG is to inform and educate its members about current and future components of the tech stack as they relate to Oracle E-Business Suite. Attend this meeting for networking and education and to share best practices. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification Roadmap - Presentation and Q&ASteven Chan, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle SIG10559 - OAUG - User Management SIGSusan Behn - VP of Oracle Delivery, Infosemantics, Inc. Sunday, Sep 30, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM - Moscone West 3024 The E-Business Suite User Management SIG focuses on the components of user management that enable Oracle E-Business Suite users to define administrative functions and manage users’ access to functions and data based on roles within an organization—rather than the user’s individual identity—which is referred to as role-based access control (RBAC). This meeting includes an introduction to Oracle User Management that covers the Oracle User Management building blocks and presents an example of creating a security policy.Guest: Security and User Management - Q&A SessionEric Bing, Sr. Director, EBS Security, OracleSara Woodhull, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle SIG10515 - OAUG – Upgrade SIGBarbara Matthews - Consultant, On Call DBASandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Sunday, Sep 30, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM - Moscone West 3009 This Upgrade SIG session starts with a business meeting and then features a Q&A panel discussion on Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade topics. The session• Reviews Upgrade SIG goals and objectives• Provides answers, during the Q&A session, to questions related to Oracle E-Business Suite upgrades• Shares “real world” experiences, tips, and techniques for Oracle E-Business Suite upgrades to Release 12.1. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade - Q&A SessionAnne Carlson - Sr. Director, Oracle E-Business Suite Product Strategy, OracleUdayan Parvate - Director, EBS Release Engineering, OracleSuzana Ferrari, Sr. Principal Consultant, OracleIsam Alyousfi, Sr. Director, Applications Performance, Oracle SIG10552 - OAUG - Oracle E-Business Suite SIGDonna Rosentrater - Manager, Global Sourcing & Procurement Systems, TJX Sunday, Sep 30, 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West 3020 The E-Business Suite SIG, affiliated with OAUG, supports Oracle E-Business Suite users through networking, education, and sharing of best practices. This SIG meeting will feature a general discussion of Oracle E-Business Suite product strategies in Release 12 and migration to Oracle Fusion Applications. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite - Q&A SessionJeanne Lowell, Vice President, EBS Product Strategy, OracleNadia Bendjedou, Sr. Director, Product Strategy, Oracle SIG10556 - OAUG - SysAdmin SIGRandy Giefer - Sr Systems and Security Architect, Solution Beacon, LLC Sunday, Sep 30, 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West 3022 The SysAdmin SIG provides a forum in which OAUG members and participants can share updates, tips, and successful practices relating to system administration in an Oracle applications environment. The SysAdmin SIG strives to enable system administrators to become more effective and efficient in their jobs by providing them with access to people and information that can increase their system administration knowledge and experience. Attend this meeting to network, share best practices, and benefit from educational content. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 Online Patching- Presentation and Q&AKevin Hudson, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle SIG10553 - OAUG - Database SIGMichael Brown - Senior DBA, COLIBRI LTD LC Sunday, Sep 30, 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West 3020 The OAUG Database SIG provides an opportunity for applications database administrators to learn from and share their experiences with supporting the various Oracle applications environments. This session will include a brief business meeting followed by a short presentation. It will end with an open discussion among the attendees about items of interest to those present. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Database Performance - Presentation and Q&AIsam Alyousfi, Sr. Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Meet the Experts We're planning two round-table discussions where you can review your questions with senior E-Business Suite ATG staff: MTE9648 - Meet the Experts for Oracle E-Business Suite: Planning Your Upgrade Jeanne Lowell - VP, EBS Product Strategy, Oracle John Abraham - Sr. Principal Product Manager, Oracle Nadia Bendjedou - Sr. Director - Product Strategy, Oracle Anne Carlson - Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Udayan Parvate - Director, EBS Release Engineering, Oracle Isam Alyousfi, Sr. Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM - Moscone West 2001A Don’t miss this Oracle Applications Meet the Experts session with experts who specialize in Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade best practices. This is the place where attendees can have informal and semistructured but open one-on-one discussions with Strategy and Development regarding Oracle Applications strategy and your specific business and IT strategy. The experts will be available to discuss the value of the latest releases and share insights into the best path for your enterprise, so come ready with your questions. Space is limited, so make sure you register. MTE9649 - Meet the Oracle E-Business Suite Tools and Technology Experts Lisa Parekh - Vice President, Technology Integration, Oracle Steven Chan - Sr. Director, Oracle Elke Phelps - Sr. Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Max Arderius - Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2001A Don’t miss this Oracle Applications Meet the Experts session with experts who specialize in Oracle E-Business Suite technology. This is the place where attendees can have informal and semistructured but open one-on-one discussions with Strategy and Development regarding Oracle Applications strategy and your specific business and IT strategy. The experts will be available to discuss the value of the latest releases and share insights into the best path for your enterprise, so come ready with your questions. Space is limited, so make sure you register. Demos We have five booths in the exhibition demogrounds this year, where you can try ATG technologies firsthand and get your questions answered. Please stop by and meet our staff at the following locations: Advanced Architecture and Technology Stack for Oracle E-Business Suite (W-067) New User Productivity Capabilities in Oracle E-Business Suite (W-065) End-to-End Management of Oracle E-Business Suite (W-063) Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Technical Upgrade Best Practices (W-066) SOA-Based Integration for Oracle E-Business Suite (W-064)

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• Inheritance Mapping Strategies with Entity Framework Code First CTP5 Part 1: Table per Hierarchy (TPH)

  - by mortezam

  A simple strategy for mapping classes to database tables might be “one table for every entity persistent class.” This approach sounds simple enough and, indeed, works well until we encounter inheritance. Inheritance is such a visible structural mismatch between the object-oriented and relational worlds because object-oriented systems model both “is a” and “has a” relationships. SQL-based models provide only "has a" relationships between entities; SQL database management systems don’t support type inheritance—and even when it’s available, it’s usually proprietary or incomplete. There are three different approaches to representing an inheritance hierarchy: Table per Hierarchy (TPH): Enable polymorphism by denormalizing the SQL schema, and utilize a type discriminator column that holds type information. Table per Type (TPT): Represent "is a" (inheritance) relationships as "has a" (foreign key) relationships. Table per Concrete class (TPC): Discard polymorphism and inheritance relationships completely from the SQL schema.I will explain each of these strategies in a series of posts and this one is dedicated to TPH. In this series we'll deeply dig into each of these strategies and will learn about "why" to choose them as well as "how" to implement them. Hopefully it will give you a better idea about which strategy to choose in a particular scenario. Inheritance Mapping with Entity Framework Code FirstAll of the inheritance mapping strategies that we discuss in this series will be implemented by EF Code First CTP5. The CTP5 build of the new EF Code First library has been released by ADO.NET team earlier this month. EF Code-First enables a pretty powerful code-centric development workflow for working with data. I’m a big fan of the EF Code First approach, and I’m pretty excited about a lot of productivity and power that it brings. When it comes to inheritance mapping, not only Code First fully supports all the strategies but also gives you ultimate flexibility to work with domain models that involves inheritance. The fluent API for inheritance mapping in CTP5 has been improved a lot and now it's more intuitive and concise in compare to CTP4. A Note For Those Who Follow Other Entity Framework ApproachesIf you are following EF's "Database First" or "Model First" approaches, I still recommend to read this series since although the implementation is Code First specific but the explanations around each of the strategies is perfectly applied to all approaches be it Code First or others. A Note For Those Who are New to Entity Framework and Code-FirstIf you choose to learn EF you've chosen well. If you choose to learn EF with Code First you've done even better. To get started, you can find a great walkthrough by Scott Guthrie here and another one by ADO.NET team here. In this post, I assume you already setup your machine to do Code First development and also that you are familiar with Code First fundamentals and basic concepts. You might also want to check out my other posts on EF Code First like Complex Types and Shared Primary Key Associations. A Top Down Development ScenarioThese posts take a top-down approach; it assumes that you’re starting with a domain model and trying to derive a new SQL schema. Therefore, we start with an existing domain model, implement it in C# and then let Code First create the database schema for us. However, the mapping strategies described are just as relevant if you’re working bottom up, starting with existing database tables. I’ll show some tricks along the way that help you dealing with nonperfect table layouts. Let’s start with the mapping of entity inheritance. -- The Domain ModelIn our domain model, we have a BillingDetail base class which is abstract (note the italic font on the UML class diagram below). We do allow various billing types and represent them as subclasses of BillingDetail class. As for now, we support CreditCard and BankAccount: Implement the Object Model with Code First As always, we start with the POCO classes. Note that in our DbContext, I only define one DbSet for the base class which is BillingDetail. Code First will find the other classes in the hierarchy based on Reachability Convention. public abstract class BillingDetail  {     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }             public string Number { get; set; } } public class BankAccount : BillingDetail {     public string BankName { get; set; }     public string Swift { get; set; } } public class CreditCard : BillingDetail {     public int CardType { get; set; }                     public string ExpiryMonth { get; set; }     public string ExpiryYear { get; set; } } public class InheritanceMappingContext : DbContext {     public DbSet<BillingDetail> BillingDetails { get; set; } } This object model is all that is needed to enable inheritance with Code First. If you put this in your application you would be able to immediately start working with the database and do CRUD operations. Before going into details about how EF Code First maps this object model to the database, we need to learn about one of the core concepts of inheritance mapping: polymorphic and non-polymorphic queries. Polymorphic Queries LINQ to Entities and EntitySQL, as object-oriented query languages, both support polymorphic queries—that is, queries for instances of a class and all instances of its subclasses, respectively. For example, consider the following query: IQueryable<BillingDetail> linqQuery = from b in context.BillingDetails select b; List<BillingDetail> billingDetails = linqQuery.ToList(); Or the same query in EntitySQL: string eSqlQuery = @"SELECT VAlUE b FROM BillingDetails AS b"; ObjectQuery<BillingDetail> objectQuery = ((IObjectContextAdapter)context).ObjectContext                                                                          .CreateQuery<BillingDetail>(eSqlQuery); List<BillingDetail> billingDetails = objectQuery.ToList(); linqQuery and eSqlQuery are both polymorphic and return a list of objects of the type BillingDetail, which is an abstract class but the actual concrete objects in the list are of the subtypes of BillingDetail: CreditCard and BankAccount. Non-polymorphic QueriesAll LINQ to Entities and EntitySQL queries are polymorphic which return not only instances of the specific entity class to which it refers, but all subclasses of that class as well. On the other hand, Non-polymorphic queries are queries whose polymorphism is restricted and only returns instances of a particular subclass. In LINQ to Entities, this can be specified by using OfType<T>() Method. For example, the following query returns only instances of BankAccount: IQueryable<BankAccount> query = from b in context.BillingDetails.OfType<BankAccount>() select b; EntitySQL has OFTYPE operator that does the same thing: string eSqlQuery = @"SELECT VAlUE b FROM OFTYPE(BillingDetails, Model.BankAccount) AS b"; In fact, the above query with OFTYPE operator is a short form of the following query expression that uses TREAT and IS OF operators: string eSqlQuery = @"SELECT VAlUE TREAT(b as Model.BankAccount)                       FROM BillingDetails AS b                       WHERE b IS OF(Model.BankAccount)"; (Note that in the above query, Model.BankAccount is the fully qualified name for BankAccount class. You need to change "Model" with your own namespace name.) Table per Class Hierarchy (TPH)An entire class hierarchy can be mapped to a single table. This table includes columns for all properties of all classes in the hierarchy. The concrete subclass represented by a particular row is identified by the value of a type discriminator column. You don’t have to do anything special in Code First to enable TPH. It's the default inheritance mapping strategy: This mapping strategy is a winner in terms of both performance and simplicity. It’s the best-performing way to represent polymorphism—both polymorphic and nonpolymorphic queries perform well—and it’s even easy to implement by hand. Ad-hoc reporting is possible without complex joins or unions. Schema evolution is straightforward. Discriminator Column As you can see in the DB schema above, Code First has to add a special column to distinguish between persistent classes: the discriminator. This isn’t a property of the persistent class in our object model; it’s used internally by EF Code First. By default, the column name is "Discriminator", and its type is string. The values defaults to the persistent class names —in this case, “BankAccount” or “CreditCard”. EF Code First automatically sets and retrieves the discriminator values. TPH Requires Properties in SubClasses to be Nullable in the Database TPH has one major problem: Columns for properties declared by subclasses will be nullable in the database. For example, Code First created an (INT, NULL) column to map CardType property in CreditCard class. However, in a typical mapping scenario, Code First always creates an (INT, NOT NULL) column in the database for an int property in persistent class. But in this case, since BankAccount instance won’t have a CardType property, the CardType field must be NULL for that row so Code First creates an (INT, NULL) instead. If your subclasses each define several non-nullable properties, the loss of NOT NULL constraints may be a serious problem from the point of view of data integrity. TPH Violates the Third Normal FormAnother important issue is normalization. We’ve created functional dependencies between nonkey columns, violating the third normal form. Basically, the value of Discriminator column determines the corresponding values of the columns that belong to the subclasses (e.g. BankName) but Discriminator is not part of the primary key for the table. As always, denormalization for performance can be misleading, because it sacrifices long-term stability, maintainability, and the integrity of data for immediate gains that may be also achieved by proper optimization of the SQL execution plans (in other words, ask your DBA). Generated SQL QueryLet's take a look at the SQL statements that EF Code First sends to the database when we write queries in LINQ to Entities or EntitySQL. For example, the polymorphic query for BillingDetails that you saw, generates the following SQL statement: SELECT  [Extent1].[Discriminator] AS [Discriminator],  [Extent1].[BillingDetailId] AS [BillingDetailId],  [Extent1].[Owner] AS [Owner],  [Extent1].[Number] AS [Number],  [Extent1].[BankName] AS [BankName],  [Extent1].[Swift] AS [Swift],  [Extent1].[CardType] AS [CardType],  [Extent1].[ExpiryMonth] AS [ExpiryMonth],  [Extent1].[ExpiryYear] AS [ExpiryYear] FROM [dbo].[BillingDetails] AS [Extent1] WHERE [Extent1].[Discriminator] IN ('BankAccount','CreditCard') Or the non-polymorphic query for the BankAccount subclass generates this SQL statement: SELECT  [Extent1].[BillingDetailId] AS [BillingDetailId],  [Extent1].[Owner] AS [Owner],  [Extent1].[Number] AS [Number],  [Extent1].[BankName] AS [BankName],  [Extent1].[Swift] AS [Swift] FROM [dbo].[BillingDetails] AS [Extent1] WHERE [Extent1].[Discriminator] = 'BankAccount' Note how Code First adds a restriction on the discriminator column and also how it only selects those columns that belong to BankAccount entity. Change Discriminator Column Data Type and Values With Fluent API Sometimes, especially in legacy schemas, you need to override the conventions for the discriminator column so that Code First can work with the schema. The following fluent API code will change the discriminator column name to "BillingDetailType" and the values to "BA" and "CC" for BankAccount and CreditCard respectively: protected override void OnModelCreating(System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration.ModelBuilder modelBuilder) {     modelBuilder.Entity<BillingDetail>()                 .Map<BankAccount>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue("BA"))                 .Map<CreditCard>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue("CC")); } Also, changing the data type of discriminator column is interesting. In the above code, we passed strings to HasValue method but this method has been defined to accepts a type of object: public void HasValue(object value); Therefore, if for example we pass a value of type int to it then Code First not only use our desired values (i.e. 1 & 2) in the discriminator column but also changes the column type to be (INT, NOT NULL): modelBuilder.Entity<BillingDetail>()             .Map<BankAccount>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue(1))             .Map<CreditCard>(m => m.Requires("BillingDetailType").HasValue(2)); SummaryIn this post we learned about Table per Hierarchy as the default mapping strategy in Code First. The disadvantages of the TPH strategy may be too serious for your design—after all, denormalized schemas can become a major burden in the long run. Your DBA may not like it at all. In the next post, we will learn about Table per Type (TPT) strategy that doesn’t expose you to this problem. References ADO.NET team blog Java Persistence with Hibernate book a { text-decoration: none; } a:visited { color: Blue; } .title { padding-bottom: 5px; font-family: Segoe UI; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: bold; padding-top: 15px; } .code, .typeName { font-family: consolas; } .typeName { color: #2b91af; } .padTop5 { padding-top: 5px; } .padTop10 { padding-top: 10px; } p.MsoNormal { margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11.0pt; font-family: "Calibri" , "sans-serif"; }

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• Creating Custom Ajax Control Toolkit Controls

