border layout - Page 334

When i add a bitmap to an array list the last element is duplicated in previous indexes

- by saxofone2

I'm trying to implement a personal way of undo/redo in a finger paint-like app. I have in synthesis three objects: the Main class (named ScorePadActivity), the relative Main Layout (with buttons, menus, etc, as well as a View object where I create my drawings), and a third object named ArrayList where i'm writing the undo/redo code. The problem is, when I press the undo button nothing happens, but if I draw anything again "one-time" and press undo, the screen is updated. If I draw many times, to see any changes happen on screen I have to press the undo button the same number of times I have drawn. Seems like (as in title) when I add a bitmap to the array list the last element is duplicated in previous indexes, and for some strange reason, everytime I press the Undo Button, the system is ok for one time, but starts to duplicate until the next undo. The index increase is verified with a series of System.out.println inserted in code. Now when I draw something on screen, the array list is updated with the code inserted after the invocation of touchup(); method in motionEvent touch_up(); } this.arrayClass.incrementArray(mBitmap); mPath.rewind(); invalidate(); and in ArrayList activity; public void incrementArray(Bitmap mBitmap) { this._mBitmap=mBitmap; _size=undoArray.size(); undoArray.add(_size, _mBitmap); } (All Logs removed for clear reading) The undo button in ScorePadActivity calls the undo method in View activity: Button undobtn= (Button)findViewById(R.id.undo); undobtn.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v) { mView.undo(); } }); in View activity: public void undo() { this.mBitmap= arrayClass.undo(); mCanvas = new Canvas(mBitmap); mPath.rewind(); invalidate(); } that calls the relative undo method in ArrayList activity: public Bitmap undo() { // TODO Auto-generated method stub _size=undoArray.size(); if (_size>1) { undoArray.remove(_size-1); _size=undoArray.size(); _mBitmap = ((Bitmap) undoArray.get(_size-1)).copy(Bitmap.Config.ARGB_8888,true); } return _mBitmap; } return mBitmap and invalidate: Due to my bad English I have made a scheme to make the problem more clear: I have tried with HashMap, with a simple array, I have tried to change mPath.rewind(); with reset();, new Path(); etc but nothing. Why? Sorry for the complex answer, i want give you a great thanks in advance. Best regards

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Problem with table in php

- by user225269

I'm trying to create a table in php that would show the data on the mysql database based on the check box that is checked by the user. As you can see in this screen shot, it will have problems when you did not check on a checkbox before the one that will be the last: http://www.mypicx.com/04282010/1/ Here is my code: if($_POST['general'] == 'ADDRESS'){ $result2 = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM student WHERE ADDRESS='$saddress'"); ?> <table border='1'> <tr> <th>IDNO</th> <th>YEAR</th> <th>SECTION</th> <?php if ( $ShowLastName ) echo "<th>LASTNAME</th>" ?> <?php if ( $ShowFirstName ) echo "<th>FIRSTNAME</th>" ?> <?php if ( $ShowMidName ) echo "<th>MIDNAME</th>" ?> <?php if ( $ShowAddress ) echo "<th>ADDRESS</th>" ?> <?php if ( $ShowGender ) echo "<th>GENDER</th>" ?> <?php if ( $ShowReligion ) echo "<th>RELIGION</th>" ?> <?php if ( $ShowBday ) echo "<th>BIRTHDAY</th>" ?> <?php if ( $ShowContact ) echo "<th>CONTACT</th>" ?> </tr> <?php while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result2)) {?> <tr> <td><?php echo $row['IDNO']?> </td> <td><?php echo $row['YEAR'] ?> </td> <td><?php echo $row['SECTION'] ?></td> <td><?php if ( $ShowLastName ) echo $row['LASTNAME'] ?></td> <td><?php if ( $ShowFirstName ) echo $row['FIRSTNAME'] ?></td> <td><?php if ( $ShowMidName ) echo $row['MI'] ?></td> <td><?php if ( $ShowAddress ) echo $row['ADDRESS'] ?></td> <td><?php if ( $ShowGender ) echo $row['GENDER'] ?></td> <td><?php if ( $ShowReligion ) echo $row['RELIGION'] ?></td> <td><?php if ( $ShowBday ) echo $row['BIRTHDAY'] ?></td> <td><?php if ( $ShowContact ) echo $row['S_CONTACTNUM'] ?></td> </tr> <?PHP } ?> </table> <?PHP } mysql_close($con); ?> What can you recommend so that the output will not look like this when you one of the checkbox before a checkbox is not clicked: http://www.mypicx.com/04282010/2/

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Update View at runtime in Android

- by seretur

The example is pretty straightforward: i want to let the user know about what the app is doing by just showing a text (canvas.drawText()). Then, my first message appears, but not the other ones. I mean, i have a "setText" method but it doesn't updates. onCreate(Bundle bundle) { super.onCreate(bundle); setContentView(splash); // splash is the view class loadResources(); splash.setText("this"); boundWebService(); splash.setText("that"): etc(); splash.setText("so on"); } The view's text drawing works by doing just a drawText in onDraw();, so setText changes the text but doesn't show it. Someone recommended me replacing the view with a SurfaceView, but it would be alot of trouble for just a couple of updates, SO... how the heck can i update the view dinamically at runtime? It should be quite simple, just showing a text for say 2 seconds and then the main thread doing his stuff and then updating the text... Thanks! Update: I tried implementing handler.onPost(), but is the same story all over again. Let me put you the code: package coda.tvt; import android.app.Activity; import android.graphics.Canvas; import android.graphics.Paint; import android.os.Bundle; import android.view.View; import android.widget.TextView; import android.widget.Toast; public class ThreadViewTestActivity extends Activity { Thread t; Splash splash; /** Called when the activity is first created. */ @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); splash = new Splash(this); t = new Thread(splash); t.start(); splash.setTextow("OA"); try { Thread.sleep(4000); } catch (InterruptedException e) { } splash.setTextow("LALA"); } } And: public class Splash implements Runnable { Activity activity; final Handler myHandler = new Handler(); public Splash(Activity activity) { this.activity=activity; } @Override public void run() { // TODO Auto-generated method stub } public synchronized void setTextow(final String textow) { // Wrap DownloadTask into another Runnable to track the statistics myHandler.post(new Runnable() { @Override public void run() { TextView t = (TextView)activity.findViewById(R.id.testo); t.setText(textow); t.invalidate(); } }); } } Although splash is in other thread, i put a sleep on the main thread, i use the handler to manage UI and everything, it doesn't changes a thing, it only shows the last update.

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Does anyone get zero-height select fields in Firefox 3.6.3?

- by user350635

If you open this HTML in Firefox 3.6.3 (confirmed in some earlier versions too), and click the drawStuff() link repeatedly, it doesn't render the contents of the last div consistently. Looking more closely it seems like it's rendering select fields with height=0. Any idea why this would happen? <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <title> A Page </title> <script type="text/javascript"> function drawStuff() { for (var i = 1; i <= 5; i++) { var curHtmlArr = []; for (var j = 0; j < 5; j++){ curHtmlArr.push("<select>"); curHtmlArr.push(getOptgroup()); curHtmlArr.push(getOptgroup()); curHtmlArr.push(getOptgroup()); curHtmlArr.push("<\/select>"); } var foobar = document.getElementById('elem_' + i); foobar.innerHTML = curHtmlArr.join(''); } } function getOptgroup(){ var htmlArr = []; htmlArr.push('<optgroup label="Whatever">'); for (var ii = 0; ii < 32; ii++){ htmlArr.push(' <option value="' + ii + '"> Blah ' + "<\/option>"); } htmlArr.push("<\/optgroup>"); return htmlArr.join(''); } </script> </head> <body> <table border=1 style="width:900px;" summary="A Table"> <tr> <td> <div id="elem_1"></div> </td> <td> <div id="elem_2"></div> </td> <td> <div id="elem_3"></div> </td> <td> <div id="elem_4"></div> </td> <td> <div>abc</div> <div id="elem_5"></div> </td> </tr> </table> <a href="javascript:drawStuff()"> drawStuff() </a> <script type="text/javascript"> drawStuff(); </script> </body> </html>

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Beginner Android Dev question navigating through intents, getting errors not sure how to fix it. I've tried rearranging and everything even tabbing.

- by user554786

/*I created this Sign-In page. I start by declaring variables for username/password & buttons. If user enters "test" as username & "test" as password and hits the login button, its supposed to go to the DrinksTwitter.class activity, else throw error message I created. To me the code and login makes perfect sense. I'm not sure why it wont go to the next activity I want it to go to */ package com.android.drinksonme; import android.app.Activity; import android.content.Intent; import android.os.Bundle; import android.view.View; import android.view.View.OnClickListener; import android.widget.Button; import android.widget.EditText; import android.widget.TextView; public class Screen2 extends Activity { // Declare our Views, so we can access them later private EditText etUsername; private EditText etPassword; private Button btnLogin; private Button btnSignUp; private TextView lblResult; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); // Get the EditText and Button References etUsername = (EditText)findViewById(R.id.username); etPassword = (EditText)findViewById(R.id.password); btnLogin = (Button)findViewById(R.id.login_button); btnSignUp = (Button)findViewById(R.id.signup_button); lblResult = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.result); // Check Login String username = etUsername.getText().toString(); String password = etPassword.getText().toString(); if(username.equals("test") && password.equals("test")){ final Intent i = new Intent(Screen2.this, DrinksTwitter.class); btnLogin.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v) { startActivity(i); } // lblResult.setText("Login successful."); else { /* ERROR- Syntax error on token "else", { expected */ lblResult.setText("Invalid username or password."); } } }); final Intent k = new Intent(Screen2.this, SignUp.class); btnSignUp.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v) { startActivity(k); } }); /* ERROR- Syntax error, insert "}" to complete Statement*/ } }

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Why my java app for android not connect to server?

- by FredVaz

Why my java app for android not connect to server ? I run the aplication in android emulator, and the server wich port 9999 and host 127.0.0.1 in my pc, but just not connect and i think this method isn't good for android app. It is my source code: import android.app.Activity; import android.os.Bundle; import android.view.View; import android.view.View.OnClickListener; import android.widget.Button; import android.widget.EditText; import android.widget.TextView; //Java imports //import android.util.Log; import java.io.*; import java.net.*; import java.util.*; import java.util.logging.Level; import java.util.logging.Logger; public class MainActivity extends Activity { //Variaveis Interface private Button ligar; private Button enviar; private EditText text1; private TextView text2; //Variaveis static Socket cSocket; static PrintWriter out; static BufferedReader in; /** Called when the activity is first created. */ @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); //Declaração butões ligar = (Button) findViewById(R.id.ligar); enviar = (Button) findViewById(R.id.enviar); text1 = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.text1); text2 = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.text2); //Interacao ligar.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener(){ public void onClick(View arg0){ connect(); } }); enviar.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener(){ public void onClick(View arg0){ out.println("Hello"); text2.setText(""); } }); } //Outras Funcoes public void connect(){ //Funcao ligar cSocket = null; out = null; in = null; try { cSocket = new Socket("127.0.0.1",9999); out = new PrintWriter(cSocket.getOutputStream(), true); in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(cSocket.getInputStream())); text2.setText("Estas conectado com sucesso."); } catch (IOException ex) { //Logger.getLogger(client.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex); text2.setText("Erro! Na conexão"); } } // }

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How can data not stored in a DB be accessed from any activity in Android?

