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• If 'Architect' is a dirty word - what's the alternative; when not everyone can actually design a goo

  - by Andras Zoltan

  Now - I'm a developer first and foremost; but whenever I sit down to work on a big project with lots of interlinking components and areas, I will forward-plan my interfaces, base classes etc as best I can - putting on my Architect hat. For a few weeks I've been doing this for a huge project - designing whole swathes of interfaces etc for a business-wide platform that we're developing. The basic structure is a couple of big projects that consists of service and data interfaces, with some basic implementations of all of these. On their own, these assemblies are useless though, as they are simply intended intended as a scaffold on which to build a business-specific implementation (we have a lot of businesses). Therefore, the design of the core platform is absolutely crucial, since consumers of the system are not intended to know which implementation they are actually using. In the past it's not worked so well, but after a few proof-of-concepts and R&D projects this new platform is now growing nicely and is already proving itself. Then somebody else gets involved in the project - he's a TDD man who sees code-level architecture as an irrelevance and is definitely from the camp that 'architect' is a dirty word - I should add that our working relationship is very good despite this :) He's open about the fact that he can't architect in advance and obviously TDD really helps him because it allows him to evolve his systems over time. That I get, and totally understand; but it means that his coding style, basically, doesn't seem to be able to honour the architecture that I've been putting in place. Now don't get me wrong - he's an awesome coder; but the other day he needed to extend one of his components (an implementation of a core interface) to bring in an extra implementation-specific dependency; and in doing so he extended the core interface as well as his implementation (he uses ReSharper), thus breaking the independence of the whole interface. When I pointed out his error to him, he was dismayed. Being test-first, all that mattered to him was that he'd made his tests pass, and just said 'well, I need that dependency, so can't we put it in?'. Of course we could put it in, but I was frustrated that he couldn't see that refactoring the generic interface to incorporate an implementation-specific feature was just wrong! But it is all very Charlie Brown to him (you know the sound the adults make when they're talking to the children) - as far as he's concerned we don't need to worry about it because we can always refactor. The problem is, the culture of test-write-refactor is all very well and good - but not when you're dealing with a platform that is going to be shared out among so many projects that you could never get them all in one place to make the refactorings work. In my opinion, sometimes you actually have to think about what you're doing, and not just let nature take its course. Am I simply fulfilling the role of Architect as a dirty word here? I believe that architecture is important and should be thought about before code gets written; unless it's a particularly small project. But when you're working in a team of people who don't think that way, or even can't think that way how can you actually get this across? Is it a case of simply making the architecture off-limits to changes by other people? I don't want to start having bloody committees just to be able to grow the system; but equally I don't want to be the only one responsible for it all. Do you think the architect role is a waste of time? Is it at odds with TDD and other practises? Can this mix of different practises be made to work, or should I just be a lot less precious (and in so doing allow a generic platform become useless!)? Or do I just lay down the law? Any ideas/experiences/views gratefully received.

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• Limiting TCP sends with a "to-be-sent" queue and other design issues.

  - by Poni

  Hello all! This question is the result of two other questions I've asked in the last few days. I'm creating a new question because I think it's related to the "next step" in my understanding of how to control the flow of my send/receive, something I didn't get a full answer to yet. The other related questions are: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3028376/an-iocp-documentation-interpretation-question-buffer-ownership-ambiguity http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3028998/non-blocking-tcp-buffer-issues In summary, I'm using Windows I/O Completion Ports. I have several threads that process notifications from the completion port. I believe the question is platform-independent and would have the same answer as if to do the same thing on a *nix, *BSD, Solaris system. So, I need to have my own flow control system. Fine. So I send send and send, a lot. How do I know when to start queueing the sends, as the receiver side is limited to X amount? Let's take an example (closest thing to my question): FTP protocol. I have two servers; One is on a 100Mb link and the other is on a 10Mb link. I order the 100Mb one to send to the other one (the 10Mb linked one) a 1GB file. It finishes with an average transfer rate of 1.25MB/s. How did the sender (the 100Mb linked one) knew when to hold the sending, so the slower one wouldn't be flooded? Another way to ask this: Can I get a "hold-your-sendings" notification from the remote side? Is it built-in in TCP or the so called "reliable network protocol" needs me to do so? Again, I have a loop with many sends to a remote server, and at some point, within that loop I'll have to determine if I should queue that send or I can pass it on to the transport layer (TCP). How do I do that? What would you do? Of course that when I get a completion notification from IOCP that the send was done I'll issue other pending sends, that's clear. Another design question related to this: Since I am to use a custom buffers with a send queue, and these buffers are being freed to be reused (thus not using the "delete" keyword) when a "send-done" notification has been arrived, I'll have to use a mutual exlusion on that buffer pool. Using a mutex slows things down, so I've been thinking; Why not have each thread have its own buffers pool, thus accessing it , at least when getting the required buffers for a send operation, will require no mutex, because it belongs to that thread only. The buffers pool is located at the thread local storage (TLS) level. No mutual pool implies no lock needed, implies faster operations BUT also implies more memory used by the app, because even if one thread already allocated 1000 buffers, the other one that is sending right now and need 1000 buffers to send something will need to allocated these to its own. This is a long question and I hope none got hurt (: Thank you all!