  - by Stephen Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to explain how you can extend the Ajax Control Toolkit with custom Ajax Control Toolkit controls. I describe how you can create the two halves of an Ajax Control Toolkit control: the server-side control extender and the client-side control behavior. Finally, I explain how you can use the new Ajax Control Toolkit control in a Web Forms page. At the end of this blog entry, there is a link to download a Visual Studio 2010 solution which contains the code for two Ajax Control Toolkit controls: SampleExtender and PopupHelpExtender. The SampleExtender contains the minimum skeleton for creating a new Ajax Control Toolkit control. You can use the SampleExtender as a starting point for your custom Ajax Control Toolkit controls. The PopupHelpExtender control is a super simple custom Ajax Control Toolkit control. This control extender displays a help message when you start typing into a TextBox control. The animated GIF below demonstrates what happens when you click into a TextBox which has been extended with the PopupHelp extender. Here’s a sample of a Web Forms page which uses the control: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="ShowPopupHelp.aspx.cs" Inherits="MyACTControls.Web.Default" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html > <head runat="server"> <title>Show Popup Help</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <act:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm" runat="server" /> <%-- Social Security Number --%> <asp:Label ID="lblSSN" Text="SSN:" AssociatedControlID="txtSSN" runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtSSN" runat="server" /> <act:PopupHelpExtender id="ph1" TargetControlID="txtSSN" HelpText="Please enter your social security number." runat="server" /> <%-- Social Security Number --%> <asp:Label ID="lblPhone" Text="Phone Number:" AssociatedControlID="txtPhone" runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtPhone" runat="server" /> <act:PopupHelpExtender id="ph2" TargetControlID="txtPhone" HelpText="Please enter your phone number." runat="server" /> </div> </form> </body> </html> In the page above, the PopupHelp extender is used to extend the functionality of the two TextBox controls. When focus is given to a TextBox control, the popup help message is displayed. An Ajax Control Toolkit control extender consists of two parts: a server-side control extender and a client-side behavior. For example, the PopupHelp extender consists of a server-side PopupHelpExtender control (PopupHelpExtender.cs) and a client-side PopupHelp behavior JavaScript script (PopupHelpBehavior.js). Over the course of this blog entry, I describe how you can create both the server-side extender and the client-side behavior. Writing the Server-Side Code Creating a Control Extender You create a control extender by creating a class that inherits from the abstract ExtenderControlBase class. For example, the PopupHelpExtender control is declared like this: public class PopupHelpExtender: ExtenderControlBase { } The ExtenderControlBase class is part of the Ajax Control Toolkit. This base class contains all of the common server properties and methods of every Ajax Control Toolkit extender control. The ExtenderControlBase class inherits from the ExtenderControl class. The ExtenderControl class is a standard class in the ASP.NET framework located in the System.Web.UI namespace. This class is responsible for generating a client-side behavior. The class generates a call to the Microsoft Ajax Library $create() method which looks like this: <script type="text/javascript"> $create(MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior, {"HelpText":"Please enter your social security number.","id":"ph1"}, null, null, $get("txtSSN")); }); </script> The JavaScript $create() method is part of the Microsoft Ajax Library. The reference for this method can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397487.aspx This method accepts the following parameters: type – The type of client behavior to create. The $create() method above creates a client PopupHelpBehavior. Properties – Enables you to pass initial values for the properties of the client behavior. For example, the initial value of the HelpText property. This is how server property values are passed to the client. Events – Enables you to pass client-side event handlers to the client behavior. References – Enables you to pass references to other client components. Element – The DOM element associated with the client behavior. This will be the DOM element associated with the control being extended such as the txtSSN TextBox. The $create() method is generated for you automatically. You just need to focus on writing the server-side control extender class. Specifying the Target Control All Ajax Control Toolkit extenders inherit a TargetControlID property from the ExtenderControlBase class. This property, the TargetControlID property, points at the control that the extender control extends. For example, the Ajax Control Toolkit TextBoxWatermark control extends a TextBox, the ConfirmButton control extends a Button, and the Calendar control extends a TextBox. You must indicate the type of control which your extender is extending. You indicate the type of control by adding a [TargetControlType] attribute to your control. For example, the PopupHelp extender is declared like this: [TargetControlType(typeof(TextBox))] public class PopupHelpExtender: ExtenderControlBase { } The PopupHelp extender can be used to extend a TextBox control. If you try to use the PopupHelp extender with another type of control then an exception is thrown. If you want to create an extender control which can be used with any type of ASP.NET control (Button, DataView, TextBox or whatever) then use the following attribute: [TargetControlType(typeof(Control))] Decorating Properties with Attributes If you decorate a server-side property with the [ExtenderControlProperty] attribute then the value of the property gets passed to the control’s client-side behavior. The value of the property gets passed to the client through the $create() method discussed above. The PopupHelp control contains the following HelpText property: [ExtenderControlProperty] [RequiredProperty] public string HelpText { get { return GetPropertyValue("HelpText", "Help Text"); } set { SetPropertyValue("HelpText", value); } } The HelpText property determines the help text which pops up when you start typing into a TextBox control. Because the HelpText property is decorated with the [ExtenderControlProperty] attribute, any value assigned to this property on the server is passed to the client automatically. For example, if you declare the PopupHelp extender in a Web Form page like this: <asp:TextBox ID="txtSSN" runat="server" /> <act:PopupHelpExtender id="ph1" TargetControlID="txtSSN" HelpText="Please enter your social security number." runat="server" />   Then the PopupHelpExtender renders the call to the the following Microsoft Ajax Library $create() method: $create(MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior, {"HelpText":"Please enter your social security number.","id":"ph1"}, null, null, $get("txtSSN")); You can see this call to the JavaScript $create() method by selecting View Source in your browser. This call to the $create() method calls a method named set_HelpText() automatically and passes the value “Please enter your social security number”. There are several attributes which you can use to decorate server-side properties including: ExtenderControlProperty – When a property is marked with this attribute, the value of the property is passed to the client automatically. ExtenderControlEvent – When a property is marked with this attribute, the property represents a client event handler. Required – When a value is not assigned to this property on the server, an error is displayed. DefaultValue – The default value of the property passed to the client. ClientPropertyName – The name of the corresponding property in the JavaScript behavior. For example, the server-side property is named ID (uppercase) and the client-side property is named id (lower-case). IDReferenceProperty – Applied to properties which refer to the IDs of other controls. URLProperty – Calls ResolveClientURL() to convert from a server-side URL to a URL which can be used on the client. ElementReference – Returns a reference to a DOM element by performing a client $get(). The WebResource, ClientResource, and the RequiredScript Attributes The PopupHelp extender uses three embedded resources named PopupHelpBehavior.js, PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js, and PopupHelpBehavior.css. The first two files are JavaScript files and the final file is a Cascading Style sheet file. These files are compiled as embedded resources. You don’t need to mark them as embedded resources in your Visual Studio solution because they get added to the assembly when the assembly is compiled by a build task. You can see that these files get embedded into the MyACTControls assembly by using Red Gate’s .NET Reflector tool: In order to use these files with the PopupHelp extender, you need to work with both the WebResource and the ClientScriptResource attributes. The PopupHelp extender includes the following three WebResource attributes. [assembly: WebResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.js", "text/javascript")] [assembly: WebResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js", "text/javascript")] [assembly: WebResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.css", "text/css", PerformSubstitution = true)] These WebResource attributes expose the embedded resource from the assembly so that they can be accessed by using the ScriptResource.axd or WebResource.axd handlers. The first parameter passed to the WebResource attribute is the name of the embedded resource and the second parameter is the content type of the embedded resource. The PopupHelp extender also includes the following ClientScriptResource and ClientCssResource attributes: [ClientScriptResource("MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior", "PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.js")] [ClientCssResource("PopupHelp.PopupHelpBehavior.css")] Including these attributes causes the PopupHelp extender to request these resources when you add the PopupHelp extender to a page. If you open View Source in a browser which uses the PopupHelp extender then you will see the following link for the Cascading Style Sheet file: <link href="/WebResource.axd?d=0uONMsWXUuEDG-pbJHAC1kuKiIMteQFkYLmZdkgv7X54TObqYoqVzU4mxvaa4zpn5H9ch0RDwRYKwtO8zM5mKgO6C4WbrbkWWidKR07LD1d4n4i_uNB1mHEvXdZu2Ae5mDdVNDV53znnBojzCzwvSw2&amp;t=634417392021676003" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" /> You also will see the following script include for the JavaScript file: <script src="/ScriptResource.axd?d=pIS7xcGaqvNLFBvExMBQSp_0xR3mpDfS0QVmmyu1aqDUjF06TrW1jVDyXNDMtBHxpRggLYDvgFTWOsrszflZEDqAcQCg-hDXjun7ON0Ol7EXPQIdOe1GLMceIDv3OeX658-tTq2LGdwXhC1-dE7_6g2&amp;t=ffffffff88a33b59" type="text/javascript"></script> The JavaScrpt file returned by this request to ScriptResource.axd contains the combined scripts for any and all Ajax Control Toolkit controls in a page. By default, the Ajax Control Toolkit combines all of the JavaScript files required by a page into a single JavaScript file. Combining files in this way really speeds up how quickly all of the JavaScript files get delivered from the web server to the browser. So, by default, there will be only one ScriptResource.axd include for all of the JavaScript files required by a page. If you want to disable Script Combining, and create separate links, then disable Script Combining like this: <act:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm" runat="server" CombineScripts="false" /> There is one more important attribute used by Ajax Control Toolkit extenders. The PopupHelp behavior uses the following two RequirdScript attributes to load the JavaScript files which are required by the PopupHelp behavior: [RequiredScript(typeof(CommonToolkitScripts), 0)] [RequiredScript(typeof(PopupExtender), 1)] The first parameter of the RequiredScript attribute represents either the string name of a JavaScript file or the type of an Ajax Control Toolkit control. The second parameter represents the order in which the JavaScript files are loaded (This second parameter is needed because .NET attributes are intrinsically unordered). In this case, the RequiredScript attribute will load the JavaScript files associated with the CommonToolkitScripts type and the JavaScript files associated with the PopupExtender in that order. The PopupHelp behavior depends on these JavaScript files. Writing the Client-Side Code The PopupHelp extender uses a client-side behavior written with the Microsoft Ajax Library. Here is the complete code for the client-side behavior: (function () { // The unique name of the script registered with the // client script loader var scriptName = "PopupHelpBehavior"; function execute() { Type.registerNamespace('MyACTControls'); MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior = function (element) { /// <summary> /// A behavior which displays popup help for a textbox /// </summmary> /// <param name="element" type="Sys.UI.DomElement">The element to attach to</param> MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.initializeBase(this, [element]); this._textbox = Sys.Extended.UI.TextBoxWrapper.get_Wrapper(element); this._cssClass = "ajax__popupHelp"; this._popupBehavior = null; this._popupPosition = Sys.Extended.UI.PositioningMode.BottomLeft; this._popupDiv = null; this._helpText = "Help Text"; this._element$delegates = { focus: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onfocus), blur: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onblur) }; } MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.prototype = { initialize: function () { MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.callBaseMethod(this, 'initialize'); // Add event handlers for focus and blur var element = this.get_element(); $addHandlers(element, this._element$delegates); }, _ensurePopup: function () { if (!this._popupDiv) { var element = this.get_element(); var id = this.get_id(); this._popupDiv = $common.createElementFromTemplate({ nodeName: "div", properties: { id: id + "_popupDiv" }, cssClasses: ["ajax__popupHelp"] }, element.parentNode); this._popupBehavior = new $create(Sys.Extended.UI.PopupBehavior, { parentElement: element }, {}, {}, this._popupDiv); this._popupBehavior.set_positioningMode(this._popupPosition); } }, get_HelpText: function () { return this._helpText; }, set_HelpText: function (value) { if (this._HelpText != value) { this._helpText = value; this._ensurePopup(); this._popupDiv.innerHTML = value; this.raisePropertyChanged("Text") } }, _element_onfocus: function (e) { this.show(); }, _element_onblur: function (e) { this.hide(); }, show: function () { this._popupBehavior.show(); }, hide: function () { if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.hide(); } }, dispose: function() { var element = this.get_element(); $clearHandlers(element); if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.dispose(); this._popupBehavior = null; } } }; MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.registerClass('MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior', Sys.Extended.UI.BehaviorBase); Sys.registerComponent(MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior, { name: "popupHelp" }); } // execute if (window.Sys && Sys.loader) { Sys.loader.registerScript(scriptName, ["ExtendedBase", "ExtendedCommon"], execute); } else { execute(); } })();   In the following sections, we’ll discuss how this client-side behavior works. Wrapping the Behavior for the Script Loader The behavior is wrapped with the following script: (function () { // The unique name of the script registered with the // client script loader var scriptName = "PopupHelpBehavior"; function execute() { // Behavior Content } // execute if (window.Sys && Sys.loader) { Sys.loader.registerScript(scriptName, ["ExtendedBase", "ExtendedCommon"], execute); } else { execute(); } })(); This code is required by the Microsoft Ajax Library Script Loader. You need this code if you plan to use a behavior directly from client-side code and you want to use the Script Loader. If you plan to only use your code in the context of the Ajax Control Toolkit then you can leave out this code. Registering a JavaScript Namespace The PopupHelp behavior is declared within a namespace named MyACTControls. In the code above, this namespace is created with the following registerNamespace() method: Type.registerNamespace('MyACTControls'); JavaScript does not have any built-in way of creating namespaces to prevent naming conflicts. The Microsoft Ajax Library extends JavaScript with support for namespaces. You can learn more about the registerNamespace() method here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397723.aspx Creating the Behavior The actual Popup behavior is created with the following code. MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior = function (element) { /// <summary> /// A behavior which displays popup help for a textbox /// </summmary> /// <param name="element" type="Sys.UI.DomElement">The element to attach to</param> MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.initializeBase(this, [element]); this._textbox = Sys.Extended.UI.TextBoxWrapper.get_Wrapper(element); this._cssClass = "ajax__popupHelp"; this._popupBehavior = null; this._popupPosition = Sys.Extended.UI.PositioningMode.BottomLeft; this._popupDiv = null; this._helpText = "Help Text"; this._element$delegates = { focus: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onfocus), blur: Function.createDelegate(this, this._element_onblur) }; } MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.prototype = { initialize: function () { MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.callBaseMethod(this, 'initialize'); // Add event handlers for focus and blur var element = this.get_element(); $addHandlers(element, this._element$delegates); }, _ensurePopup: function () { if (!this._popupDiv) { var element = this.get_element(); var id = this.get_id(); this._popupDiv = $common.createElementFromTemplate({ nodeName: "div", properties: { id: id + "_popupDiv" }, cssClasses: ["ajax__popupHelp"] }, element.parentNode); this._popupBehavior = new $create(Sys.Extended.UI.PopupBehavior, { parentElement: element }, {}, {}, this._popupDiv); this._popupBehavior.set_positioningMode(this._popupPosition); } }, get_HelpText: function () { return this._helpText; }, set_HelpText: function (value) { if (this._HelpText != value) { this._helpText = value; this._ensurePopup(); this._popupDiv.innerHTML = value; this.raisePropertyChanged("Text") } }, _element_onfocus: function (e) { this.show(); }, _element_onblur: function (e) { this.hide(); }, show: function () { this._popupBehavior.show(); }, hide: function () { if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.hide(); } }, dispose: function() { var element = this.get_element(); $clearHandlers(element); if (this._popupBehavior) { this._popupBehavior.dispose(); this._popupBehavior = null; } } }; The code above has two parts. The first part of the code is used to define the constructor function for the PopupHelp behavior. This is a factory method which returns an instance of a PopupHelp behavior: MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior = function (element) { } The second part of the code modified the prototype for the PopupHelp behavior: MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.prototype = { } Any code which is particular to a single instance of the PopupHelp behavior should be placed in the constructor function. For example, the default value of the _helpText field is assigned in the constructor function: this._helpText = "Help Text"; Any code which is shared among all instances of the PopupHelp behavior should be added to the PopupHelp behavior’s prototype. For example, the public HelpText property is added to the prototype: get_HelpText: function () { return this._helpText; }, set_HelpText: function (value) { if (this._HelpText != value) { this._helpText = value; this._ensurePopup(); this._popupDiv.innerHTML = value; this.raisePropertyChanged("Text") } }, Registering a JavaScript Class After you create the PopupHelp behavior, you must register the behavior as a class by using the Microsoft Ajax registerClass() method like this: MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior.registerClass('MyACTControls.PopupHelpBehavior', Sys.Extended.UI.BehaviorBase); This call to registerClass() registers PopupHelp behavior as a class which derives from the base Sys.Extended.UI.BehaviorBase class. Like the ExtenderControlBase class on the server side, the BehaviorBase class on the client side contains method used by every behavior. The documentation for the BehaviorBase class can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb311020.aspx The most important methods and properties of the BehaviorBase class are the following: dispose() – Use this method to clean up all resources used by your behavior. In the case of the PopupHelp behavior, the dispose() method is used to remote the event handlers created by the behavior and disposed the Popup behavior. get_element() -- Use this property to get the DOM element associated with the behavior. In other words, the DOM element which the behavior extends. get_id() – Use this property to the ID of the current behavior. initialize() – Use this method to initialize the behavior. This method is called after all of the properties are set by the $create() method. Creating Debug and Release Scripts You might have noticed that the PopupHelp behavior uses two scripts named PopupHelpBehavior.js and PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js. However, you never create these two scripts. Instead, you only create a single script named PopupHelpBehavior.pre.js. The pre in PopupHelpBehavior.pre.js stands for preprocessor. When you build the Ajax Control Toolkit (or the sample Visual Studio Solution at the end of this blog entry), a build task named JSBuild generates the PopupHelpBehavior.js release script and PopupHelpBehavior.debug.js debug script automatically. The JSBuild preprocessor supports the following directives: #IF #ELSE #ENDIF #INCLUDE #LOCALIZE #DEFINE #UNDEFINE The preprocessor directives are used to mark code which should only appear in the debug version of the script. The directives are used extensively in the Microsoft Ajax Library. For example, the Microsoft Ajax Library Array.contains() method is created like this: $type.contains = function Array$contains(array, item) { //#if DEBUG var e = Function._validateParams(arguments, [ {name: "array", type: Array, elementMayBeNull: true}, {name: "item", mayBeNull: true} ]); if (e) throw e; //#endif return (indexOf(array, item) >= 0); } Notice that you add each of the preprocessor directives inside a JavaScript comment. The comment prevents Visual Studio from getting confused with its Intellisense. The release version, but not the debug version, of the PopupHelpBehavior script is also minified automatically by the Microsoft Ajax Minifier. The minifier is invoked by a build step in the project file. Conclusion The goal of this blog entry was to explain how you can create custom AJAX Control Toolkit controls. In the first part of this blog entry, you learned how to create the server-side portion of an Ajax Control Toolkit control. You learned how to derive a new control from the ExtenderControlBase class and decorate its properties with the necessary attributes. Next, in the second part of this blog entry, you learned how to create the client-side portion of an Ajax Control Toolkit control by creating a client-side behavior with JavaScript. You learned how to use the methods of the Microsoft Ajax Library to extend your client behavior from the BehaviorBase class. Download the Custom ACT Starter Solution

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• Inheritance Mapping Strategies with Entity Framework Code First CTP5: Part 3 – Table per Concrete Type (TPC) and Choosing Strategy Guidelines