- by jul

hi, I'm passing data to a ListView to display some restaurant names. Now when clicking on an item I'd like to start another activity to display more restaurant data. I'm not sure about how to do it. Shall I pass all the restaurant data in a bundle through the intent object? Or shall I just pass the restaurant id and get the data in the other activity? In that case, how can I access my restaurantList from the other activity? In any case, how can I get data from the restaurant I clicked on (the view only contains the name)? Any help, pointers welcome! Thanks Jul ListView lv= (ListView)findViewById(R.id.listview); lv.setAdapter( new ArrayAdapter<String>(this,android.R.layout.simple_list_item_1,restaurantList.getRestaurantNames())); lv.setOnItemClickListener(new OnItemClickListener() { public void onItemClick(AdapterView<?> parent, View view, int position, long id) { Intent i = new Intent(Atable.this, RestaurantEdit.class); Bundle b = new Bundle(); //b.putInt("id", ? ); startActivityForResult(i, ACTIVITY_EDIT); } }); RestaurantList.java package org.digitalfarm.atable; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.List; public class RestaurantList { private List<Restaurant> restaurants = new ArrayList<Restaurant>(); public List<Restaurant> getRestaurants() { return this.restaurants; } public void setRestaurants(List<Restaurant> restaurants) { this.restaurants = restaurants; } public List<String> getRestaurantNames() { List<String> restaurantNames = new ArrayList<String>(); for (int i=0; i<this.restaurants.size(); i++) { restaurantNames.add(this.restaurants.get(i).getName()); } return restaurantNames; } } Restaurant.java package org.digitalfarm.atable; public class Restaurant { private int id; private String name; private float latitude; private float longitude; public int getId() { return this.id; } public void setId(int id) { this.id = id; } public String getName() { return this.name; } public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; } public float getLatitude() { return this.latitude; } public void setLatitude(float latitude) { this.latitude = latitude; } public float getLongitude() { return this.longitude; } public void setLongitude(float longitude) { this.longitude = longitude; } }

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I cannot get mlocManager.removeUpdates(mlocListener); to work

- by Colin

I have an app that uses the LocationManage functions which works well until the app is stopped or paused. The location listener function is still carrying on in the background. Relevant bits of code follow. When I click home or back the onstop() function is being triggered correctly. package uk.cr.anchor; import android.app.Activity; import android.content.Context; import android.location.Location; import android.location.LocationListener; import android.location.LocationManager; import android.media.MediaPlayer; import android.media.RingtoneManager; import android.net.Uri; import android.os.Bundle; import android.view.View; import android.widget.EditText; import android.widget.TableRow; import android.widget.Toast; import android.widget.ToggleButton; import android.content.SharedPreferences; import android.graphics.Color; public class main extends Activity { /** Called when the activity is first created. */ private LocationManager mlocManager; private LocationListener mlocListener; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); LocationManager mlocManager = (LocationManager)getSystemService(Context.LOCATION_SERVICE); LocationListener mlocListener = new MyLocationListener(); mlocManager.requestLocationUpdates( LocationManager.GPS_PROVIDER, 0, 0, mlocListener); } @Override protected void onStop(){ stoplistening(); super.onStop(); } /* Class My Location Listener */ public class MyLocationListener implements LocationListener { @Override public void onLocationChanged(Location loc) { loc.getLatitude(); loc.getLongitude(); etc etc etc } private void stoplistening() { if (mlocManager != null) { Toast.makeText( getApplicationContext(), "kill", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT ).show(); mlocManager.removeUpdates(mlocListener); } else { Toast.makeText( getApplicationContext(), " not kill", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT ).show(); } } } I always get the "not kill" message. Can anyone help me!

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Select list shrinks in size horizontally when empty

- by joe

Hello, I have two select list boxes and i can move items back and forth between them using the forward (--) and backward (<--) button. However, if there are no items in a select list, it shrinks in size horizontally. Any way to keep the select list a fixed size, irrespective of whether it contains any options or not ? Below is the code: <html> <head> <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">  </script> </head> <body> <form action="yourpage.asp" method="post"> <table border="0"> <tr> <td width="70"> <select name="sel1" size="10" multiple="multiple"> <option value="1">Left1</option> <option value="2">Left2</option> <option value="3">Left3</option> <option value="4">Left4</option> <option value="5">Left5</option> </select> </td> <td align="center" valign="middle"> <input type="button" value="-->" onclick="moveOptions(this.form.sel1, this.form.sel2);" /><br /> <input type="button" value="<--" onclick="moveOptions(this.form.sel2, this.form.sel1);" /> </td> <td> <select name="sel2" size="10" multiple="multiple"> <option value="1">Right1</option> <option value="2">Right2</option> <option value="3">Right3</option> <option value="4">Right4</option> <option value="5">Right5</option> </select> </td> </tr> </table> </form> </body> </html> Please help. Thank You.

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NullPointerException while trying to bind at SimpleCursorAdapter

- by hrskrs

I have asked a question before where i found my mistake. However now i am facing with another problem. I have checked all the similar errors asked on StackOverflow but without success.Any help is appriciated. The idea here is that i am getting image names from DB so depending on those names images from Drawable folder will be shown in a listView together with a description but im getting an error of NullPointException at setViewValue. Here is the code snippet: private void populateListView() { ListView customListView = (ListView)findViewById(R.id.lvCustom); Cursor cursor = DBhelper.getAllimages(); startManagingCursor(cursor); String[] from = { DBhelper.COLUMN_PIC_URL, DBhelper.COLUMN_PIC_DESC}; int[] to = {R.id.ivImg, R.id.tvTitle}; SimpleCursorAdapter cursorAdapter = new SimpleCursorAdapter(this, R.layout.custom_listview_row, cursor, from, to, 0); cursorAdapter.setViewBinder(new ViewBinder() { @Override public boolean setViewValue(View view, Cursor cursor, int columnIndex) { ImageView imageImageView = (ImageView)findViewById(R.id.ivImg); String[] imgNames = new String[cursor.getCount()]; int[] imgResourceIds = new int[cursor.getCount()]; for(int i=0; i<cursor.getCount(); i++){ imgNames[i] = cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex(DBhelper.COLUMN_PIC_URL)); imgResourceIds[i] = getResources().getIdentifier(imgNames[i], "drawable", getPackageName()); imageImageView.setImageResource(imgResourceIds[i]); cursor.moveToNext(); } return true; } }); customListView.setAdapter(cursorAdapter); } Here is the Error from LogCat: I have tried to log the output of imgNames[i] where it returns the url pic from the DB correctly and imgResourceIds[i] where it return the image resource id correctly also(it does not return NULL but something like: 295731). But it stops at imageImageView.setImageResource(imgResourceIds[i]); To see from where that NullPointerException is coming, i commented out imageImageView.setImageResource(imgResourceIds[i]);. This time imageNames(those with a TAG) and imgResourceIds(those system printed out) came correctly but doubled, when i removed cursor.MoveToNext() last row were doubled. Here is the screen shot of that: I have tried all the suggestions on stack about gettin a NullException but without success. Any idea where i am doing mistake?

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Unable to display images through media queries form stylesheet

- by kNair

I'm trying to create a responsive homepage with max-width of 1024 first. However the images are not displaying when I called from the css file. I did include the stylesheet inside the home page and the current viewport is 1024. I can't find my mistake, please help. Thanks. homepage <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1"/> <title>Responsive design</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="res-style.css" type="text/css" media="screen and (max-width:1024px)"/> </head> <body> <table class="ct"> <tr> <td class="1"> <?php include 'menu.php'; ?> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="2"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class='3'> <img src="NewLogo1.png"></td> </tr> <tr> <td class='4'> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class='5'> wefhuiweabhfuia</td> </tr> </table> </body> </html> stylesheet @charset "utf-8"; /* CSS Document */ @media screen and (max-width:1024px) { .ct{min-width:1000px;height:898px;border:0;} .1{background-image:url('images/text-5_02.png');min-width:1000px;height:43px;margin-left:10px;background-repeat:no-repeat;display:inherit;} .2{background-image:url('images/text-5_04.png');min-width:1000px;height:256px;background-repeat:no-repeat;} .3{background-image:url('images/text-5_05.png');min-width:1000px;height:288px;padding-left:25%;background-repeat:no-repeat;} .4{background-image:url('images/text-5_06.png');min-width:1000px;height:256px;background-repeat:no-repeat;} .5{background-image:url('images/text-5_07.png');min-width:1000px;height:55px;background-repeat:no-repeat;} }

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From Binary to Data Structures

- by Cédric Menzi

Table of Contents Introduction PE file format and COFF header COFF file header BaseCoffReader Byte4ByteCoffReader UnsafeCoffReader ManagedCoffReader Conclusion History This article is also available on CodeProject Introduction Sometimes, you want to parse well-formed binary data and bring it into your objects to do some dirty stuff with it. In the Windows world most data structures are stored in special binary format. Either we call a WinApi function or we want to read from special files like images, spool files, executables or may be the previously announced Outlook Personal Folders File. Most specifications for these files can be found on the MSDN Libarary: Open Specification In my example, we are going to get the COFF (Common Object File Format) file header from a PE (Portable Executable). The exact specification can be found here: PECOFF PE file format and COFF header Before we start we need to know how this file is formatted. The following figure shows an overview of the Microsoft PE executable format. Source: Microsoft Our goal is to get the PE header. As we can see, the image starts with a MS-DOS 2.0 header with is not important for us. From the documentation we can read "...After the MS DOS stub, at the file offset specified at offset 0x3c, is a 4-byte...". With this information we know our reader has to jump to location 0x3c and read the offset to the signature. The signature is always 4 bytes that ensures that the image is a PE file. The signature is: PE\0\0. To prove this we first seek to the offset 0x3c, read if the file consist the signature. So we need to declare some constants, because we do not want magic numbers. private const int PeSignatureOffsetLocation = 0x3c; private const int PeSignatureSize = 4; private const string PeSignatureContent = "PE"; Then a method for moving the reader to the correct location to read the offset of signature. With this method we always move the underlining Stream of the BinaryReader to the start location of the PE signature. private void SeekToPeSignature(BinaryReader br) { // seek to the offset for the PE signagure br.BaseStream.Seek(PeSignatureOffsetLocation, SeekOrigin.Begin); // read the offset int offsetToPeSig = br.ReadInt32(); // seek to the start of the PE signature br.BaseStream.Seek(offsetToPeSig, SeekOrigin.Begin); } Now, we can check if it is a valid PE image by reading of the next 4 byte contains the content PE. private bool IsValidPeSignature(BinaryReader br) { // read 4 bytes to get the PE signature byte[] peSigBytes = br.ReadBytes(PeSignatureSize); // convert it to a string and trim \0 at the end of the content string peContent = Encoding.Default.GetString(peSigBytes).TrimEnd('\0'); // check if PE is in the content return peContent.Equals(PeSignatureContent); } With this basic functionality we have a good base reader class to try the different methods of parsing the COFF file header. COFF file header The COFF header has the following structure: Offset Size Field 0 2 Machine 2 2 NumberOfSections 4 4 TimeDateStamp 8 4 PointerToSymbolTable 12 4 NumberOfSymbols 16 2 SizeOfOptionalHeader 18 2 Characteristics If we translate this table to code, we get something like this: [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public struct CoffHeader { public MachineType Machine; public ushort NumberOfSections; public uint TimeDateStamp; public uint PointerToSymbolTable; public uint NumberOfSymbols; public ushort SizeOfOptionalHeader; public Characteristic Characteristics; } BaseCoffReader All readers do the same thing, so we go to the patterns library in our head and see that Strategy pattern or Template method pattern is sticked out in the bookshelf. I have decided to take the template method pattern in this case, because the Parse() should handle the IO for all implementations and the concrete parsing should done in its derived classes. public CoffHeader Parse() { using (var br = new BinaryReader(File.Open(_fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read))) { SeekToPeSignature(br); if (!IsValidPeSignature(br)) { throw new BadImageFormatException(); } return ParseInternal(br); } } protected abstract CoffHeader ParseInternal(BinaryReader br); First we open the BinaryReader, seek to the PE signature then we check if it contains a valid PE signature and rest is done by the derived implementations. Byte4ByteCoffReader The first solution is using the BinaryReader. It is the general way to get the data. We only need to know which order, which data-type and its size. If we read byte for byte we could comment out the first line in the CoffHeader structure, because we have control about the order of the member assignment. protected override CoffHeader ParseInternal(BinaryReader br) { CoffHeader coff = new CoffHeader(); coff.Machine = (MachineType)br.ReadInt16(); coff.NumberOfSections = (ushort)br.ReadInt16(); coff.TimeDateStamp = br.ReadUInt32(); coff.PointerToSymbolTable = br.ReadUInt32(); coff.NumberOfSymbols = br.ReadUInt32(); coff.SizeOfOptionalHeader = (ushort)br.ReadInt16(); coff.Characteristics = (Characteristic)br.ReadInt16(); return coff; } If the structure is as short as the COFF header here and the specification will never changed, there is probably no reason to change the strategy. But if a data-type will be changed, a new member will be added or ordering of member will be changed the maintenance costs of this method are very high. UnsafeCoffReader Another way to bring the data into this structure is using a "magically" unsafe trick. As above, we know the layout and order of the data structure. Now, we need the StructLayout attribute, because we have to ensure that the .NET Runtime allocates the structure in the same order as it is specified in the source code. We also need to enable "Allow unsafe code (/unsafe)" in the project's build properties. Then we need to add the following constructor to the CoffHeader structure. [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public struct CoffHeader { public CoffHeader(byte[] data) { unsafe { fixed (byte* packet = &data[0]) { this = *(CoffHeader*)packet; } } } } The "magic" trick is in the statement: this = *(CoffHeader*)packet;. What happens here? We have a fixed size of data somewhere in the memory and because a struct in C# is a value-type, the assignment operator = copies the whole data of the structure and not only the reference. To fill the structure with data, we need to pass the data as bytes into the CoffHeader structure. This can be achieved by reading the exact size of the structure from the PE file. protected override CoffHeader ParseInternal(BinaryReader br) { return new CoffHeader(br.ReadBytes(Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(CoffHeader)))); } This solution is the fastest way to parse the data and bring it into the structure, but it is unsafe and it could introduce some security and stability risks. ManagedCoffReader In this solution we are using the same approach of the structure assignment as above. But we need to replace the unsafe part in the constructor with the following managed part: [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)] public struct CoffHeader { public CoffHeader(byte[] data) { IntPtr coffPtr = IntPtr.Zero; try { int size = Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(CoffHeader)); coffPtr = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(size); Marshal.Copy(data, 0, coffPtr, size); this = (CoffHeader)Marshal.PtrToStructure(coffPtr, typeof(CoffHeader)); } finally { Marshal.FreeHGlobal(coffPtr); } } } Conclusion We saw that we can parse well-formed binary data to our data structures using different approaches. The first is probably the clearest way, because we know each member and its size and ordering and we have control about the reading the data for each member. But if add member or the structure is going change by some reason, we need to change the reader. The two other solutions use the approach of the structure assignment. In the unsafe implementation we need to compile the project with the /unsafe option. We increase the performance, but we get some security risks.