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• West Wind WebSurge - an easy way to Load Test Web Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  A few months ago on a project the subject of load testing came up. We were having some serious issues with a Web application that would start spewing SQL lock errors under somewhat heavy load. These sort of errors can be tough to catch, precisely because they only occur under load and not during typical development testing. To replicate this error more reliably we needed to put a load on the application and run it for a while before these SQL errors would flare up. It’s been a while since I’d looked at load testing tools, so I spent a bit of time looking at different tools and frankly didn’t really find anything that was a good fit. A lot of tools were either a pain to use, didn’t have the basic features I needed, or are extravagantly expensive. In  the end I got frustrated enough to build an initially small custom load test solution that then morphed into a more generic library, then gained a console front end and eventually turned into a full blown Web load testing tool that is now called West Wind WebSurge. I got seriously frustrated looking for tools every time I needed some quick and dirty load testing for an application. If my aim is to just put an application under heavy enough load to find a scalability problem in code, or to simply try and push an application to its limits on the hardware it’s running I shouldn’t have to have to struggle to set up tests. It should be easy enough to get going in a few minutes, so that the testing can be set up quickly so that it can be done on a regular basis without a lot of hassle. And that was the goal when I started to build out my initial custom load tester into a more widely usable tool. If you’re in a hurry and you want to check it out, you can find more information and download links here: West Wind WebSurge Product Page Walk through Video Download link (zip) Install from Chocolatey Source on GitHub For a more detailed discussion of the why’s and how’s and some background continue reading. How did I get here? When I started out on this path, I wasn’t planning on building a tool like this myself – but I got frustrated enough looking at what’s out there to think that I can do better than what’s available for the most common simple load testing scenarios. When we ran into the SQL lock problems I mentioned, I started looking around what’s available for Web load testing solutions that would work for our whole team which consisted of a few developers and a couple of IT guys both of which needed to be able to run the tests. It had been a while since I looked at tools and I figured that by now there should be some good solutions out there, but as it turns out I didn’t really find anything that fit our relatively simple needs without costing an arm and a leg… I spent the better part of a day installing and trying various load testing tools and to be frank most of them were either terrible at what they do, incredibly unfriendly to use, used some terminology I couldn’t even parse, or were extremely expensive (and I mean in the ‘sell your liver’ range of expensive). Pick your poison. There are also a number of online solutions for load testing and they actually looked more promising, but those wouldn’t work well for our scenario as the application is running inside of a private VPN with no outside access into the VPN. Most of those online solutions also ended up being very pricey as well – presumably because of the bandwidth required to test over the open Web can be enormous. When I asked around on Twitter what people were using– I got mostly… crickets. Several people mentioned Visual Studio Load Test, and most other suggestions pointed to online solutions. I did get a bunch of responses though with people asking to let them know what I found – apparently I’m not alone when it comes to finding load testing tools that are effective and easy to use. As to Visual Studio, the higher end skus of Visual Studio and the test edition include a Web load testing tool, which is quite powerful, but there are a number of issues with that: First it’s tied to Visual Studio so it’s not very portable – you need a VS install. I also find the test setup and terminology used by the VS test runner extremely confusing. Heck, it’s complicated enough that there’s even a Pluralsight course on using the Visual Studio Web test from Steve Smith. And of course you need to have one of the high end Visual Studio Skus, and those are mucho Dinero ($$$) – just for the load testing that’s rarely an option. Some of the tools are ultra extensive and let you run analysis tools on the target serves which is useful, but in most cases – just plain overkill and only distracts from what I tend to be ultimately interested in: Reproducing problems that occur at high load, and finding the upper limits and ‘what if’ scenarios as load is ramped up increasingly against a site. Yes it’s useful to have Web app instrumentation, but often that’s not what you’re interested in. I still fondly remember early days of Web testing when Microsoft had the WAST (Web Application Stress Tool) tool, which was rather simple – and also somewhat limited – but easily allowed you to create stress tests very quickly. It had some serious limitations (mainly that it didn’t work with SSL),  but the idea behind it was excellent: Create tests quickly and easily and provide a decent engine to run it locally with minimal setup. You could get set up and run tests within a few minutes. Unfortunately, that tool died a quiet death as so many of Microsoft’s tools that probably were built by an intern and then abandoned, even though there was a lot of potential and it was actually fairly widely used. Eventually the tools was no longer downloadable and now it simply doesn’t work anymore on higher end hardware. West Wind Web Surge – Making Load Testing Quick and Easy So I ended up creating West Wind WebSurge out of rebellious frustration… The goal of WebSurge is to make it drop dead simple to create load tests. It’s super easy to capture sessions either using the built in capture tool (big props to Eric Lawrence, Telerik and FiddlerCore which made that piece a snap), using the full version of Fiddler and exporting sessions, or by manually or programmatically creating text files based on plain HTTP headers to create requests. I’ve been using this tool for 4 months now on a regular basis on various projects as a reality check for performance and scalability and it’s worked extremely well for finding small performance issues. I also use it regularly as a simple URL tester, as it allows me to quickly enter a URL plus headers and content and test that URL and its results along with the ability to easily save one or more of those URLs. A few weeks back I made a walk through video that goes over most of the features of WebSurge in some detail: Note that the UI has slightly changed since then, so there are some UI improvements. Most notably the test results screen has been updated recently to a different layout and to provide more information about each URL in a session at a glance. The video and the main WebSurge site has a lot of info of basic operations. For the rest of this post I’ll talk about a few deeper aspects that may be of interest while also giving a glance at how WebSurge works. Session Capturing As you would expect, WebSurge works with Sessions of Urls that are played back under load. Here’s what the main Session View looks like: You can create session entries manually by individually adding URLs to test (on the Request tab on the right) and saving them, or you can capture output from Web Browsers, Windows Desktop applications that call services, your own applications using the built in Capture tool. With this tool you can capture anything HTTP -SSL requests and content from Web pages, AJAX calls, SOAP or REST services – again anything that uses Windows or .NET HTTP APIs. Behind the scenes the capture tool uses FiddlerCore so basically anything you can capture with Fiddler you can also capture with Web Surge Session capture tool. Alternately you can actually use Fiddler as well, and then export the captured Fiddler trace to a file, which can then be imported into WebSurge. This is a nice way to let somebody capture session without having to actually install WebSurge or for your customers to provide an exact playback scenario for a given set of URLs that cause a problem perhaps. Note that not all applications work with Fiddler’s proxy unless you configure a proxy. For example, .NET Web applications that make HTTP calls usually don’t show up in Fiddler by default. For those .NET applications you can explicitly override proxy settings to capture those requests to service calls. The capture tool also has handy optional filters that allow you to filter by domain, to help block out noise that you typically don’t want to include in your requests. For example, if your pages include links to CDNs, or Google Analytics or social links you typically don’t want to include those in your load test, so by capturing just from a specific domain you are guaranteed content from only that one domain. Additionally you can provide url filters in the configuration file – filters allow to provide filter strings that if contained in a url will cause requests to be ignored. Again this is useful if you don’t filter by domain but you want to filter out things like static image, css and script files etc. Often you’re not interested in the load characteristics of these static and usually cached resources as they just add noise to tests and often skew the overall url performance results. In my testing I tend to care only about my dynamic requests. SSL Captures require Fiddler Note, that in order to capture SSL requests you’ll have to install the Fiddler’s SSL certificate. The easiest way to do this is to install Fiddler and use its SSL configuration options to get the certificate into the local certificate store. There’s a document on the Telerik site that provides the exact steps to get SSL captures to work with Fiddler and therefore with WebSurge. Session Storage A group of URLs entered or captured make up a Session. Sessions can be saved and restored easily as they use a very simple text format that simply stored on disk. The format is slightly customized HTTP header traces separated by a separator line. The headers are standard HTTP headers except that the full URL instead of just the domain relative path is stored as part of the 1st HTTP header line for easier parsing. Because it’s just text and uses the same format that Fiddler uses for exports, it’s super easy to create Sessions by hand manually or under program control writing out to a simple text file. You can see what this format looks like in the Capture window figure above – the raw captured format is also what’s stored to disk and what WebSurge parses from. The only ‘custom’ part of these headers is that 1st line contains the full URL instead of the domain relative path and Host: header. The rest of each header are just plain standard HTTP headers with each individual URL isolated by a separator line. The format used here also uses what Fiddler produces for exports, so it’s easy to exchange or view data either in Fiddler or WebSurge. Urls can also be edited interactively so you can modify the headers easily as well: Again – it’s just plain HTTP headers so anything you can do with HTTP can be added here. Use it for single URL Testing Incidentally I’ve also found this form as an excellent way to test and replay individual URLs for simple non-load testing purposes. Because you can capture a single or many URLs and store them on disk, this also provides a nice HTTP playground where you can record URLs with their headers, and fire them one at a time or as a session and see results immediately. It’s actually an easy way for REST presentations and I find the simple UI flow actually easier than using Fiddler natively. Finally you can save one or more URLs as a session for later retrieval. I’m using this more and more for simple URL checks. Overriding Cookies and Domains Speaking of HTTP headers – you can also overwrite cookies used as part of the options. One thing that happens with modern Web applications is that you have session cookies in use for authorization. These cookies tend to expire at some point which would invalidate a test. Using the Options dialog you can actually override the cookie: which replaces the cookie for all requests with the cookie value specified here. You can capture a valid cookie from a manual HTTP request in your browser and then paste into the cookie field, to replace the existing Cookie with the new one that is now valid. Likewise you can easily replace the domain so if you captured urls on west-wind.com and now you want to test on localhost you can do that easily easily as well. You could even do something like capture on store.west-wind.com and then test on localhost/store which would also work. Running Load Tests Once you’ve created a Session you can specify the length of the test in seconds, and specify the number of simultaneous threads to run each session on. Sessions run through each of the URLs in the session sequentially by default. One option in the options list above is that you can also randomize the URLs so each thread runs requests in a different order. This avoids bunching up URLs initially when tests start as all threads run the same requests simultaneously which can sometimes skew the results of the first few minutes of a test. While sessions run some progress information is displayed: By default there’s a live view of requests displayed in a Console-like window. On the bottom of the window there’s a running total summary that displays where you’re at in the test, how many requests have been processed and what the requests per second count is currently for all requests. Note that for tests that run over a thousand requests a second it’s a good idea to turn off the console display. While the console display is nice to see that something is happening and also gives you slight idea what’s happening with actual requests, once a lot of requests are processed, this UI updating actually adds a lot of CPU overhead to the application which may cause the actual load generated to be reduced. If you are running a 1000 requests a second there’s not much to see anyway as requests roll by way too fast to see individual lines anyway. If you look on the options panel, there is a NoProgressEvents option that disables the console display. Note that the summary display is still updated approximately once a second so you can always tell that the test is still running. Test Results When the test is done you get a simple Results display: On the right you get an overall summary as well as breakdown by each URL in the session. Both success and failures are highlighted so it’s easy to see what’s breaking in your load test. The report can be printed or you can also open the HTML document in your default Web Browser for printing to PDF or saving the HTML document to disk. The list on the right shows you a partial list of the URLs that were fired so you can look in detail at the request and response data. The list can be filtered by success and failure requests. Each list is partial only (at the moment) and limited to a max of 1000 items in order to render reasonably quickly. Each item in the list can be clicked to see the full request and response data: This particularly useful for errors so you can quickly see and copy what request data was used and in the case of a GET request you can also just click the link to quickly jump to the page. For non-GET requests you can find the URL in the Session list, and use the context menu to Test the URL as configured including any HTTP content data to send. You get to see the full HTTP request and response as well as a link in the Request header to go visit the actual page. Not so useful for a POST as above, but definitely useful for GET requests. Finally you can also get a few charts. The most useful one is probably the Request per Second chart which can be accessed from the Charts menu or shortcut. Here’s what it looks like:   Results can also be exported to JSON, XML and HTML. Keep in mind that these files can get very large rather quickly though, so exports can end up taking a while to complete. Command Line Interface WebSurge runs with a small core load engine and this engine is plugged into the front end application I’ve shown so far. There’s also a command line interface available to run WebSurge from the Windows command prompt. Using the command line you can run tests for either an individual URL (similar to AB.exe for example) or a full Session file. By default when it runs WebSurgeCli shows progress every second showing total request count, failures and the requests per second for the entire test. A silent option can turn off this progress display and display only the results. The command line interface can be useful for build integration which allows checking for failures perhaps or hitting a specific requests per second count etc. It’s also nice to use this as quick and dirty URL test facility similar to the way you’d use Apache Bench (ab.exe). Unlike ab.exe though, WebSurgeCli supports SSL and makes it much easier to create multi-URL tests using either manual editing or the WebSurge UI. Current Status Currently West Wind WebSurge is still in Beta status. I’m still adding small new features and tweaking the UI in an attempt to make it as easy and self-explanatory as possible to run. Documentation for the UI and specialty features is also still a work in progress. I plan on open-sourcing this product, but it won’t be free. There’s a free version available that provides a limited number of threads and request URLs to run. A relatively low cost license  removes the thread and request limitations. Pricing info can be found on the Web site – there’s an introductory price which is $99 at the moment which I think is reasonable compared to most other for pay solutions out there that are exorbitant by comparison… The reason code is not available yet is – well, the UI portion of the app is a bit embarrassing in its current monolithic state. The UI started as a very simple interface originally that later got a lot more complex – yeah, that never happens, right? Unless there’s a lot of interest I don’t foresee re-writing the UI entirely (which would be ideal), but in the meantime at least some cleanup is required before I dare to publish it :-). The code will likely be released with version 1.0. I’m very interested in feedback. Do you think this could be useful to you and provide value over other tools you may or may not have used before? I hope so – it already has provided a ton of value for me and the work I do that made the development worthwhile at this point. You can leave a comment below, or for more extensive discussions you can post a message on the West Wind Message Board in the WebSurge section Microsoft MVPs and Insiders get a free License If you’re a Microsoft MVP or a Microsoft Insider you can get a full license for free. Send me a link to your current, official Microsoft profile and I’ll send you a not-for resale license. Send any messages to [email protected]. Resources For more info on WebSurge and to download it to try it out, use the following links. West Wind WebSurge Home Download West Wind WebSurge Getting Started with West Wind WebSurge Video© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in ASP.NET   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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• Top things web developers should know about the Visual Studio 2013 release