  - by mortezam

  This is the third (and last) post in a series that explains different approaches to map an inheritance hierarchy with EF Code First. I've described these strategies in previous posts: Part 1 – Table per Hierarchy (TPH) Part 2 – Table per Type (TPT)In today’s blog post I am going to discuss Table per Concrete Type (TPC) which completes the inheritance mapping strategies supported by EF Code First. At the end of this post I will provide some guidelines to choose an inheritance strategy mainly based on what we've learned in this series. TPC and Entity Framework in the Past Table per Concrete type is somehow the simplest approach suggested, yet using TPC with EF is one of those concepts that has not been covered very well so far and I've seen in some resources that it was even discouraged. The reason for that is just because Entity Data Model Designer in VS2010 doesn't support TPC (even though the EF runtime does). That basically means if you are following EF's Database-First or Model-First approaches then configuring TPC requires manually writing XML in the EDMX file which is not considered to be a fun practice. Well, no more. You'll see that with Code First, creating TPC is perfectly possible with fluent API just like other strategies and you don't need to avoid TPC due to the lack of designer support as you would probably do in other EF approaches. Table per Concrete Type (TPC)In Table per Concrete type (aka Table per Concrete class) we use exactly one table for each (nonabstract) class. All properties of a class, including inherited properties, can be mapped to columns of this table, as shown in the following figure: As you can see, the SQL schema is not aware of the inheritance; effectively, we’ve mapped two unrelated tables to a more expressive class structure. If the base class was concrete, then an additional table would be needed to hold instances of that class. I have to emphasize that there is no relationship between the database tables, except for the fact that they share some similar columns. TPC Implementation in Code First Just like the TPT implementation, we need to specify a separate table for each of the subclasses. We also need to tell Code First that we want all of the inherited properties to be mapped as part of this table. In CTP5, there is a new helper method on EntityMappingConfiguration class called MapInheritedProperties that exactly does this for us. Here is the complete object model as well as the fluent API to create a TPC mapping: public abstract class BillingDetail {     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }     public string Number { get; set; } }          public class BankAccount : BillingDetail {     public string BankName { get; set; }     public string Swift { get; set; } }          public class CreditCard : BillingDetail {     public int CardType { get; set; }     public string ExpiryMonth { get; set; }     public string ExpiryYear { get; set; } }      public class InheritanceMappingContext : DbContext {     public DbSet<BillingDetail> BillingDetails { get; set; }              protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder)     {         modelBuilder.Entity<BankAccount>().Map(m =>         {             m.MapInheritedProperties();             m.ToTable("BankAccounts");         });         modelBuilder.Entity<CreditCard>().Map(m =>         {             m.MapInheritedProperties();             m.ToTable("CreditCards");         });                 } } The Importance of EntityMappingConfiguration ClassAs a side note, it worth mentioning that EntityMappingConfiguration class turns out to be a key type for inheritance mapping in Code First. Here is an snapshot of this class: namespace System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration.Configuration.Mapping {     public class EntityMappingConfiguration<TEntityType> where TEntityType : class     {         public ValueConditionConfiguration Requires(string discriminator);         public void ToTable(string tableName);         public void MapInheritedProperties();     } } As you have seen so far, we used its Requires method to customize TPH. We also used its ToTable method to create a TPT and now we are using its MapInheritedProperties along with ToTable method to create our TPC mapping. TPC Configuration is Not Done Yet!We are not quite done with our TPC configuration and there is more into this story even though the fluent API we saw perfectly created a TPC mapping for us in the database. To see why, let's start working with our object model. For example, the following code creates two new objects of BankAccount and CreditCard types and tries to add them to the database: using (var context = new InheritanceMappingContext()) {     BankAccount bankAccount = new BankAccount();     CreditCard creditCard = new CreditCard() { CardType = 1 };                      context.BillingDetails.Add(bankAccount);     context.BillingDetails.Add(creditCard);     context.SaveChanges(); } Running this code throws an InvalidOperationException with this message: The changes to the database were committed successfully, but an error occurred while updating the object context. The ObjectContext might be in an inconsistent state. Inner exception message: AcceptChanges cannot continue because the object's key values conflict with another object in the ObjectStateManager. Make sure that the key values are unique before calling AcceptChanges. The reason we got this exception is because DbContext.SaveChanges() internally invokes SaveChanges method of its internal ObjectContext. ObjectContext's SaveChanges method on its turn by default calls AcceptAllChanges after it has performed the database modifications. AcceptAllChanges method merely iterates over all entries in ObjectStateManager and invokes AcceptChanges on each of them. Since the entities are in Added state, AcceptChanges method replaces their temporary EntityKey with a regular EntityKey based on the primary key values (i.e. BillingDetailId) that come back from the database and that's where the problem occurs since both the entities have been assigned the same value for their primary key by the database (i.e. on both BillingDetailId = 1) and the problem is that ObjectStateManager cannot track objects of the same type (i.e. BillingDetail) with the same EntityKey value hence it throws. If you take a closer look at the TPC's SQL schema above, you'll see why the database generated the same values for the primary keys: the BillingDetailId column in both BankAccounts and CreditCards table has been marked as identity. How to Solve The Identity Problem in TPC As you saw, using SQL Server’s int identity columns doesn't work very well together with TPC since there will be duplicate entity keys when inserting in subclasses tables with all having the same identity seed. Therefore, to solve this, either a spread seed (where each table has its own initial seed value) will be needed, or a mechanism other than SQL Server’s int identity should be used. Some other RDBMSes have other mechanisms allowing a sequence (identity) to be shared by multiple tables, and something similar can be achieved with GUID keys in SQL Server. While using GUID keys, or int identity keys with different starting seeds will solve the problem but yet another solution would be to completely switch off identity on the primary key property. As a result, we need to take the responsibility of providing unique keys when inserting records to the database. We will go with this solution since it works regardless of which database engine is used. Switching Off Identity in Code First We can switch off identity simply by placing DatabaseGenerated attribute on the primary key property and pass DatabaseGenerationOption.None to its constructor. DatabaseGenerated attribute is a new data annotation which has been added to System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace in CTP5: public abstract class BillingDetail {     [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGenerationOption.None)]     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }     public string Number { get; set; } } As always, we can achieve the same result by using fluent API, if you prefer that: modelBuilder.Entity<BillingDetail>()             .Property(p => p.BillingDetailId)             .HasDatabaseGenerationOption(DatabaseGenerationOption.None); Working With The Object Model Our TPC mapping is ready and we can try adding new records to the database. But, like I said, now we need to take care of providing unique keys when creating new objects: using (var context = new InheritanceMappingContext()) {     BankAccount bankAccount = new BankAccount()      {          BillingDetailId = 1                          };     CreditCard creditCard = new CreditCard()      {          BillingDetailId = 2,         CardType = 1     };                      context.BillingDetails.Add(bankAccount);     context.BillingDetails.Add(creditCard);     context.SaveChanges(); } Polymorphic Associations with TPC is Problematic The main problem with this approach is that it doesn’t support Polymorphic Associations very well. After all, in the database, associations are represented as foreign key relationships and in TPC, the subclasses are all mapped to different tables so a polymorphic association to their base class (abstract BillingDetail in our example) cannot be represented as a simple foreign key relationship. For example, consider the the domain model we introduced here where User has a polymorphic association with BillingDetail. This would be problematic in our TPC Schema, because if User has a many-to-one relationship with BillingDetail, the Users table would need a single foreign key column, which would have to refer both concrete subclass tables. This isn’t possible with regular foreign key constraints. Schema Evolution with TPC is Complex A further conceptual problem with this mapping strategy is that several different columns, of different tables, share exactly the same semantics. This makes schema evolution more complex. For example, a change to a base class property results in changes to multiple columns. It also makes it much more difficult to implement database integrity constraints that apply to all subclasses. Generated SQLLet's examine SQL output for polymorphic queries in TPC mapping. For example, consider this polymorphic query for all BillingDetails and the resulting SQL statements that being executed in the database: var query = from b in context.BillingDetails select b; Just like the SQL query generated by TPT mapping, the CASE statements that you see in the beginning of the query is merely to ensure columns that are irrelevant for a particular row have NULL values in the returning flattened table. (e.g. BankName for a row that represents a CreditCard type). TPC's SQL Queries are Union Based As you can see in the above screenshot, the first SELECT uses a FROM-clause subquery (which is selected with a red rectangle) to retrieve all instances of BillingDetails from all concrete class tables. The tables are combined with a UNION operator, and a literal (in this case, 0 and 1) is inserted into the intermediate result; (look at the lines highlighted in yellow.) EF reads this to instantiate the correct class given the data from a particular row. A union requires that the queries that are combined, project over the same columns; hence, EF has to pad and fill up nonexistent columns with NULL. This query will really perform well since here we can let the database optimizer find the best execution plan to combine rows from several tables. There is also no Joins involved so it has a better performance than the SQL queries generated by TPT where a Join is required between the base and subclasses tables. Choosing Strategy GuidelinesBefore we get into this discussion, I want to emphasize that there is no one single "best strategy fits all scenarios" exists. As you saw, each of the approaches have their own advantages and drawbacks. Here are some rules of thumb to identify the best strategy in a particular scenario: If you don’t require polymorphic associations or queries, lean toward TPC—in other words, if you never or rarely query for BillingDetails and you have no class that has an association to BillingDetail base class. I recommend TPC (only) for the top level of your class hierarchy, where polymorphism isn’t usually required, and when modification of the base class in the future is unlikely. If you do require polymorphic associations or queries, and subclasses declare relatively few properties (particularly if the main difference between subclasses is in their behavior), lean toward TPH. Your goal is to minimize the number of nullable columns and to convince yourself (and your DBA) that a denormalized schema won’t create problems in the long run. If you do require polymorphic associations or queries, and subclasses declare many properties (subclasses differ mainly by the data they hold), lean toward TPT. Or, depending on the width and depth of your inheritance hierarchy and the possible cost of joins versus unions, use TPC. By default, choose TPH only for simple problems. For more complex cases (or when you’re overruled by a data modeler insisting on the importance of nullability constraints and normalization), you should consider the TPT strategy. But at that point, ask yourself whether it may not be better to remodel inheritance as delegation in the object model (delegation is a way of making composition as powerful for reuse as inheritance). Complex inheritance is often best avoided for all sorts of reasons unrelated to persistence or ORM. EF acts as a buffer between the domain and relational models, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore persistence concerns when designing your classes. SummaryIn this series, we focused on one of the main structural aspect of the object/relational paradigm mismatch which is inheritance and discussed how EF solve this problem as an ORM solution. We learned about the three well-known inheritance mapping strategies and their implementations in EF Code First. Hopefully it gives you a better insight about the mapping of inheritance hierarchies as well as choosing the best strategy for your particular scenario. Happy New Year and Happy Code-Firsting! References ADO.NET team blog Java Persistence with Hibernate book a { color: #5A99FF; } a:visited { color: #5A99FF; } .title { padding-bottom: 5px; font-family: Segoe UI; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: bold; padding-top: 15px; } .code, .typeName { font-family: consolas; } .typeName { color: #2b91af; } .padTop5 { padding-top: 5px; } .padTop10 { padding-top: 10px; } .exception { background-color: #f0f0f0; font-style: italic; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 5px; padding-top: 5px; padding-right: 5px; }

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• jQuery Time Entry with Time Navigation Keys

  - by Rick Strahl

  So, how do you display time values in your Web applications? Displaying date AND time values in applications is lot less standardized than date display only. While date input has become fairly universal with various date picker controls available, time entry continues to be a bit of a non-standardized. In my own applications I tend to use the jQuery UI DatePicker control for date entries and it works well for that. Here's an example: The date entry portion is well defined and it makes perfect sense to have a calendar pop up so you can pick a date from a rich UI when necessary. However, time values are much less obvious when it comes to displaying a UI or even just making time entries more useful. There are a slew of time picker controls available but other than adding some visual glitz, they are not really making time entry any easier. Part of the reason for this is that time entry is usually pretty simple. Clicking on a dropdown of any sort and selecting a value from a long scrolling list tends to take more user interaction than just typing 5 characters (7 if am/pm is used). Keystrokes can make Time Entry easier Time entry maybe pretty simple, but I find that adding a few hotkeys to handle date navigation can make it much easier. Specifically it'd be nice to have keys to: Jump to the current time (Now) Increase/decrease minutes Increase/decrease hours The timeKeys jQuery PlugIn Some time ago I created a small plugin to handle this scenario. It's non-visual other than tooltip that pops up when you press ? to display the hotkeys that are available: Try it Online The keys loosely follow the ancient Quicken convention of using the first and last letters of what you're increasing decreasing (ie. H to decrease, R to increase hours and + and - for the base unit or minutes here). All navigation happens via the keystrokes shown above, so it's all non-visual, which I think is the most efficient way to deal with dates. To hook up the plug-in, start with the textbox:<input type="text" id="txtTime" name="txtTime" value="12:05 pm" title="press ? for time options" /> Note the title which might be useful to alert people using the field that additional functionality is available. To hook up the plugin code is as simple as:$("#txtTime").timeKeys(); You essentially tie the plugin to any text box control. OptionsThe syntax for timeKeys allows for an options map parameter:$(selector).timeKeys(options); Options are passed as a parameter map object which can have the following properties: timeFormatYou can pass in a format string that allows you to format the date. The default is "hh:mm t" which is US time format that shows a 12 hour clock with am/pm. Alternately you can pass in "HH:mm" which uses 24 hour time. HH, hh, mm and t are translated in the format string - you can arrange the format as you see fit. callbackYou can also specify a callback function that is called when the date value has been set. This allows you to either re-format the date or perform post processing (such as displaying highlight if it's after a certain hour for example). Here's another example that uses both options:$("#txtTime").timeKeys({ timeFormat: "HH:mm", callback: function (time) { showStatus("new time is: " + time.toString() + " " + $(this).val() ); } }); The plugin code itself is fairly simple. It hooks the keydown event and checks for the various keys that affect time navigation which is straight forward. The bulk of the code however deals with parsing the time value and formatting the output using a Time class that implements parsing, formatting and time navigation methods. Here's the code for the timeKeys jQuery plug-in:/// <reference path="jquery.js" /> /// <reference path="ww.jquery.js" /> (function ($) { $.fn.timeKeys = function (options) { /// <summary> /// Attaches a set of hotkeys to time fields /// + Add minute - subtract minute /// H Subtract Hour R Add houR /// ? Show keys /// </summary> /// <param name="options" type="object"> /// Options: /// timeFormat: "hh:mm t" by default HH:mm alternate /// callback: callback handler after time assignment /// </param> /// <example> /// var proxy = new ServiceProxy("JsonStockService.svc/"); /// proxy.invoke("GetStockQuote",{symbol:"msft"},function(quote) { alert(result.LastPrice); },onPageError); ///</example> if (this.length < 1) return this; var opt = { timeFormat: "hh:mm t", callback: null } $.extend(opt, options); return this.keydown(function (e) { var $el = $(this); var time = new Time($el.val()); //alert($(this).val() + " " + time.toString() + " " + time.date.toString()); switch (e.keyCode) { case 78: // [N]ow time = new Time(new Date()); break; case 109: case 189: // - time.addMinutes(-1); break; case 107: case 187: // + time.addMinutes(1); break; case 72: //H time.addHours(-1); break; case 82: //R time.addHours(1); break; case 191: // ? if (e.shiftKey) $(this).tooltip("<b>N</b> Now<br/><b>+</b> add minute<br /><b>-</b> subtract minute<br /><b>H</b> Subtract Hour<br /><b>R</b> add hour", 4000, { isHtml: true }); return false; default: return true; } $el.val(time.toString(opt.timeFormat)); if (opt.callback) { // call async and set context in this element setTimeout(function () { opt.callback.call($el.get(0), time) }, 1); } return false; }); } Time = function (time, format) { /// <summary> /// Time object that can parse and format /// a time values. /// </summary> /// <param name="time" type="object"> /// A time value as a string (12:15pm or 23:01), a Date object /// or time value. /// /// </param> /// <param name="format" type="string"> /// Time format string: /// HH:mm (23:01) /// hh:mm t (11:01 pm) /// </param> /// <example> /// var time = new Time( new Date()); /// time.addHours(5); /// time.addMinutes(10); /// var s = time.toString(); /// /// var time2 = new Time(s); // parse with constructor /// var t = time2.parse("10:15 pm"); // parse with .parse() method /// alert( t.hours + " " + t.mins + " " + t.ampm + " " + t.hours25) ///</example> var _I = this; this.date = new Date(); this.timeFormat = "hh:mm t"; if (format) this.timeFormat = format; this.parse = function (time) { /// <summary> /// Parses time value from a Date object, or string in format of: /// 12:12pm or 23:01 /// </summary> /// <param name="time" type="any"> /// A time value as a string (12:15pm or 23:01), a Date object /// or time value. /// /// </param> if (!time) return null; // Date if (time.getDate) { var t = {}; var d = time; t.hours24 = d.getHours(); t.mins = d.getMinutes(); t.ampm = "am"; if (t.hours24 > 11) { t.ampm = "pm"; if (t.hours24 > 12) t.hours = t.hours24 - 12; } time = t; } if (typeof (time) == "string") { var parts = time.split(":"); if (parts < 2) return null; var time = {}; time.hours = parts[0] * 1; time.hours24 = time.hours; time.mins = parts[1].toLowerCase(); if (time.mins.indexOf("am") > -1) { time.ampm = "am"; time.mins = time.mins.replace("am", ""); if (time.hours == 12) time.hours24 = 0; } else if (time.mins.indexOf("pm") > -1) { time.ampm = "pm"; time.mins = time.mins.replace("pm", ""); if (time.hours < 12) time.hours24 = time.hours + 12; } time.mins = time.mins * 1; } _I.date.setMinutes(time.mins); _I.date.setHours(time.hours24); return time; }; this.addMinutes = function (mins) { /// <summary> /// adds minutes to the internally stored time value. /// </summary> /// <param name="mins" type="number"> /// number of minutes to add to the date /// </param> _I.date.setMinutes(_I.date.getMinutes() + mins); } this.addHours = function (hours) { /// <summary> /// adds hours the internally stored time value. /// </summary> /// <param name="hours" type="number"> /// number of hours to add to the date /// </param> _I.date.setHours(_I.date.getHours() + hours); } this.getTime = function () { /// <summary> /// returns a time structure from the currently /// stored time value. /// Properties: hours, hours24, mins, ampm /// </summary> return new Time(new Date()); h } this.toString = function (format) { /// <summary> /// returns a short time string for the internal date /// formats: 12:12 pm or 23:12 /// </summary> /// <param name="format" type="string"> /// optional format string for date /// HH:mm, hh:mm t /// </param> if (!format) format = _I.timeFormat; var hours = _I.date.getHours(); if (format.indexOf("t") > -1) { if (hours > 11) format = format.replace("t", "pm") else format = format.replace("t", "am") } if (format.indexOf("HH") > -1) format = format.replace("HH", hours.toString().padL(2, "0")); if (format.indexOf("hh") > -1) { if (hours > 12) hours -= 12; if (hours == 0) hours = 12; format = format.replace("hh", hours.toString().padL(2, "0")); } if (format.indexOf("mm") > -1) format = format.replace("mm", _I.date.getMinutes().toString().padL(2, "0")); return format; } // construction if (time) this.time = this.parse(time); } String.prototype.padL = function (width, pad) { if (!width || width < 1) return this; if (!pad) pad = " "; var length = width - this.length if (length < 1) return this.substr(0, width); return (String.repeat(pad, length) + this).substr(0, width); } String.repeat = function (chr, count) { var str = ""; for (var x = 0; x < count; x++) { str += chr }; return str; } })(jQuery); The plugin consists of the actual plugin and the Time class which handles parsing and formatting of the time value via the .parse() and .toString() methods. Code like this always ends up taking up more effort than the actual logic unfortunately. There are libraries out there that can handle this like datejs or even ww.jquery.js (which is what I use) but to keep the code self contained for this post the plugin doesn't rely on external code. There's one optional exception: The code as is has one dependency on ww.jquery.js  for the tooltip plugin that provides the small popup for all the hotkeys available. You can replace that code with some other mechanism to display hotkeys or simply remove it since that behavior is optional. While we're at it: A jQuery dateKeys plugIn Although date entry tends to be much better served with drop down calendars to pick dates from, often it's also easier to pick dates using a few simple hotkeys. Navigation that uses + - for days and M and H for MontH navigation, Y and R for YeaR navigation are a quick way to enter dates without having to resort to using a mouse and clicking around to what you want to find. Note that this plugin does have a dependency on ww.jquery.js for the date formatting functionality.$.fn.dateKeys = function (options) { /// <summary> /// Attaches a set of hotkeys to date 'fields' /// + Add day - subtract day /// M Subtract Month H Add montH /// Y Subtract Year R Add yeaR /// ? Show keys /// </summary> /// <param name="options" type="object"> /// Options: /// dateFormat: "MM/dd/yyyy" by default "MMM dd, yyyy /// callback: callback handler after date assignment /// </param> /// <example> /// var proxy = new ServiceProxy("JsonStockService.svc/"); /// proxy.invoke("GetStockQuote",{symbol:"msft"},function(quote) { alert(result.LastPrice); },onPageError); ///</example> if (this.length < 1) return this; var opt = { dateFormat: "MM/dd/yyyy", callback: null }; $.extend(opt, options); return this.keydown(function (e) { var $el = $(this); var d = new Date($el.val()); if (!d) d = new Date(1900, 0, 1, 1, 1); var month = d.getMonth(); var year = d.getFullYear(); var day = d.getDate(); switch (e.keyCode) { case 84: // [T]oday d = new Date(); break; case 109: case 189: d = new Date(year, month, day - 1); break; case 107: case 187: d = new Date(year, month, day + 1); break; case 77: //M d = new Date(year, month - 1, day); break; case 72: //H d = new Date(year, month + 1, day); break; case 191: // ? if (e.shiftKey) $el.tooltip("<b>T</b> Today<br/><b>+</b> add day<br /><b>-</b> subtract day<br /><b>M</b> subtract Month<br /><b>H</b> add montH<br/><b>Y</b> subtract Year<br/><b>R</b> add yeaR", 5000, { isHtml: true }); return false; default: return true; } $el.val(d.formatDate(opt.dateFormat)); if (opt.callback) // call async setTimeout(function () { opt.callback.call($el.get(0),d); }, 10); return false; }); } The logic for this plugin is similar to the timeKeys plugin, but it's a little simpler as it tries to directly parse the date value from a string via new Date(inputString). As mentioned it also uses a helper function from ww.jquery.js to format dates which removes the logic to perform date formatting manually which again reduces the size of the code. And the Key is… I've been using both of these plugins in combination with the jQuery UI datepicker for datetime values and I've found that I rarely actually pop up the date picker any more. It's just so much more efficient to use the hotkeys to navigate dates. It's still nice to have the picker around though - it provides the expected behavior for date entry. For time values however I can't justify the UI overhead of a picker that doesn't make it any easier to pick a time. Most people know how to type in a time value and if they want shortcuts keystrokes easily beat out any pop up UI. Hopefully you'll find this as useful as I have found it for my code. Resources Online Sample Download Sample Project © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in jQuery  HTML   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Configure Forms based authentication in SharePoint 2010