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Run Windows in Ubuntu with VMware Player

- by Matthew Guay

Are you an enthusiast who loves their Ubuntu Linux experience but still needs to use Windows programs? Here’s how you can get the full Windows experience on Ubuntu with the free VMware Player. Linux has become increasingly consumer friendly, but still, the wide majority of commercial software is only available for Windows and Macs. Dual-booting between Windows and Linux has been a popular option for years, but this is a frustrating solution since you have to reboot into the other operating system each time you want to run a specific application. With virtualization, you’ll never have to make this tradeoff. VMware Player makes it quick and easy to install any edition of Windows in a virtual machine. With VMware’s great integration tools, you can copy and paste between your Linux and Windows programs and even run native Windows applications side-by-side with Linux ones. Getting Started Download the latest version of VMware Player for Linux, and select either the 32-bit or 64-bit version, depending on your system. VMware Player is a free download, but requires registration. Sign in with your VMware account, or create a new one if you don’t already have one. VMware Player is fairly easy to install on Linux, but you will need to start out the installation from the terminal. First, enter the following to make sure the installer is marked as executable, substituting version/build_number for the version number on the end of the file you downloaded. chmod +x ./VMware-Player-version/build_number.bundle Then, enter the following to start the install, again substituting your version number: gksudo bash ./VMware-Player-version/build_number.bundle You may have to enter your administrator password to start the installation, and then the VMware Player graphical installer will open. Choose whether you want to check for product updates and submit usage data to VMware, and then proceed with the install as normal. VMware Player installed in only a few minutes in our tests, and was immediately ready to run, no reboot required. You can now launch it from your Ubuntu menu: click Applications \ System Tools \ VMware Player. You’ll need to accept the license agreement the first time you run it. Welcome to VMware Player! Now you can create new virtual machines and run pre-built ones on your Ubuntu desktop. Install Windows in VMware Player on Ubuntu Now that you’ve got VMware setup, it’s time to put it to work. Click the Create a New Virtual Machine as above to start making a Windows virtual machine. In the dialog that opens, select your installer disk or ISO image file that you want to install Windows from. In this example, we’re select a Windows 7 ISO. VMware will automatically detect the operating system on the disk or image. Click Next to continue. Enter your Windows product key, select the edition of Windows to install, and enter your name and password. You can leave the product key field blank and enter it later. VMware will ask if you want to continue without a product key, so just click Yes to continue. Now enter a name for your virtual machine and select where you want to save it. Note: This will take up at least 15Gb of space on your hard drive during the install, so make sure to save it on a drive with sufficient storage space. You can choose how large you want your virtual hard drive to be; the default is 40Gb, but you can choose a different size if you wish. The entire amount will not be used up on your hard drive initially, but the virtual drive will increase in size up to your maximum as you add files. Additionally, you can choose if you want the virtual disk stored as a single file or as multiple files. You will see the best performance by keeping the virtual disk as one file, but the virtual machine will be more portable if it is broken into smaller files, so choose the option that will work best for your needs. Finally, review your settings, and if everything looks good, click Finish to create the virtual machine. VMware will take over now, and install Windows without any further input using its Easy Install. This is one of VMware’s best features, and is the main reason we find it the easiest desktop virtualization solution to use. Installing VMware Tools VMware Player doesn’t include the VMware Tools by default; instead, it automatically downloads them for the operating system you’re installing. Once you’ve downloaded them, it will use those tools anytime you install that OS. If this is your first Windows virtual machine to install, you may be prompted to download and install them while Windows is installing. Click Download and Install so your Easy Install will finish successfully. VMware will then download and install the tools. You may need to enter your administrative password to complete the install. Other than this, you can leave your Windows install unattended; VMware will get everything installed and running on its own. Our test setup took about 30 minutes, and when it was done we were greeted with the Windows desktop ready to use, complete with drivers and the VMware tools. The only thing missing was the Aero glass feature. VMware Player is supposed to support the Aero glass effects in virtual machines, and although this works every time when we use VMware Player on Windows, we could not get it to work in Linux. Other than that, Windows is fully ready to use. You can copy and paste text, images, or files between Ubuntu and Windows, or simply drag-and-drop files between the two. Unity Mode Using Windows in a window is awkward, and makes your Windows programs feel out of place and hard to use. This is where Unity mode comes in. Click Virtual Machine in VMware’s menu, and select Enter Unity. Your Windows desktop will now disappear, and you’ll see a new Windows menu underneath your Ubuntu menu. This works the same as your Windows Start Menu, and you can open your Windows applications and files directly from it. By default, programs from Windows will have a colored border and a VMware badge in the corner. You can turn this off from the VMware settings pane. Click Virtual Machine in VMware’s menu and select Virtual Machine Settings. Select Unity under the Options tab, and uncheck the Show borders and Show badges boxes if you don’t want them. Unity makes your Windows programs feel at home in Ubuntu. Here we have Word 2010 and IE8 open beside the Ubuntu Help application. Notice that the Windows applications show up in the taskbar on the bottom just like the Linux programs. If you’re using the Compiz graphics effects in Ubuntu, your Windows programs will use them too, including the popular wobbly windows effect. You can switch back to running Windows inside VMware Player’s window by clicking the Exit Unity button in the VMware window. Now, whenever you want to run Windows applications in Linux, you can quickly launch it from VMware Player. Conclusion VMware Player is a great way to run Windows on your Linux computer. It makes it extremely easy to get Windows installed and running, lets you run your Windows programs seamlessly alongside your Linux ones. VMware products work great in our experience, and VMware Player on Linux was no exception. If you’re a Windows user and you’d like to run Ubuntu on Windows, check out our article on how to Run Ubuntu in Windows with VMware Player. Link Download VMware Player 3 (Registration required) Download Windows 7 Enterprise 90-day trial Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Enable Copy and Paste from Ubuntu VMware GuestInstall VMware Tools on Ubuntu Edgy EftRestart the Ubuntu Gnome User Interface QuicklyHow to Add a Program to the Ubuntu Startup List (After Login)How To Run Ubuntu in Windows 7 with VMware Player TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor

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Netflix, jQuery, JSONP, and OData

- by Stephen Walther

At the last MIX conference, Netflix announced that they are exposing their catalog of movie information using the OData protocol. This is great news! This means that you can take advantage of all of the advanced OData querying features against a live database of Netflix movies. In this blog entry, I’ll demonstrate how you can use Netflix, jQuery, JSONP, and OData to create a simple movie lookup form. The form enables you to enter a movie title, or part of a movie title, and display a list of matching movies. For example, Figure 1 illustrates the movies displayed when you enter the value robot into the lookup form. Using the Netflix OData Catalog API You can learn about the Netflix OData Catalog API at the following website: http://developer.netflix.com/docs/oData_Catalog The nice thing about this website is that it provides plenty of samples. It also has a good general reference for OData. For example, the website includes a list of OData filter operators and functions. The Netflix Catalog API exposes 4 top-level resources: Titles – A database of Movie information including interesting movie properties such as synopsis, BoxArt, and Cast. People – A database of people information including interesting information such as Awards, TitlesDirected, and TitlesActedIn. Languages – Enables you to get title information in different languages. Genres – Enables you to get title information for specific movie genres. OData is REST based. This means that you can perform queries by putting together the right URL. For example, if you want to get a list of the movies that were released after 2010 and that had an average rating greater than 4 then you can enter the following URL in the address bar of your browser: http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=ReleaseYear gt 2010&AverageRating gt 4 Entering this URL returns the movies in Figure 2. Creating the Movie Lookup Form The complete code for the Movie Lookup form is contained in Listing 1. Listing 1 – MovieLookup.htm <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Netflix with jQuery</title> <style type="text/css"> #movieTemplateContainer div { width:400px; padding: 10px; margin: 10px; border: black solid 1px; } </style> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="App_Scripts/Microtemplates.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <label>Search Movies:</label> <input id="movieName" size="50" /> <button id="btnLookup">Lookup</button> <div id="movieTemplateContainer"></div> <script id="movieTemplate" type="text/html"> <div> <img src="<%=BoxArtSmallUrl %>" /> <strong><%=Name%></strong> <p> <%=Synopsis %> </p> </div> </script> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnLookup").click(function () { // Build OData query var movieName = $("#movieName").val(); var query = "http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog" // netflix base url + "/Titles" // top-level resource + "?$filter=substringof('" + escape(movieName) + "',Name)" // filter by movie name + "&$callback=callback" // jsonp request + "&$format=json"; // json request // Make JSONP call to Netflix $.ajax({ dataType: "jsonp", url: query, jsonpCallback: "callback", success: callback }); }); function callback(result) { // unwrap result var movies = result["d"]["results"]; // show movies in template var showMovie = tmpl("movieTemplate"); var html = ""; for (var i = 0; i < movies.length; i++) { // flatten movie movies[i].BoxArtSmallUrl = movies[i].BoxArt.SmallUrl; // render with template html += showMovie(movies[i]); } $("#movieTemplateContainer").html(html); } </script> </body> </html> The HTML page in Listing 1 includes two JavaScript libraries: <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="App_Scripts/Microtemplates.js" type="text/javascript"></script> The first script tag retrieves jQuery from the Microsoft Ajax CDN. You can learn more about the Microsoft Ajax CDN by visiting the following website: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/cdn.ashx The second script tag is used to reference Resig’s micro-templating library. Because I want to use a template to display each movie, I need this library: http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/ When you enter a value into the Search Movies input field and click the button, the following JavaScript code is executed: // Build OData query var movieName = $("#movieName").val(); var query = "http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog" // netflix base url + "/Titles" // top-level resource + "?$filter=substringof('" + escape(movieName) + "',Name)" // filter by movie name + "&$callback=callback" // jsonp request + "&$format=json"; // json request // Make JSONP call to Netflix $.ajax({ dataType: "jsonp", url: query, jsonpCallback: "callback", success: callback }); This code Is used to build a query that will be executed against the Netflix Catalog API. For example, if you enter the search phrase King Kong then the following URL is created: http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=substringof(‘King%20Kong’,Name)&$callback=callback&$format=json This query includes the following parameters: $filter – You assign a filter expression to this parameter to filter the movie results. $callback – You assign the name of a JavaScript callback method to this parameter. OData calls this method to return the movie results. $format – you assign either the value json or xml to this parameter to specify how the format of the movie results. Notice that all of the OData parameters -- $filter, $callback, $format -- start with a dollar sign $. The Movie Lookup form uses JSONP to retrieve data across the Internet. Because WCF Data Services supports JSONP, and Netflix uses WCF Data Services to expose movies using the OData protocol, you can use JSONP when interacting with the Netflix Catalog API. To learn more about using JSONP with OData, see Pablo Castro’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/pablo/archive/2009/02/25/adding-support-for-jsonp-and-url-controlled-format-to-ado-net-data-services.aspx The actual JSONP call is performed by calling the $.ajax() method. When this call successfully completes, the JavaScript callback() method is called. The callback() method looks like this: function callback(result) { // unwrap result var movies = result["d"]["results"]; // show movies in template var showMovie = tmpl("movieTemplate"); var html = ""; for (var i = 0; i < movies.length; i++) { // flatten movie movies[i].BoxArtSmallUrl = movies[i].BoxArt.SmallUrl; // render with template html += showMovie(movies[i]); } $("#movieTemplateContainer").html(html); } The movie results from Netflix are passed to the callback method. The callback method takes advantage of Resig’s micro-templating library to display each of the movie results. A template used to display each movie is passed to the tmpl() method. The movie template looks like this: <script id="movieTemplate" type="text/html"> <div> <img src="<%=BoxArtSmallUrl %>" /> <strong><%=Name%></strong> <p> <%=Synopsis %> </p> </div> </script> This template looks like a server-side ASP.NET template. However, the template is rendered in the client (browser) instead of the server. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to demonstrate how well jQuery works with OData. We managed to use a number of interesting open-source libraries and open protocols while building the Movie Lookup form including jQuery, JSONP, JSON, and OData.