  - by Jon Galloway

  ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesSummary for lazy readers: Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download on the Visual Studio site and on MSDN subscriber downloads) Visual Studio 2013 installs side by side with Visual Studio 2012 and supports round-tripping between Visual Studio versions, so you can try it out without committing to a switch Visual Studio 2013 ships with the new version of ASP.NET, which includes ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Web API 2, Razor 3, Entity Framework 6 and SignalR 2.0 The new releases ASP.NET focuses on One ASP.NET, so core features and web tools work the same across the platform (e.g. adding ASP.NET MVC controllers to a Web Forms application) New core features include new templates based on Bootstrap, a new scaffolding system, and a new identity system Visual Studio 2013 is an incredible editor for web files, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Markdown, LESS, Coffeescript, Handlebars, Angular, Ember, Knockdown, etc. Top links: Visual Studio 2013 content on the ASP.NET site are in the standard new releases area: http://www.asp.net/vnext ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release Notes Short intro videos on the new Visual Studio web editor features from Scott Hanselman and Mads Kristensen Announcing release of ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 post on the official .NET Web Development and Tools Blog Scott Guthrie's post: Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework Okay, for those of you who are still with me, let's dig in a bit. Quick web dev notes on downloading and installing Visual Studio 2013 I found Visual Studio 2013 to be a pretty fast install. According to Brian Harry's release post, installing over pre-release versions of Visual Studio is supported.  I've installed the release version over pre-release versions, and it worked fine. If you're only going to be doing web development, you can speed up the install if you just select Web Developer tools. Of course, as a good Microsoft employee, I'll mention that you might also want to install some of those other features, like the Store apps for Windows 8 and the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, but they do download and install a lot of other stuff (e.g. the Windows Phone SDK sets up Hyper-V and downloads several GB's of VM's). So if you're planning just to do web development for now, you can pick just the Web Developer Tools and install the other stuff later. If you've got a fast internet connection, I recommend using the web installer instead of downloading the ISO. The ISO includes all the features, whereas the web installer just downloads what you're installing. Visual Studio 2013 development settings and color theme When you start up Visual Studio, it'll prompt you to pick some defaults. These are totally up to you -whatever suits your development style - and you can change them later. As I said, these are completely up to you. I recommend either the Web Development or Web Development (Code Only) settings. The only real difference is that Code Only hides the toolbars, and you can switch between them using Tools / Import and Export Settings / Reset. Web Development settings Web Development (code only) settings Usually I've just gone with Web Development (code only) in the past because I just want to focus on the code, although the Standard toolbar does make it easier to switch default web browsers. More on that later. Color theme Sigh. Okay, everyone's got their favorite colors. I alternate between Light and Dark depending on my mood, and I personally like how the low contrast on the window chrome in those themes puts the emphasis on my code rather than the tabs and toolbars. I know some people got pretty worked up over that, though, and wanted the blue theme back. I personally don't like it - it reminds me of ancient versions of Visual Studio that I don't want to think about anymore. So here's the thing: if you install Visual Studio Ultimate, it defaults to Blue. The other versions default to Light. If you use Blue, I won't criticize you - out loud, that is. You can change themes really easily - either Tools / Options / Environment / General, or the smart way: ctrl+q for quick launch, then type Theme and hit enter. Signing in During the first run, you'll be prompted to sign in. You don't have to - you can click the "Not now, maybe later" link at the bottom of that dialog. I recommend signing in, though. It's not hooked in with licensing or tracking the kind of code you write to sell you components. It is doing good things, like  syncing your Visual Studio settings between computers. More about that here. So, you don't have to, but I sure do. Overview of shiny new things in ASP.NET land There are a lot of good new things in ASP.NET. I'll list some of my favorite here, but you can read more on the ASP.NET site. One ASP.NET You've heard us talk about this for a while. The idea is that options are good, but choice can be a burden. When you start a new ASP.NET project, why should you have to make a tough decision - with long-term consequences - about how your application will work? If you want to use ASP.NET Web Forms, but have the option of adding in ASP.NET MVC later, why should that be hard? It's all ASP.NET, right? Ideally, you'd just decide that you want to use ASP.NET to build sites and services, and you could use the appropriate tools (the green blocks below) as you needed them. So, here it is. When you create a new ASP.NET application, you just create an ASP.NET application. Next, you can pick from some templates to get you started... but these are different. They're not "painful decision" templates, they're just some starting pieces. And, most importantly, you can mix and match. I can pick a "mostly" Web Forms template, but include MVC and Web API folders and core references. If you've tried to mix and match in the past, you're probably aware that it was possible, but not pleasant. ASP.NET MVC project files contained special project type GUIDs, so you'd only get controller scaffolding support in a Web Forms project if you manually edited the csproj file. Features in one stack didn't work in others. Project templates were painful choices. That's no longer the case. Hooray! I just did a demo in a presentation last week where I created a new Web Forms + MVC + Web API site, built a model, scaffolded MVC and Web API controllers with EF Code First, add data in the MVC view, viewed it in Web API, then added a GridView to the Web Forms Default.aspx page and bound it to the Model. In about 5 minutes. Sure, it's a simple example, but it's great to be able to share code and features across the whole ASP.NET family. Authentication In the past, authentication was built into the templates. So, for instance, there was an ASP.NET MVC 4 Intranet Project template which created a new ASP.NET MVC 4 application that was preconfigured for Windows Authentication. All of that authentication stuff was built into each template, so they varied between the stacks, and you couldn't reuse them. You didn't see a lot of changes to the authentication options, since they required big changes to a bunch of project templates. Now, the new project dialog includes a common authentication experience. When you hit the Change Authentication button, you get some common options that work the same way regardless of the template or reference settings you've made. These options work on all ASP.NET frameworks, and all hosting environments (IIS, IIS Express, or OWIN for self-host) The default is Individual User Accounts: This is the standard "create a local account, using username / password or OAuth" thing; however, it's all built on the new Identity system. More on that in a second. The one setting that has some configuration to it is Organizational Accounts, which lets you configure authentication using Active Directory, Windows Azure Active Directory, or Office 365. Identity There's a new identity system. We've taken the best parts of the previous ASP.NET Membership and Simple Identity systems, rolled in a lot of feedback and made big enhancements to support important developer concerns like unit testing and extensiblity. I've written long posts about ASP.NET identity, and I'll do it again. Soon. This is not that post. The short version is that I think we've finally got just the right Identity system. Some of my favorite features: There are simple, sensible defaults that work well - you can File / New / Run / Register / Login, and everything works. It supports standard username / password as well as external authentication (OAuth, etc.). It's easy to customize without having to re-implement an entire provider. It's built using pluggable pieces, rather than one large monolithic system. It's built using interfaces like IUser and IRole that allow for unit testing, dependency injection, etc. You can easily add user profile data (e.g. URL, twitter handle, birthday). You just add properties to your ApplicationUser model and they'll automatically be persisted. Complete control over how the identity data is persisted. By default, everything works with Entity Framework Code First, but it's built to support changes from small (modify the schema) to big (use another ORM, store your data in a document database or in the cloud or in XML or in the EXIF data of your desktop background or whatever). It's configured via OWIN. More on OWIN and Katana later, but the fact that it's built using OWIN means it's portable. You can find out more in the Authentication and Identity section of the ASP.NET site (and lots more content will be going up there soon). New Bootstrap based project templates The new project templates are built using Bootstrap 3. Bootstrap (formerly Twitter Bootstrap) is a front-end framework that brings a lot of nice benefits: It's responsive, so your projects will automatically scale to device width using CSS media queries. For example, menus are full size on a desktop browser, but on narrower screens you automatically get a mobile-friendly menu. The built-in Bootstrap styles make your standard page elements (headers, footers, buttons, form inputs, tables etc.) look nice and modern. Bootstrap is themeable, so you can reskin your whole site by dropping in a new Bootstrap theme. Since Bootstrap is pretty popular across the web development community, this gives you a large and rapidly growing variety of templates (free and paid) to choose from. Bootstrap also includes a lot of very useful things: components (like progress bars and badges), useful glyphicons, and some jQuery plugins for tooltips, dropdowns, carousels, etc.). Here's a look at how the responsive part works. When the page is full screen, the menu and header are optimized for a wide screen display: When I shrink the page down (this is all based on page width, not useragent sniffing) the menu turns into a nice mobile-friendly dropdown: For a quick example, I grabbed a new free theme off bootswatch.com. For simple themes, you just need to download the boostrap.css file and replace the /content/bootstrap.css file in your project. Now when I refresh the page, I've got a new theme: Scaffolding The big change in scaffolding is that it's one system that works across ASP.NET. You can create a new Empty Web project or Web Forms project and you'll get the Scaffold context menus. For release, we've got MVC 5 and Web API 2 controllers. We had a preview of Web Forms scaffolding in the preview releases, but they weren't fully baked for RTM. Look for them in a future update, expected pretty soon. This scaffolding system wasn't just changed to work across the ASP.NET frameworks, it's also built to enable future extensibility. That's not in this release, but should also hopefully be out soon. Project Readme page This is a small thing, but I really like it. When you create a new project, you get a Project_Readme.html page that's added to the root of your project and opens in the Visual Studio built-in browser. I love it. A long time ago, when you created a new project we just dumped it on you and left you scratching your head about what to do next. Not ideal. Then we started adding a bunch of Getting Started information to the new project templates. That told you what to do next, but you had to delete all of that stuff out of your website. It doesn't belong there. Not ideal. This is a simple HTML file that's not integrated into your project code at all. You can delete it if you want. But, it shows a lot of helpful links that are current for the project you just created. In the future, if we add new wacky project types, they can create readme docs with specific information on how to do appropriately wacky things. Side note: I really like that they used the internal browser in Visual Studio to show this content rather than popping open an HTML page in the default browser. I hate that. It's annoying. If you're doing that, I hope you'll stop. What if some unnamed person has 40 or 90 tabs saved in their browser session? When you pop open your "Thanks for installing my Visual Studio extension!" page, all eleventy billion tabs start up and I wish I'd never installed your thing. Be like these guys and pop stuff Visual Studio specific HTML docs in the Visual Studio browser. ASP.NET MVC 5 The biggest change with ASP.NET MVC 5 is that it's no longer a separate project type. It integrates well with the rest of ASP.NET. In addition to that and the other common features we've already looked at (Bootstrap templates, Identity, authentication), here's what's new for ASP.NET MVC. Attribute routing ASP.NET MVC now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your routes by annotating your actions and controllers. This supports some pretty complex, customized routing scenarios, and it allows you to keep your route information right with your controller actions if you'd like. Here's a controller that includes an action whose method name is Hiding, but I've used AttributeRouting to configure it to /spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo public class SampleController : Controller { [Route("spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo")] public string Hiding() { return "You found me!"; } } I enable that in my RouteConfig.cs, and I can use that in conjunction with my other MVC routes like this: public class RouteConfig { public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapMvcAttributeRoutes(); routes.MapRoute( name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } ); } } You can read more about Attribute Routing in ASP.NET MVC 5 here. Filter enhancements There are two new additions to filters: Authentication Filters and Filter Overrides. Authentication filters are a new kind of filter in ASP.NET MVC that run prior to authorization filters in the ASP.NET MVC pipeline and allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller, or globally for all controllers. Authentication filters process credentials in the request and provide a corresponding principal. Authentication filters can also add authentication challenges in response to unauthorized requests. Override filters let you change which filters apply to a given action method or controller. Override filters specify a set of filter types that should not be run for a given scope (action or controller). This allows you to configure filters that apply globally but then exclude certain global filters from applying to specific actions or controllers. ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 includes a lot of new features. Attribute Routing ASP.NET Web API supports the same attribute routing system that's in ASP.NET MVC 5. You can read more about the Attribute Routing features in Web API in this article. OAuth 2.0 ASP.NET Web API picks up OAuth 2.0 support, using security middleware running on OWIN (discussed below). This is great for features like authenticated Single Page Applications. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API now has full OData support. That required adding in some of the most powerful operators: $select, $expand, $batch and $value. You can read more about OData operator support in this article by Mike Wasson. Lots more There's a huge list of other features, including CORS (cross-origin request sharing), IHttpActionResult, IHttpRequestContext, and more. I think the best overview is in the release notes. OWIN and Katana I've written about OWIN and Katana recently. I'm a big fan. OWIN is the Open Web Interfaces for .NET. It's a spec, like HTML or HTTP, so you can't install OWIN. The benefit of OWIN is that it's a community specification, so anyone who implements it can plug into the ASP.NET stack, either as middleware or as a host. Katana is the Microsoft implementation of OWIN. It leverages OWIN to wire up things like authentication, handlers, modules, IIS hosting, etc., so ASP.NET can host OWIN components and Katana components can run in someone else's OWIN implementation. Howard Dierking just wrote a cool article in MSDN magazine describing Katana in depth: Getting Started with the Katana Project. He had an interesting example showing an OWIN based pipeline which leveraged SignalR, ASP.NET Web API and NancyFx components in the same stack. If this kind of thing makes sense to you, that's great. If it doesn't, don't worry, but keep an eye on it. You're going to see some cool things happen as a result of ASP.NET becoming more and more pluggable. Visual Studio Web Tools Okay, this stuff's just crazy. Visual Studio has been adding some nice web dev features over the past few years, but they've really cranked it up for this release. Visual Studio is by far my favorite code editor for all web files: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and lots of popular libraries. Stop thinking of Visual Studio as a big editor that you only use to write back-end code. Stop editing HTML and CSS in Notepad (or Sublime, Notepad++, etc.). Visual Studio starts up in under 2 seconds on a modern computer with an SSD. Misspelling HTML attributes or your CSS classes or jQuery or Angular syntax is stupid. It doesn't make you a better developer, it makes you a silly person who wastes time. Browser Link Browser Link is a real-time, two-way connection between Visual Studio and all connected browsers. It's only attached when you're running locally, in debug, but it applies to any and all connected browser, including emulators. You may have seen demos that showed the browsers refreshing based on changes in the editor, and I'll agree that's pretty cool. But it's really just the start. It's a two-way connection, and it's built for extensiblity. That means you can write extensions that push information from your running application (in IE, Chrome, a mobile emulator, etc.) back to Visual Studio. Mads and team have showed off some demonstrations where they enabled edit mode in the browser which updated the source HTML back on the browser. It's also possible to look at how the rendered HTML performs, check for compatibility issues, watch for unused CSS classes, the sky's the limit. New HTML editor The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Here's a 3 minute tour from Mads Kristensen. The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Lots more Visual Studio web dev features That's just a sampling - there's a ton of great features for JavaScript editing, CSS editing, publishing, and Page Inspector (which shows real-time rendering of your page inside Visual Studio). Here are some more short videos showing those features. Lots, lots more Okay, that's just a summary, and it's still quite a bit. Head on over to http://asp.net/vnext for more information, and download Visual Studio 2013 now to get started!

