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• Adopting DBVCS

  - by Wes McClure

  Identify early adopters Pick a small project with a small(ish) team.  This can be a legacy application or a green-field application. Strive to find a team of early adopters that will be eager to try something new. Get the team on board! Research Research the tool(s) that you want to use.  Some tools provide all of the features you would need while some only provide a slice of the pie.  DBVCS requires the ability to manage a set of change scripts that update a database from one version to the next.  Ideally a tool can track database versions and automatically apply updates.  The change script generation process can be manual, but having diff tools available to automatically generate it can really reduce the overhead to adoption.  Finally, an automated tool to generate a script file per database object is an added bonus as your version control system can quickly identify what was changed in a commit (add/del/modify), just like with code changes. Don’t settle on just one tool, identify several.  Then work with the team to evaluate the tools.  Have the team do some tests of the following scenarios with each tool: Baseline an existing database: can the migration tool work with legacy databases?  Caution: most migration platforms do not support baselines or have poor support, especially the fad of fluent APIs. Add/drop tables Add/drop procedures/functions/views Alter tables (rename columns, add columns, remove columns) Massage data – migrations sometimes involve changing data types that cannot be implicitly casted and require you to decide how the data is explicitly cast to the new type.  This is a requirement for a migrations platform.  Think about a case where you might want to combine fields, or move a field from one table to another, you wouldn’t want to lose the data. Run the tool via the command line.  If you cannot automate the tool in Continuous Integration what is the point? Create a copy of a database on demand. Backup/restore databases locally. Let the team give feedback and decide together, what tool they would like to try out. My recommendation at this point would be to include TSqlMigrations and RoundHouse as SQL based migration platforms.  In general I would recommend staying away from the fluent platforms as they often lack baseline capabilities and add overhead to learn a new API when SQL is already a very well known DSL.  Code migrations often get messy with procedures/views/functions as these have to be created with SQL and aren’t cross platform anyways.  IMO stick to SQL based migrations. Reconciling Production If your project is a legacy application, you will need to reconcile the current state of production with your development databases.  Find changes in production and bring them down to development, even if they are old and need to be removed.  Once complete, produce a baseline of either dev or prod as they are now in sync.  Commit this to your VCS of choice. Add whatever schema changes tracking mechanism your tool requires to your development database.  This often requires adding a table to track the schema version of that database.  Your tool should support doing this for you.  You can add this table to production when you do your next release. Script out any changes currently in dev.  Remove production artifacts that you brought down during reconciliation.  Add change scripts for any outstanding changes in dev since the last production release.  Commit these to your repository.   Say No to Shared Dev DBs Simply put, you wouldn’t dream of sharing a code checkout, why would you share a development database?  If you have a shared dev database, back it up, distribute the backups and take the shared version offline (including the dev db server once all projects are using DB VCS).  Doing DB VCS with a shared database is bound to cause problems as people won’t be able to easily script out their own changes from those that others are working on.   First prod release Copy prod to your beta/testing environment.  Add the schema changes table (or mechanism) and do a test run of your changes.  If successful you can schedule this to be run on production.   Evaluation After your first release, evaluate the pain points of the process.  Try to find tools or modifications to existing tools to help fix them.  Don’t leave stones unturned, iteratively evolve your tools and practices to make the process as seamless as possible.  This is why I suggest open source alternatives.  Nothing is set in stone, a good example was adding transactional support to TSqlMigrations.  We ran into situations where an update would break a database, so I added a feature to do transactional updates and rollback on errors!  Another good example is generating change scripts.  We have been manually making these for months now.  I found an open source project called Open DB Diff and integrated this with TSqlMigrations.  These were things we just accepted at the time when we began adopting our tool set.  Once we became comfortable with the base functionality, it was time to start automating more of the process.  Just like anything else with development, never be afraid to try to find tools to make your job easier!   Enjoy -Wes

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• How to deploy Document Set using CAML in SharePoint2010 solution package