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Oracle Enhances Oracle Social Cloud with Next-Generation User Experience

- by Richard Lefebvre

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Today’s enterprise must meet the technology standards of today’s consumer. According to a recent IDG Enterprise report, enterprises that invest in consumerized, easy-to-use technologies experience a 56 percent increase in employee productivity and a 46 percent increase in customer satisfaction. In order to deliver that simple and intuitive experience across even the most advanced social management capabilities, Oracle today introduced Social Station, an innovative new workspace within Oracle Social Cloud’s Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform. With Social Station, users benefit from a personalized and intuitive user experience that helps increase both the productivity and performance of social business practices. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} News Facts Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle today introduced Social Station, an innovative new workspace within Oracle Social Cloud’s Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform that helps organizations socially enable the way they do business. With an advanced yet intuitive user interface, Social Station delivers a compelling user experience that improves productivity and helps users more easily deliver on social objectives. To help users quickly and easily build out and configure their social workspaces, Social Station provides drag-and-drop capabilities that allow users to personalize their workspace with different social modules. With a new Custom Analytics module that mixes and matches more than 120 metrics with thousands of customizable reporting options, users can customize their view of social data and access constantly refreshed updates that support real-time understanding. One-click sharing capabilities and annotation functionality within the new Custom Analytics module also drives productivity by improving sharing and collaboration across teams, departments, and executives. Multiview layout capabilities further allows visibility into social insights by offering users the flexibility to monitor conversations by network, stream, metric, graph type, date range, and relative time period. Social Station also includes an Enhanced Calendar module that provides a clear visual representation of content, posts, networks, and views, helping users easily and efficiently understand information and toggle between various functions and views. To support different user personas and social business needs, Oracle plans to continue building out Social Station with additional modules, including content curation, influencer engagement, and command center creation. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 and WCF RIA Services Released

- by ScottGu

The final release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services is now available for download. Download and Install If you already have Visual Studio 2010 installed (or the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express), then you can install both the Silverlight 4 Tooling Support as well as WCF RIA Services support by downloading and running this setup package (note: please make sure to uninstall the preview release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 if you have previously installed that). The Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 package extends the Silverlight support built into Visual Studio 2010 and enables support for Silverlight 4 applications as well. It also installs WCF RIA Services application templates and libraries: Today’s release includes the English edition of the Silverlight 4 Tooling – localized versions will be available next month for other Visual Studio languages as well. Silverlight Tooling Support Visual Studio 2010 includes rich tooling support for building Silverlight and WPF applications. It includes a WYSIWYG designer surface that enables you to easily use controls to construct UI – including the ability to take advantage of layout containers, and apply styles and resources: The VS 2010 designer enables you to leverage the rich data binding support within Silverlight and WPF, and easily wire-up bindings on controls. The Data Sources window within Silverlight projects can be used to reference POCO objects (plain old CLR objects), WCF Services, WCF RIA Services client proxies or SharePoint Lists. For example, let’s assume we add a “Person” class like below to our project: We could then add it to the Data Source window which will cause it to show up like below in the IDE: We can optionally customize the default UI control types that are associated for each property on the object. For example, below we’ll default the BirthDate property to be represented by a “DatePicker” control: And then when we drag/drop the Person type from the Data Sources onto the design-surface it will automatically create UI controls that are bound to the properties of our Person class: VS 2010 allows you to optionally customize each UI binding further by selecting a control, and then right-click on any of its properties within the property-grid and pull up the “Apply Bindings” dialog: This will bring up a floating data-binding dialog that enables you to easily configure things like the binding path on the data source object, specify a format convertor, specify string-format settings, specify how validation errors should be handled, etc: In addition to providing WYSIWYG designer support for WPF and Silverlight applications, VS 2010 also provides rich XAML intellisense and code editing support – enabling a rich source editing environment. Silverlight 4 Tool Enhancements Today’s Silverlight 4 Tooling Release for VS 2010 includes a bunch of nice new features. These include: Support for Silverlight Out of Browser Applications and Elevated Trust Applications You can open up a Silverlight application’s project properties window and click the “Enable Running Application Out of Browser” checkbox to enable you to install an offline, out of browser, version of your Silverlight 4 application. You can then customize a number of “out of browser” settings of your application within Visual Studio: Notice above how you can now indicate that you want to run with elevated trust, with hardware graphics acceleration, as well as customize things like the Window style of the application (allowing you to build a nice polished window style for consumer applications). Support for Implicit Styles and “Go to Value Definition” Support: Silverlight 4 now allows you to define “implicit styles” for your applications. This allows you to style controls by type (for example: have a default look for all buttons) and avoid you having to explicitly reference styles from each control. In addition to honoring implicit styles on the designer-surface, VS 2010 also now allows you to right click on any control (or on one of it properties) and choose the “Go to Value Definition…” context menu to jump to the XAML where the style is defined, and from there you can easily navigate onward to any referenced resources. This makes it much easier to figure out questions like “why is my button red?”: Style Intellisense VS 2010 enables you to easily modify styles you already have in XAML, and now you get intellisense for properties and their values within a style based on the TargetType of the specified control. For example, below we have a style being set for controls of type “Button” (this is indicated by the “TargetType” property). Notice how intellisense now automatically shows us properties for the Button control (even within the <Setter> element): Great Video - Watch the Silverlight Designer Features in Action You can see all of the above Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 features (and some more cool ones I haven’t mentioned) demonstrated in action within this 20 minute Silverlight.TV video on Channel 9: WCF RIA Services Today we also shipped the V1 release of WCF RIA Services. It is included and automatically installed as part of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 setup. WCF RIA Services makes it much easier to build business applications with Silverlight. It simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms using the power of WCF for communication. WCF RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and authorization based on roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier. Put simply – it makes it much easier to query data stored on a server from a client machine, optionally manipulate/modify the data on the client, and then save it back to the server. It supports a validation architecture that helps ensure that your data is kept secure and business rules are applied consistently on both the client and middle-tiers. WCF RIA Services uses WCF for communication between the client and the server It supports both an optimized .NET to .NET binary serialization format, as well as a set of open extensions to the ATOM format known as ODATA and an optional JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format that can be used by any client. You can hear Nikhil and Dinesh talk a little about WCF RIA Services in this 13 minutes Channel 9 video. Putting it all Together – the Silverlight 4 Training Kit Check out the Silverlight 4 Training Kit to learn more about how to build business applications with Silverlight 4, Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services. The training kit includes 8 modules, 25 videos, and several hands-on labs that explain Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services concepts and walks you through building an end-to-end application with them. The training kit is available for free and is a great way to get started. Summary I’m really excited about today’s release – as they really complete the Silverlight development story and deliver a great end to end runtime + tooling story for building applications. All of the above features are available for use both in VS 2010 as well as the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition – making it really easy to get started building great solutions. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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javafx tableview get selected data from ObservableList

- by user3717821

i am working on a javafx project and i need your help . while i am trying to get selected data from table i can get selected data from normal cell but can't get data from ObservableList inside tableview. code for my database: -- phpMyAdmin SQL Dump -- version 4.0.4 -- http://www.phpmyadmin.net -- -- Host: localhost -- Generation Time: Jun 10, 2014 at 06:20 AM -- Server version: 5.1.33-community -- PHP Version: 5.4.12 SET SQL_MODE = "NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO"; SET time_zone = "+00:00"; /*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT=@@CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT */; /*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS=@@CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS */; /*!40101 SET @OLD_COLLATION_CONNECTION=@@COLLATION_CONNECTION */; /*!40101 SET NAMES utf8 */; -- -- Database: `test` -- -- -------------------------------------------------------- -- -- Table structure for table `customer` -- CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `customer` ( `col0` int(11) NOT NULL, `col1` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL, `col2` int(11) DEFAULT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`col0`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1; -- -- Dumping data for table `customer` -- INSERT INTO `customer` (`col0`, `col1`, `col2`) VALUES (12, 'adasdasd', 231), (22, 'adasdasd', 231), (212, 'adasdasd', 231); /*!40101 SET CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT=@OLD_CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT */; /*!40101 SET CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS=@OLD_CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS */; /*!40101 SET COLLATION_CONNECTION=@OLD_COLLATION_CONNECTION */; my javafx codes: import java.sql.Connection; import java.sql.DriverManager; import java.sql.ResultSet; import java.sql.SQLException; import java.util.Map; import javafx.application.Application; import javafx.beans.property.SimpleStringProperty; import javafx.beans.value.ChangeListener; import javafx.beans.value.ObservableValue; import javafx.collections.FXCollections; import javafx.collections.ObservableList; import javafx.event.ActionEvent; import javafx.event.EventHandler; import javafx.scene.Scene; import javafx.scene.control.Button; import javafx.scene.control.TableCell; import javafx.scene.control.TableColumn; import javafx.scene.control.TableColumn.CellDataFeatures; import javafx.scene.control.TablePosition; import javafx.scene.control.TableView; import javafx.scene.control.TableView.TableViewSelectionModel; import javafx.scene.control.cell.ChoiceBoxTableCell; import javafx.scene.control.cell.TextFieldTableCell; import javafx.scene.layout.BorderPane; import javafx.stage.Stage; import javafx.util.Callback; import javafx.util.StringConverter; class DBConnector { private static Connection conn; private static String url = "jdbc:mysql://localhost/test"; private static String user = "root"; private static String pass = "root"; public static Connection connect() throws SQLException{ try{ Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver").newInstance(); }catch(ClassNotFoundException cnfe){ System.err.println("Error: "+cnfe.getMessage()); }catch(InstantiationException ie){ System.err.println("Error: "+ie.getMessage()); }catch(IllegalAccessException iae){ System.err.println("Error: "+iae.getMessage()); } conn = DriverManager.getConnection(url,user,pass); return conn; } public static Connection getConnection() throws SQLException, ClassNotFoundException{ if(conn !=null && !conn.isClosed()) return conn; connect(); return conn; } } public class DynamicTable extends Application{ Object newValue; //TABLE VIEW AND DATA private ObservableList<ObservableList> data; private TableView<ObservableList> tableview; //MAIN EXECUTOR public static void main(String[] args) { launch(args); } //CONNECTION DATABASE public void buildData(){ tableview.setEditable(true); Callback<TableColumn<Map, String>, TableCell<Map, String>> cellFactoryForMap = new Callback<TableColumn<Map, String>, TableCell<Map, String>>() { @Override public TableCell call(TableColumn p) { return new TextFieldTableCell(new StringConverter() { @Override public String toString(Object t) { return t.toString(); } @Override public Object fromString(String string) { return string; } }); } }; Connection c ; data = FXCollections.observableArrayList(); try{ c = DBConnector.connect(); //SQL FOR SELECTING ALL OF CUSTOMER String SQL = "SELECT * from CUSTOMer"; //ResultSet ResultSet rs = c.createStatement().executeQuery(SQL); /********************************** * TABLE COLUMN ADDED DYNAMICALLY * **********************************/ for(int i=0 ; i<rs.getMetaData().getColumnCount(); i++){ //We are using non property style for making dynamic table final int j = i; TableColumn col = new TableColumn(rs.getMetaData().getColumnName(i+1)); if(j==1){ final ObservableList<String> logLevelList = FXCollections.observableArrayList("FATAL", "ERROR", "WARN", "INFO", "INOUT", "DEBUG"); col.setCellFactory(ChoiceBoxTableCell.forTableColumn(logLevelList)); tableview.getColumns().addAll(col); } else{ col.setCellValueFactory(new Callback<CellDataFeatures<ObservableList,String>,ObservableValue<String>>(){ public ObservableValue<String> call(CellDataFeatures<ObservableList, String> param) { return new SimpleStringProperty(param.getValue().get(j).toString()); } }); tableview.getColumns().addAll(col); } if(j!=1) col.setCellFactory(cellFactoryForMap); System.out.println("Column ["+i+"] "); } /******************************** * Data added to ObservableList * ********************************/ while(rs.next()){ //Iterate Row ObservableList<String> row = FXCollections.observableArrayList(); for(int i=1 ; i<=rs.getMetaData().getColumnCount(); i++){ //Iterate Column row.add(rs.getString(i)); } System.out.println("Row [1] added "+row ); data.add(row); } //FINALLY ADDED TO TableView tableview.setItems(data); }catch(Exception e){ e.printStackTrace(); System.out.println("Error on Building Data"); } } @Override public void start(Stage stage) throws Exception { //TableView Button showDataButton = new Button("Add"); showDataButton.setOnAction(new EventHandler<ActionEvent>() { public void handle(ActionEvent event) { ObservableList<String> row = FXCollections.observableArrayList(); for(int i=1 ; i<=3; i++){ //Iterate Column row.add("asdasd"); } data.add(row); //FINALLY ADDED TO TableView tableview.setItems(data); } }); tableview = new TableView(); buildData(); //Main Scene BorderPane root = new BorderPane(); root.setCenter(tableview); root.setBottom(showDataButton); Scene scene = new Scene(root,500,500); stage.setScene(scene); stage.show(); tableview.getSelectionModel().selectedItemProperty().addListener(new ChangeListener() { @Override public void changed(ObservableValue observableValue, Object oldValue, Object newValue) { //Check whether item is selected and set value of selected item to Label if (tableview.getSelectionModel().getSelectedItem() != null) { TableViewSelectionModel selectionModel = tableview.getSelectionModel(); ObservableList selectedCells = selectionModel.getSelectedCells(); TablePosition tablePosition = (TablePosition) selectedCells.get(0); Object val = tablePosition.getTableColumn().getCellData(newValue); System.out.println("Selected Value " + val); System.out.println("Selected row " + newValue); } } }); } } please help me..