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• IIS, multiple CPU cores, application pools and worker processes - best configuration for a single si

  - by Egghead Design

  Hi We use Kentico CMS and I've exchanged emails with them about a web garden deployment. We have a single site running on a server with 8 cpu cores. In line with Kentico's advice, we have not altered the application pool web garden setting from the default i.e. it is set to a maximum number of worker processes of 1. Our experience is that the site only uses one of the cpu cores - the others are idling. When I emailed them about this, their response was that the OS/IIS would handle this and use other cores as necessary even though the application pool only has a single worker process. Now, I've a lot of respect for the guys at Kentico, but this doesn't seem right to me? Surely, if we want to use all cores, we need to permit eight worker processes (and implement session state storage in SQL server)? Many thanks Tony

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• List of resources for database continuous integration

  - by David Atkinson

  Because there is so little information on database continuous integration out in the wild, I've taken it upon myself to aggregate as much as possible and post the links to this blog. Because it's my area of expertise, this will focus on SQL Server and Red Gate tooling, although I am keen to include any quality articles that discuss the topic in general terms. Please let me know if you find a resource that I haven't listed! General database Continuous Integration · What is Database Continuous Integration? (David Atkinson) · Continuous Integration for SQL Server Databases (Troy Hunt) · Installing NAnt to drive database continuous integration (David Atkinson) · Continuous Integration Tip #3 - Version your Databases as part of your automated build (Doug Rathbone) · How the "migrations" approach makes database continuous integration possible (David Atkinson) · Continuous Integration for the Database (Keith Bloom) Setting up Continuous Integration with Red Gate tools · Continuous integration for databases using Red Gate tools - A technical overview (White Paper, Roger Hart and David Atkinson) · Continuous integration for databases using Red Gate SQL tools (Product pages) · Database continuous integration step by step (David Atkinson) · Database Continuous Integration with Red Gate Tools (video, David Atkinson) · Database schema synchronisation with RedGate (Vincent Brouillet) · Database continuous integration and deployment with Red Gate tools (David Duffett) · Automated database releases with TeamCity and Red Gate (Troy Hunt) · How to build a database from source control (David Atkinson) · Continuous Integration Automated Database Update Process (Lance Lyons) Other · Evolutionary Database Design (Martin Fowler) · Recipes for Continuous Database Integration: Evolutionary Database Development (book, Pramod J Sadalage) · Recipes for Continuous Database Integration (book, Pramod Sadalage) · The Red Gate Guide to SQL Server Team-based Development (book, Phil Factor, Grant Fritchey, Alex Kuznetsov, Mladen Prajdic) · Using SQL Test Database Unit Testing with TeamCity Continuous Integration (Dave Green) · Continuous Database Integration (covers MySQL, Perason Education) Technorati Tags: SQL Server,Continous Integration

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• PASS Precon Countdown… See some of you Monday, and others on Tuesday Night

  - by drsql

  As I finish up the plans for Monday’s database design precon, I am getting pretty excited for the day. This is the third time I have done this precon, and where the base slides are very similar, I have a few new twists in mind. One of my big ideas for my Database Design Workshop precon has always been to give people to do some design. So I am even now trying to go through and whittle down the slides and make sure that we have the time for design. If you are attending, be prepared to be a team player....(read more)

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• TFS Auto Shelve - New Visual Studio 2010 / TFS 2010 Extension

  - by MikeParks

  We've been working with the Visual Studio 2010 SDK and the TFS 2010 SDK a lot recently to create new Visual Studio Extensions. You can find these extensions in the Visual Studio Gallery. If you're a developer/programmer, you should check it out, they have some pretty cool tools out there. I'd be surprised if you told me you went there and couldn't find any tools that could help you. One of the new extensions Cory and I made is called TFS Auto Shelve. Check out the description and read about it below. If you're interested and you have VS 2010 w/TFS 2010, feel free to try it out and let us know what you think. You can download it here: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/080540cb-e35f-4651-b71c-86c73e4a633d   Here's a description and screenshots of what it does: Automatically shelves the latest version of all pending changes from local TFS workspaces to the TFS Server every "x" number of minutes when solutions are opened.   ·         Purpose o    Created for Team Foundation Server 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 o    This tool is mainly aimed at the Programmer/Developer audience so they can always have the latest copy of their pending changes backed up to the TFS Server while coding ·         Functionality o    Menu options become active and automatic shelving begins when a solution that mapped to a TFS Workspace is opened in Visual Studio o    In Tools > TFS Auto Shelve (Running/NotRunning):  Automatic shelving can be turned on/off o    In Tools > TFS Auto Shelve Now : Shelve all code can be manually triggered o    Each TFS workspace has its own shelveset which is re-used to save the latest version of pending changes o    Shelvesets are named as Base Name + Workspace Name o    Shelveset comment contains item count o    If there are no pending changes, no shelvesets will be created/updated o    If a solution is opened that is not mapped to a TFS Workspace, menu options are disabled since shelving only works for mapped workspaces. ·         Configuration o    In Tools > Options > TFS Auto Shelve Options: Base Name is configurable o    In Tools > Options > TFS Auto Shelve Options: "x" number of minutes is configurable in options ·         Logging o    Custom Visual Studio Activity Logging is implemented. If you run into any errors, please startup Visual Studio with the /log switch, re-create the error, then close Visual Studio. You can browse to “%AppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ActivityLog.XML” to view the log. Please feel free to inform us of any errors you see and we can work it out via email. ·         Other Helpful Information o    To view shelvesets, open Source Control Explorer, click on File > Source Control > Unshelve Pending Changes o    Workspaces can be modified by opening the Source Control Explorer > Clicking on Workspaces drop down > Click Workspaces… > Click Add / Edit / Removed   Thanks! - Mike

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• This Week's Developer Reading List

  Design, Visual Basic, and Google AppEngine Google AppEngine - Visual Basic - Google - Tools - Chats and Forums

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• Requirement refinement between two levels of specification

  - by user107149

  I am currently working on the definition of the documentation architecture of a system, from customers needs to software/hardware requirements. I encounter a big problem with the level of refinement of requirements. The classic architecture is : PTS -- SSS -- SSDD -- SRS/HRS with PTS : Purshaser Technical Specification SSS : Supplier System Specification SSDD : System Segment Design Description SRS / HRS : Software / Hardware Requirement Specification. Requirements from PTS are reworked in SSS, this document only expressed the needs (no design requirements are defined at this level). Then, the system design is described in SSDD : we allocate requirements from the SSS to functions from the design and functions are then allocated to component (Software or hardware) (we are still at the SSDD level). Finally, for each component, we write one SRS or one HRS. Requirements in SRS or HRS are refinement of requirements from SSS (and traceability matrix are made between these two levels). My problem is the following one : Our system is a complex one, and some of the requirements in the SSS needs to be refined twice to be at the right level in the SRS (means that software people can understand the requirement to make their coding). But, with this document architecture, I can only refine once the requirements from the SSS. The second problem is that only a part of the requirements from the SSS needs to be refined twice. The other part only need one refinement. On the picture below, the green boxes are requirements at the right level for SRS or HRS. And purple boxes are intermediate requirements which can not be included in SSS since they are design requirements. Where can I put these purple requirements ?? Is there someone who has already encountered this problem ? Should I write two documents at SRS level ? Should I include intermediate requirements in SSDD ? Should I includes the two refinement levels (purple and green) in the same SRS document (not sure that's possible since a SRS is only for one component) ??? Thanks for your help and expertise ;-)

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• Where’s my MD.050?