  - by ybbest

  In my last post, I showed you how to use Document Set using SharePoint UI in the browser. In this post, I’d like to show you how to create the same Document Set using CAML and SharePoint solution package. You can download the complete solution here. 1. Create the Application Number site column using the SharePoint empty element item template in VS2010 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/"> <Field Type="Text" DisplayName="ApplicationNumber" Required="FALSE" EnforceUniqueValues="FALSE" Indexed="FALSE" MaxLength="255" Group="YBBEST" ID="{916bf3af-5ec1-4441-acd8-88ff62ab1b7e}" Name="ApplicationNumber" ></Field> </Elements> 2. Create the Loan Application Form and Loan Contract Form content types. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/"> <!-- Parent ContentType: Document (0x0101) --> <ContentType ID="0x0101005dfbf820ce3c49f69c73a00e0e0e53f6" Name="Loan Contract Form" Group="YBBEST" Description="Loan Contract Form" Inherits="TRUE" Version="0"> <FieldRefs> <FieldRef ID="916bf3af-5ec1-4441-acd8-88ff62ab1b7e" Name="ApplicationNumber" DisplayName="ApplicationNumber" /> </FieldRefs> </ContentType> <!-- Parent ContentType: Document (0x0101) --> <ContentType ID="0x010100f3016e3d03454b93bc4d6ab63941c0d2" Name="Loan Application Form" Group="YBBEST" Description="Loan Application Form" Inherits="TRUE" Version="0"> <FieldRefs> <FieldRef ID="916bf3af-5ec1-4441-acd8-88ff62ab1b7e" Name="ApplicationNumber" DisplayName="ApplicationNumber" /> </FieldRefs> </ContentType> </Elements> 3. Create the Loan Application Document Set. 4. Create the Document Set Welcome Page using the SharePoint Module item template. Notes: 1.When creating document set content type , you need to set the  Inherits=”FALSE”  or remove the  Inherits=”TRUE” from the content type definition (default is  Inherits=”FALSE”) . This is the Document Set limitation in the current version of SharePoint2010. Because of this , you also need to manually  attach the event receiver and  Document Set welcome page to your custom Document Set Content Type. 2. Shared Fields are push down only: 3. Not available in SharePoint foundation (only SharePoint Server 2010). 4. You can’t have folders within document sets (you can place document sets in folders though). For a complete limitation and considerations , you can see the references for details. References: Document Set Limitations and Considerations in SharePoint 2010 1 Document Set Limitations and Considerations in SharePoint 2010 2 Document Sets planning (SharePoint Server 2010) Import Document Sets Issue http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg581064.aspx http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2010/OSP305 DocumentSet Class

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• Blend for Visual Studio 2013 Prototyping Applications with SketchFlow