  - by sreejukg

    Configuring form authentication is a straight forward task in SharePoint. Mostly public facing websites built on SharePoint requires form based authentication. Recently, one of the WCM implementation where I was included in the project team required registration system. Any internet user can register to the site and the site offering them some membership specific functionalities once the user logged in. Since the registration open for all, I don’t want to store all those users in Active Directory. I have decided to use Forms based authentication for those users. This is a typical scenario of form authentication in SharePoint implementation. To implement form authentication you require the following A data store where you are storing the users – technically this can be active directory, SQL server database, LDAP etc. Form authentication will redirect the user to the login page, if the request is not authenticated. In the login page, there will be controls that validate the user inputs against the configured data store. In this article, I am going to use SQL server database with ASP.Net membership API’s to configure form based authentication in SharePoint 2010. This article assumes that you have SQL membership database available. I already configured the membership and roles database using aspnet_regsql command. If you want to know how to configure membership database using aspnet_regsql command, read the below blog post. http://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/archive/2011/06/16/usage-of-aspnet-regsql-exe-in-asp-net-4.aspx The snapshot of the database after implementing membership and role manager is as follows. I have used the database name “aspnetdb_claim”. Make sure you have created the database and make sure your database contains tables and stored procedures for membership. Create a web application with claims based authentication. This article assumes you already created a web application using claims based authentication. If you want to enable forms based authentication in SharePoint 2010, you must enable claims based authentication. Read this post for creating a web application using claims based authentication. http://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/archive/2011/06/15/create-a-web-application-in-sharepoint-2010-using-claims-based-authentication.aspx  You make sure, you have selected enable form authentication, and then selected Membership provider and Role manager name. To make sure you are done with the configuration, navigate to central administration website, from central administration, navigate to the Web Applications page, select the web application and click on icon, you will see the authentication providers for the current web application. Go to the section Claims authentication types, and make sure you have enabled forms based authentication. As mentioned in the snapshot, I have named the membership provider as SPFormAuthMembership and role manager as SPFormAuthRoleManager. You can choose your own names as you need. Modify the configuration files(Web.Config) to enable form authentication There are three applications that needs to be configured to support form authentication. The following are those applications. Central Administration If you want to assign permissions to web application using the credentials from form authentication, you need to update Central Administration configuration. If you do not want to access form authentication credentials from Central Administration, just leave this step.  STS service application Security Token service is the service application that issues security token when users are logging in. You need to modify the configuration of STS application to make sure users are able to login. To find the STS application, follow the following steps Go to the IIS Manager Expand the sites Node, you will see SharePoint Web Services Expand SharePoint Web Services, you can see SecurityTokenServiceApplication Right click SecuritytokenServiceApplication and click explore, it will open the corresponding file system. By default, the path for STS is C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\WebServices\SecurityToken You need to modify the configuration file available in the mentioned location. The web application that needs to be enabled with form authentication. You need to modify the configuration of your web application to make sure your web application identifies users from the form authentication.   Based on the above, I am going to modify the web configuration. At end of each step, I have mentioned the expected output. I recommend you to go step by step and after each step, make sure the configuration changes are working as expected. If you do everything all together, and test your application at the end, you may face difficulties in troubleshooting the configuration errors. Modifications for Central Administration Web.Config Open the web.config for the Central administration in a text editor. I always prefer Visual Studio, for editing web.config. In most cases, the path of the web.config for the central administration website is as follows C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\<port number> Make sure you keep a backup copy of the web.config, before editing it. Let me summarize what we are going to do with Central Administration web.config. First I am going to add a connection string that points to the form authentication database, that I created as mentioned in previous steps. Then I need to add a membership provider and a role manager with the corresponding connectionstring. Then I need to update the peoplepickerwildcards section to make sure the users are appearing in search results. By default there is no connection string available in the web.config of Central Administration. Add a connection string just after the configsections element. The below is the connection string I have used all over the article. <add name="FormAuthConnString" connectionString="Initial Catalog=yourdatabasename;data source=databaseservername;Integrated Security=SSPI;" /> Once you added the connection string, the web.config look similar to Now add membership provider to the code. In web.config for CA, there will be <membership> tag, search for it. You will find membership and role manager under the <system.web> element. Under the membership providers section add the below code… <add name="SPFormAuthMembership" type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" applicationName="FormAuthApplication" connectionStringName="FormAuthConnString" /> After adding memberhip element, see the snapshot of the web.config. Now you need to add role manager element to the web.config. Insider providers element under rolemanager, add the below code. <add name="SPFormAuthRoleManager" type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" applicationName="FormAuthApplication" connectionStringName="FormAuthConnString" /> After adding, your role manager will look similar to the following. As a last step, you need to update the people picker wildcard element in web.config, so that the users from your membership provider are available for browsing in Central Administration. Search for PeoplePickerWildcards in the web.config, add the following inside the <PeoplePickerWildcards> tag. <add key="SPFormAuthMembership" value="%" /> After adding this element, your web.config will look like After completing these steps, you can browse the users available in the SQL server database from central administration website. Go to the site collection administrator’s page from central administration. Select the site collection you have created for form authentication. Click on the people picker icon, choose Forms Auth and click on the search icon, you will see the users listed from the SQL server database. Once you complete these steps, make sure the users are available for browsing from central administration website. If you are unable to find the users, there must be some errors in the configuration, check windows event logs to find related errors and fix them. Change the web.config for STS application Open the web.config for STS application in text editor. By default, STS web.config does not have system.Web or connectionstrings section. Just after the System.Webserver element, add the following code. <connectionStrings> <add name="FormAuthConnString" connectionString="Initial Catalog=aspnetdb_claim;data source=sp2010_db;Integrated Security=SSPI;" /> </connectionStrings> <system.web> <roleManager enabled="true" cacheRolesInCookie="false" cookieName=".ASPXROLES" cookieTimeout="30" cookiePath="/" cookieRequireSSL="false" cookieSlidingExpiration="true" cookieProtection="All" createPersistentCookie="false" maxCachedResults="25"> <providers> <add name="SPFormAuthRoleManager" type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" applicationName="FormAuthApplication" connectionStringName="FormAuthConnString" /> </providers> </roleManager> <membership userIsOnlineTimeWindow="15" hashAlgorithmType=""> <providers> <add name="SPFormAuthMembership" type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" applicationName="FormAuthApplication" connectionStringName="FormAuthConnString" /> </providers> </membership> </system.web> See the snapshot of the web.config after adding the required elements. After adding this, you should be able to login using the credentials from SQL server. Try assigning a user as primary/secondary administrator for your site collection from Central Administration and login to your site using form authentication. If you made everything correct, you should be able to login. This means you have successfully completed configuration of STS Configuration of Web Application for Form Authentication As a last step, you need to modify the web.config of the form authentication web application. Once you have done this, you should be able to grant permissions to users stored in the membership database. Open the Web.config of the web application you created for form authentication. You can find the web.config for the application under the path C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\<port number> Basically you need to add connection string, membership provider, role manager and update the people picker wild card configuration. Add the connection string (same as the one you added to the web.config in Central Administration). See the screenshot after the connection string has added. Search for <membership> in the web.config, you will find this inside system.web element. There will be other providers already available there. You add your form authentication membership provider (similar to the one added to Central Administration web.config) to the provider element under membership. Find the snapshot of membership configuration as follows. Search for <roleManager> element in web.config, add the new provider name under providers section of the roleManager element. See the snapshot of web.config after new provider added. Now you need to configure the peoplepickerwildcard configuration in web.config. As I specified earlier, this is to make sure, you can locate the users by entering a part of their username. Add the following line under the <PeoplePickerWildcards> element in web.config. See the screenshot of the peoplePickerWildcards element after the element has been added. Now you have completed all the setup for form authentication. Navigate to the web application. From the site actions -> site settings -> go to peope and groups Click on new -> add users, it will popup the people picker dialog. Click on the icon, select Form Auth, enter a username in the search textbox, and click on search icon. See the screenshot of admin search when I tried searching the users If it displays the user, it means you are done with the configuration. If you add users to the form authentication database, the users will be able to access SharePoint portal as normal.

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• Is your team is a high-performing team?

  As a child I can remember looking out of the car window as my father drove along the Interstate in Florida while seeing prisoners wearing bright orange jump suits and prison guards keeping a watchful eye on them. The prisoners were taking part in a prison road gang. These road gangs were formed to help the state maintain the state highway infrastructure. The prisoner’s primary responsibilities are to pick up trash and debris from the roadway. This is a prime example of a work group or working group used by most prison systems in the United States. Work groups or working groups can be defined as a collection of individuals or entities working together to achieve a specific goal or accomplish a specific set of tasks. Typically these groups are only established for a short period of time and are dissolved once the desired outcome has been achieved. More often than not group members usually feel as though they are expendable to the group and some even dread that they are even in the group. "A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they are mutually accountable." (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993) So how do you determine that a team is a high-performing team?  This can be determined by three base line criteria that include: consistently high quality output, the promotion of personal growth and well being of all team members, and most importantly the ability to learn and grow as a unit. Initially, a team can successfully create high-performing output without meeting all three criteria, however this will erode over time because team members will feel detached from the group or that they are not growing then the quality of the output will decline. High performing teams are similar to work groups because they both utilize a collection of individuals or entities to accomplish tasks. What distinguish a high-performing team from a work group are its characteristics. High-performing teams contain five core characteristics. These characteristics are what separate a group from a team. The five characteristics of a high-performing team include: Purpose, Performance Measures, People with Tasks and Relationship Skills, Process, and Preparation and Practice. A high-performing team is much more than a work group, and typically has a life cycle that can vary from team to team. The standard team lifecycle consists of five states and is comparable to a human life cycle. The five states of a high-performing team lifecycle include: Formulating, Storming, Normalizing, Performing, and Adjourning. The Formulating State of a team is first realized when the team members are first defined and roles are assigned to all members. This initial stage is very important because it can set the tone for the team and can ultimately determine its success or failure. In addition, this stage requires the team to have a strong leader because team members are normally unclear about specific roles, specific obstacles and goals that my lay ahead of them.  Finally, this stage is where most team members initially meet one another prior to working as a team unless the team members already know each other. The Storming State normally arrives directly after the formulation of a new team because there are still a lot of unknowns amongst the newly formed assembly. As a general rule most of the parties involved in the team are still getting used to the workload, pace of work, deadlines and the validity of various tasks that need to be performed by the group.  In this state everything is questioned because there are so many unknowns. Items commonly questioned include the credentials of others on the team, the actual validity of a project, and the leadership abilities of the team leader.  This can be exemplified by looking at the interactions between animals when they first meet.  If we look at a scenario where two people are walking directly toward each other with their dogs. The dogs will automatically enter the Storming State because they do not know the other dog. Typically in this situation, they attempt to define which is more dominating via play or fighting depending on how the dogs interact with each other. Once dominance has been defined and accepted by both dogs then they will either want to play or leave depending on how the dogs interacted and other environmental variables. Once the Storming State has been realized then the Normalizing State takes over. This state is entered by a team once all the questions of the Storming State have been answered and the team has been tested by a few tasks or projects.  Typically, participants in the team are filled with energy, and comradery, and a strong alliance with team goals and objectives.  A high school football team is a perfect example of the Normalizing State when they start their season.  The player positions have been assigned, the depth chart has been filled and everyone is focused on winning each game. All of the players encourage and expect each other to perform at the best of their abilities and are united by competition from other teams. The Performing State is achieved by a team when its history, working habits, and culture solidify the team as one working unit. In this state team members can anticipate specific behaviors, attitudes, reactions, and challenges are seen as opportunities and not problems. Additionally, each team member knows their role in the team’s success, and the roles of others. This is the most productive state of a group and is where all the time invested working together really pays off. If you look at an Olympic figure skating team skate you can easily see how the time spent working together benefits their performance. They skate as one unit even though it is comprised of two skaters. Each skater has their routine completely memorized as well as their partners. This allows them to anticipate each other’s moves on the ice makes their skating look effortless. The final state of a team is the Adjourning State. This state is where accomplishments by the team and each individual team member are recognized. Additionally, this state also allows for reflection of the interactions between team members, work accomplished and challenges that were faced. Finally, the team celebrates the challenges they have faced and overcome as a unit. Currently in the workplace teams are divided into two different types: Co-located and Distributed Teams. Co-located teams defined as the traditional group of people working together in an office, according to Andy Singleton of Assembla. This traditional type of a team has dominated business in the past due to inadequate technology, which forced workers to primarily interact with one another via face to face meetings.  Team meetings are primarily lead by the person with the highest status in the company. Having personally, participated in meetings of this type, usually a select few of the team members dominate the flow of communication which reduces the input of others in group discussions. Since discussions are dominated by a select few individuals the discussions and group discussion are skewed in favor of the individuals who communicate the most in meetings. In addition, Team members might not give their full opinions on a topic of discussion in part not to offend or create controversy amongst the team and can alter decision made in meetings towards those of the opinions of the dominating team members. Distributed teams are by definition spread across an area or subdivided into separate sections. That is exactly what distributed teams when compared to a more traditional team. It is common place for distributed teams to have team members across town, in the next state, across the country and even with the advances in technology over the last 20 year across the world. These teams allow for more diversity compared to the other type of teams because they allow for more flexibility regarding location. A team could consist of a 30 year old male Italian project manager from New York, a 50 year old female Hispanic from California and a collection of programmers from India because technology allows them to communicate as if they were standing next to one another.  In addition, distributed team members consult with more team members prior to making decisions compared to traditional teams, and take longer to come to decisions due to the changes in time zones and cultural events. However, team members feel more empowered to speak out when they do not agree with the team and to notify others of potential issues regarding the work that the team is doing. Virtual teams which are a subset of the distributed team type is changing organizational strategies due to the fact that a team can now in essence be working 24 hrs a day because of utilizing employees in various time zones and locations.  A primary example of this is with customer services departments, a company can have multiple call centers spread across multiple time zones allowing them to appear to be open 24 hours a day while all a employees work from 9AM to 5 PM every day. Virtual teams also allow human resources departments to go after the best talent for the company regardless of where the potential employee works because they will be a part of a virtual team all that is need is the proper technology to be setup to allow everyone to communicate. In addition to allowing employees to work from home, the company can save space and resources by not having to provide a desk for every team member. In fact, those team members that randomly come into the office can actually share one desk amongst multiple people. This is definitely a cost cutting plus given the current state of the economy. One thing that can turn a team into a high-performing team is leadership. High-performing team leaders need to focus on investing in ongoing personal development, provide team members with direction, structure, and resources needed to accomplish their work, make the right interventions at the right time, and help the team manage boundaries between the team and various external parties involved in the teams work. A team leader needs to invest in ongoing personal development in order to effectively manage their team. People have said that attitude is everything; this is very true about leaders and leadership. A team takes on the attitudes and behaviors of its leaders. This can potentially harm the team and the team’s output. Leaders must concentrate on self-awareness, and understanding their team’s group dynamics to fully understand how to lead them. In addition, always learning new leadership techniques from other effective leaders is also very beneficial. Providing team members with direction, structure, and resources that they need to accomplish their work collectively sounds easy, but it is not.  Leaders need to be able to effectively communicate with their team on how their work helps the company reach for its organizational vision. Conversely, the leader needs to allow his team to work autonomously within specific guidelines to turn the company’s vision into a reality.  This being said the team must be appropriately staffed according to the size of the team’s tasks and their complexity. These tasks should be clear, and be meaningful to the company’s objectives and allow for feedback to be exchanged with the leader and the team member and the leader and upper management. Now if the team is properly staffed, and has a clear and full understanding of what is to be done; the company also must supply the workers with the proper tools to achieve the tasks that they are asked to do. No one should be asked to dig a hole without being given a shovel.  Finally, leaders must reward their team members for accomplishments that they achieve. Awards could range from just a simple congratulatory email, a party to close the completion of a large project, or other monetary rewards. Managing boundaries is very important for team leaders because it can alter attitudes of team members and can add undue stress to the team which will force them to loose focus on the tasks at hand for the group. Team leaders should promote communication between team members so that burdens are shared amongst the team and solutions can be derived from hearing the opinions of multiple sources. This also reinforces team camaraderie and working as a unit. Team leaders must manage the type and timing of interventions as to not create an even bigger mess within the team. Poorly timed interventions can really deflate team members and make them question themselves. This could really increase further and undue interventions by the team leader. Typically, the best time for interventions is when the team is just starting to form so that all unproductive behaviors are removed from the team and that it can retain focus on its agenda. If an intervention is effectively executed the team will feel energized about the work that they are doing, promote communication and interaction amongst the group and improve moral overall. High-performing teams are very import to organizations because they consistently produce high quality output and develop a collective purpose for their work. This drive to succeed allows team members to utilize specific talents allowing for growth in these areas.  In addition, these team members usually take on a sense of ownership with their projects and feel that the other team members are irreplaceable. References: http://blog.assembla.com/assemblablog/tabid/12618/bid/3127/Three-ways-to-organize-your-team-co-located-outsourced-or-global.aspx Katzenbach, J.R. & Smith, D.K. (1993). The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-performance Organization. Boston: Harvard Business School.