  - by Dave Burke

  A question that I’m sometimes asked is “where’s my MD.050 in OUM?” For those not familiar with an MD.050, it serves the purpose of being a Functional Design Document (FDD) in one of Oracle’s legacy Methods. Functional Design Documents have existed for many years with their primary purpose being to describe the functional aspects of one or more components of an IT system, typically, a Custom Extension of some sort. So why don’t we have a direct replacement for the MD.050/FDD in OUM? In simple terms, the disadvantage of the MD.050/FDD approach is that it tends to lead practitioners into “Design mode” too early in the process. Whereas OUM encourages more emphasis on gathering, and describing the functional requirements of a system ahead of the formal Analysis and Design process. So that just means more work up front for the Business Analyst or Functional Consultants right? Well no…..the design of a solution, particularly when it involves a complex custom extension, does not necessarily take longer just because you put more thought into the functional requirements. In fact, one could argue the complete opposite, in that by putting more emphasis on clearly understanding the nuances of functionality requirements early in the process, then the overall time and cost incurred during the Analysis to Design process should be less. In short, as your understanding of requirements matures over time, it is far easier (and more cost effective) to update a document or a diagram, than to change lines of code. So how does that translate into Tasks and Work Products in OUM? Let us assume you have reached a point on a project where a Custom Extension is needed. One of the first things you should consider doing is creating a Use Case, and remember, a Use Case could be as simple as a few lines of text reflecting a “User Story”, or it could be what Cockburn1 describes a “fully dressed Use Case”. It is worth mentioned at this point the highly scalable nature of OUM in the sense that “documents” should not be produced just because that is the way we have always done things. Some projects may well be predicated upon a base of electronic documents, whilst other projects may take a much more Agile approach to describing functional requirements; through “User Stories” perhaps. In any event, it is quite common for a Custom Extension to involve the creation of several “components”, i.e. some new screens, an interface, a report etc. Therefore several Use Cases might be required, which in turn can then be assembled into a Use Case Package. Once you have the Use Cases attributed to an appropriate (fit-for-purpose) level of detail, and assembled into a Package, you can now create an Analysis Model for the Package. An Analysis Model is conceptual in nature, and depending on the solution being developing, would involve the creation of one or more diagrams (i.e. Sequence Diagrams, Collaboration Diagrams etc.) which collectively describe the Data, Behavior and Use Interface requirements of the solution. If required, the various elements of the Analysis Model may be indexed via an Analysis Specification. For Custom Extension projects that follow a pure Object Orientated approach, then the Analysis Model will naturally support the development of the Design Model without any further artifacts. However, for projects that are transitioning to this approach, then the various elements of the Analysis Model may be represented within the Analysis Specification. If we now return to the original question of “Where’s my MD.050”. The full answer would be: Capture the functional requirements within a Use Case Group related Use Cases into a Package Create an Analysis Model for each Package Consider creating an Analysis Specification (AN.100) as a index to each Analysis Model artifact An alternative answer for a relatively simple Custom Extension would be: Capture the functional requirements within a Use Case Optionally, group related Use Cases into a Package Create an Analysis Specification (AN.100) for each package 1 Cockburn, A, 2000, Writing Effective Use Case, Addison-Wesley Professional; Edition 1

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• How do I resolve not fully installed package (python3-setuptools)?

  - by user3737693

  I was trying to install python3-setuptools, and when i run $ sudo apt-get install python3-setuptools I get this error: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 6 not upgraded. 1 not fully installed or removed. After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. Setting up python3-setuptools (0.6.34-0ubuntu1) ... Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/py3compile", line 36, in <module> from debpython import files as dpf File "/usr/share/python3/debpython/files.py", line 25, in <module> from debpython.pydist import PUBLIC_DIR_RE File "/usr/share/python3/debpython/pydist.py", line 28, in <module> from debpython.tools import memoize File "/usr/share/python3/debpython/tools.py", line 25, in <module> from datetime import datetime ImportError: /usr/bin/datetime.so: undefined symbol: _Py_ZeroStruct dpkg: error processing python3-setuptools (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing: python3-setuptools E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) I tried apt-get clean, apt-get autoclean, apt-get remove python3-setuptools, dpkg --remove python3-setuptools, apt-get install -f, dpkg -P --force-remove-reinstreq, dpkg -P --force-all --force-remove-reinstreq and dpkg --purge, but none of them worked. Output of sudo dpkg -P --force-all --force-remove-reinstreq python3-setuptools (Reading database ... 225309 files and directories currently installed.) Removing python3-setuptools ... Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/py3clean", line 32, in <module> from debpython import files as dpf File "/usr/share/python3/debpython/files.py", line 25, in <module> from debpython.pydist import PUBLIC_DIR_RE File "/usr/share/python3/debpython/pydist.py", line 28, in <module> from debpython.tools import memoize File "/usr/share/python3/debpython/tools.py", line 25, in <module> from datetime import datetime ImportError: /usr/bin/datetime.so: undefined symbol: _Py_ZeroStruct dpkg: error processing python3-setuptools (--purge): subprocess installed pre-removal script returned error exit status 1 Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/py3compile", line 36, in <module> from debpython import files as dpf File "/usr/share/python3/debpython/files.py", line 25, in <module> from debpython.pydist import PUBLIC_DIR_RE File "/usr/share/python3/debpython/pydist.py", line 28, in <module> from debpython.tools import memoize File "/usr/share/python3/debpython/tools.py", line 25, in <module> from datetime import datetime ImportError: /usr/bin/datetime.so: undefined symbol: _Py_ZeroStruct dpkg: error while cleaning up: subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing: python3-setuptools