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, February 22, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, February 22, 2010New ProjectsAVDB: System to keep track of orders and the inventory of televisions, DVDs, VCRs etcBooky: Booky is an online Bookmark Management Tool. Gear Up for Lord of the Rings Online (lotro): Windows utility for checking what your LOTRO character currently has equipped and figuring out gear you should get to improve your stats.GotSharp Extensions: GotSharp Extensions is a set of helpful classes and extension methods that can make your coding experience easier and cleaner. Halfwit: A minimalist WPF Twitter client.HOA Starter Kit: A community subdivision website starter kit. First draft.Lua For Irony: Project to define the Lua language using the Irony (http://irony.codeplex.com/) development kit. This work is based heavily on the work done for V...MimeCloud: Scalable .NET Digital Asset & Media Management: MimeCloud is a scalable digital asset library & media management toolset. Founded by Alex Norcliffe and Peter Miller Written by people who have b...Parallel Mandelbrot Set solver: Solving the Mandelbrot set using the Parallel class in .NET 4.0. Showing the resulting image in a WPF application. The solution file requires VS 2010.Pomogad - Pomodoro Windows Gadget: Você usa Pomodoro Technique? Não sabe o que é? Veja aqui http://www.pomodorotechnique.com Agora que você já sabe, que tal usar essa técnica? E p...PostCrap - flyweight .NET AOP post compiler: PostCrap is a flyweight attribute based aspect injection .NET post compiler It is written in C# and uses Mono.Cecil to modify assemblies and injec...Software + Service Reference Demo Kit: MS China Developer and Platform Evangelism team created an End-2-End demo for Software + Service. Yet Another SharePoint Tool: YEAST provides you with a simple to integrate approach to generating SharePoint solution packages as part of a Visual Studio project. Zen Coding Visual Studio Plugin: Zen Coding for Visual Studio is plugin for HTML and CSS hi-speed codingNew Releases.Net MSBuild Google Closure Compiler Task: .Net MSBuild Google Closure Compiler Task 1.1: - Corrected issue with regular expression source file and renamingdotNails: dotNails_0.5.9: NOTE - the latest source code has been moved to google code to take advantage of Mercurial source control - http://code.google.com/p/dotnails/sourc...EasyWFUnit: EasyWFUnit-2.2: Release 2.2 of EasyWFUnit, an extension library to support unit testing of Windows Workflow, includes a revised WinForm GUI Test Builder that utili...Fluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite BETA2 (for .NET 4.0RC): Includes Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml) and test application compiled with .NET 4.0 RC.FolderSize: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.3.0: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.3.0 A simple utility intended to be used to scan harddrives for the folders that take most place and display this to the user...Fusion Charts Free for SharePoint: 1.3: Fix release for issue #11833 : Feature Must Be Activated on Root of Web Application.GotSharp Extensions: 1.0: First release, containing only a few extension methods for the System.String and System.IO.Stream classes, and a Range utility class.Jeremy's Experimental Repository: FluentValidation with IoC Sample: Sample code for the blog post Using FluentValidation with an IoC containerMiniTwitter: 1.08: MiniTwitter 1.08 更新内容修正自動更新が CodePlex の変更で動いていなかった問題を修正自動更新に失敗すると落ちるバグを修正通知領域アイコン右クリックで表示されるメニューが消えないバグを修正変更ハッシュタグの抽出条件を変更 API のエンドポイ...MSTS Editors & Tools: Simis Editor v0.3: Simis Editor v0.3 Enabled Edit > Undo and Edit > Redo. Undoing/redoing back to last saved state is identified as saved (no prompt on exit, etc.)....Parallel Mandelbrot Set solver: Alpha 1: First releaseParallelTasks: ParallelTasks 2.0 beta1: ParallelTasks 2.0 is a total re-write of the original version. Featuring improved performance and stability and a more consistent API.Personal Expense Tracker: Personal Expense Tracker v0.1 beta: This is the first beta release. Please provide me with your feedback.PostCrap - flyweight .NET AOP post compiler: PostCrap 1.0 AOP source and binaries: PostCrap 1.0 source and binaries (the unit test project contains sample interceptor attributes for exception handling & logging)Protoforma | Tactica Adversa: Skilful 0.1.3.276: AlphaRawr: Rawr 2.3.10: - More improvements to the default filters - Further improvement on avoiding useless gem swaps from the Optimizer. - Normal/Heroic ICC items shou...Reusable Library: v1.0.2: A collection of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developer.Sem.Sync: 2010-02-21 - Synchronization Manager - Beta: This release is not tested very well, so you should use this version only to evaluate new features. - Changed way of handling source-ids in order ...Survey - web survey & form engine: Survey 1.1.0: Release Survey v. 1.1.0.0 Major changes: - layout & graphics completely overhauled - several technical changes & repairs (e.g. matrix question iss...Yet Another SharePoint Tool: Version 1: Version 1Zeta Resource Editor: Release 2010-02-21: New source code release.Most Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)Image Resizer Powertoy Clone for WindowsASP.NETDotNetNuke® Community EditionMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsDinnerNow.netRawrBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleSharpyjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesSharePoint ContribInfoServicepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcel

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Securing an ASP.NET MVC 2 Application

- by rajbk

This post attempts to look at some of the methods that can be used to secure an ASP.NET MVC 2 Application called Northwind Traders Human Resources. The sample code for the project is attached at the bottom of this post. We are going to use a slightly modified Northwind database. The screen capture from SQL server management studio shows the change. I added a new column called Salary, inserted some random salaries for the employees and then turned off AllowNulls. The reporting relationship for Northwind Employees is shown below. The requirements for our application are as follows: Employees can see their LastName, FirstName, Title, Address and Salary Employees are allowed to edit only their Address information Employees can see the LastName, FirstName, Title, Address and Salary of their immediate reports Employees cannot see records of non immediate reports. Employees are allowed to edit only the Salary and Title information of their immediate reports. Employees are not allowed to edit the Address of an immediate report Employees should be authenticated into the system. Employees by default get the “Employee” role. If a user has direct reports, they will also get assigned a “Manager” role. We use a very basic empId/pwd scheme of EmployeeID (1-9) and password test$1. You should never do this in an actual application. The application should protect from Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF). For example, Michael could trick Steven, who is already logged on to the HR website, to load a page which contains a malicious request. where without Steven’s knowledge, a form on the site posts information back to the Northwind HR website using Steven’s credentials. Michael could use this technique to give himself a raise :-) UI Notes The layout of our app looks like so: When Nancy (EmpID 1) signs on, she sees the default page with her details and is allowed to edit her address. If Nancy attempts to view the record of employee Andrew who has an employeeID of 2 (Employees/Edit/2), she will get a “Not Authorized” error page. When Andrew (EmpID 2) signs on, he can edit the address field of his record and change the title and salary of employees that directly report to him. Implementation Notes All controllers inherit from a BaseController. The BaseController currently only has error handling code. When a user signs on, we check to see if they are in a Manager role. We then create a FormsAuthenticationTicket, encrypt it (including the roles that the employee belongs to) and add it to a cookie. private void SetAuthenticationCookie(int employeeID, List<string> roles) { HttpCookiesSection cookieSection = (HttpCookiesSection) ConfigurationManager.GetSection("system.web/httpCookies"); AuthenticationSection authenticationSection = (AuthenticationSection) ConfigurationManager.GetSection("system.web/authentication"); FormsAuthenticationTicket authTicket = new FormsAuthenticationTicket( 1, employeeID.ToString(), DateTime.Now, DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(authenticationSection.Forms.Timeout.TotalMinutes), false, string.Join("|", roles.ToArray())); String encryptedTicket = FormsAuthentication.Encrypt(authTicket); HttpCookie authCookie = new HttpCookie(FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName, encryptedTicket); if (cookieSection.RequireSSL || authenticationSection.Forms.RequireSSL) { authCookie.Secure = true; } HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies.Add(authCookie); } We read this cookie back in Global.asax and set the Context.User to be a new GenericPrincipal with the roles we assigned earlier. protected void Application_AuthenticateRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e){ if (Context.User != null) { string cookieName = FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName; HttpCookie authCookie = Context.Request.Cookies[cookieName]; if (authCookie == null) return; FormsAuthenticationTicket authTicket = FormsAuthentication.Decrypt(authCookie.Value); string[] roles = authTicket.UserData.Split(new char[] { '|' }); FormsIdentity fi = (FormsIdentity)(Context.User.Identity); Context.User = new System.Security.Principal.GenericPrincipal(fi, roles); }} We ensure that a user has permissions to view a record by creating a custom attribute AuthorizeToViewID that inherits from ActionFilterAttribute. public class AuthorizeToViewIDAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute{ IEmployeeRepository employeeRepository = new EmployeeRepository(); public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) { if (filterContext.ActionParameters.ContainsKey("id") && filterContext.ActionParameters["id"] != null) { if (employeeRepository.IsAuthorizedToView((int)filterContext.ActionParameters["id"])) { return; } } throw new UnauthorizedAccessException("The record does not exist or you do not have permission to access it"); }} We add the AuthorizeToView attribute to any Action method that requires authorization. [HttpPost][Authorize(Order = 1)]//To prevent CSRF[ValidateAntiForgeryToken(Salt = Globals.EditSalt, Order = 2)]//See AuthorizeToViewIDAttribute class[AuthorizeToViewID(Order = 3)] [ActionName("Edit")]public ActionResult Update(int id){ var employeeToEdit = employeeRepository.GetEmployee(id); if (employeeToEdit != null) { //Employees can edit only their address //A manager can edit the title and salary of their subordinate string[] whiteList = (employeeToEdit.IsSubordinate) ? new string[] { "Title", "Salary" } : new string[] { "Address" }; if (TryUpdateModel(employeeToEdit, whiteList)) { employeeRepository.Save(employeeToEdit); return RedirectToAction("Details", new { id = id }); } else { ModelState.AddModelError("", "Please correct the following errors."); } } return View(employeeToEdit);} The Authorize attribute is added to ensure that only authorized users can execute that Action. We use the TryUpdateModel with a white list to ensure that (a) an employee is able to edit only their Address and (b) that a manager is able to edit only the Title and Salary of a subordinate. This works in conjunction with the AuthorizeToViewIDAttribute. The ValidateAntiForgeryToken attribute is added (with a salt) to avoid CSRF. The Order on the attributes specify the order in which the attributes are executed. The Edit View uses the AntiForgeryToken helper to render the hidden token: ......<% using (Html.BeginForm()) {%><%=Html.AntiForgeryToken(NorthwindHR.Models.Globals.EditSalt)%><%= Html.ValidationSummary(true, "Please correct the errors and try again.") %><div class="editor-label"> <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.LastName) %></div><div class="editor-field">...... The application uses View specific models for ease of model binding. public class EmployeeViewModel{ public int EmployeeID; [Required] [DisplayName("Last Name")] public string LastName { get; set; } [Required] [DisplayName("First Name")] public string FirstName { get; set; } [Required] [DisplayName("Title")] public string Title { get; set; } [Required] [DisplayName("Address")] public string Address { get; set; } [Required] [DisplayName("Salary")] [Range(500, double.MaxValue)] public decimal Salary { get; set; } public bool IsSubordinate { get; set; }} To help with displaying readonly/editable fields, we use a helper method. //Simple extension method to display a TextboxFor or DisplayFor based on the isEditable variablepublic static MvcHtmlString TextBoxOrLabelFor<TModel, TProperty>(this HtmlHelper<TModel> htmlHelper, Expression<Func<TModel, TProperty>> expression, bool isEditable){ if (isEditable) { return htmlHelper.TextBoxFor(expression); } else { return htmlHelper.DisplayFor(expression); }} The helper method is used in the view like so: <%=Html.TextBoxOrLabelFor(model => model.Title, Model.IsSubordinate)%> As mentioned in this post, there is a much easier way to update properties on an object. Download Demo Project VS 2008, ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM Remember to change the connectionString to point to your Northwind DB NorthwindHR.zip Feedback and bugs are always welcome :-)

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Reporting Services - It's a Wrap!