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• Yet Another ASP.NET MVC CRUD Tutorial

  - by Ricardo Peres

  I know that I have not posted much on MVC, mostly because I don’t use it on my daily life, but since I find it so interesting, and since it is gaining such popularity, I will be talking about it much more. This time, it’s about the most basic of scenarios: CRUD. Although there are several ASP.NET MVC tutorials out there that cover ordinary CRUD operations, I couldn’t find any that would explain how we can have also AJAX, optimistic concurrency control and validation, using Entity Framework Code First, so I set out to write one! I won’t go into explaining what is MVC, Code First or optimistic concurrency control, or AJAX, I assume you are all familiar with these concepts by now. Let’s consider an hypothetical use case, products. For simplicity, we only want to be able to either view a single product or edit this product. First, we need our model: 1: public class Product 2: { 3: public Product() 4: { 5: this.Details = new HashSet<OrderDetail>(); 6: } 7:  8: [Required] 9: [StringLength(50)] 10: public String Name 11: { 12: get; 13: set; 14: } 15:  16: [Key] 17: [ScaffoldColumn(false)] 18: [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)] 19: public Int32 ProductId 20: { 21: get; 22: set; 23: } 24:  25: [Required] 26: [Range(1, 100)] 27: public Decimal Price 28: { 29: get; 30: set; 31: } 32:  33: public virtual ISet<OrderDetail> Details 34: { 35: get; 36: protected set; 37: } 38:  39: [Timestamp] 40: [ScaffoldColumn(false)] 41: public Byte[] RowVersion 42: { 43: get; 44: set; 45: } 46: } Keep in mind that this is a simple scenario. Let’s see what we have: A class Product, that maps to a product record on the database; A product has a required (RequiredAttribute) Name property which can contain up to 50 characters (StringLengthAttribute); The product’s Price must be a decimal value between 1 and 100 (RangeAttribute); It contains a set of order details, for each time that it has been ordered, which we will not talk about (Details); The record’s primary key (mapped to property ProductId) comes from a SQL Server IDENTITY column generated by the database (KeyAttribute, DatabaseGeneratedAttribute); The table uses a SQL Server ROWVERSION (previously known as TIMESTAMP) column for optimistic concurrency control mapped to property RowVersion (TimestampAttribute). Then we will need a controller for viewing product details, which will located on folder ~/Controllers under the name ProductController: 1: public class ProductController : Controller 2: { 3: [HttpGet] 4: public ViewResult Get(Int32 id = 0) 5: { 6: if (id != 0) 7: { 8: using (ProductContext ctx = new ProductContext()) 9: { 10: return (this.View("Single", ctx.Products.Find(id) ?? new Product())); 11: } 12: } 13: else 14: { 15: return (this.View("Single", new Product())); 16: } 17: } 18: } If the requested product does not exist, or one was not requested at all, one with default values will be returned. I am using a view named Single to display the product’s details, more on that later. As you can see, it delegates the loading of products to an Entity Framework context, which is defined as: 1: public class ProductContext: DbContext 2: { 3: public DbSet<Product> Products 4: { 5: get; 6: set; 7: } 8: } Like I said before, I’ll keep it simple for now, only aggregate root Product is available. The controller will use the standard routes defined by the Visual Studio ASP.NET MVC 3 template: 1: routes.MapRoute( 2: "Default", // Route name 3: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters 4: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults 5: ); Next, we need a view for displaying the product details, let’s call it Single, and have it located under ~/Views/Product: 1: <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<Product>" %> 2: <!DOCTYPE html> 3:  4: <html> 5: <head runat="server"> 6: <title>Product</title> 7: <script src="/Scripts/jquery-1.7.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> 1:  2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.19.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.validate.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script type="text/javascript"> 3: function onFailure(error) 4: { 5: } 6:  7: function onComplete(ctx) 8: { 9: } 10:  11: </script> 8: </head> 9: <body> 10: <div> 11: <% 1: : this.Html.ValidationSummary(false) %> 12: <% 1: using (this.Ajax.BeginForm("Edit", "Product", new AjaxOptions{ HttpMethod = FormMethod.Post.ToString(), OnSuccess = "onSuccess", OnFailure = "onFailure" })) { %> 13: <% 1: : this.Html.EditorForModel() %> 14: <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit" /> 15: <% 1: } %> 16: </div> 17: </body> 18: </html> Yes… I am using ASPX syntax… sorry about that!   I implemented an editor template for the Product class, which must be located on the ~/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates folder as file Product.ascx: 1: <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<Product>" %> 2: <div> 3: <%: this.Html.HiddenFor(model => model.ProductId) %> 4: <%: this.Html.HiddenFor(model => model.RowVersion) %> 5: <fieldset> 6: <legend>Product</legend> 7: <div class="editor-label"> 8: <%: this.Html.LabelFor(model => model.Name) %> 9: </div> 10: <div class="editor-field"> 11: <%: this.Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.Name) %> 12: <%: this.Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Name) %> 13: </div> 14: <div class="editor-label"> 15: <%= this.Html.LabelFor(model => model.Price) %> 16: </div> 17: <div class="editor-field"> 18: <%= this.Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.Price) %> 19: <%: this.Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Price) %> 20: </div> 21: </fieldset> 22: </div> One thing you’ll notice is, I am including both the ProductId and the RowVersion properties as hidden fields; they will come handy later or, so that we know what product and version we are editing. The other thing is the included JavaScript files: jQuery, jQuery UI and unobtrusive validations. Also, I am not using the Content extension method for translating relative URLs, because that way I would lose JavaScript intellisense for jQuery functions. OK, so, at this moment, I want to add support for AJAX and optimistic concurrency control. So I write a controller method like this: 1: [HttpPost] 2: [AjaxOnly] 3: [Authorize] 4: public JsonResult Edit(Product product) 5: { 6: if (this.TryValidateModel(product) == true) 7: { 8: using (BlogContext ctx = new BlogContext()) 9: { 10: Boolean success = false; 11:  12: ctx.Entry(product).State = (product.ProductId == 0) ? EntityState.Added : EntityState.Modified; 13:  14: try 15: { 16: success = (ctx.SaveChanges() == 1); 17: } 18: catch (DbUpdateConcurrencyException) 19: { 20: ctx.Entry(product).Reload(); 21: } 22:  23: return (this.Json(new { Success = success, ProductId = product.ProductId, RowVersion = Convert.ToBase64String(product.RowVersion) })); 24: } 25: } 26: else 27: { 28: return (this.Json(new { Success = false, ProductId = 0, RowVersion = String.Empty })); 29: } 30: } So, this method is only valid for HTTP POST requests (HttpPost), coming from AJAX (AjaxOnly, from MVC Futures), and from authenticated users (Authorize). It returns a JSON object, which is what you would normally use for AJAX requests, containing three properties: Success: a boolean flag; RowVersion: the current version of the ROWVERSION column as a Base-64 string; ProductId: the inserted product id, as coming from the database. If the product is new, it will be inserted into the database, and its primary key will be returned into the ProductId property. Success will be set to true; If a DbUpdateConcurrencyException occurs, it means that the value in the RowVersion property does not match the current ROWVERSION column value on the database, so the record must have been modified between the time that the page was loaded and the time we attempted to save the product. In this case, the controller just gets the new value from the database and returns it in the JSON object; Success will be false. Otherwise, it will be updated, and Success, ProductId and RowVersion will all have their values set accordingly. So let’s see how we can react to these situations on the client side. Specifically, we want to deal with these situations: The user is not logged in when the update/create request is made, perhaps the cookie expired; The optimistic concurrency check failed; All went well. So, let’s change our view: 1: <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<Product>" %> 2: <%@ Import Namespace="System.Web.Security" %> 3:  4: <!DOCTYPE html> 5:  6: <html> 7: <head runat="server"> 8: <title>Product</title> 9: <script src="/Scripts/jquery-1.7.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> 1:  2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.19.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.validate.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script type="text/javascript"> 3: function onFailure(error) 4: { 5: window.alert('An error occurred: ' + error); 6: } 7:  8: function onSuccess(ctx) 9: { 10: if (typeof (ctx.Success) != 'undefined') 11: { 12: $('input#ProductId').val(ctx.ProductId); 13: $('input#RowVersion').val(ctx.RowVersion); 14:  15: if (ctx.Success == false) 16: { 17: window.alert('An error occurred while updating the entity: it may have been modified by third parties. Please try again.'); 18: } 19: else 20: { 21: window.alert('Saved successfully'); 22: } 23: } 24: else 25: { 26: if (window.confirm('Not logged in. Login now?') == true) 27: { 28: document.location.href = '<%: FormsAuthentication.LoginUrl %>?ReturnURL=' + document.location.pathname; 29: } 30: } 31: } 32:  33: </script> 10: </head> 11: <body> 12: <div> 13: <% 1: : this.Html.ValidationSummary(false) %> 14: <% 1: using (this.Ajax.BeginForm("Edit", "Product", new AjaxOptions{ HttpMethod = FormMethod.Post.ToString(), OnSuccess = "onSuccess", OnFailure = "onFailure" })) { %> 15: <% 1: : this.Html.EditorForModel() %> 16: <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit" /> 17: <% 1: } %> 18: </div> 19: </body> 20: </html> The implementation of the onSuccess function first checks if the response contains a Success property, if not, the most likely cause is the request was redirected to the login page (using Forms Authentication), because it wasn’t authenticated, so we navigate there as well, keeping the reference to the current page. It then saves the current values of the ProductId and RowVersion properties to their respective hidden fields. They will be sent on each successive post and will be used in determining if the request is for adding a new product or to updating an existing one. The only thing missing is the ability to insert a new product, after inserting/editing an existing one, which can be easily achieved using this snippet: 1: <input type="button" value="New" onclick="$('input#ProductId').val('');$('input#RowVersion').val('');"/> And that’s it.

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• SOA Suite Integration: Part 1: Building a Web Service

  - by Anthony Shorten

  Over the next few weeks I will be posting blog entries outlying the SOA Suite integration of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. This will illustrate how easy it is to integrate by providing some samples. I will use a consistent set of features as examples. The examples will be simple and while will not illustrate ALL the possibilities it will illustrate the relative ease of integration. Think of them as a foundation. You can obviously build upon them. Now, to ease a few customers minds, this series will certainly feature the latest version of SOA Suite and the latest version of Oracle Utilities Application Framework but the principles will apply to past versions of both those products. So if you have Oracle SOA Suite 10g or are a customer of Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.1 or above most of what I will show you will work with those versions. It is just easier in Oracle SOA Suite 11g and Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4.x. This first posting will not feature SOA Suite at all but concentrate on the capability for the Oracle Utilities Application Framework to create Web Services you can use for integration. The XML Application Integration (XAI) component of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework allows product objects to be exposed as XML based transactions or as Web Services (or both). XAI was written before Web Services became fashionable and has allowed customers of our products to provide a consistent interface into and out of our product line. XAI has been enhanced over the last few years to take advantages of the maturing landscape of Web Services in the market place to a point where it now easier to integrate to SOA infrastructure. There are a number of object types that can be exposed as Web Services: Maintenance Objects – These are the lowest level objects that can be exposed as Web Services. Customers of past versions of the product will be familiar with XAI services based upon Maintenance Objects as they used to be the only method of generating Web Services. These are still supported for background compatibility but are starting to become less popular as they were strict in their structure and were solely attribute based. To generate Maintenance Object based Web Services definition you need to use the XAI Schema Editor component. Business Objects – In Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.1 we introduced the concept of Business Objects. These are site or industry specific objects that are based upon Maintenance Objects. These allow sites to respecify, in configuration, the structure and elements of a Maintenance Object and other Business Objects (they are true objects with support for inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation etc.). These can be exposed as Web Services. Business Services – As with Business Objects, we introduced Business Services in Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.1 which allowed applications services and query zones to be expressed as custom services. These can then be exposed as Web Services via the Business Service definition. Service Scripts - As with Business Objects and Business Services, we introduced Service Scripts in Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.1. These allow services and/objects to be combined into complex objects or simply expose common routines as callable scripts. These can also be defined as Web Services. For the purpose of this series we will restrict ourselves to Business Objects. The techniques can apply to any of the objects discussed above. Now, lets get to the important bit of this blog post, the creation of a Web Service. To build a Business Object, you first logon to the product and navigate to the Administration Menu by selecting the Admin Menu from the Menu action on left top of the screen (next to Home). A popup menu will appear with the menu’s available. If you do not see the Admin menu then you do not have authority to use it. Here is an example: Navigate to the B menu and select the + symbol next to the Business Object menu item. This indicates that you want to ADD a new Business Object. This menu will appear if you are running Alphabetic mode in your installation (I almost forgot that point). You will be presented with the Business Object maintenance screen. You will fill out the following on the first tab (at a minimum): Business Object – The name of the Business Object. Typically you will make it descriptive and also prefix with CM to denote it as a customization (you can easily find it if you prefix it). As I running this on my personal copy of the product I will use my initials as the prefix and call the sample Web Service “AS-User”. Description – A short description of the object to tell others what it is used for. For my example, I will use “Anthony Shorten’s User Object”. Detailed Description – You can add a long description to help other developers understand your object. I am just going to specify “Anthony Shorten’s Test Object for SOA Suite Integration”. Maintenance Object – As this Business Service is going to be based upon a Maintenance Object I will specify the desired Maintenance Object. In this example, I have decided to use the Framework object USER. Now, I chose this for a number of reasons. It is meaningful, simple and is across all our product lines. I could choose ANY maintenance object I wished to expose (including any custom ones, if I had them). Parent Business Object – If I was not using a Maintenance Object but building a child Business Object against another Business Object, then I would specify the Parent Business Object here. I am not using Parent’s so I will leave this blank. You either use Parent Business Object or Maintenance Object not both. Application Service – Business Objects like other objects are subject to security. You can attach an Application Service to an object to specify which groups of users (remember services are attached to user groups not users) have appropriate access to the object. I will use a default service provided with the product, F1-DFLTS ,as this is just a demonstration so I do not have to be too sophisticated about security. Instance Control – This allows the object to create instances in its objects. You can specify a Business Object purely to hold rules. I am being simple here so I will set it to Allow New Instances to allow the Business Object to be used to create, read, update and delete user records. The rest of the tab I will leave empty as I want this to be a very simple object. Other options allow lots of flexibility. The contents should look like this: Before saving your work, you need to navigate to the Schema tab and specify the contents of your object. I will save some time. When you create an object the schema will only contain the basic root elements of the object (in fact only the schema tag is visible). When you go to the Schema Tab, on the dashboard you will see a BO Schema zone with a solitary button. This will allow you to Generate the Schema for you from our metadata. Click on the Generate button to generate a basic schema from the metadata. You will now see a Schema with the element tags and references to the metadata of the Maintenance object (in the mapField attribute). I could spend a while outlining all the ways you can change the schema with defaults, formatting, tagging etc but the online help has plenty of great examples to illustrate this. You can use the Schema Tips zone in the for more details of the available customizations. Note: The tags are generated from the language pack you have installed. The sample is English so the tags are in English (which is the base language of all installations). If you are using a language pack then the tags will be generated in the language of the user that generated the object. At this point you can save your Business Object by pressing the Save action. At this point you have a basic Business Object based on the USER maintenance object ready for use but it is not defined as a Web Service yet. To do this you need to define the newly created Business Object as an XAI Inbound Service. The easiest and quickest way is to select + off the XAI Inbound Service off the context menu on the Business Object maintenance screen. This will prepopulate the service definition with the following: Adapter – This will be set to Business Adaptor. This indicates that the service is either Business Object, Business Service or Service Script based. Schema Type – Whether the object is a Business Object, Business Service or Service Script. In this case it is a Business Object. Schema Name – The name of the object. In this case it is the Business Object AS-User. Active – Set to Yes. This means the service is available upon startup automatically. You can enable and disable services as needed. Transaction Type – A default transaction type as this is Business Object Service. More about this in later postings. In our case we use the default Read. This means that if we only specify data and not a transaction type then the product will assume you want to issue a read against the object. You need to fill in the following: XAI Inbound Service – The name of the Web Service. Usually people use the same name as the underlying object , in the case of this example, but this can match your sites interfacing standards. By the way you can define multiple XAI Inbound Services/Web Services against the same object if you want. Description and Detail Description – Documentation for your Web Service. I just supplied some basic documentation for this demonstration. You can now save the service definition. Note: There are lots of other options on this screen that allow for behavior of your service to be specified. I will leave them blank for now. When you save the service you are issued with two new pieces of information. XAI Inbound Service Id is a randomly generated identifier used internally by the XAI Servlet. WSDL URL is the WSDL standard URL used for integration. We will take advantage of that in later posts. An example of the definition is shown below: Now you have defined the service but it will only be available when the next server restart or when you flush the data cache. XAI Inbound Services are cached for performance so the cache needs to be told of this new service. To refresh the cache you can use the Admin –> X –> XAI Command menu item. From the command dropdown select Refresh Registry and press Send Command. You will see an XML of the command sent to the server (the presence of the XML means it is finished). If you have an error around the authorization, then check your default user and password settings on the XAI Options menu item. Be careful with flushing the cache as the cache is shared (unless of course you are the only Web Service user on the system – In that case it only affects you). The Web Service is NOW available to be used. To perform a simple test of your new Web Service, navigate to the Admin –> X –> XAI Submission menu item. You will see an open XML request tab. You need to type in the request XML you want to test in the Main tab. The first tag is the XAI Inbound Service Name and the elements are as per your schema (minus the schema tag itself as that is only used internally). My example is as follows (I want to return the details of user SYSUSER) – Remember to close tags. Hitting the Save button will issue the XML and return the response according to the Business Object schema. Now before you panic, you noticed that it did not ask for credentials. It propagates the online credentials to the service call on this function. You now have a Web Service you can use for integration. We will reuse this information in subsequent posts. The process I just described can be used for ANY object in the system you want to expose. This whole process at a minimum can take under a minute. Obviously I only showed the basics but you can at least get an appreciation of the ease of defining a Web Service (just by using a browser). The next posts now build upon this. Hope you enjoyed the post.