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• Designing for the future

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  User interfaces and user experience design is a fast moving field. It’s something that changes pretty quick: what feels fresh today will look outdated tomorrow. I remember the day I first got a beta version of Windows 95 and I felt swept away by the user interface of the OS. It felt so modern! If I look back now, it feels old. Well, it should: the design is 17 years old which is an eternity in our field. Of course, this is not limited to UI. Same goes for many industries. I want you to think back of the cars that amazed you when you were in your teens (if you are in your teens then this may not apply to you). Didn’t they feel like part of the future? Didn’t you think that this was the ultimate in designs? And aren’t those designs hopelessly outdated today (again, depending on your age, it may just be me)? Let’s review the Win95 design: And let’s compare that to Windows 7: There are so many differences here, I wouldn’t even know where to start explaining them. The general feeling however is one of more usability: studies have shown Windows 7 is much easier to understand for new users than the older versions of Windows did. Of course, experienced Windows users didn’t like it: people are usually afraid of changes and like to stick to what they know. But for new users this was a huge improvement. And that is what UX design is all about: make a product easier to use, with less training required and make users feel more productive. Still, there are areas where this doesn’t hold up. There are plenty examples of designs from the past that are still fresh today. But if you look closely at them, you’ll notice some subtle differences. This differences are what keep the designs fresh. A good example is the signs you’ll find on the road. They haven’t changed much over the years (otherwise people wouldn’t recognize them anymore) but they have been changing gradually to reflect changes in traffic. The same goes for computer interfaces. With each new product or version of a product, the UI and UX is changed gradually. Every now and then however, a bigger change is needed. Just think about the introduction of the Ribbon in Microsoft Office 2007: the whole UI was redesigned. A lot of old users (not in age, but in times of using older versions) didn’t like it a bit, but new users or casual users seem to be more efficient using the product. Which, of course, is exactly the reason behind the changes. I believe that a big engine behind the changes in User Experience design has been the web. In the old days (i.e. before the explosion of the internet) user interface design in Windows applications was limited to choosing the margins between your battleship gray buttons. When the web came along, and especially the web 2.0 where the browsers started to act more and more as application platforms, designers stepped in and made a huge impact. In the browser, they could do whatever they wanted. In the beginning this was limited to the darn blink tag but gradually people really started to think about UX. Even more so: the design of the UI and the whole experience was taken away from the developers and put into the hands of people who knew what they were doing: UX designers. This caused some problems. Everyone who has done a web project in the early 2000’s must have had the same experience: the designers give you a set of Photoshop files and tell you to translate it to HTML. Which, of course, is very hard to do. However, with new tooling and new standards this became much easier. The latest version of HTML and CSS has taken the responsibility for the design away from the developers and placed them in the capable hands of the designers. And that’s where that responsibility belongs, after all, I don’t want a designer to muck around in my c# code just as much as he or she doesn’t want me to poke in the sites style definitions. This change in responsibilities resulted in good looking but more important: better thought out user interfaces in websites. And when websites became more and more interactive, people started to expect the same sort of look and feel from their desktop applications. But that didn’t really happen. Most business applications still have that battleship gray look and feel. Ok, they may use a different color but we’re not talking colors here but usability. Now, you may not be able to read the Dutch captions, but even if you did you wouldn’t understand what was going on. At least, not when you first see it. You have to scan the screen, read all the labels, see how they are related to the other elements on the screen and then figure out what they do. If you’re an experienced user of this application however, this might be a good thing: you know what to do and you get all the information you need in one single screen. But for most applications this isn’t the case. A lot of people only use their computer for a limited time a day (a weird concept for me, but it happens) and need it to get something done and then get on with their lives. For them, a user interface experience like the above isn’t working. (disclaimer: I just picked a screenshot, I am not saying this is bad software but it is an example of about 95% of the Windows applications out there). For the knowledge worker, this isn’t a problem. They use one or two systems and they know exactly what they need to do to achieve their goal. They don’t want any clutter on their screen that distracts them from their task, they just want to be as efficient as possible. When they know the systems they are very productive. The point is, how long does it take to become productive? And: could they be even more productive if the UX was better? Are there things missing that they don’t know about? Are there better ways to achieve what they want to achieve? Also: could a system be designed in such a way that it is not only much more easy to work with but also less tiring? in the example above you need to switch between the keyboard and mouse a lot, something that we now know can be very tiring. The goal of most applications (being client apps or websites on any kind of device) is to provide information. Information is data that when given to the right people, on the right time, in the right place and when it is correct adds value for that person (please, remember that definition: I still hear the statement “the information was wrong” which doesn’t make sense: data can be wrong, information cannot be). So if a system provides data, how can we make sure the chances of becoming information is as high as possible? A good example of a well thought-out system that attempts this is the Zune client. It is a very good application, and I think the UX is much better than it’s main competitor iTunes. Have a look at both: On the left you see the iTunes screenshot, on the right the Zune. As you notice, the Zune screen has more images but less chrome (chrome being visuals not part of the data you want to show, i.e. edges around buttons). The whole thing is text oriented or image oriented, where that text or image is part of the information you need. What is important is big, what’s less important is smaller. Yet, everything you need to know at that point is present and your attention is drawn immediately to what you’re trying to achieve: information about music. You can easily switch between the content on your machine and content on your Zune player but clicking on the image of the player. But if you didn’t know that, you’d find out soon enough: the whole UX is designed in such a way that it invites you to play around. So sooner or later (probably sooner) you’d click on that image and you would see what it does. In the iTunes version it’s harder to find: the discoverability is a lot lower. For inexperienced people the Zune player feels much more natural than the iTunes player, and they get up to speed a lot faster. How does this all work? Why is this UX better? The answer lies in a project from Microsoft with the codename (it seems to be becoming the official name though) “Metro”. Metro is a design language, based on certain principles. When they thought about UX they took a good long look around them and went out in search of metaphors. And they found them. The team noticed that signage in streets, airports, roads, buildings and so on are usually very clear and very precise. These signs give you the information you need and nothing more. It’s simple, clearly understood and fast to understand. A good example are airport signs. Airports can be intimidating places, especially for the non-experienced traveler. In the early 1990’s Amsterdam Airport Schiphol decided to redesign all the signage to make the traveller feel less disoriented. They developed a set of guidelines for signs and implemented those. Soon, most airports around the world adopted these ideas and you see variations of the Dutch signs everywhere on the globe. The signs are text-oriented. Yes, there are icons explaining what it all means for the people who can’t read or don’t understand the language, but the basic sign language is text. It’s clear, it’s high-contrast and it’s easy to understand. One look at the sign and you know where to go. The only thing I don’t like is the green sign pointing to the emergency exit, but since this is the default style for emergency exits I understand why they did this. If you look at the Zune UI again, you’ll notice the similarities. Text oriented, little or no icons, clear usage of fonts and all the information you need. This design language has a set of principles: Clean, light, open and fast Content, not chrome Soulful and alive These are just a couple of the principles, you can read the whole philosophy behind Metro for Windows Phone 7 here. These ideas seem to work. I love my Windows Phone 7. It’s easy to use, it’s clear, there’s no clutter that I do not need. It works for me. And I noticed it works for a lot of other people as well, especially people who aren’t as proficient with computers as I am. You see these ideas in a lot other places. Corning, a manufacturer of glass, has made a video of possible usages of their products. It’s their glimpse into the future. You’ll notice that a lot of the UI in the screens look a lot like what Microsoft is doing with Metro (not coincidentally Corning is the supplier for the Gorilla glass display surface on the new SUR40 device (or Surface v2.0 as a lot of people call it)). The idea behind this vision is that data should be available everywhere where you it. Systems should be available at all times and data is presented in a clear and light manner so that you can turn that data into information. You don’t need a lot of fancy animations that only distract from the data. You want the data and you want it fast. Have a look at this truly inspiring video that made: This is what I believe the future will look like. Of course, not everything is possible, or even desirable. But it is a nice way to think about the future . I feel very strongly about designing applications in such a way that they add value to the user. Designing applications that turn data into information. Applications that make the user feel happy to use them. So… when are you going to drop the battleship-gray designs? Tags van Technorati: surface,design,windows phone 7,wp7,metro

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• Referencing environment variables *in* /etc/environment?

  - by Stefan Kendall

  I recently discovered /etc/environment, which seems a more standard way to setup simple environment variables than scripts, but I was wondering if there was a way to back-reference environment variables in the /etc/environment file. That is, I have this: JAVA_HOME="/tools/java" GRAILS_HOME="/tools/grails" GROOVY_HOME="/tools/groovy" GRADLE_HOME="/tools/gradle" PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games" If I try to add $JAVA_HOME/bin to the PATH definition, however, I get $JAVA_HOME/bin, and not the interpolated variable. To remedy this, I'm creating environment.sh in profile.d to add the /bin entries to the path, but this seems sloppy and disorganized. Is there a way to backreference the environment variables in /etc/environment?

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• Analyst's Corner: "Integration Made Simple"

  Tools and strategies improve application implementations.

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• SQL SERVER – Integrate Your Data with Skyvia – Cloud ETL Solution

  - by Pinal Dave

  In our days data integration often becomes a key aspect of business success. For business analysts it’s very important to get integrated data from various sources, such as relational databases, cloud CRMs, etc. to make correct and successful decisions. There are various data integration solutions on market, and today I will tell about one of them – Skyvia. Skyvia is a cloud data integration service, which allows integrating data in cloud CRMs and different relational databases. It is a completely online solution and does not require anything except for a browser. Skyvia provides powerful etl tools for data import, export, replication, and synchronization for SQL Server and other databases and cloud CRMs. You can use Skyvia data import tools to load data from various sources to SQL Server (and SQL Azure). Skyvia supports such cloud CRMs as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM and such databases as MySQL and PostgreSQL. You even can migrate data from SQL Server to SQL Server, or from SQL Server to other databases and cloud CRMs. Additionally Skyvia supports import of CSV files, either uploaded manually or stored on cloud file storage services, such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, or FTP servers. When data import is not enough, Skyvia offers bidirectional data synchronization. With this tool, you can synchronize SQL Server data with other databases and cloud CRMs. After performing the first synchronization, Skyvia tracks data changes in the synchronized data storages. In SQL Server databases (and other relational databases) it creates additional tracking tables and triggers. This allows synchronizing only the changed data. Skyvia also maps records by their primary key values to each other, so it does not require different sources to have the same primary key structure. It still can match the corresponding records without having to add any additional columns or changing data structure. The only requirement for synchronization is that primary keys must be autogenerated. With Skyvia it’s not necessary for data to have the same structure in integrated data storages. Skyvia supports powerful mapping mechanisms that allow synchronizing data with completely different structure. It provides support for complex mathematical and string expressions when mapping data, using lookups, etc. You may use data splitting – loading data from a single CSV file or source table to multiple related target tables. Or you may load data from several source CSV files or tables to several related target tables. In each case Skyvia preserves data relations. It builds corresponding relations between the target data automatically. When you often work with cloud CRM data, native CRM data reporting and analysis tools may be not enough for you. And there is a vast set of professional data analysis and reporting tools available for SQL Server. With Skyvia you can quickly copy your cloud CRM data to an SQL Server database and apply corresponding SQL Server tools to the data. In such case you can use Skyvia data replication tools. It allows you to quickly copy cloud CRM data to SQL Server or other databases without customizing any mapping. You need just to specify columns to copy data from. Target database tables will be created automatically. Skyvia offers powerful filtering settings to replicate only the records you need. Skyvia also provides capability to export data from SQL Server (including SQL Azure) and other databases and cloud CRMs to CSV files. These files can be either downloadable manually or loaded to cloud file storages or FTP server. You can use export, for example, to backup SQL Azure data to Dropbox. Any data integration operation can be scheduled for automatic execution. Thus, you can automate your SQL Azure data backup or data synchronization – just configure it once, then schedule it, and benefit from automatic data integration with Skyvia. Currently registration and using Skyvia is completely free, so you can try it yourself and find out whether its data migration and integration tools suits for you. Visit this link to register on Skyvia: https://app.skyvia.com/register Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Cloud Computing

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• Expression Blend 4 available and training resources

  - by pluginbaby

  As you may know Expression Blend 4 has shipped! It is still part of Expression Studio, which now comes in 2 “flavors”: Expression Studio 4 Ultimate Expression Blend SketchFlow Expression Web + SuperPreview Expression Encoder Expression Design Expression Studio 4 Web Professional Expression Web + SuperPreview Expression Encoder Expression Design So the version you want for Silverlight is Expression Studio 4 Ultimate (because you can’t buy Expression Blend alone). Expression Blend is an awesome tool but might be difficult to approach at first, specially for people coming from Visual Studio… this tool target designers so it can takes time for a developer to get comfortable enough. Good news is the availability of a free “Blend Fundamentals Training” which contains plenty of resources to help you master Expression Blend in 5 days: http://www.microsoft.com/expression/resources/BlendTraining/   Also don’t forget the .toolbox: http://www.microsoft.com/design/toolbox/ This Microsoft website contains courses and tutorials to help you learn UI Design for Silverlight with Expression Blend.

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• What&rsquo;s new in VS.10 &amp; TFS.10?