- by smisner

If you have any experience at all with Reporting Services, you have probably developed a report using the matrix data region. It's handy when you want to generate columns dynamically based on data. If users view a matrix report online, they can scroll horizontally to view all columns and all is well. But if they want to print the report, the experience is completely different and you'll have to decide how you want to handle dynamic columns. By default, when a user prints a matrix report for which the number of columns exceeds the width of the page, Reporting Services determines how many columns can fit on the page and renders one or more separate pages for the additional columns. In this post, I'll explain two techniques for managing dynamic columns. First, I'll show how to use the RepeatRowHeaders property to make it easier to read a report when columns span multiple pages, and then I'll show you how to "wrap" columns so that you can avoid the horizontal page break. Included with this post are the sample RDLs for download. First, let's look at the default behavior of a matrix. A matrix that has too many columns for one printed page (or output to page-based renderer like PDF or Word) will be rendered such that the first page with the row group headers and the inital set of columns, as shown in Figure 1. The second page continues by rendering the next set of columns that can fit on the page, as shown in Figure 2.This pattern continues until all columns are rendered. The problem with the default behavior is that you've lost the context of employee and sales order - the row headers - on the second page. That makes it hard for users to read this report because the layout requires them to flip back and forth between the current page and the first page of the report. You can fix this behavior by finding the RepeatRowHeaders of the tablix report item and changing its value to True. The second (and subsequent pages) of the matrix now look like the image shown in Figure 3. The problem with this approach is that the number of printed pages to flip through is unpredictable when you have a large number of potential columns. What if you want to include all columns on the same page? You can take advantage of the repeating behavior of a tablix and get repeating columns by embedding one tablix inside of another. For this example, I'm using SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services. You can get similar results with SQL Server 2008. (In fact, you could probably do something similar in SQL Server 2005, but I haven't tested it. The steps would be slightly different because you would be working with the old-style matrix as compared to the new-style tablix discussed in this post.) I created a dataset that queries AdventureWorksDW2008 tables: SELECT TOP (100) e.LastName + ', ' + e.FirstName AS EmployeeName, d.FullDateAlternateKey, f.SalesOrderNumber, p.EnglishProductName, sum(SalesAmount) as SalesAmount FROM FactResellerSales AS f INNER JOIN DimProduct AS p ON p.ProductKey = f.ProductKey INNER JOIN DimDate AS d ON d.DateKey = f.OrderDateKey INNER JOIN DimEmployee AS e ON e.EmployeeKey = f.EmployeeKey GROUP BY p.EnglishProductName, d.FullDateAlternateKey, e.LastName + ', ' + e.FirstName, f.SalesOrderNumber ORDER BY EmployeeName, f.SalesOrderNumber, p.EnglishProductName To start the report: Add a matrix to the report body and drag Employee Name to the row header, which also creates a group. Next drag SalesOrderNumber below Employee Name in the Row Groups panel, which creates a second group and a second column in the row header section of the matrix, as shown in Figure 4. Now for some trickiness. Add another column to the row headers. This new column will be associated with the existing EmployeeName group rather than causing BIDS to create a new group. To do this, right-click on the EmployeeName textbox in the bottom row, point to Insert Column, and then click Inside Group-Right. Then add the SalesOrderNumber field to this new column. By doing this, you're creating a report that repeats a set of columns for each EmployeeName/SalesOrderNumber combination that appears in the data. Next, modify the first row group's expression to group on both EmployeeName and SalesOrderNumber. In the Row Groups section, right-click EmployeeName, click Group Properties, click the Add button, and select [SalesOrderNumber]. Now you need to configure the columns to repeat. Rather than use the Columns group of the matrix like you might expect, you're going to use the textbox that belongs to the second group of the tablix as a location for embedding other report items. First, clear out the text that's currently in the third column - SalesOrderNumber - because it's already added as a separate textbox in this report design. Then drag and drop a matrix into that textbox, as shown in Figure 5. Again, you need to do some tricks here to get the appearance and behavior right. We don't really want repeating rows in the embedded matrix, so follow these steps: Click on the Rows label which then displays RowGroup in the Row Groups pane below the report body. Right-click on RowGroup,click Delete Group, and select the option to delete associated rows and columns. As a result, you get a modified matrix which has only a ColumnGroup in it, with a row above a double-dashed line for the column group and a row below the line for the aggregated data. Let's continue: Drag EnglishProductName to the data textbox (below the line). Add a second data row by right-clicking EnglishProductName, pointing to Insert Row, and clicking Below. Add the SalesAmount field to the new data textbox. Now eliminate the column group row without eliminating the group. To do this, right-click the row above the double-dashed line, click Delete Rows, and then select Delete Rows Only in the message box. Now you're ready for the fit and finish phase: Resize the column containing the embedded matrix so that it fits completely. Also, the final column in the matrix is for the column group. You can't delete this column, but you can make it as small as possible. Just click on the matrix to display the row and column handles, and then drag the right edge of the rightmost column to the left to make the column virtually disappear. Next, configure the groups so that the columns of the embedded matrix will wrap. In the Column Groups pane, right-click ColumnGroup1 and click on the expression button (labeled fx) to the right of Group On [EnglishProductName]. Replace the expression with the following: =RowNumber("SalesOrderNumber" ). We use SalesOrderNumber here because that is the name of the group that "contains" the embedded matrix. The next step is to configure the number of columns to display before wrapping. Click any cell in the matrix that is not inside the embedded matrix, and then double-click the second group in the Row Groups pane - SalesOrderNumber. Change the group expression to the following expression: =Ceiling(RowNumber("EmployeeName")/3) The last step is to apply formatting. In my example, I set the SalesAmount textbox's Format property to C2 and also right-aligned the text in both the EnglishProductName and the SalesAmount textboxes. And voila - Figure 6 shows a matrix report with wrapping columns. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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Validation in Silverlight

- by Timmy Kokke

Getting started with the basics Validation in Silverlight can get very complex pretty easy. The DataGrid control is the only control that does data validation automatically, but often you want to validate your own entry form. Values a user may enter in this form can be restricted by the customer and have to fit an exact fit to a list of requirements or you just want to prevent problems when saving the data to the database. Showing a message to the user when a value is entered is pretty straight forward as I’ll show you in the following example. This (default) Silverlight textbox is data-bound to a simple data class. It has to be bound in “Two-way” mode to be sure the source value is updated when the target value changes. The INotifyPropertyChanged interface must be implemented by the data class to get the notification system to work. When the property changes a simple check is performed and when it doesn’t match some criteria an ValidationException is thrown. The ValidatesOnExceptions binding attribute is set to True to tell the textbox it should handle the thrown ValidationException. Let’s have a look at some code now. The xaml should contain something like below. The most important part is inside the binding. In this case the Text property is bound to the “Name” property in TwoWay mode. It is also told to validate on exceptions. This property is false by default. <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBox Width="150" x:Name="Name" Text="{Binding Path=Name, Mode=TwoWay, ValidatesOnExceptions=True}"/> <TextBlock Text="Name"/> </StackPanel> The data class in this first example is a very simplified person class with only one property: string Name. The INotifyPropertyChanged interface is implemented and the PropertyChanged event is fired when the Name property changes. When the property changes a check is performed to see if the new string is null or empty. If this is the case a ValidationException is thrown explaining that the entered value is invalid. public class PersonData:INotifyPropertyChanged { private string _name; public string Name { get { return _name; } set { if (_name != value) { if(string.IsNullOrEmpty(value)) throw new ValidationException("Name is required"); _name = value; if (PropertyChanged != null) PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs("Name")); } } } public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged=delegate { }; } The last thing that has to be done is letting binding an instance of the PersonData class to the DataContext of the control. This is done in the code behind file. public partial class Demo1 : UserControl { public Demo1() { InitializeComponent(); this.DataContext = new PersonData() {Name = "Johnny Walker"}; } } Error Summary In many cases you would have more than one entry control. A summary of errors would be nice in such case. With a few changes to the xaml an error summary, like below, can be added. First, add a namespace to the xaml so the control can be used. Add the following line to the header of the .xaml file. xmlns:Controls="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls;assembly=System.Windows.Controls.Data.Input" Next, add the control to the layout. To get the result as in the image showed earlier, add the control right above the StackPanel from the first example. It’s got a small margin to separate it from the textbox a little. <Controls:ValidationSummary Margin="8"/> The ValidationSummary control has to be notified that an ValidationException occurred. This can be done with a small change to the xaml too. Add the NotifyOnValidationError to the binding expression. By default this value is set to false, so nothing would be notified. Set the property to true to get it to work. <TextBox Width="150" x:Name="Name" Text="{Binding Name, Mode=TwoWay, ValidatesOnExceptions=True, NotifyOnValidationError=True}"/> Data annotation Validating data in the setter is one option, but not my personal favorite. It’s the easiest way if you have a single required value you want to check, but often you want to validate more. Besides, I don’t consider it best practice to write logic in setters. The way used by frameworks like WCF Ria Services is the use of attributes on the properties. Instead of throwing exceptions you have to call the static method ValidateProperty on the Validator class. This call stays always the same for a particular property, not even when you change the attributes on the property. To mark a property “Required” you can use the RequiredAttribute. This is what the Name property is going to look like: [Required] public string Name { get { return _name; } set { if (_name != value) { Validator.ValidateProperty(value, new ValidationContext(this, null, null){ MemberName = "Name" }); _name = value; if (PropertyChanged != null) PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs("Name")); } } } The ValidateProperty method takes the new value for the property and an instance of ValidationContext. The properties passed to the constructor of the ValidationContextclass are very straight forward. This part is the same every time. The only thing that changes is the MemberName property of the ValidationContext. Property has to hold the name of the property you want to validate. It’s the same value you provide the PropertyChangedEventArgs with. The System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotation contains eight different validation attributes including a base class to create your own. They are: RequiredAttribute Specifies that a value must be provided. RangeAttribute The provide value must fall in the specified range. RegularExpressionAttribute Validates is the value matches the regular expression. StringLengthAttribute Checks if the number of characters in a string falls between a minimum and maximum amount. CustomValidationAttribute Use a custom method to validate the value. DataTypeAttribute Specify a data type using an enum or a custom data type. EnumDataTypeAttribute Makes sure the value is found in a enum. ValidationAttribute A base class for custom validation attributes All of these will ensure that an validation exception is thrown, except the DataTypeAttribute. This attribute is used to provide some additional information about the property. You can use this information in your own code. [Required] [Range(0,125,ErrorMessage = "Value is not a valid age")] public int Age { It’s no problem to stack different validation attributes together. For example, when an Age is required and must fall in the range from 0 to 125: [Required, StringLength(255,MinimumLength = 3)] public string Name { Or in one row like this, for a required Name with at least 3 characters and a maximum of 255: Delayed validation Having properties marked as required can be very useful. The only downside to the technique described earlier is that you have to change the value in order to get it validated. What if you start out with empty an empty entry form? All fields are empty and thus won’t be validated. With this small trick you can validate at the moment the user click the submit button. <TextBox Width="150" x:Name="NameField" Text="{Binding Name, Mode=TwoWay, ValidatesOnExceptions=True, NotifyOnValidationError=True, UpdateSourceTrigger=Explicit}"/> By default, when a TwoWay bound control looses focus the value is updated. When you added validation like I’ve shown you earlier, the value is validated. To overcome this, you have to tell the binding update explicitly by setting the UpdateSourceTrigger binding property to Explicit: private void SubmitButtonClick(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { NameField.GetBindingExpression(TextBox.TextProperty).UpdateSource(); } This way, the binding is in two direction but the source is only updated, thus validated, when you tell it to. In the code behind you have to call the UpdateSource method on the binding expression, which you can get from the TextBox. Conclusion Data validation is something you’ll probably want on almost every entry form. I always thought it was hard to do, but it wasn’t. If you can throw an exception you can do validation. If you want to know anything more in depth about something I talked about in this article let me know. I might write an entire post to that.