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• Continuous Integration for SQL Server Part II – Integration Testing

  - by Ben Rees

  My previous post, on setting up Continuous Integration for SQL Server databases using GitHub, Bamboo and Red Gate’s tools, covered the first two parts of a simple Database Continuous Delivery process: Putting your database in to a source control system, and, Running a continuous integration process, each time changes are checked in. However there is, of course, a lot more to to Continuous Delivery than that. Specifically, in addition to the above: Putting some actual integration tests in to the CI process (otherwise, they don’t really do much, do they!?), Deploying the database changes with a managed, automated approach, Monitoring what you’ve just put live, to make sure you haven’t broken anything. This post will detail how to set up a very simple pipeline for implementing the first of these (continuous integration testing). NB: A lot of the setup in this post is built on top of the configuration from before, so it might be difficult to implement this post without running through part I first. There’ll then be a third post on automated database deployment followed by a final post dealing with the last item – monitoring changes on the live system. In the previous post, I used a mixture of Red Gate products and other 3rd party software – GitHub and Atlassian Bamboo specifically. This was partly because I believe most people work in an heterogeneous environment, using software from different vendors to suit their purposes and I wanted to show how this could work for this process. For example, you could easily substitute Atlassian’s BitBucket or Stash for GitHub, depending on your needs, or use an alternative CI server such as TeamCity, TFS or Jenkins. However, in this, post, I’ll be mostly using Red Gate products only (other than tSQLt). I would do this, firstly because I work for Red Gate. However, I also think that in the area of Database Delivery processes, nobody else has the offerings to implement this process fully – so I didn’t have any choice!   Background on Continuous Delivery For me, a great source of information on what makes a proper Continuous Delivery process is the Jez Humble and David Farley classic: Continuous Delivery – Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation This book is not of course, primarily about databases, and the process I outline here and in the previous article is a gross simplification of what Jez and David describe (not least because it’s that much harder for databases!). However, a lot of the principles that they describe can be equally applied to database development and, I would argue, should be. As I say however, what I describe here is a very simple version of what would be required for a full production process. A couple of useful resources on handling some of these complexities can be found in the following two references: Refactoring Databases – Evolutionary Database Design, by Scott J Ambler and Pramod J. Sadalage Versioning Databases – Branching and Merging, by Scott Allen In particular, I don’t deal at all with the issues of multiple branches and merging of those branches, an issue made particularly acute by the use of GitHub. The other point worth making is that, in the words of Martin Fowler: Continuous Delivery is about keeping your application in a state where it is always able to deploy into production.   I.e. we are not talking about continuously delivery updates to the production database every time someone checks in an amendment to a stored procedure. That is possible (and what Martin calls Continuous Deployment). However, again, that’s more than I describe in this article. And I doubt I need to remind DBAs or Developers to Proceed with Caution!   Integration Testing Back to something practical. The next stage, building on our set up from the previous article, is to add in some integration tests to the process. As I say, the CI process, though interesting, isn’t enormously useful without some sort of test process running. For this we’ll use the tSQLt framework, an open source framework designed specifically for running SQL Server tests. tSQLt is part of Red Gate’s SQL Test found on http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-test/ or can be downloaded separately from www.tsqlt.org - though I’ll provide a step-by-step guide below for setting this up. Getting tSQLt set up via SQL Test Click on the link http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-test/ and click on the blue Download button to download the Red Gate SQL Test product, if not already installed. Follow the install process for SQL Test to install the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) plugin on to your machine, if not already installed. Open SSMS. You should now see SQL Test under the Tools menu:   Clicking this link will give you the basic SQL Test dialogue: As yet, though we’ve installed the SQL Test product we haven’t yet installed the tSQLt test framework on to any particular database. To do this, we need to add our RedGateApp database using this dialogue, by clicking on the + Add Database to SQL Test… link, selecting the RedGateApp database and clicking the Add Database link:   In the next screen, SQL Test describes what will be installed on the database for the tSQLt framework. Also in this dialogue, uncheck the “Add SQL Cop tests” option (shown below). SQL Cop is a great set of pre-defined tests that work within the tSQLt framework to check the general health of your SQL Server database. However, we won’t be using them in this particular simple example: Once you’ve clicked on the OK button, the changes described in the dialogue will be made to your database. Some of these are shown in the left-hand-side below: We’ve now installed the framework. However, we haven’t actually created any tests, so this will be the next step. But, before we proceed, we’ve made an update to our database so should, again check this in to source control, adding comments as required:   Also worth a quick check that your build still runs with the new additions!: (And a quick check of the RedGateAppCI database shows that the changes have been made).   Creating and Testing a Unit Test There are, of course, a lot of very interesting unit tests that you could and should set up for a database. The great thing about the tSQLt framework is that you can write these in SQL. The example I’m going to use here is pretty Mickey Mouse – our database table is going to include some email addresses as reference data and I want to check whether these are all in a correct email format. Nothing clever but it illustrates the process and hopefully shows the method by which more interesting tests could be set up. Adding Reference Data to our Database To start, I want to add some reference data to my database, and have this source controlled (as well as the schema). First of all I need to add some data in to my solitary table – this can be done a number of ways, but I’ll do this in SSMS for simplicity: I then add some reference data to my table: Currently this reference data just exists in the database. For proper integration testing, this needs to form part of the source-controlled version of the database – and so needs to be added to the Git repository. This can be done via SQL Source Control, though first a Primary Key needs to be added to the table. Right click the table, select Design, then right-click on the first “id” row. Then click on “Set Primary Key”: NB: once this change is made, click Save to save the change to the table. Then, to source control this reference data, right click on the table (dbo.Email) and selecting the following option:   In the next screen, link the data in the Email table, by selecting it from the list and clicking “save and close”: We should at this point re-commit the changes (both the addition of the Primary Key, and the data) to the Git repo. NB: From here on, I won’t show screenshots for the GitHub side of things – it’s the same each time: whenever a change is made in SQL Source Control and committed to your local folder, you then need to sync this in the GitHub Windows client (as this is where the build server, Bamboo is taking it from). An interesting point to note here, when these changes are committed in SQL Source Control (right-click database and select “Commit Changes to Source Control..”): The display gives a warning about possibly needing a migration script for the “Add Primary Key” step of the changes. This isn’t actually necessary in this case, but this mechanism would allow you to create override scripts to replace the default change scripts created by the SQL Compare engine (which runs underneath SQL Source Control). Ignoring this message (!), we add a comment and commit the changes to Git. I then sync these, run a build (or the build gets run automatically), and check that the data is being deployed over to the target RedGateAppCI database:   Creating and Running the Test As I mention, the test I’m going to use here is a very simple one - are the email addresses in my reference table valid? This isn’t of course, a full test of email validation (I expect the email addresses I’ve chosen here aren’t really the those of the Fab Four) – but just a very basic check of format used. I’ve taken the relevant SQL from this Stack Overflow article. In SSMS select “SQL Test” from the Tools menu, then click on + New Test: In the next screen, give your new test a name, and also enter a name in the Test Class box (test classes are schemas that help you keep things organised). Also check that the database in which the test is going to be created is correct – RedGateApp in this example: Click “Create Test”. After closing a couple of subsequent dialogues, you’ll see a dummy script for the test, that needs filling in:   We now need to define the SQL for our test. As mentioned before, tSQLt allows you to write your unit tests in T-SQL, and the code I’m going to use here is as below. This needs to be copied and pasted in to the query window, to replace the default given by tSQLt: –  Basic email check test ALTER PROCEDURE [MyChecks].[test Check Email Addresses] AS BEGIN SET NOCOUNT ON         Declare @Output VarChar(max)     Set @Output = ”       SELECT  @Output = @Output + Email +Char(13) + Char(10) FROM dbo.Email WHERE email NOT LIKE ‘%_@__%.__%’       If @Output > ”         Begin             Set @Output = Char(13) + Char(10)                           + @Output             EXEC tSQLt.Fail@Output         End   END;   Once this script is entered, hit execute to add the Stored Procedure to the database. Before committing the test to source control,  it’s worth just checking that it works! For a positive test, click on “SQL Test” from the Tools menu, then click Run Tests. You should see output like the following: - a green tick to indicate success! But of course, what we also need to do is test that this is actually doing something by showing a failed test. Edit one of the email addresses in your table to an incorrect format: Now, re-run the same SQL Test as before and you’ll see the following: Great – we now know that our test is really doing something! You’ll also see a useful error message at the bottom of SSMS: (leave the email address as invalid for now, for the next steps). The next stage is to check this new test in to source control again, by right-clicking on the database and checking in the changes with a commit message (and not forgetting to sync in the GitHub client):   Checking that the Tests are Running as Integration Tests After the changes above are made, and after a build has run on Bamboo (manual or automatic), looking at the Stored Procedures for the RedGateAppCI, the SPROC for the new test has been moved over to the database. However this is not exactly what we were after. We didn’t want to just copy objects from one database to another, but actually run the tests as part of the build/integration test process. I.e. we’re continuously checking any changes we make (in this case, to the reference data emails), to ensure we’re not breaking a test that we’ve set up. The behaviour we want to see is that, if we check in static data that is incorrect (as we did in step 9 above) and we have the tSQLt test set up, then our build in Bamboo should fail. However, re-running the build shows the following: - sadly, a successful build! To make sure the tSQLt tests are run as part of the integration test, we need to amend a switch in the Red Gate CI config file. First, navigate to file sqlCI.targets in your working folder: Edit this document, make the following change, save the document, then commit and sync this change in the GitHub client: <!-- tSQLt tests --> <!-- Optional --> <!-- To run tSQLt tests in source control for the database, enter true. --> <enableTsqlt>true</enableTsqlt> Now, if we re-run the build in Bamboo (NB: I’ve moved to a new server here, hence different address and build number): - superb, a broken build!! The error message isn’t great here, so to get more detailed info, click on the full build log link on this page (below the fold). The interesting part of the log shown is towards the bottom. Pulling out this part:   21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 Build FAILED. 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 "C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj" (default target) (1) -> 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 (sqlCI target) -> 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: RedGate.Deploy.SqlServerDbPackage.Shared.Exceptions.InvalidSqlException: Test Case Summary: 1 test case(s) executed, 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 errored. [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: [MyChecks].[test Check Email Addresses] failed: [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: ringo.starr@beatles [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: +----------------------+ [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: |Test Execution Summary| [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj]   As a final check, we should make sure that, if we now fix this error, the build succeeds. So in SSMS, I’m going to correct the invalid email address, then check this change in to SQL Source Control (with a comment), commit to GitHub, and re-run the build:   This should have fixed the build: It worked! Summary This has been a very quick run through the implementation of CI for databases, including tSQLt tests to test whether your database updates are working. The next post in this series will focus on automated deployment – we’ve tested our database changes, how can we now deploy these to target sites?  

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• CLSF & CLK 2013 Trip Report by Jeff Liu