  - by johndoucette

  Getting my geek on… I have decided to call the products VS.10 (Visual Studio 2010), TP.10 (Test Professional 2010),  and TFS.10 (Team Foundation Server 2010) Thanks Neno Loje. What's new in Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server 2010? Focusing on Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) ALM-related parts: Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 NEW: IntelliTrace® (aka the historical debugger) NEW: Architecture Tools New Project Type: Modeling Project UML Diagrams UML Use Case Diagram UML Class Diagram UML Sequence Diagram (supports reverse enginneering) UML Activity Diagram UML Component Diagram Layer Diagram (with Team Build integration for layer validation) Architecuture Explorer Dependency visualization DGML Web & Load Tests Visual Studio Premium 2010 NEW: Architecture Tools Read-only model viewer Development Tools Code Analysis New Rules like SQL Injection detection Rule Sets Code Profiler Multi-Tier Profiling JScript Profiling Profiling applications on virtual machines in sampling mode Code Metrics Test Tools Code Coverage NEW: Test Impact Analysis NEW: Coded UI Test Database Tools (DB schema versioning & deployment) Visual Studio Professional 2010 Debuger Mixed Mode Debugging for 64-bit Applications Export/Import of Breakpoints and data tips Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 Microsoft Test Manager (MTM, formerly known as "Camano")) Fast Forward Testing Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Work Item Tracking and Project Management New MSF templatesfor Agile and CMMI (V 5.0) Hierarchical Work Items Custom Work Item Link Types Ready to use Excel agile project management workbooks for managing your backlogs (including capacity planing) Convert Work Item query to an Excel report MS Excel integration Support for Work Item hierarchies Formatting is preserved after doing a 'Refresh' MS Project integration Hierarchy and successor/predecessor info is now synchronized NEW: Test Case Management Version Control Public Workspaces Branch & Merge Visualization Tracking of Changesets & Work Items Gated Check-In Team Build Build Controllers and Agents Workflow 4-based build process NEW: Lab Management (only a pre-release is avaiable at the moment!) Project Portal & Reporting Dashboards (on SharePoint Portal) Burndown Chart TFS Web Parts (to show data from TFS) Administration & Operations Topology enhancements Application tier network load balancing (NLB) SQL Server scale out Improved Sharepoint flexibility Report Server flexibility Zone support Kerberos support Separation of TFS and SQL administration Setup Separate install from configure Improved installation wizards Optional components Simplified account requirements Improved Reporting Services configuration Setup consolidation Upgrading from previous TFS versions Improved IIS flexibility Administration Consolidation of command line tools User rename support Project Collections Archive/restore individual project collections Move Team Project Collections Server consolidation Team Project Collection Split Team Project Collection Isolation Server request cancellation Licensing: TFS server license included in MSDN subscriptions Removed features (former features not part of Visual Studio 2010): Debug » Start With Application Verifier Object Test Bench IntelliSense for C++ / CLI Debugging support for SQL 2000

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• Tailoring the Oracle Fusion Applications User Interface with Oracle Composer

  - by mvaughan

  By Killian Evers, Oracle Applications User Experience Changing the user interface (UI) is one of the most common modifications customers perform to Oracle Fusion Applications. Typically, customers add or remove a field based on their needs. Oracle makes the process of tailoring easier for customers, and reduces the burden for their IT staff, which you can read about on the Usable Apps website or in an earlier VoX post.This is the first in a series of posts that will talk about the tools that Oracle has provided for tailoring with its family of composers. These tools are designed for business systems analysts, and they allow employees other than IT staff to make changes in an upgrade-safe and patch-friendly manner. Let’s take a deep dive into one of these composers, the Oracle Composer. Oracle Composer allows business users to modify existing UIs after they have been deployed and are in use. It is an integral component of our SaaS offering. Using Oracle Composer, users can control:     •    Who sees the changes     •    When the changes are made     •    What changes are made Change for me, change for you, change for all of youOne of the most powerful aspects of Oracle Composer is its flexibility. Oracle uses Oracle Composer to make changes for a user or group of users – those who see the changes. A user of Oracle Fusion Applications can make changes to the user interface at runtime via Oracle Composer, and these changes will remain every time they log into the system. For example, they can rearrange certain objects on a page, add and remove designated content, and save queries.Business systems analysts can make changes to Oracle Fusion Application UIs for groups of users or all users. Oracle’s Fusion Middleware Metadata Services (MDS) stores these changes and retrieves them at runtime, merging customizations with the base metadata and revealing the final experience to the end user. A tailored application can have multiple customization layers, and some layers can be specific to certain Fusion Applications. Some examples of customization layers are: site, organization, country, or role. Customization layers are applied in a specific order of precedence on top of the base application metadata. This image illustrates how customization layers are applied.What time is it?Users make changes to UIs at design time, runtime, and design time at runtime. Design time changes are typically made by application developers using an integrated development environment, or IDE, such as Oracle JDeveloper. Once made, these changes are then deployed to managed servers by application administrators. Oracle Composer covers the other two areas: Runtime changes and design time at runtime changes. When we say users are making changes at runtime, we mean that the changes are made within the running application and take effect immediately in the running application. A prime example of this ability is users who make changes to their running application that only affect the UIs they see. What is new with Oracle Composer is the last area: Design time at runtime.  A business systems analyst can make changes to the UIs at runtime but does not have to make those changes immediately to the application. These changes are stored as metadata, separate from the base application definitions. Customizations made at runtime can be saved in a sandbox so that the changes can be isolated and validated before being published into an environment, without the need to redeploy the application. What can I do?Oracle Composer can be run in one of two modes. Depending on which mode is chosen, you may have different capabilities available for changing the UIs. The first mode is view mode, the most common default mode for most pages. This is the mode that is used for personalizations or user customizations. Users can access this mode via the Personalization link (see below) in the global region on Oracle Fusion Applications pages. In this mode, you can rearrange components on a page with drag-and-drop, collapse or expand components, add approved external content, and change the overall layout of a page. However, all of the changes made this way are exclusive to that particular user.The second mode, edit mode, is typically made available to select users with access privileges to edit page content. We call these folks business systems analysts. This mode is used to make UI changes for groups of users. Users with appropriate privileges can access the edit mode of Oracle Composer via the Administration menu (see below) in the global region on Oracle Fusion Applications pages. In edit mode, users can also add components, delete components, and edit component properties. While in edit mode in Oracle Composer, there are two views that assist the business systems analyst with making UI changes: Design View and Source View (see below). Design View, the default view, is a WYSIWYG rendering of the page and its content. The business systems analyst can perform these actions: Add content – including custom content like a portlet displaying news or stock quotes, or predefined content delivered from Oracle Fusion Applications (including ADF components and task flows) Rearrange content – performed via drag-and-drop on the page or by using the actions menu of a component or portlet to move content around Edit component properties and parameters – for specific components, control the visual properties such as text or display labels, or parameters such as RSS feeds Hide or show components – hidden components can be re-shown Delete components Change page layout – users can select from eight pre-defined layouts Edit page properties – create or edit a page’s parameters and display properties Reset page customizations – remove edits made to the page in the current layer and/or reset the page to a previous state. Detailed information on each of these capabilities and the additional actions not covered in the list above can be found in the Oracle® Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle WebCenter.This image shows what the screen looks like in Design View.Source View, the second option in the edit mode of Oracle Composer, provides a WYSIWYG and a hierarchical rendering of page components in a component navigator. In Source View, users can access and modify properties of components that are not otherwise selectable in Design View. For example, many ADF Faces components can be edited only in Source View. Users can also edit components within a task flow. This image shows what the screen looks like in Source View.Detailed information on Source View can be found in the Oracle® Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle WebCenter.Oracle Composer enables any application or portal to be customized or personalized after it has been deployed and is in use. It is designed to be extremely easy to use so that both business systems analysts and users can edit Oracle Fusion Applications pages with a few clicks of the mouse. Oracle Composer runs in all modern browsers and provides a rich, dynamic way to edit JSF application and portal pages.From the editor: The next post in this series about composers will be on Data Composer. You can also catch Killian speaking about extensibility at OpenWorld 2012 and in her Faces of Fusion video.

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• More info: a "stand-alone" installer for Management Studio Express 2008

  - by AaronBertrand

  Last February, I blogged about something I was initially very happy about: a stand-alone installer for Management Studio Express (SSMSE) 2008 . Now users could allegedly download a much smaller installer, and only install the client tools without having to install an instance of SQL Server Express. While the latter is true, the former remains a pipe dream. Bill Ramos stated in his 2009-02-20 announcement : "We teased out the Tools portion of SQL Server 2008 Express with Tools into it’s own download."...(read more)

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• Hudson.. another Continuous Integration tool

  - by Narendra Tiwari

  In my previous posts I discussed about Cruisecontrol.net and its legacy support to .Net development. Hudson  is yet another continuous integration tool. Hudson is also free like CCNet and built in java. - CCNet has its legacy support to .Net applications where as Hudson can be easily configured on both the environments (.Net and Java). - One of the major differences in CCNet and Hudson is the richer GUI of Hudson provide user interactive screens for project configuration where as in CCNet we have to play with a few xml configuration files. Both the tools are capable of providing basic features of continuous integration e.g.:- - Source Control configuration - Code Compilation/Build - Ad hoc plugin tools to be configured along with compilation Support for adhoc tools seems to be bigger with CCNet e.g. There are almost every source control plugin available with CCNet where as Hudson has support for limited source control servers. Basically there is an interseting point to see is that there are 2 major partsof whole CI system one performed by build tool and rest. Build tool takes care of all adhoc plugin tools  so no matter if CI tool does not have plugin for that tool if thet tools provides command line support that can be configured in build tool and that build tool is then configured with CI tool inturn. For example if I have a build script configured in MSBuild and CCNet can be easily switched to Hudson. Here we need not to change anything in build script we just need to configure MSBuild on Hudson and pass the path of script file and thats it... all is same. Hudson Resources:- - https://hudson.dev.java.net/ - http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/Meet+Hudson - http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/Plugins - http://callport.blogspot.com/2009/02/hudson-for-net-projects.html Java support on CCNet http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CC/Getting+Started+With+CruiseControl?focusedCommentId=19988484#comment-19988484 Please share your thoughts...