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Michael Crump’s notes for 70-563 PRO – Designing and Developing Windows Applications usi

- by mbcrump

TIME TO GO PRO! This is my notes for 70-563 PRO – Designing and Developing Windows Applications using .NET Framework 3.5 I created it using several resources (various certification web sites, msdn, official ms 70-548 book). The reason that I created this review is because a) I am taking the exam. b) MS did not create a book for this exam. Use the(MS 70-548)book. c) To make sure I am familiar with each before the exam. I hope that it provides a good start for your own notes. I hope that someone finds this useful. At least, it will give you a starting point of what to expect to know on the PRO exam. Also, for those wondering, the PRO exam does contains very little code. It is basically all theory. 1. Validation Controls – How to prevent users from entering invalid data on forms. (MaskedTextBox control and RegEx) 2. ServiceController – used to start and control the behavior of existing services. 3. User Feedback (know winforms Status Bar, Tool Tips, Color, Error Provider, Context-Sensitive and Accessibility) 4. Specific (derived) exceptions must be handled before general (base class) exceptions. By moving the exception handling for the base type Exception to after exception handling of ArgumentNullException, all ArgumentNullException thrown by the Helper method will be caught and logged correctly. 5. A heartbeat method is a method exposed by a Web service that allows external applications to check on the status of the service. 6. New users must master key tasks quickly. Giving these tasks context and appropriate detail will help. However, advanced users will demand quicker paths. Shortcuts, accelerators, or toolbar buttons will speed things along for the advanced user. 7. MSBuild uses project files to instruct the build engine what to build and how to build it. MSBuild project files are XML files that adhere to the MSBuild XML schema. The MSBuild project files contain complete file, build action, and dependency information for each individual projects. 8. Evaluating whether or not to fix a bug involves a triage process. You must identify the bug's impact, set the priority, categorize it, and assign a developer. Many times the person doing the triage work will assign the bug to a developer for further investigation. In fact, the workflow for the bug work item inside of Team System supports this step. Developers are often asked to assess the impact of a given bug. This assessment helps the person doing the triage make a decision on how to proceed. When assessing the impact of a bug, you should consider time and resources to fix it, bug risk, and impacts of the bug. 9. In large projects it is generally impossible and unfeasible to fix all bugs because of the impact on schedule and budget. 10. Code reviews should be conducted by a technical lead or a technical peer. 11. Testing Applications 12. WCF Services – application state 13. SQL Server 2005 / 2008 Express Edition – reliable storage of data / Microsoft SQL Server 3.5 Compact Database– used for client computers to retrieve and save data from a shared location. 14. SQL Server 2008 Compact Edition – used for minimum possible memory and can synchronize data with a corporate SQL Server 2008 Database. Supports offline user and minimum dependency on external components. 15. MDI and SDI Forms (specifically IsMDIContainer) 16. GUID – in the case of data warehousing, it is important to define unique keys. 17. Encrypting / Security Data 18. Understanding of Isolated Storage/Proper location to store items 19. LINQ to SQL 20. Multithreaded access 21. ADO.NET Entity Framework model 22. Marshal.ReleaseComObject 23. Common User Interface Layout (ComboBox, ListBox, Listview, MaskedTextBox, TextBox, RichTextBox, SplitContainer, TableLayoutPanel, TabControl) 24. DataSets Class - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.dataset%28VS.71%29.aspx 25. SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services (SSRS) 26. SystemIcons.Shield (Vista UAC) 27. Leverging stored procedures to perform data manipulation for a database schema that can change. 28. DataContext 29. Microsoft Windows Installer Packages, ClickOnce(bootstrapping features), XCopy. 30. Client Application Services – will authenticate users by using the same data source as a ASP.NET web application. 31. SQL Server 2008 Caching 32. StringBuilder 33. Accessibility Guidelines for Windows Applications http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228004.aspx 34. Logging erros 35. Testing performance related issues. 36. Role Based Security, GenericIdentity and GenericPrincipal 37. System.Net.CookieContainer will store session data for webapps (see isolated storage for winforms) 38. .NET CLR Profiler tool will identify objects that cause performance issues. 39. ADO.NET Synchronization (SyncGroup) 40. Globalization - CultureInfo 41. IDisposable Interface- reports on several questions relating to this. 42. Adding timestamps to determine whether data has changed or not. 43. Converting applications to .NET Framework 3.5 44. MicrosoftReportViewer 45. Composite Controls 46. Windows Vista KNOWN folders. 47. Microsoft Sync Framework 48. TypeConverter -Provides a unified way of converting types of values to other types, as well as for accessing standard values and sub properties. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.typeconverter.aspx 49. Concurrency control mechanisms The main categories of concurrency control mechanisms are: Optimistic - Delay the checking of whether a transaction meets the isolation rules (e.g., serializability and recoverability) until its end, without blocking any of its (read, write) operations, and then abort a transaction, if the desired rules are violated. Pessimistic - Block operations of a transaction, if they may cause violation of the rules. Semi-optimistic - Block operations in some situations, and do not block in other situations, while delaying rules checking to transaction's end, as done with optimistic. 50. AutoResetEvent 51. Microsoft Messaging Queue (MSMQ) 4.0 52. Bulk imports 53. KeyDown event of controls 54. WPF UI components 55. UI process layer 56. GAC (installing, removing and queuing) 57. Use a local database cache to reduce the network bandwidth used by applications. 58. Sound can easily be annoying and distracting to users, so use it judiciously. Always give users the option to turn sound off. Because a user might have sound off, never convey important information through sound alone.

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May 2011 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit

- by Stephen Walther

I’m happy to announce that the Superexpert team has published the May 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit at CodePlex. You can download the new release at the following URL: http://ajaxcontroltoolkit.codeplex.com/releases/view/65800 This release focused on improving the ModalPopup and AsyncFileUpload controls. Our team closed a total of 34 bugs related to the ModalPopup and AsyncFileUpload controls. Enhanced ModalPopup Control You can take advantage of the Ajax Control Toolkit ModalPopup control to easily create popup dialogs in your ASP.NET Web Forms applications. When the dialog appears, you cannot interact with any page content which appears behind the modal dialog. For example, the following page contains a standard ASP.NET Button and Panel. When you click the Button, the Panel appears as a popup dialog: <%@ Page Language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeBehind="Simple.aspx.vb" Inherits="ACTSamples.Simple" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="act" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head runat="server"> <title>Simple Modal Popup Sample</title> <style type="text/css"> html { background-color: blue; } #dialog { border: 2px solid black; width: 500px; background-color: White; } #dialogContents { padding: 10px; } .modalBackground { background-color:Gray; filter:alpha(opacity=70); opacity:0.7; } </style> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <act:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm" runat="server" /> <asp:Panel ID="dialog" runat="server"> <div id="dialogContents"> Here are the contents of the dialog. <br /> <asp:Button ID="btnOK" Text="OK" runat="server" /> </div> </asp:Panel> <asp:Button ID="btnShow" Text="Open Dialog" runat="server" /> <act:ModalPopupExtender TargetControlID="btnShow" PopupControlID="dialog" OkControlID="btnOK" DropShadow="true" BackgroundCssClass="modalBackground" runat="server" /> </div> </form> </body> </html> Notice that the page includes two controls from the Ajax Control Toolkit: the ToolkitScriptManager and the ModalPopupExtender control. Any page which uses any of the controls from the Ajax Control Toolkit must include a ToolkitScriptManager. The ModalPopupExtender is used to create the popup. The following properties are set: · TargetControlID – This is the ID of the Button or LinkButton control which causes the modal popup to be displayed. · PopupControlID – This is the ID of the Panel control which contains the content displayed in the modal popup. · OKControlID – This is the ID of a Button or LinkButton which causes the modal popup to close. · DropShadow – Displays a drop shadow behind the modal popup. · BackgroundCSSClass – The name of a Cascading Style Sheet class which is used to gray out the background of the page when the modal popup is displayed. The ModalPopup is completely cross-browser compatible. For example, the following screenshots show the same page displayed in Firefox 4, Internet Explorer 9, and Chrome 11: The ModalPopup control has lots of nice properties. For example, you can make the ModalPopup draggable. You also can programmatically hide and show a modal popup from either server-side or client-side code. To learn more about the properties of the ModalPopup control, see the following website: http://www.asp.net/ajax/ajaxcontroltoolkit/Samples/ModalPopup/ModalPopup.aspx Animated ModalPopup Control In the May 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit, we enhanced the Modal Popup control so that it supports animations. We made this modification in response to a feature request posted at CodePlex which got 65 votes (plenty of people wanted this feature): http://ajaxcontroltoolkit.codeplex.com/workitem/6944 I want to thank Dani Kenan for posting a patch to this issue which we used as the basis for adding animation support for the modal popup. Thanks Dani! The enhanced ModalPopup in the May 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit supports the following animations: OnShowing – Called before the modal popup is shown. OnShown – Called after the modal popup is shown. OnHiding – Called before the modal popup is hidden. OnHidden – Called after the modal popup is hidden. You can use these animations, for example, to fade-in a modal popup when it is displayed and fade-out the popup when it is hidden. Here’s the code: <act:ModalPopupExtender ID="ModalPopupExtender1" TargetControlID="btnShow" PopupControlID="dialog" OkControlID="btnOK" DropShadow="true" BackgroundCssClass="modalBackground" runat="server"> <Animations> <OnShown> <Fadein /> </OnShown> <OnHiding> <Fadeout /> </OnHiding> </Animations> </act:ModalPopupExtender> So that you can experience the full joy of this animated modal popup, I recorded the following video: Of course, you can use any of the animations supported by the Ajax Control Toolkit with the modal popup. The animation reference is located here: http://www.asp.net/ajax/ajaxcontroltoolkit/Samples/Walkthrough/AnimationReference.aspx Fixes to the AsyncFileUpload In the May 2011 release, we also focused our energies on performing bug fixes for the AsyncFileUpload control. We fixed several major issues with the AsyncFileUpload including: It did not work in master pages It did not work when ClientIDMode=”Static” It did not work with Firefox 4 It did not work when multiple AsyncFileUploads were included in the same page It generated markup which was not HTML5 compatible The AsyncFileUpload control is a super useful control. It enables you to upload files in a form without performing a postback. Here’s some sample code which demonstrates how you can use the AsyncFileUpload: <%@ Page Language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeBehind="Simple.aspx.vb" Inherits="ACTSamples.Simple1" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="act" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head id="Head1" runat="server"> <title>Simple AsyncFileUpload</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <act:ToolkitScriptManager ID="tsm" runat="server" /> User Name: <br /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtUserName" runat="server" /> <asp:RequiredFieldValidator EnableClientScript="false" ErrorMessage="Required" ControlToValidate="txtUserName" runat="server" /> <br /><br /> Avatar: <act:AsyncFileUpload ID="async1" ThrobberID="throbber" UploadingBackColor="yellow" ErrorBackColor="red" CompleteBackColor="green" UploaderStyle="Modern" PersistFile="true" runat="server" /> <asp:Image ID="throbber" ImageUrl="uploading.gif" style="display:none" runat="server" /> <br /><br /> <asp:Button ID="btnSubmit" Text="Submit" runat="server" /> </div> </form> </body> </html> And here’s the code-behind for the page above: Public Class Simple1 Inherits System.Web.UI.Page Private Sub btnSubmit_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnSubmit.Click If Page.IsValid Then ' Get Form Fields Dim userName As String Dim file As Byte() userName = txtUserName.Text If async1.HasFile Then file = async1.FileBytes End If ' Save userName, file to database ' Redirect to success page Response.Redirect("SimpleDone.aspx") End If End Sub End Class The form above contains an AsyncFileUpload which has values for the following properties: ThrobberID – The ID of an element in the page to display while a file is being uploaded. UploadingBackColor – The color to display in the upload field while a file is being uploaded. ErrorBackColor – The color to display in the upload field when there is an error uploading a file. CompleteBackColor – The color to display in the upload field when the upload is complete. UploaderStyle – The user interface style: Traditional or Modern. PersistFile – When true, the uploaded file is persisted in Session state. The last property PersistFile, causes the uploaded file to be stored in Session state. That way, if completing a form requires multiple postbacks, then the user needs to upload the file only once. For example, if there is a server validation error, then the user is not required to re-upload the file after fixing the validation issue. In the sample code above, this condition is simulated by disabling client-side validation for the RequiredFieldValidator control. The RequiredFieldValidator EnableClientScript property has the value false. The following video demonstrates how the AsyncFileUpload control works: You can learn more about the properties and methods of the AsyncFileUpload control by visiting the following page: http://www.asp.net/ajax/ajaxcontroltoolkit/Samples/AsyncFileUpload/AsyncFileUpload.aspx Conclusion In the May 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit, we addressed over 30 bugs related to the ModalPopup and AsyncFileUpload controls. Furthermore, by building on code submitted by the community, we enhanced the ModalPopup control so that it supports animation (Thanks Dani). In our next sprint for the June release of the Ajax Control Toolkit, we plan to focus on the HTML Editor control. Subscribe to this blog to keep updated.