  - by T

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tburger/archive/2014/08/10/blend-for-visual-studio-2013-prototyping-applications-with-sketchflow.aspxSketchFlow enables rapid creating of dynamic interface mockups very quickly. The SketchFlow workspace is the same as the standard Blend workspace with the inclusion of three panels: the SketchFlow Feedback panel, the SketchFlow Animation panel and the SketchFlow Map panel. By using SketchFlow to prototype, you can get feedback early in the process. It helps to surface possible issues, lower development iterations, and increase stakeholder buy in. SketchFlow prototypes not only provide an initial look but also provide a way to add additional ideas and input and make sure the team is on track prior to investing in complete development. When you have completed the prototyping, you can discard the prototype and just use the lessons learned to design the application from or extract individual elements from your prototype and include them in the application. I don’t recommend trying to transition the entire project into a development project. Objects that you add with the SketchFlow style have a hand-sketched look. The sketch style is used to remind stakeholders that this is a prototype. This encourages them to focus on the flow and functionality without getting distracted by design details. The sketchflow assets are under sketchflow in the asset panel and are identifiable by the postfix “–Sketch”. For example “Button-Sketch”. You can mix sketch and standard controls in your interface, if required. Be creative, if there is a missing control or your interface has a different look and feel than the out of the box one, reuse other sketch controls to mimic the functionality or look and feel. Only use standard controls if it doesn’t distract from the idea that this is a prototype and not a standard application. The SketchFlow Map panel provides information about the structure of your application. To create a new screen in your prototype: Right-click the map surface and choose “Create a Connected Screen”. Name the screens with names that are meaningful to the stakeholders. The start screen is the one that has the green arrow. To change the start screen, right click on any other screen and set to start screen. Only one screen can be the start screen at a time. Rounded screen are component screens to mimic reusable custom controls that will be built into the final application. You can change the colors of all of the boxes and should use colors to create functional groupings. The groupings can be identified in the SketchFlow Project Settings. To add connections between screens in the SketchFlow Map panel. Move the mouse over a screen in the SketchFlow and a menu will appear at the bottom of the screen node. In the menu, click Connect to an existing screen. Drag the arrow to another screen on the Map. You add navigation to your prototype by adding connections on the SketchFlow map or by adding navigation directly to items on your interface. To add navigation from objects on the artboard, right click the item then from the menu, choose “Navigate to”. This will expose a sub-menu with available screens, backward, or forward. When the map has connected screens, the SketchFlow Player displays the connected screens on the Navigate sidebar. All screens show in the SketchFlow Player Map. To see the SketchFlow Player, run your SketchFlow prototype. The Navigation sidebar is meant to show the desired user work flow. The map can be used to view the different screens regardless of suggested navigation in the navigation bar. The map is able to be hidden and shown. As mentioned, a component screen is a shared screen that is used in more than one screen and generally represents what will be a custom object in the application. To create a component screen, you can create a screen, right click on it in the SketchFlow Map and choose “Make into component screen”. You can mouse over a screen and from the menu that appears underneath, choose create and insert component screen. To use an existing screen, select if from the Asset panel under SketchFlow, Components. You can use Storyboards and Visual State animations in your SketchFlow project. However, SketchFlow also offers its own animation technique that is simpler and better suited for prototyping. The SketchFlow Animation panel is above your artboard by default. In SketchFlow animation, you create frames and then position the elements on your interface for each frame. You then specify elapsed time and any effects you want to apply to the transition. The + at the top is what creates new frames. Once you have a new Frame, select it and change the property you want to animate. In the example above, I changed the Text of the result box. You can adjust the time between frames in the lower area between the frames. The easing and effects functions are changed in the center between each frame. You edit the hold time for frames by clicking the clock icon in the lower left and the hold time will appear on each frame and can be edited. The FluidLayout icon (also located in the lower left) will create smooth transitions. Next to the FluidLayout icon is the name of that Animation. You can rename the animation by clicking on it and editing the name. The down arrow chevrons next to the name allow you to view the list of all animations in this prototype and select them for editing. To add the animation to the interface object (such as a button to start the animation), select the PlaySketchFlowAnimationAction from the SketchFlow behaviors in the Assets menu and drag it to an object on your interface. With the PlaySketchFlowAnimationAction that you just added selected in the Objects and Timeline, edit the properties to change the EventName to the event you want and choose the SketchFlowAnimation you want from the drop down list. You may want to add additional information to your screens that isn’t really part of the prototype but is relevant information or a request for clarification or feedback from the reviewer. You do this with annotations or notes. Both appear on the user interface, however, annotations can be switched on or off at design and review time. Notes cannot be switched off. To add an Annotation, chose the Create Annotation from the Tools menu. The annotation appears on the UI where you will add the notes. To display or Hide annotations, click the annotation toggle at the bottom right on the artboard . After to toggle annotations on, the identifier of the person who created them appears on the artboard and you must click that to expand the notes. To add a note to the artboard, simply select the Note-Sketch from Assets ->SketchFlow ->Styles ->Sketch Styles. Drag and drop it to the artboard and place where you want it. When you are ready for users to review the prototype, you have a few options available. Click File -> Export and choose one of the options from the list: Publish to Sharepoint, Package SketchFlowProject, Export to Microsoft Word, or Export as Images. I suggest you play with as many of the options as you can to see what they do. Both the Sharepoint and Packaged SketchFlowProject allow you to collect feedback from one or more users that you can import into the project. The user can make notes on the UI and in the Feedback area in the bottom left corner of the player. When the user is done adding feedback, it is exported from the right most folder icon in the My Feedback panel. Feeback is imported on a panel named SketchFlow Feedback. To get that panel to show up, select Window -> SketchFlow Feedback. Once you have the panel showing, click the + in the upper right of the panel and find the notes you exported. When imported, they will show up in a list and on the artboard. To document your prototype, use the Export to Microsoft Word option from the File menu. That should get you started with prototyping.