  - by jamesmorris

  This is a contributed post from Jeff Liu, lead XFS developer for the Oracle mainline Linux kernel team. Recently, I attended both the China Linux Storage and Filesystem workshop (CLSF), and the China Linux Kernel conference (CLK), which were held in Shanghai. Here are the highlights for both events. CLSF - 17th October XFS update (led by Jeff Liu) XFS keeps rapid progress with a lot of changes, especially focused on the infrastructure/performance improvements as well as  new feature development.  This can be reflected with a sample statistics among XFS/Ext4+JBD2/Btrfs via: # git diff --stat --minimal -C -M v3.7..v3.12-rc4 -- fs/xfs|fs/ext4+fs/jbd2|fs/btrfs XFS: 141 files changed, 27598 insertions(+), 19113 deletions(-) Ext4+JBD2: 39 files changed, 10487 insertions(+), 5454 deletions(-) Btrfs: 70 files changed, 19875 insertions(+), 8130 deletions(-) What made up those changes in XFS? Self-describing metadata(CRC32c). This is a new feature and it contributed about 70% code changes, it can be enabled via `mkfs.xfs -m crc=1 /dev/xxx` for v5 superblock. Transaction log space reservation improvements. With this change, we can calculate the log space reservation at mount time rather than runtime to reduce the the CPU overhead. User namespace support. So both XFS and USERNS can be enabled on kernel configuration begin from Linux 3.10. Thanks Dwight Engen's efforts for this thing. Split project/group quota inodes. Originally, project quota can not be enabled with group quota at the same time because they were share the same quota file inode, now it works but only for v5 super block. i.e, CRC enabled. CONFIG_XFS_WARN, an new lightweight runtime debugger which can be deployed in production environment. Readahead log object recovery, this change can speed up the log replay progress significantly. Speculative preallocation inode tracking, clearing and throttling. The main purpose is to deal with inodes with post-EOF space due to speculative preallocation, support improved quota management to free up a significant amount of unwritten space when at or near EDQUOT. It support backgroup scanning which occurs on a longish interval(5 mins by default, tunable), and on-demand scanning/trimming via ioctl(2). Bitter arguments ensued from this session, especially for the comparison between Ext4 and Btrfs in different areas, I have to spent a whole morning of the 1st day answering those questions. We basically agreed on XFS is the best choice in Linux nowadays because: Stable, XFS has a good record in stability in the past 10 years. Fengguang Wu who lead the 0-day kernel test project also said that he has observed less error than other filesystems in the past 1+ years, I own it to the XFS upstream code reviewer, they always performing serious code review as well as testing. Good performance for large/small files, XFS does not works very well for small files has already been an old story for years. Best choice (maybe) for distributed PB filesystems. e.g, Ceph recommends delopy OSD daemon on XFS because Ext4 has limited xattr size. Best choice for large storage (>16TB). Ext4 does not support a single file more than around 15.95TB. Scalability, any objection to XFS is best in this point? :) XFS is better to deal with transaction concurrency than Ext4, why? The maximum size of the log in XFS is 2038MB compare to 128MB in Ext4. Misc. Ext4 is widely used and it has been proved fast/stable in various loads and scenarios, XFS just need more customers, and Btrfs is still on the road to be a manhood. Ceph Introduction (Led by Li Wang) This a hot topic.  Li gave us a nice introduction about the design as well as their current works. Actually, Ceph client has been included in Linux kernel since 2.6.34 and supported by Openstack since Folsom but it seems that it has not yet been widely deployment in production environment. Their major work is focus on the inline data support to separate the metadata and data storage, reduce the file access time, i.e, a file access need communication twice, fetch the metadata from MDS and then get data from OSD, and also, the small file access is limited by the network latency. The solution is, for the small files they would like to store the data at metadata so that when accessing a small file, the metadata server can push both metadata and data to the client at the same time. In this way, they can reduce the overhead of calculating the data offset and save the communication to OSD. For this feature, they have only run some small scale testing but really saw noticeable improvements. Test environment: Intel 2 CPU 12 Core, 64GB RAM, Ubuntu 12.04, Ceph 0.56.6 with 200GB SATA disk, 15 OSD, 1 MDS, 1 MON. The sequence read performance for 1K size files improved about 50%. I have asked Li and Zheng Yan (the core developer of Ceph, who also worked on Btrfs) whether Ceph is really stable and can be deployed at production environment for large scale PB level storage, but they can not give a positive answer, looks Ceph even does not spread over Dreamhost (subject to confirmation). From Li, they only deployed Ceph for a small scale storage(32 nodes) although they'd like to try 6000 nodes in the future. Improve Linux swap for Flash storage (led by Shaohua Li) Because of high density, low power and low price, flash storage (SSD) is a good candidate to partially replace DRAM. A quick answer for this is using SSD as swap. But Linux swap is designed for slow hard disk storage, so there are a lot of challenges to efficiently use SSD for swap. SWAPOUT swap_map scan swap_map is the in-memory data structure to track swap disk usage, but it is a slow linear scan. It will become a bottleneck while finding many adjacent pages in the use of SSD. Shaohua Li have changed it to a cluster(128K) list, resulting in O(1) algorithm. However, this apporoach needs restrictive cluster alignment and only enabled for SSD. IO pattern In most cases, the swap io is in interleaved pattern because of mutiple reclaimers or a free cluster is shared by all reclaimers. Even though block layer can merge interleaved IO to some extent, but we cannot count on it completely. Hence the per-cpu cluster is added base on the previous change, it can help reclaimer do sequential IO and the block layer will be easier to merge IO. TLB flush: If we're reclaiming one active page, we should first move the page from active lru list to inactive lru list, and then reclaim the page from inactive lru to swap it out. During the process, we need to clear PTE twice: first is 'A'(ACCESS) bit, second is 'P'(PRESENT) bit. Processors need to send lots of ipi which make the TLB flush really expensive. Some works have been done to improve this, including rework smp_call_functiom_many() or remove the first TLB flush in x86, but there still have some arguments here and only parts of works have been pushed to mainline. SWAPIN: Page fault does iodepth=1 sync io, but it's a little waste if only issue a page size's IO. The obvious solution is doing swap readahead. But the current in-kernel swap readahead is arbitary(always 8 pages), and it always doesn't perform well for both random and sequential access workload. Shaohua introduced a new flag for madvise(MADV_WILLNEED) to do swap prefetch, so the changes happen in userspace API and leave the in-kernel readahead unchanged(but I think some improvement can also be done here). SWAP discard As we know, discard is important for SSD write throughout, but the current swap discard implementation is synchronous. He changed it to async discard which allow discard and write run in the same time. Meanwhile, the unit of discard is also optimized to cluster. Misc: lock contention For many concurrent swapout and swapin , the lock contention such as anon_vma or swap_lock is high, so he changed the swap_lock to a per-swap lock. But there still have some lock contention in very high speed SSD because of swapcache address_space lock. Zproject (led by Bob Liu) Bob gave us a very nice introduction about the current memory compression status. Now there are 3 projects(zswap/zram/zcache) which all aim at smooth swap IO storm and promote performance, but they all have their own pros and cons. ZSWAP It is implemented based on frontswap API and it uses a dynamic allocater named Zbud to allocate free pages. Zbud means pairs of zpages are "buddied" and it can only store at most two compressed pages in one page frame, so the max compress ratio is 50%. Each page frame is lru-linked and can do shink in memory pressure. If the compressed memory pool reach its limitation, shink or reclaim happens. It decompress the page frame into two new allocated pages and then write them to real swap device, but it can fail when allocating the two pages. ZRAM Acts as a compressed ramdisk and used as swap device, and it use zsmalloc as its allocator which has high density but may have fragmentation issues. Besides, page reclaim is hard since it will need more pages to uncompress and free just one page. ZRAM is preferred by embedded system which may not have any real swap device. Now both ZRAM and ZSWAP are in driver/staging tree, and in the mm community there are some disscussions of merging ZRAM into ZSWAP or viceversa, but no agreement yet. ZCACHE Handles file page compression but it is removed out of staging recently. From industry (led by Tang Jie, LSI) An LSI engineer introduced several new produces to us. The first is raid5/6 cards that it use full stripe writes to improve performance. The 2nd one he introduced is SandForce flash controller, who can understand data file types (data entropy) to reduce write amplification (WA) for nearly all writes. It's called DuraWrite and typical WA is 0.5. What's more, if enable its Dynamic Logical Capacity function module, the controller can do data compression which is transparent to upper layer. LSI testing shows that with this virtual capacity enables 1x TB drive can support up to 2x TB capacity, but the application must monitor free flash space to maintain optimal performance and to guard against free flash space exhaustion. He said the most useful application is for datebase. Another thing I think it's worth to mention is that a NV-DRAM memory in NMR/Raptor which is directly exposed to host system. Applications can directly access the NV-DRAM via a memory address - using standard system call mmap(). He said that it is very useful for database logging now. This kind of NVM produces are beginning to appear in recent years, and it is said that Samsung is building a research center in China for related produces. IMHO, NVM will bring an effect to current os layer especially on file system, e.g. its journaling may need to redesign to fully utilize these nonvolatile memory. OCFS2 (led by Canquan Shen) Without a doubt, HuaWei is the biggest contributor to OCFS2 in the past two years. They have posted 46 upstream patches and 39 patches have been merged. Their current project is based on 32/64 nodes cluster, but they also tried 128 nodes at the experimental stage. The major work they are working is to support ATS (atomic test and set), it can be works with DLM at the same time. Looks this idea is inspired by the vmware VMFS locking, i.e, http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/05/vmfs-locking-uncovered.html CLK - 18th October 2013 Improving Linux Development with Better Tools (Andi Kleen) This talk focused on how to find/solve bugs along with the Linux complexity growing. Generally, we can do this with the following kind of tools: Static code checkers tools. e.g, sparse, smatch, coccinelle, clang checker, checkpatch, gcc -W/LTO, stanse. This can help check a lot of things, simple mistakes, complex problems, but the challenges are: some are very slow, false positives, may need a concentrated effort to get false positives down. Especially, no static checker I found can follow indirect calls (“OO in C”, common in kernel): struct foo_ops { int (*do_foo)(struct foo *obj); } foo->do_foo(foo); Dynamic runtime checkers, e.g, thread checkers, kmemcheck, lockdep. Ideally all kernel code would come with a test suite, then someone could run all the dynamic checkers. Fuzzers/test suites. e.g, Trinity is a great tool, it finds many bugs, but needs manual model for each syscall. Modern fuzzers around using automatic feedback, but notfor kernel yet: http://taviso.decsystem.org/making_software_dumber.pdf Debuggers/Tracers to understand code, e.g, ftrace, can dump on events/oops/custom triggers, but still too much overhead in many cases to run always during debug. Tools to read/understand source, e.g, grep/cscope work great for many cases, but do not understand indirect pointers (OO in C model used in kernel), give us all “do_foo” instances: struct foo_ops { int (*do_foo)(struct foo *obj); } = { .do_foo = my_foo }; foo>do_foo(foo); That would be great to have a cscope like tool that understands this based on types/initializers XFS: The High Performance Enterprise File System (Jeff Liu) [slides] I gave a talk for introducing the disk layout, unique features, as well as the recent changes.   The slides include some charts to reflect the performances between XFS/Btrfs/Ext4 for small files. About a dozen users raised their hands when I asking who has experienced with XFS. I remembered that when I asked the same question in LinuxCon/Japan, only 3 people raised their hands, but they are Chris Mason, Ric Wheeler, and another attendee. The attendee questions were mainly focused on stability, and comparison with other file systems. Linux Containers (Feng Gao) The speaker introduced us that the purpose for those kind of namespaces, include mount/UTS/IPC/Network/Pid/User, as well as the system API/ABI. For the userspace tools, He mainly focus on the Libvirt LXC rather than us(LXC). Libvirt LXC is another userspace container management tool, implemented as one type of libvirt driver, it can manage containers, create namespace, create private filesystem layout for container, Create devices for container and setup resources controller via cgroup. In this talk, Feng also mentioned another two possible new namespaces in the future, the 1st is the audit, but not sure if it should be assigned to user namespace or not. Another is about syslog, but the question is do we really need it? In-memory Compression (Bob Liu) Same as CLSF, a nice introduction that I have already mentioned above. Misc There were some other talks related to ACPI based memory hotplug, smart wake-affinity in scheduler etc., but my head is not big enough to record all those things. -- Jeff Liu

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• Using Oracle Proxy Authentication with JPA (eclipselink-Style)

  - by olaf.heimburger

  Security is a very intriguing topic. You will find it everywhere and you need to implement it everywhere. Yes, you need. Unfortunately, one can easily forget it while implementing the last mile. The Last Mile In a multi-tier application it is a common practice to use connection pools between the business layer and the database layer. Connection pools are quite useful to speed database connection creation and to split the load. Another very common practice is to use a specific, often called technical, user to connect to the database. This user has authentication and authorization rules that apply to all application users. Imagine you've put every effort to define roles for different types of users that use your application. These roles are necessary to differentiate between normal users, premium users, and administrators (I bet you will find or already have more roles in your application). While these user roles are pretty well used within your application, once the flow of execution enters the database everything is gone. Each and every user just has one role and is the same database user. Issues? What Issues? As long as things go well, this is not a real issue. However, things do not go well all the time. Once your application becomes famous performance decreases in certain situations or, more importantly, current and upcoming regulations and laws require that your application must be able to apply different security measures on a per user role basis at every stage of your application. If you only have a bunch of users with the same name and role you are not able to find the application usage profile that causes the performance issue, or which user has accessed data that he/she is not allowed to. Another thread to your role concept is that databases tend to be used by different applications and tools. These tools can be developer tools like SQL*Plus, SQL Developer, etc. or end user applications like BI Publisher, Oracle Forms and so on. These tools have no idea of your applications role concept and access the database the way they think is appropriate. A big oversight for your perfect role model and a big nightmare for your Chief Security Officer. Speaking of the CSO, brings up another issue: Password management. Once your technical user account is compromised, every user is able to do things that he/she is not expected to do from the design of your application. Counter Measures In the Oracle world a common counter measure is to use Virtual Private Database (VPD). This restricts the values a database user can see to the allowed minimum. However, it doesn't help in regard of a connection pool user, because this one is still not the real user. Oracle Proxy Authentication Another feature of the Oracle database is Proxy Authentication. First introduced with version 9i it is a quite useful feature for nearly every situation. The main idea behind Proxy Authentication is, to create a crippled database user who has only connect rights. Even if this user is compromised the risks are well understood and fairly limited. This user can be used in every situation in which you need to connect to the database, no matter which tool or application (see above) you use.The proxy user is perfect for multi-tier connection pools. CREATE USER app_user IDENTIFIED BY abcd1234; GRANT CREATE SESSION TO app_user; But what if you need to access real data? Well, this is the primary use case, isn't it? Now is the time to bring the application's role concept into play. You define database roles that define the grants for your identified user groups. Once you have these groups you grant access through the proxy user with the application role to the specific user. CREATE ROLE app_role_a; GRANT app_role_a TO scott; ALTER USER scott GRANT CONNECT THROUGH app_user WITH ROLE app_role_a; Now, hr has permission to connect to the database through the proxy user. Through the role you can restrict the hr's rights the are needed for the application only. If hr connects to the database directly all assigned role and permissions apply. Testing the Setup To test the setup you can use SQL*Plus and connect to your database: $ sqlplus app_user[hr]/abcd1234 Java Persistence API The Java Persistence API (JPA) is a fairly easy means to build applications that retrieve data from the database and put it into Java objects. You use plain old Java objects (POJOs) and mixin some Java annotations that define how the attributes of the object are used for storing data from the database into the Java object. Here is a sample for objects from the HR sample schema EMPLOYEES table. When using Java annotations you only specify what can not be deduced from the code. If your Java class name is Employee but the table name is EMPLOYEES, you need to specify the table name, otherwise it will fail. package demo.proxy.ejb; import java.io.Serializable; import java.sql.Timestamp; import java.util.List; import javax.persistence.Column; import javax.persistence.Entity; import javax.persistence.Id; import javax.persistence.JoinColumn; import javax.persistence.ManyToOne; import javax.persistence.NamedQueries; import javax.persistence.NamedQuery; import javax.persistence.OneToMany; import javax.persistence.Table; @Entity @NamedQueries({ @NamedQuery(name = "Employee.findAll", query = "select o from Employee o") }) @Table(name = "EMPLOYEES") public class Employee implements Serializable { @Column(name="COMMISSION_PCT") private Double commissionPct; @Column(name="DEPARTMENT_ID") private Long departmentId; @Column(nullable = false, unique = true, length = 25) private String email; @Id @Column(name="EMPLOYEE_ID", nullable = false) private Long employeeId; @Column(name="FIRST_NAME", length = 20) private String firstName; @Column(name="HIRE_DATE", nullable = false) private Timestamp hireDate; @Column(name="JOB_ID", nullable = false, length = 10) private String jobId; @Column(name="LAST_NAME", nullable = false, length = 25) private String lastName; @Column(name="PHONE_NUMBER", length = 20) private String phoneNumber; private Double salary; @ManyToOne @JoinColumn(name = "MANAGER_ID") private Employee employee; @OneToMany(mappedBy = "employee") private List employeeList; public Employee() { } public Employee(Double commissionPct, Long departmentId, String email, Long employeeId, String firstName, Timestamp hireDate, String jobId, String lastName, Employee employee, String phoneNumber, Double salary) { this.commissionPct = commissionPct; this.departmentId = departmentId; this.email = email; this.employeeId = employeeId; this.firstName = firstName; this.hireDate = hireDate; this.jobId = jobId; this.lastName = lastName; this.employee = employee; this.phoneNumber = phoneNumber; this.salary = salary; } public Double getCommissionPct() { return commissionPct; } public void setCommissionPct(Double commissionPct) { this.commissionPct = commissionPct; } public Long getDepartmentId() { return departmentId; } public void setDepartmentId(Long departmentId) { this.departmentId = departmentId; } public String getEmail() { return email; } public void setEmail(String email) { this.email = email; } public Long getEmployeeId() { return employeeId; } public void setEmployeeId(Long employeeId) { this.employeeId = employeeId; } public String getFirstName() { return firstName; } public void setFirstName(String firstName) { this.firstName = firstName; } public Timestamp getHireDate() { return hireDate; } public void setHireDate(Timestamp hireDate) { this.hireDate = hireDate; } public String getJobId() { return jobId; } public void setJobId(String jobId) { this.jobId = jobId; } public String getLastName() { return lastName; } public void setLastName(String lastName) { this.lastName = lastName; } public String getPhoneNumber() { return phoneNumber; } public void setPhoneNumber(String phoneNumber) { this.phoneNumber = phoneNumber; } public Double getSalary() { return salary; } public void setSalary(Double salary) { this.salary = salary; } public Employee getEmployee() { return employee; } public void setEmployee(Employee employee) { this.employee = employee; } public List getEmployeeList() { return employeeList; } public void setEmployeeList(List employeeList) { this.employeeList = employeeList; } public Employee addEmployee(Employee employee) { getEmployeeList().add(employee); employee.setEmployee(this); return employee; } public Employee removeEmployee(Employee employee) { getEmployeeList().remove(employee); employee.setEmployee(null); return employee; } } JPA could be used in standalone applications and Java EE containers. In both worlds you normally create a Facade to retrieve or store the values of the Entities to or from the database. The Facade does this via an EntityManager which will be injected by the Java EE container. Here is sample Facade Session Bean for a Java EE container. package demo.proxy.ejb; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.List; import javax.ejb.Local; import javax.ejb.Remote; import javax.ejb.Stateless; import javax.persistence.EntityManager; import javax.persistence.PersistenceContext; import javax.persistence.Query; import javax.interceptor.AroundInvoke; import javax.interceptor.InvocationContext; import oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleConnection; import org.eclipse.persistence.config.EntityManagerProperties; import org.eclipse.persistence.internal.jpa.EntityManagerImpl; @Stateless(name = "DataFacade", mappedName = "ProxyUser-TestEJB-DataFacade") @Remote @Local public class DataFacadeBean implements DataFacade, DataFacadeLocal { @PersistenceContext(unitName = "TestEJB") private EntityManager em; private String username; public Object queryByRange(String jpqlStmt, int firstResult, int maxResults) { // setSessionUser(); Query query = em.createQuery(jpqlStmt); if (firstResult 0) { query = query.setFirstResult(firstResult); } if (maxResults 0) { query = query.setMaxResults(maxResults); } return query.getResultList(); } public Employee persistEmployee(Employee employee) { // setSessionUser(); em.persist(employee); return employee; } public Employee mergeEmployee(Employee employee) { // setSessionUser(); return em.merge(employee); } public void removeEmployee(Employee employee) { // setSessionUser(); employee = em.find(Employee.class, employee.getEmployeeId()); em.remove(employee); } /** select o from Employee o */ public List getEmployeeFindAll() { Query q = em.createNamedQuery("Employee.findAll"); return q.getResultList(); } Putting Both Together To use Proxy Authentication with JPA and within a Java EE container you have to take care of the additional requirements: Use an OCI JDBC driver Provide the user name that connects through the proxy user Use an OCI JDBC driver To use the OCI JDBC driver you need to set up your JDBC data source file to use the correct JDBC URL. hr jdbc:oracle:oci8:@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=localhost)(PORT=1521))(CONNECT_DATA=(SID=XE))) oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver user app_user 62C32F70E98297522AD97E15439FAC0E SQL SELECT 1 FROM DUAL jdbc/hrDS Application Additionally you need to make sure that the version of the shared libraries of the OCI driver match the version of the JDBC driver in your Java EE container or Java application and are within your PATH (on Windows) or LD_LIBRARY_PATH (on most Unix-based systems). Installing the Oracle Database Instance Client software works perfectly. Provide the user name that connects through the proxy user This part needs some modification of your application software and session facade. Session Facade Changes In the Session Facade we must ensure that every call that goes through the EntityManager must be prepared correctly and uniquely assigned to this session. The second is really important, as the EntityManager works with a connection pool and can not guarantee that we set the proxy user on the connection that will be used for the database activities. To avoid changing every method call of the Session Facade we provide a method to set the username of the user that connects through the proxy user. This method needs to be called by the Facade client bfore doing anything else. public void setUsername(String name) { username = name; } Next we provide a means to instruct the TopLink EntityManager Delegate to use Oracle Proxy Authentication. (I love small helper methods to hide the nitty-gritty details and avoid repeating myself.) private void setSessionUser() { setSessionUser(username); } private void setSessionUser(String user) { if (user != null && !user.isEmpty()) { EntityManagerImpl emDelegate = ((EntityManagerImpl)em.getDelegate()); emDelegate.setProperty(EntityManagerProperties.ORACLE_PROXY_TYPE, OracleConnection.PROXYTYPE_USER_NAME); emDelegate.setProperty(OracleConnection.PROXY_USER_NAME, user); emDelegate.setProperty(EntityManagerProperties.EXCLUSIVE_CONNECTION_MODE, "Always"); } } The final step is use the EJB 3.0 AroundInvoke interceptor. This interceptor will be called around every method invocation. We therefore check whether the Facade methods will be called or not. If so, we set the user for proxy authentication and the normal method flow continues. @AroundInvoke public Object proxyInterceptor(InvocationContext invocationCtx) throws Exception { if (invocationCtx.getTarget() instanceof DataFacadeBean) { setSessionUser(); } return invocationCtx.proceed(); } Benefits Using Oracle Proxy Authentification has a number of additional benefits appart from implementing the role model of your application: Fine grained access control for temporary users of the account, without compromising the original password. Enabling database auditing and logging. Better identification of performance bottlenecks. References Effective Oracle Database 10g Security by Design, David Knox TopLink Developer's Guide, Chapter 98

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• Is Social Media The Vital Skill You Aren’t Tracking?