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New Skool Crosstabbing

- by Tim Dexter

A while back I spoke about having to go back to BIP's original crosstabbing solution to achieve a certain layout. Hok Min has provided a 'man' page for the new crosstab/pivot builder for 10.1.3.4.1 users. This will make the documentation drop but for now, get it here! The old, hand method is still available but this new approach, is more efficient and flexible. That said you may need to get into the crosstab code to tweak it where the crosstab dialog can not help. I had to do this, this week but more on that later. The following explains how the crosstab wizard builds the crosstab and what the fields inside the resulting template structure are there for. To create the crosstab a new XDO command "<?crosstab:...?>" has been created. XDO Command: <?crosstab: ctvarname; data-element; rows; columns; measures; aggregation?> Parameter Description Example Ctvarname Crosstab variable name. This is automatically generated by the Add-in. C123 data-element This is the XML data element that contains the data. "//ROW" Rows This contains a list of XML elements for row headers. The ordering information is specified within "{" and "}". The first attribute is the sort element. Leaving it blank means the sort element is the same as the row header element. The attribute "o" means order. Its value can be "a" for ascending, or "d" for descending. The attribute "t" means type. Its value can be "t" for text, and "n" for numeric. There can be more than one sort elements, example: "emp-full-name {emp-lastname,o=a,t=n}{emp-firstname,o=a,t=n}. This will sort employee by last name and first name. "Region{,o=a,t=t}, District{,o=a,t=t}" In the example, the first row header is "Region". It is sort by "Region", order is ascending, and type is text. The second row header is "District". It is sort by "District", order is ascending, and type is text. Columns This contains a list of XML elements for columns headers. The ordering information is specified within "{" and "}". The first attribute is the sort element. Leaving it blank means the sort element is the same as the column header element. The attribute "o" means order. Its value can be "a" for ascending, or "d" for descending. The attribute "t" means type. Its value can be "t" for text, and "n" for numeric. There can be more than one sort elements, example: "emp-full-name {emp-lastname,o=a,t=n}{emp-firstname,o=a,t=n}. This will sort employee by last name and first name. "ProductsBrand{,o=a,t=t}, PeriodYear{,o=a,t=t}" In the example, the first column header is "ProductsBrand". It is sort by "ProductsBrand", order is ascending, and type is text. The second column header is "PeriodYear". It is sort by "District", order is ascending, and type is text. Measures This contains a list of XML elements for measures. "Revenue, PrevRevenue" Aggregation The aggregation function name. Currently, we only support "sum". "sum" Using the Oracle BI Publisher Template Builder for Word add-in, we are able to construct the following Pivot Table: The generated XDO command for this Pivot Table is as follow: <?crosstab:c547; "//ROW";"Region{,o=a,t=t}, District{,o=a,t=t}"; "ProductsBrand{,o=a,t=t},PeriodYear{,o=a,t=t}"; "Revenue, PrevRevenue";"sum"?> Running the command on the give XML data files generates this XML file "cttree.xml". Each XPath in the "cttree.xml" is described in the following table. Element XPath Count Description C0 /cttree/C0 1 This contains elements which are related to column. C1 /cttree/C0/C1 4 The first level column "ProductsBrand". There are four distinct values. They are shown in the label H element. CS /cttree/C0/C1/CS 4 The column-span value. It is used to format the crosstab table. H /cttree/C0/C1/H 4 The column header label. There are four distinct values "Enterprise", "Magicolor", "McCloskey" and "Valspar". T1 /cttree/C0/C1/T1 4 The sum for measure 1, which is Revenue. T2 /cttree/C0/C1/T2 4 The sum for measure 2, which is PrevRevenue. C2 /cttree/C0/C1/C2 8 The first level column "PeriodYear", which is the second group-by key. There are two distinct values "2001" and "2002". H /cttree/C0/C1/C2/H 8 The column header label. There are two distinct values "2001" and "2002". Since it is under C1, therefore the total number of entries is 4 x 2 => 8. T1 /cttree/C0/C1/C2/T1 8 The sum for measure 1 "Revenue". T2 /cttree/C0/C1/C2/T2 8 The sum for measure 2 "PrevRevenue". M0 /cttree/M0 1 This contains elements which are related to measures. M1 /cttree/M0/M1 1 This contains summary for measure 1. H /cttree/M0/M1/H 1 The measure 1 label, which is "Revenue". T /cttree/M0/M1/T 1 The sum of measure 1 for the entire xpath from "//ROW". M2 /cttree/M0/M2 1 This contains summary for measure 2. H /cttree/M0/M2/H 1 The measure 2 label, which is "PrevRevenue". T /cttree/M0/M2/T 1 The sum of measure 2 for the entire xpath from "//ROW". R0 /cttree/R0 1 This contains elements which are related to row. R1 /cttree/R0/R1 4 The first level row "Region". There are four distinct values, they are shown in the label H element. H /cttree/R0/R1/H 4 This is row header label for "Region". There are four distinct values "CENTRAL REGION", "EASTERN REGION", "SOUTHERN REGION" and "WESTERN REGION". RS /cttree/R0/R1/RS 4 The row-span value. It is used to format the crosstab table. T1 /cttree/R0/R1/T1 4 The sum of measure 1 "Revenue" for each distinct "Region" value. T2 /cttree/R0/R1/T2 4 The sum of measure 1 "Revenue" for each distinct "Region" value. R1C1 /cttree/R0/R1/R1C1 16 This contains elements from combining R1 and C1. There are 4 distinct values for "Region", and four distinct values for "ProductsBrand". Therefore, the combination is 4 X 4 è 16. T1 /cttree/R0/R1/R1C1/T1 16 The sum of measure 1 "Revenue" for each combination of "Region" and "ProductsBrand". T2 /cttree/R0/R1/R1C1/T2 16 The sum of measure 2 "PrevRevenue" for each combination of "Region" and "ProductsBrand". R1C2 /cttree/R0/R1/R1C1/R1C2 32 This contains elements from combining R1, C1 and C2. There are 4 distinct values for "Region", and four distinct values for "ProductsBrand", and two distinct values of "PeriodYear". Therefore, the combination is 4 X 4 X 2 è 32. T1 /cttree/R0/R1/R1C1/R1C2/T1 32 The sum of measure 1 "Revenue" for each combination of "Region", "ProductsBrand" and "PeriodYear". T2 /cttree/R0/R1/R1C1/R1C2/T2 32 The sum of measure 2 "PrevRevenue" for each combination of "Region", "ProductsBrand" and "PeriodYear". R2 /cttree/R0/R1/R2 18 This contains elements from combining R1 "Region" and R2 "District". Since the list of values in R2 has dependency on R1, therefore the number of entries is not just a simple multiplication. H /cttree/R0/R1/R2/H 18 The row header label for R2 "District". R1N /cttree/R0/R1/R2/R1N 18 The R2 position number within R1. This is used to check if it is the last row, and draw table border accordingly. T1 /cttree/R0/R1/R2/T1 18 The sum of measure 1 "Revenue" for each combination "Region" and "District". T2 /cttree/R0/R1/R2/T2 18 The sum of measure 2 "PrevRevenue" for each combination of "Region" and "District". R2C1 /cttree/R0/R1/R2/R2C1 72 This contains elements from combining R1, R2 and C1. T1 /cttree/R0/R1/R2/R2C1/T1 72 The sum of measure 1 "Revenue" for each combination of "Region", "District" and "ProductsBrand". T2 /cttree/R0/R1/R2/R2C1/T2 72 The sum of measure 2 "PrevRevenue" for each combination of "Region", "District" and "ProductsBrand". R2C2 /cttree/R0/R1/R2/R2C1/R2C2 144 This contains elements from combining R1, R2, C1 and C2, which gives the finest level of details. M1 /cttree/R0/R1/R2/R2C1/R2C2/M1 144 The sum of measure 1 "Revenue". M2 /cttree/R0/R1/R2/R2C1/R2C2/M2 144 The sum of measure 2 "PrevRevenue". Lots to read and digest I know! Customization One new feature I discovered this week is the ability to show one column and sort by another. I had a data set that was extracting month abbreviations, we wanted to show the months across the top and some row headers to the side. As you may know XSL is not great with dates, especially recognising month names. It just wants to sort them alphabetically, so Apr comes before Jan, etc. A way around this is to generate a month number alongside the month and use that to sort. We can do that in the crosstab, sadly its not exposed in the UI yet but its doable. Go back up and take a look a the initial crosstab command. especially the Rows and Columns entries. In there you will find the sort criteria. "ProductsBrand{,o=a,t=t}, PeriodYear{,o=a,t=t}" Notice those leading commas inside the curly braces? Because there is no field preceding them it means that the crosstab should sort on the column before the brace ie PeriodYear. But you can insert another column in the data set to sort by. To get my sort working how I needed. <?crosstab:c794;"current-group()";"_Fund_Type_._Fund_Type_Display_{_Fund_Type_._Fund_Type_Sort_,o=a,t=n}";"_Fiscal_Period__Amount__._Amt_Fm_Disp_Abbr_{_Fiscal_Period__Amount__._Amt_Fiscal_Month_Sort_,o=a,t=n}";"_Execution_Facts_._Amt_";"sum"?> Excuse the horribly verbose XML tags, good ol BIEE :0) The emboldened columns are not in the crosstab but are in the data set. I just opened up the field, dropped them in and changed the type(t) value to be 'n', for number, instead of the default 'a' and my crosstab started sorting how I wanted it. If you find other tips and tricks, please share in the comments.

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What is SharePoint Out of the Box?

- by Bil Simser

It’s always fun in the blog-o-sphere and SharePoint bloggers always keep the pot boiling. Bjorn Furuknap recently posted a blog entry titled Why Out-of-the-Box Makes No Sense in SharePoint, quickly followed up by a rebuttal by Marc Anderson on his blog. Okay, now that we have all the players and the stage what’s the big deal? Bjorn started his post saying that you don’t use “out-of-the-box” (OOTB) SharePoint because it makes no sense. I have to disagree with his premise because what he calls OOTB is basically installing SharePoint and admiring it, but not using it. In his post he lays claim that modifying say the OOTB contacts list by removing (or I suppose adding) a column, now puts you in a situation where you’re no longer using the OOTB functionality. Really? Side note. Dear Internet, please stop comparing building software to building houses. Or comparing software architecture to building architecture. Or comparing web sites to making dinner. Are you trying to dumb down something so the general masses understand it? Comparing a technical skill to a construction operation isn’t the way to do this. Last time I checked, most people don’t know how to build houses and last time I checked people reading technical SharePoint blogs are generally technical people that understand the terms you use. Putting metaphors around software development to make it easy to understand is detrimental to the goal. </rant> Okay, where were we? Right, adding columns to lists means you are no longer using the OOTB functionality. Yeah, I still don’t get it. Another statement Bjorn makes is that using the OOTB functionality kills the flexibility SharePoint has in creating exactly what you want. IMHO this really flies in the absolute face of *where* SharePoint *really* shines. For the past year or so I’ve been leaning more and more towards OOTB solutions over custom development for the simple reason that its expensive to maintain systems and code and assets. SharePoint has enabled me to do this simply by providing the tools where I can give users what they need without cracking open up Visual Studio. This might be the fact that my day job is with a regulated company and there’s more scrutiny with spending money on anything new, but frankly that should be the position of any responsible developer, architect, manager, or PM. Do you really want to throw money away because some developer tells you that you need a custom web part when perhaps with some creative thinking or expectation setting with customers you can meet the need with what you already have. The way I read Bjorn’s terminology of “out-of-the-box” is install the software and tell people to go to a website and admire the OOTB system, but don’t change it! For those that know things like WordPress, DotNetNuke, SubText, Drupal or any of those content management/blogging systems, its akin to installing the software and setting up the “Hello World” blog post or page, then staring at it like it’s useful. “Yes, we are using WordPress!”. Then not adding a new post, creating a new category, or adding an About page. Perhaps I’m wrong in my interpretation. This leads us to what is OOTB SharePoint? To many people I’ve talked to the last few hours on twitter, email, etc. it is *not* just installing software but actually using it as it was fit for purpose. What’s the purpose of SharePoint then? It has many purposes, but using the OOTB templates Microsoft has given you the ability to collaborate on projects, author/share/publish documents, create pages, track items/contacts/tasks/etc. in a multi-user web based interface, and so on. Microsoft has pretty clear definitions of these different levels of SharePoint we’re talking about and I think it’s important for everyone to know what they are and what they mean. Personalization and Administration To me, this is the OOTB experience. You install the product and then are able to do things like create new lists, sites, edit and personalize pages, create new views, etc. Basically use the platform services available to you with Windows SharePoint Services (or SharePoint Foundation in 2010) to your full advantage. No code, no special tools needed, and very little user training required. Could you take someone who has never done anything in a website or piece of software and unleash them onto a site? Probably not. However I would argue that anyone who’s configured the Outlook reading layout or applied styles to a Word document probably won’t have too much difficulty in using SharePoint OUT OF THE BOX. Customization Here’s where things might get a bit murky but to me this is where you start looking at HTML/ASPX page code through SharePoint Designer, using jQuery scripts and plugging them into Web Part Pages via a Content Editor Web Part, and generally enhancing the site. The JavaScript debate might kick in here claiming it’s no different than C#, and frankly you can totally screw a site up with jQuery on a CEWP just as easily as you can with a C# delegate control deployed to the server file system. However (again, my blog, my opinion) the customization label comes in when I need to access the server (for example creating a custom theme) or have some kind of net-new element I add to the system that wasn’t there OOTB. It’s not content (like a new list or site), it’s code and does something functional. Development Here’s were the propeller hats come on and we’re talking algorithms and unit tests and compilers oh my. Software is deployed to the server, people are writing solutions after some kind of training (perhaps), there might be some specialized tools they use to craft and deploy the solutions, there’s the possibility of exceptions being thrown, etc. There are a lot of definitions here and just like customization it might get murky (do you let non-developers build solutions using development, i.e. jQuery/C#?). In my experience, it’s much more cost effective keeping solutions under the first two umbrellas than leaping into the third one. Arguably you could say that you can’t build useful solutions without *some* kind of code (even just some simple jQuery). I think you can get a *lot* of value just from using the OOTB experience and I don’t think you’re constraining your users that much. I’m not saying Marc or Bjorn are wrong. Like Obi-Wan stated, they’re both correct “from a certain point of view”. To me, SharePoint Out of the Box makes total sense and should not be dismissed. I just don’t agree with the premise that Bjorn is basing his statements on but that’s just my opinion and his is different and never the twain shall meet.

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