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• How to deploy Document Set using CAML in SharePoint2010 solution package

  - by ybbest

  In my last post, I showed you how to use Document Set using SharePoint UI in the browser. In this post, I’d like to show you how to create the same Document Set using CAML and SharePoint solution package. You can download the complete solution here. 1. Create the Application Number site column using the SharePoint empty element item template in VS2010 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/"> <Field Type="Text" DisplayName="ApplicationNumber" Required="FALSE" EnforceUniqueValues="FALSE" Indexed="FALSE" MaxLength="255" Group="YBBEST" ID="{916bf3af-5ec1-4441-acd8-88ff62ab1b7e}" Name="ApplicationNumber" ></Field> </Elements> 2. Create the Loan Application Form and Loan Contract Form content types. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/"> <!-- Parent ContentType: Document (0x0101) --> <ContentType ID="0x0101005dfbf820ce3c49f69c73a00e0e0e53f6" Name="Loan Contract Form" Group="YBBEST" Description="Loan Contract Form" Inherits="TRUE" Version="0"> <FieldRefs> <FieldRef ID="916bf3af-5ec1-4441-acd8-88ff62ab1b7e" Name="ApplicationNumber" DisplayName="ApplicationNumber" /> </FieldRefs> </ContentType> <!-- Parent ContentType: Document (0x0101) --> <ContentType ID="0x010100f3016e3d03454b93bc4d6ab63941c0d2" Name="Loan Application Form" Group="YBBEST" Description="Loan Application Form" Inherits="TRUE" Version="0"> <FieldRefs> <FieldRef ID="916bf3af-5ec1-4441-acd8-88ff62ab1b7e" Name="ApplicationNumber" DisplayName="ApplicationNumber" /> </FieldRefs> </ContentType> </Elements> 3. Create the Loan Application Document Set. 4. Create the Document Set Welcome Page using the SharePoint Module item template. Notes: 1.When creating document set content type , you need to set the  Inherits=”FALSE”  or remove the  Inherits=”TRUE” from the content type definition (default is  Inherits=”FALSE”) . This is the Document Set limitation in the current version of SharePoint2010. Because of this , you also need to manually  attach the event receiver and  Document Set welcome page to your custom Document Set Content Type. 2. Shared Fields are push down only: 3. Not available in SharePoint foundation (only SharePoint Server 2010). 4. You can’t have folders within document sets (you can place document sets in folders though). For a complete limitation and considerations , you can see the references for details. References: Document Set Limitations and Considerations in SharePoint 2010 1 Document Set Limitations and Considerations in SharePoint 2010 2 Document Sets planning (SharePoint Server 2010) Import Document Sets Issue http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg581064.aspx http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2010/OSP305 DocumentSet Class

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• ViewBag dynamic in ASP.NET MVC 3 - RC 2