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• Packaging Swing apps with integrated JavaFX content

  - by igor

  JavaFX provides a lot of interesting capabilities for developing rich client applications in Java, but what if you are working on an existing Swing application and you want to take advantage of these new features?  Maybe you want to use one or two controls like the LineChart or a MediaView.  Maybe you want to embed a large Scene Graph as an initial step in porting your application to FX.  A hybrid Swing/FX application might just be the answer. Developing a hybrid Swing + JavaFX application is not terribly difficult, but until recently the deployment of hybrid applications has not simple as a "pure" JavaFX application.  The existing tools focused on packaging FX Applications, or Swing applications - they did not account for hybrid applications. But with JavaFX 2.2 the tools include support for this hybrid application use case.  Solution  In JavaFX 2.2 we extended the packaging ant tasks to greatly simplify deploying hybrid applications.  You now use the same deployment approach as you would for pure JavaFX applications.  Just bundle your main application jar with the fx:jar ant task and then generate html/jnlp files using fx:deploy.  The only difference is setting toolkit attribute for the fx:application tag as shown below: <fx:application id="swingFXApp" mainClass="${main.class}" toolkit="swing"/>  The value of ${main.class} in the example above is your application class which has a main method.  It does not need to extend JavaFX Application class. The resulting package provides support for the same set of execution modes as a package for a JavaFX application, although the packages which are created are not identical to the packages created for a pure FX application.  You will see two JNLP files generated in the case of a hybrid application - one for use from Swing applet and another for the webstart launch.  Note that these improvements do not alter the set of features available to Swing applications. The packaging tools just make it easier to use the advanced features of JavaFX in your Swing application. The same limits still apply, for example a Swing application can not use JavaFX Preloaders and code changes are necessary to support HTML splash screens. Why should I use the JavaFX ant tasks for packaging my Swing application?  While using FX packaging tool for a Swing application may seem like a mismatch at face value, there are some really good reasons to use this approach.  The primary justification for our packaging tools is to simplify the creation of your application artifacts, and to reduce manual errors.  Plus, no one should have to write JNLP by hand. Some specific benefits include: Your application jar will include a launcher program.  This improves your standalone launch by: checking for the JavaFX runtime guiding the user through any necessary installations setting the system proxy for Java The ant tasks will generate JNLP and HTML files for your swing app: avoids learning unnecessary details about JNLP, and eliminates the error-prone hand editing of JNLP files simplifies using advanced features like embedding JNLP and signing jars as BLOBs to improve launch performance.you can also embed the signing certificate details to improve the user's experience  allows the use of web page templates to inject the generated code directly into your actual web page instead of being forced to copy/paste the generated code snippets. What about native packing? Absolutely!  The very same ant task can generate a native bundle for a Swing application with JavaFX content.  Try running one of these sample native bundles for the "SwingInterop" FX example: exe and dmg.   I also used another feature on these examples: a click-through license agreement for .exe installers and OS X DMG drag installers. Small Caveat This packaging procedure is optimized around using the JavaFX packaging tools for your entire Swing application.  If you are trying to embed JavaFX content into existing project (with an existing build/packing process) then you may need to experiment in order to find the best way to integrate the JavaFX packaging steps into your existing build procedure. As long as you can use ant in your build process this should be a workable approach. It some cases solution could be less than ideal. For example, you need to use fx:jar to package your main jar file in order to produce a double-clickable jar or a native bundle.  The jar will be created from scratch, but you may already be creating the main jar file with a custom manifest.  This may lead to some redundant steps in your build process.  Hopefully the benefits will outweigh the problems. This is an area of ongoing development for the team, and we will continue to refine and improve both the tools and the process. Please share your experiences and suggestions with us.  You can comment here on the blog or file issues to JIRA. Sample code Here is the full ant code used to package SwingInterop.  You can grab latest JavaFX samples and try it yourself:  <target name="-post-jar"> <taskdef resource="com/sun/javafx/tools/ant/antlib.xml" uri="javafx:com.sun.javafx.tools.ant" classpath="${javafx.tools.ant.jar}"/> <!-- Mark application as Swing-based --> <fx:application id="swingFXApp" mainClass="${main.class}" toolkit="swing"/> <!-- Create doubleclickable jar file with embedded launcher --> <fx:jar destfile="${dist.jar}"> <fileset dir="${build.classes.dir}"/> <fx:application refid="swingFXApp" name="SwingInterop"/> <manifest> <attribute name="Implementation-Vendor" value="${application.vendor}"/> <attribute name="Implementation-Title" value="${application.title}"/> <attribute name="Implementation-Version" value="1.0"/> </manifest> </fx:jar> <!-- sign application jar. Use new self signed certificate --> <delete file="${build.dir}/test.keystore"/> <genkey alias="TestAlias" storepass="xyz123" keystore="${build.dir}/test.keystore" dname="CN=Samples, OU=JavaFX Dev, O=Oracle, C=US"/> <fx:signjar keystore="${build.dir}/test.keystore" alias="TestAlias" storepass="xyz123"> <fileset file="${dist.jar}"/> </fx:signjar> <!-- generate JNLPs, HTML and native bundles --> <fx:deploy width="960" height="720" includeDT="true" nativeBundles="all" outdir="${basedir}/${dist.dir}" embedJNLP="true" outfile="${application.title}"> <fx:application refId="swingFXApp"/> <fx:resources> <fx:fileset dir="${basedir}/${dist.dir}" includes="SwingInterop.jar"/> </fx:resources> <fx:permissions/> <info title="Sample app: ${application.title}" vendor="${application.vendor}"/> </fx:deploy> </target>

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• I'd like to rebuild my web server without web management software; what knowledge, skills, and tools will I require? [closed]

  - by Joe Zeng

  I've been using Webmin for my web server that runs my personal website and a host of other websites for a while now, and I feel like I should be able to manage my web server more directly, because I haven't even touched the Webmin for the past year or so and I feel like maybe it has too much functionality that I have to click through the next time I want to access it or create a new subdomain or database on my site. I want to try something lighter and more wholly manageable, now that I'm more comfortable with using ssh and command-line tools. I've decided that I'm going to try using Django as a framework, but obviously that's only part of the picture. What sort of knowledge will I require?

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• Visual Studio 2010 RC &ndash; Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services Development - Updates from MIX Anno

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  MIX is happening and there is a lot of excitement around the various releases such as the Windows Phone 7 Developer Preview, IE9 Platform Preview and few other announcements that have been made.  Clearly, the Windows Phone 7 Developer Preview has generated the maximum interest and opened a plethora of opportunities for .NET Developers.  It also takes the mobile development to a new generation and doesn’t force developers to learn different programming language. Along with this, few other releases have been out.  The most anticipated Silverlight 4 RC is out and its corresponding templates are also out there for you to download.  Once VS 2010 RC was released, it was much of a disappointment that it doesn’t support SL4 development as well as the SL4 Business Application Development (a.k.a. WCF RIA Services).   There were few workarounds though nothing concrete.  Earlier I had written about how the WCF RIA Services Preview does work with ASP.NET Development using VS 2010 RC. However, with the release of SL4 RC and the corresponding tooling updates, one can develop for both SL4 as well as SL4 + WCF RIA Services using VS 2010 RC.  This is kind of important and keeps the continuum going until VS 2010 RTMs.  So, the purpose of this post is to quickly give the updates and links to install the relevant tools. Silverlight 4 RC Runtime Windows Runtime or the Mac Runtime Silverlight 4 RC Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2010 RC Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 (this would install the Runtime as well automatically) Expression Blend 4 Beta Expression Blend 4 Beta If you install the SL4 RC Developer Tools, it also installs the WCF RIA Services Preview automatically.  You just need to install the WCF RIA Services Toolkit that can be downloaded from Install the WCF RIA Services Toolkit Of course you can also just install the WCF RIA Services for VS 2010 RC separately (without SL4 Tools) from here Kindly note, all the above mentioned links are with respect to Visual Studio 2010 RC edition.  If you are developing with VS 2008, then you can just target SL3 (as I write this, there seems to be no official support for developing SL4 with VS 2008) and the related tools can be downloaded from http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/ Basically you need to download SL 3 Runtime, SDK, Expression Blend 3 and the Silverlight Toolkit.  All the links for the download are available in the above mentioned page. Also, a version of WCF RIA Services that is supported in VS 2008 is available for download at WCF RIA Services Beta for VS 2008 I know there are far too many things to keep in mind.  So, I put a flowchart that could help with depicting it pictorial.  Note that this is just my own imagination and doesn’t cover all scenarios.  for example, if you are neither developing for Webform, Silverlight, you end up nowhere whereas in actual scenario you may want to develop Desktop, Services, Console, Game and what not.  So, keep in mind this is just Web. Cheers !!!

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• Online Media Daily: Oracle Takes Social Marketing Seriously

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  In the article published on Nov 12, 2012 and titled "Oracle Integrates Social Marketing Into Enterprise To Gain Marketing Revs," Online Media Daily explores Oracle's approach to social marketing. The publication says that Oracle is focused on showing marketers how to integrate social data into corporate business processes and how to "socialize" the corporate world. The article goes on to state:"Enterprise software companies like Oracle, SAP, IBM, Salesforce and Microsoft have been slowly building up an expertise in social marketing to integrate the data into traditional enterprise resource planning, and customer relationship management tools into social marketing tools.   Enterprise software companies like Oracle, SAP, IBM, Salesforce and Microsoft have been slowly building up an expertise in social marketing to integrate the data into traditional enterprise resource planning, and customer relationship management tools into social marketing tools.    Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/187096/oracle-integrates-social-marketing-into-enterprise.html#ixzz2CPMZ1w3D Meg Bear, VP of cloud social platform at Oracle, sees the integration with ERP systems as a differentiator for the company. Oracle Social Relationship Management launched last month. It integrates social data into traditional enterprise applications like Oracle Fusion Marketing, Oracle Fusion Sales Catalog, Oracle ATG Web Commerce and Oracle ERP." The post goes on to quote a Forrester analyst stating the following:""There's room for any process-driven application to run more efficiently, especially if they're socially enabled," said Rob Koplowitz, VP and principal analyst at Forrester Research. "It takes the human part of the process not generally captured today to provide better access to content, information and collective actions." Koplowitz said several acquisitions support Oracle's long-term vision: to layer social on top of other enterprise apps, like its ERP platform." With many great acquisitions under our belt and organically grown social tools, the market recognizes that Oracle is poised to seize the moment in socially enabled business apps. Continue reading the full article here.

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