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Mark Bennett - Originally featured in Talent Management Excellence The ever-increasing presence of the workforce on social media presents opportunities as well as risks for organizations. While on the one hand, we read about social media embarrassments happening to organizations, on the other we see that social media activities by workers and candidates can enhance a company’s brand and provide insight into what individuals are, or can become, influencers in the social media sphere. HR can play a key role in helping organizations make the most value out of the activities and presence of workers and candidates, while at the same time also helping to manage the risks that come with the permanence and viral nature of social media. What is Missing from Understanding Our Workforce? “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three-times more productive.”  Lew Platt, Former Chairman, President, CEO, Hewlett-Packard  What Lew Platt recognized was that organizations only have a partial understanding of what their workforce is capable of. This lack of understanding impacts the company in several negative ways: 1. A particular skill that the company needs to access in one part of the organization might exist somewhere else, but there is no record that the skill exists, so the need is unfulfilled. 2. As market conditions change rapidly, the company needs to know strategic options, but some options are missed entirely because the company doesn’t know that sufficient capability already exists to enable those options. 3. Employees may miss out on opportunities to demonstrate how their hidden skills could create new value to the company. Why don’t companies have that more complete picture of their workforce capabilities – that is, not know what they know? One very good explanation is that companies put most of their efforts into rating their workforce according to the jobs and roles they are filling today. This is the essence of two important talent management processes: recruiting and performance appraisals.  In recruiting, a set of requirements is put together for a job, either explicitly or indirectly through a job description. During the recruiting process, much of the attention is paid towards whether the candidate has the qualifications, the skills, the experience and the cultural fit to be successful in the role. This makes a lot of sense.  In the performance appraisal process, an employee is measured on how well they performed the functions of their role and in an effort to help the employee do even better next time, they are also measured on proficiency in the competencies that are deemed to be key in doing that job. Again, the logic is impeccable.  But in both these cases, two adages come to mind: 1. What gets measured is what gets managed. 2. You only see what you are looking for. In other words, the fact that the current roles the workforce are performing are the basis for measuring which capabilities the workforce has, makes them the only capabilities to be measured. What was initially meant to be a positive, i.e. identify what is needed to perform well and measure it, in order that it can be managed, comes with the unintended negative consequence of overshadowing the other capabilities the workforce has. This also comes with an employee engagement price, for the measurements and management of workforce capabilities is to typically focus on where the workforce comes up short. Again, it makes sense to do this, since improving a capability that appears to result in improved performance benefits, both the individual through improved performance ratings and the company through improved productivity. But this is based on the assumption that the capabilities identified and their required proficiencies are the only attributes of the individual that matter. Anything else the individual brings that results in high performance, while resulting in a desired performance outcome, often goes unrecognized or underappreciated at best. As social media begins to occupy a more important part in current and future roles in organizations, businesses must incorporate social media savvy and innovation into job descriptions and expectations. These new measures could provide insight into how well someone can use social media tools to influence communities and decision makers; keep abreast of trends in fast-moving industries; present a positive brand image for the organization around thought leadership, customer focus, social responsibility; and coordinate and collaborate with partners. These measures should demonstrate the “social capital” the individual has invested in and developed over time. Without this dimension, “short cut” methods may generate a narrow set of positive metrics that do not have real, long-lasting benefits to the organization. How Workforce Reputation Management Helps HR Harness Social Media With hundreds of petabytes of social media data flowing across Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, businesses are tapping technology solutions to effectively leverage social for HR. Workforce reputation management technology helps organizations discover, mobilize and retain talent by providing insight into the social reputation and influence of the workforce while also helping organizations monitor employee social media policy compliance and mitigate social media risk.  There are three major ways that workforce reputation management technology can play a strategic role to support HR: 1. Improve Awareness and Decisions on Talent Many organizations measure the skills and competencies that they know they need today, but are unaware of what other skills and competencies their workforce has that could be essential tomorrow. How about whether your workforce has the reputation and influence to make their skills and competencies more effective? Many organizations don’t have insight into the social media “reach” their workforce has, which is becoming more critical to business performance. These features help organizations, managers, and employees improve many talent processes and decision making, including the following: Hiring and Assignments. People and teams with higher reputations are considered more valuable and effective workers. Someone with high reputation who refers a candidate also can have high credibility as a source for hires.   Training and Development. Reputation trend analysis can impact program decisions regarding training offerings by showing how reputation and influence across the workforce changes in concert with training. Worker reputation impacts development plans and goal choices by helping the individual see which development efforts result in improved reputation and influence.   Finding Hidden Talent. Managers can discover hidden talent and skills amongst employees based on a combination of social profile information and social media reputation. Employees can improve their personal brand and accelerate their career development.  2. Talent Search and Discovery The right technology helps organizations find information on people that might otherwise be hidden. By leveraging access to candidate and worker social profiles as well as their social relationships, workforce reputation management provides companies with a more complete picture of what their knowledge, skills, and attributes are and what they can in turn access. This more complete information helps to find the right talent both outside the organization as well as the right, perhaps previously hidden talent, within the organization to fill roles and staff projects, particularly those roles and projects that are required in reaction to fast-changing opportunities and circumstances. 3. Reputation Brings Credibility Workforce reputation management technology provides a clearer picture of how candidates and workers are viewed by their peers and communities across a wide range of social reputation and influence metrics. This information is less subject to individual bias and can impact critical decision-making. Knowing the individual’s reputation and influence enables the organization to predict how well their capabilities and behaviors will have a positive effect on desired business outcomes. Many roles that have the highest impact on overall business performance are dependent on the individual’s influence and reputation. In addition, reputation and influence measures offer a very tangible source of feedback for workers, providing them with insight that helps them develop themselves and their careers and see the effectiveness of those efforts by tracking changes over time in their reputation and influence. The following are some examples of the different reputation and influence measures of the workforce that Workforce Reputation Management could gather and analyze: Generosity – How often the user reposts other’s posts. Influence – How often the user’s material is reposted by others.  Engagement – The ratio of recent posts with references (e.g. links to other posts) to the total number of posts.  Activity – How frequently the user posts. (e.g. number per day)  Impact – The size of the users’ social networks, which indicates their ability to reach unique followers, friends, or users.   Clout – The number of references and citations of the user’s material in others’ posts.  The Vital Ingredient of Workforce Reputation Management: Employee Participation “Nothing about me, without me.” Valerie Billingham, “Through the Patient’s Eyes”, Salzburg Seminar Session 356, 1998 Since data resides primarily in social media, a question arises: what manner is used to collect that data? While much of social media activity is publicly accessible (as many who wished otherwise have learned to their chagrin), the social norms of social media have developed to put some restrictions on what is acceptable behavior and by whom. Disregarding these norms risks a repercussion firestorm. One of the more recognized norms is that while individuals can follow and engage with other individual’s public social activity (e.g. Twitter updates) fairly freely, the more an organization does this unprompted and without getting permission from the individual beforehand, the more likely the organization risks a totally opposite outcome from the one desired. Instead, the organization must look for permission from the individual, which can be met with resistance. That resistance comes from not knowing how the information will be used, how it will be shared with others, and not receiving enough benefit in return for granting permission. As the quote above about patient concerns and rights succinctly states, no one likes not feeling in control of the information about themselves, or the uncertainty about where it will be used. This is well understood in consumer social media (i.e. permission-based marketing) and is applicable to workforce reputation management. However, asking permission leaves open the very real possibility that no one, or so few, will grant permission, resulting in a small set of data with little usefulness for the company. Connecting Individual Motivation to Organization Needs So what is it that makes an individual decide to grant an organization access to the data it wants? It is when the individual’s own motivations are in alignment with the organization’s objectives. In the case of workforce reputation management, when the individual is motivated by a desire for increased visibility and career growth opportunities to advertise their skills and level of influence and reputation, they are aligned with the organizations’ objectives; to fill resource needs or strategically build better awareness of what skills are present in the workforce, as well as levels of influence and reputation. Individuals can see the benefit of granting access permission to the company through multiple means. One is through simple social awareness; they begin to discover that peers who are getting more career opportunities are those who are signed up for workforce reputation management. Another is where companies take the message directly to the individual; we think you would benefit from signing up with our workforce reputation management solution. Another, more strategic approach is to make reputation management part of a larger Career Development effort by the company; providing a wide set of tools to help the workforce find ways to plan and take action to achieve their career aspirations in the organization. An effective mechanism, that facilitates connecting the visibility and career growth motivations of the workforce with the larger context of the organization’s business objectives, is to use game mechanics to help individuals transform their career goals into concrete, actionable steps, such as signing up for reputation management. This works in favor of companies looking to use workforce reputation because the workforce is more apt to see how it fits into achieving their overall career goals, as well as seeing how other participation brings additional benefits.  Once an individual has signed up with reputation management, not only have they made themselves more visible within the organization and increased their career growth opportunities, they have also enabled a tool that they can use to better understand how their actions and behaviors impact their influence and reputation. Since they will be able to see their reputation and influence measurements change over time, they will gain better insight into how reputation and influence impacts their effectiveness in a role, as well as how their behaviors and skill levels in turn affect their influence and reputation. This insight can trigger much more directed, and effective, efforts by the individual to improve their ability to perform at a higher level and become more productive. The increased sense of autonomy the individual experiences, in linking the insight they gain to the actions and behavior changes they make, greatly enhances their engagement with their role as well as their career prospects within the company. Workforce reputation management takes the wide range of disparate data about the workforce being produced across various social media platforms and transforms it into accessible, relevant, and actionable information that helps the organization achieve its desired business objectives. Social media holds untapped insights about your talent, brand and business, and workforce reputation management can help unlock them. Imagine - if you could find the hidden secrets of your businesses, how much more productive and efficient would your organization be? Mark Bennett is a Director of Product Strategy at Oracle. Mark focuses on setting the strategic vision and direction for tools that help organizations understand, shape, and leverage the capabilities of their workforce to achieve business objectives, as well as help individuals work effectively to achieve their goals and navigate their own growth. His combination of a deep technical background in software design and development, coupled with a broad knowledge of business challenges and thinking in today’s globalized, rapidly changing, technology accelerated economy, has enabled him to identify and incorporate key innovations that are central to Oracle Fusion’s unique value proposition. Mark has over the course of his career been in charge of the design, development, and strategy of Talent Management products and the design and development of cutting edge software that is better equipped to handle the increasingly complex demands of users while also remaining easy to use. Follow him @mpbennett

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• AngularJs ng-cloak Problems on large Pages

  - by Rick Strahl

  I’ve been working on a rather complex and large Angular page. Unlike a typical AngularJs SPA style ‘application’ this particular page is just that: a single page with a large amount of data on it that has to be visible all at once. The problem is that when this large page loads it flickers and displays template markup briefly before kicking into its actual content rendering. This is is what the Angular ng-cloak is supposed to address, but in this case I had no luck getting it to work properly. This application is a shop floor app where workers need to see all related information in one big screen view, so some of the benefits of Angular’s routing and view swapping features couldn’t be applied. Instead, we decided to have one very big view but lots of ng-controllers and directives to break out the logic for code separation. For code separation this works great – there are a number of small controllers that deal with their own individual and isolated application concerns. For HTML separation we used partial ASP.NET MVC Razor Views which made breaking out the HTML into manageable pieces super easy and made migration of this page from a previous server side Razor page much easier. We were also able to leverage most of our server side localization without a lot of  changes as a bonus. But as a result of this choice the initial HTML document that loads is rather large – even without any data loaded into it, resulting in a fairly large DOM tree that Angular must manage. Large Page and Angular Startup The problem on this particular page is that there’s quite a bit of markup – 35k’s worth of markup without any data loaded, in fact. It’s a large HTML page with a complex DOM tree. There are quite a lot of Angular {{ }} markup expressions in the document. Angular provides the ng-cloak directive to try and hide the element it cloaks so that you don’t see the flash of these markup expressions when the page initially loads before Angular has a chance to render the data into the markup expressions.<div id="mainContainer" class="mainContainer boxshadow" ng-app="app" ng-cloak> Note the ng-cloak attribute on this element, which here is an outer wrapper element of the most of this large page’s content. ng-cloak is supposed to prevent displaying the content below it, until Angular has taken control and is ready to render the data into the templates. Alas, with this large page the end result unfortunately is a brief flicker of un-rendered markup which looks like this: It’s brief, but plenty ugly – right?  And depending on the speed of the machine this flash gets more noticeable with slow machines that take longer to process the initial HTML DOM. ng-cloak Styles ng-cloak works by temporarily hiding the marked up element and it does this by essentially applying a style that does this:[ng\:cloak], [ng-cloak], [data-ng-cloak], [x-ng-cloak], .ng-cloak, .x-ng-cloak { display: none !important; } This style is inlined as part of AngularJs itself. If you looking at the angular.js source file you’ll find this at the very end of the file:!angular.$$csp() && angular.element(document) .find('head') .prepend('<style type="text/css">@charset "UTF-8";[ng\\:cloak],[ng-cloak],' + '[data-ng-cloak],[x-ng-cloak],.ng-cloak,.x-ng-cloak,' + '.ng-hide{display:none !important;}ng\\:form{display:block;}' '.ng-animate-block-transitions{transition:0s all!important;-webkit-transition:0s all!important;}' + '</style>'); This is is meant to initially hide any elements that contain the ng-cloak attribute or one of the other Angular directive permutation markup. Unfortunately on this particular web page ng-cloak had no effect – I still see the flicker. Why doesn’t ng-cloak work? The problem is of course – timing. The problem is that Angular actually needs to get control of the page before it ever starts doing anything like process even the ng-cloak attribute (or style etc). Because this page is rather large (about 35k of non-data HTML) it takes a while for the DOM to actually plow through the HTML. With the Angular <script> tag defined at the bottom of the page after the HTML DOM content there’s a slight delay which causes the flicker. For smaller pages the initial DOM load/parse cycle is so fast that the markup never shows, but with larger content pages it may show and become an annoying problem. Workarounds There a number of simple ways around this issue and some of them are hinted on in the Angular documentation. Load Angular Sooner One obvious thing that would help with this is to load Angular at the top of the page  BEFORE the DOM loads and that would give it much earlier control. The old ng-cloak documentation actually recommended putting the Angular.js script into the header of the page (apparently this was recently removed), but generally it’s not a good practice to load scripts in the header for page load performance. This is especially true if you load other libraries like jQuery which should be loaded prior to loading Angular so it can use jQuery rather than its own jqLite subset. This is not something I normally would like to do and also something that I’d likely forget in the future and end up right back here :-). Use ng-include for Child Content Angular supports nesting of child templates via the ng-include directive which essentially delay loads HTML content. This helps by removing a lot of the template content out of the main page and so getting control to Angular a lot sooner in order to hide the markup template content. In the application in question, I realize that in hindsight it might have been smarter to break this page out with client side ng-include directives instead of MVC Razor partial views we used to break up the page sections. Razor partial views give that nice separation as well, but in the end Razor puts humpty dumpty (ie. the HTML) back together into a whole single and rather large HTML document. Razor provides the logical separation, but still results in a large physical result document. But Razor also ended up being helpful to have a few security related blocks handled via server side template logic that simply excludes certain parts of the UI the user is not allowed to see – something that you can’t really do with client side exclusion like ng-hide/ng-show – client side content is always there whereas on the server side you can simply not send it to the client. Another reason I’m not a huge fan of ng-include is that it adds another HTTP hit to a request as templates are loaded from the server dynamically as needed. Given that this page was already heavy with resources adding another 10 separate ng-include directives wouldn’t be beneficial :-) ng-include is a valid option if you start from scratch and partition your logic. Of course if you don’t have complex pages, having completely separate views that are swapped in as they are accessed are even better, but we didn’t have this option due to the information having to be on screen all at once. Avoid using {{ }}  Expressions The biggest issue that ng-cloak attempts to address isn’t so much displaying the original content – it’s displaying empty {{ }} markup expression tags that get embedded into content. It gives you the dreaded “now you see it, now you don’t” effect where you sometimes see three separate rendering states: Markup junk, empty views, then views filled with data. If we can remove {{ }} expressions from the page you remove most of the perceived double draw effect as you would effectively start with a blank form and go straight to a filled form. To do this you can forego {{ }}  expressions and replace them with ng-bind directives on DOM elements. For example you can turn:<div class="list-item-name listViewOrderNo"> <a href='#'>{{lineItem.MpsOrderNo}}</a> </div>into:<div class="list-item-name listViewOrderNo"> <a href="#" ng-bind="lineItem.MpsOrderNo"></a> </div> to get identical results but because the {{ }}  expression has been removed there’s no double draw effect for this element. Again, not a great solution. The {{ }} syntax sure reads cleaner and is more fluent to type IMHO. In some cases you may also not have an outer element to attach ng-bind to which then requires you to artificially inject DOM elements into the page. This is especially painful if you have several consecutive values like {{Firstname}} {{Lastname}} for example. It’s an option though especially if you think of this issue up front and you don’t have a ton of expressions to deal with. Add the ng-cloak Styles manually You can also explicitly define the .css styles that Angular injects via code manually in your application’s style sheet. By doing so the styles become immediately available and so are applied right when the page loads – no flicker. I use the minimal:[ng-cloak] { display: none !important; } which works for:<div id="mainContainer" class="mainContainer dialog boxshadow" ng-app="app" ng-cloak> If you use one of the other combinations add the other CSS selectors as well or use the full style shown earlier. Angular will still load its version of the ng-cloak styling but it overrides those settings later, but this will do the trick of hiding the content before that CSS is injected into the page. Adding the CSS in your own style sheet works well, and is IMHO by far the best option. The nuclear option: Hiding the Content manually Using the explicit CSS is the best choice, so the following shouldn’t ever be necessary. But I’ll mention it here as it gives some insight how you can hide/show content manually on load for other frameworks or in your own markup based templates. Before I figured out that I could explicitly embed the CSS style into the page, I had tried to figure out why ng-cloak wasn’t doing its job. After wasting an hour getting nowhere I finally decided to just manually hide and show the container. The idea is simple – initially hide the container, then show it once Angular has done its initial processing and removal of the template markup from the page. You can manually hide the content and make it visible after Angular has gotten control. To do this I used:<div id="mainContainer" class="mainContainer boxshadow" ng-app="app" style="display:none"> Notice the display: none style that explicitly hides the element initially on the page. Then once Angular has run its initialization and effectively processed the template markup on the page you can show the content. For Angular this ‘ready’ event is the app.run() function:app.run( function ($rootScope, $location, cellService) { $("#mainContainer").show(); … }); This effectively removes the display:none style and the content displays. By the time app.run() fires the DOM is ready to displayed with filled data or at least empty data – Angular has gotten control. Edge Case Clearly this is an edge case. In general the initial HTML pages tend to be reasonably sized and the load time for the HTML and Angular are fast enough that there’s no flicker between the rendering times. This only becomes an issue as the initial pages get rather large. Regardless – if you have an Angular application it’s probably a good idea to add the CSS style into your application’s CSS (or a common shared one) just to make sure that content is always hidden. You never know how slow of a browser somebody might be running and while your super fast dev machine might not show any flicker, grandma’s old XP box very well might…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in Angular  JavaScript  CSS  HTML   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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