  - by hajan

  Earlier today Scott Guthrie announced the ASP.NET MVC 3 - Release Candidate 2. I installed the new version right after the announcement since I was eager to see the new features. Among other cool features included in this release candidate, there is a new ViewBag dynamic which can be used to pass data from Controllers to Views same as you use ViewData[] dictionary. What is great and nice about ViewBag (despite the name) is that its a dynamic type which means you can dynamically get/set values and add any number of additional fields without need of strongly-typed classes. In order to see the difference, please take a look at the following examples. Example - Using ViewData Controller public ActionResult Index() {     List<string> colors = new List<string>();     colors.Add("red");     colors.Add("green");     colors.Add("blue");                 ViewData["listColors"] = colors;     ViewData["dateNow"] = DateTime.Now;     ViewData["name"] = "Hajan";     ViewData["age"] = 25;     return View(); } View (ASPX View Engine) <p>     My name is     <b><%: ViewData["name"] %></b>,     <b><%: ViewData["age"] %></b> years old.     <br />         I like the following colors: </p> <ul id="colors"> <% foreach (var color in ViewData["listColors"] as List<string>){ %>     <li>        <font color="<%: color %>"><%: color %></font>    </li> <% } %> </ul> <p>     <%: ViewData["dateNow"] %> </p> (I know the code might look cleaner with Razor View engine, but it doesn’t matter right? ;) ) Example - Using ViewBag Controller public ActionResult Index() {     List<string> colors = new List<string>();     colors.Add("red");     colors.Add("green");     colors.Add("blue");     ViewBag.ListColors = colors; //colors is List     ViewBag.DateNow = DateTime.Now;     ViewBag.Name = "Hajan";     ViewBag.Age = 25;     return View(); } You see the difference? View (ASPX View Engine) <p>     My name is     <b><%: ViewBag.Name %></b>,     <b><%: ViewBag.Age %></b> years old.     <br />         I like the following colors: </p> <ul id="colors"> <% foreach (var color in ViewBag.ListColors) { %>     <li>         <font color="<%: color %>"><%: color %></font>     </li> <% } %> </ul> <p>     <%: ViewBag.DateNow %> </p> In my example now I don’t need to cast ViewBag.ListColors as List<string> since ViewBag is dynamic type! On the other hand the ViewData[“key”] is object.I would like to note that if you use ViewData["ListColors"] = colors; in your Controller, you can retrieve it in the View by using ViewBag.ListColors. And the result in both cases is Hope you like it! Regards, Hajan

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• New .NET Library for Accessing the Survey Monkey API

  - by Ben Emmett

  I’ve used Survey Monkey’s API for a while, and though it’s pretty powerful, there’s a lot of boilerplate each time it’s used in a new project, and the json it returns needs a bunch of processing to be able to use the raw information. So I’ve finally got around to releasing a .NET library you can use to consume the API more easily. The main advantages are: Only ever deal with strongly-typed .NET objects, making everything much more robust and a lot faster to get going Automatically handles things like rate-limiting and paging through results Uses combinations of endpoints to get all relevant data for you, and processes raw response data to map responses to questions To start, either install it using NuGet with PM> Install-Package SurveyMonkeyApi (easier option), or grab the source from https://github.com/bcemmett/SurveyMonkeyApi if you prefer to build it yourself. You’ll also need to have signed up for a developer account with Survey Monkey, and have both your API key and an OAuth token. A simple usage would be something like: string apiKey = "KEY"; string token = "TOKEN"; var sm = new SurveyMonkeyApi(apiKey, token); List<Survey> surveys = sm.GetSurveyList(); The surveys object is now a list of surveys with all the information available from the /surveys/get_survey_list API endpoint, including the title, id, date it was created and last modified, language, number of questions / responses, and relevant urls. If there are more than 1000 surveys in your account, the library pages through the results for you, making multiple requests to get a complete list of surveys. All the filtering available in the API can be controlled using .NET objects. For example you might only want surveys created in the last year and containing “pineapple” in the title: var settings = new GetSurveyListSettings { Title = "pineapple", StartDate = DateTime.Now.AddYears(-1) }; List<Survey> surveys = sm.GetSurveyList(settings); By default, whenever optional fields can be requested with a response, they will all be fetched for you. You can change this behaviour if for some reason you explicitly don’t want the information, using var settings = new GetSurveyListSettings { OptionalData = new GetSurveyListSettingsOptionalData { DateCreated = false, AnalysisUrl = false } }; Survey Monkey’s 7 read-only endpoints are supported, and the other 4 which make modifications to data might be supported in the future. The endpoints are: Endpoint Method Object returned /surveys/get_survey_list GetSurveyList() List<Survey> /surveys/get_survey_details GetSurveyDetails() Survey /surveys/get_collector_list GetCollectorList() List<Collector> /surveys/get_respondent_list GetRespondentList() List<Respondent> /surveys/get_responses GetResponses() List<Response> /surveys/get_response_counts GetResponseCounts() Collector /user/get_user_details GetUserDetails() UserDetails /batch/create_flow Not supported Not supported /batch/send_flow Not supported Not supported /templates/get_template_list Not supported Not supported /collectors/create_collector Not supported Not supported The hierarchy of objects the library can return is Survey List<Page> List<Question> QuestionType List<Answer> List<Item> List<Collector> List<Response> Respondent List<ResponseQuestion> List<ResponseAnswer> Each of these classes has properties which map directly to the names of properties returned by the API itself (though using PascalCasing which is more natural for .NET, rather than the snake_casing used by SurveyMonkey). For most users, Survey Monkey imposes a rate limit of 2 requests per second, so by default the library leaves at least 500ms between requests. You can request higher limits from them, so if you want to change the delay between requests just use a different constructor: var sm = new SurveyMonkeyApi(apiKey, token, 200); //200ms delay = 5 reqs per sec There’s a separate cap of 1000 requests per day for each API key, which the library doesn’t currently enforce, so if you think you’ll be in danger of exceeding that you’ll need to handle it yourself for now.  To help, you can see how many requests the current instance of the SurveyMonkeyApi object has made by reading its RequestsMade property. If the library encounters any errors, including communicating with the API, it will throw a SurveyMonkeyException, so be sure to handle that sensibly any time you use it to make calls. Finally, if you have a survey (or list of surveys) obtained using GetSurveyList(), the library can automatically fill in all available information using sm.FillMissingSurveyInformation(surveys); For each survey in the list, it uses the other endpoints to fill in the missing information about the survey’s question structure, respondents, and responses. This results in at least 5 API calls being made per survey, so be careful before passing it a large list. It also joins up the raw response information to the survey’s question structure, so that for each question in a respondent’s set of replies, you can access a ProcessedAnswer object. For example, a response to a dropdown question (from the /surveys/get_responses endpoint) might be represented in json as { "answers": [ { "row": "9384627365", } ], "question_id": "615487516" } Separately, the question’s structure (from the /surveys/get_survey_details endpoint) might have several possible answers, one of which might look like { "text": "Fourth item in dropdown list", "visible": true, "position": 4, "type": "row", "answer_id": "9384627365" } The library understands how this mapping works, and uses that to give you the following ProcessedAnswer object, which first describes the family and type of question, and secondly gives you the respondent’s answers as they relate to the question. Survey Monkey has many different question types, with 11 distinct data structures, each of which are supported by the library. If you have suggestions or spot any bugs, let me know in the comments, or even better submit a pull request .

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• SQLAuthority News – Technology and Online Learning – Personal Technology Tip

  - by pinaldave

  This is the fourth post in my series about Personal Technology Tips and Tricks, and I knew exactly what I wanted to write about.  But at first I was conflicted.   Is online learning really a personal tip?  Is it really a trick that no one knows?  However, I have decided to stick with my original idea because online learning is everywhere.  It’s a trick that we can’t – and shouldn’t – overlook.  Here are ten of my ideas about how we should be taking advantage of online learning. 1) Get ahead in the work place.  We all know that a good way to become better at your job, and to become more competitive for promotions and raises.  Many people overlook online learning as a way to get job training, though, thinking it is a path for people still seeking their high school or college diplomas.  But take a look at what companies like Pluralsight offer, and you might be pleasantly surprised. 2) Flexibility.  Some of us remember the heady days of college with nostalgia, others remember it with loathing.  A lot of bad memories come from remembering the strict scheduling and deadlines of college.  But with online learning, the classes fit into your free time – you don’t have to schedule your life around classes.  Even better, there are usually no homework or test deadlines, only one final deadline where all work must be completed.  This allows students to work at their own pace – my next point. 3) Learn at your own pace.  One thing traditional classes suffer from is that they are highly structured.  If you work more quickly than the rest of the class, or especially if you work more slowly, traditional classes do not work for you.  Online courses let you move as quickly or as slowly as you find necessary. 4) Fill gaps in your knowledge.  I’m sure I am not the only one who has thought to myself “I would love to take a course on X, Y, or Z.”  The problem is that it can be very hard to find the perfect class that teaches exactly what you’re interested in, at a time and a price that’s right.  But online courses are far easier to tailor exactly to your tastes. 5) Fits into your schedule.  Even harder to find than a class you’re interested in is one that fits into your schedule.  If you hold down a job – even a part time job – you know it’s next to impossible to find class times that work for you.  Online classes can be taken anytime, anywhere.  On your lunch break, in your car, or in your pajamas at the end of the day. 6) Student centered.  Online learning has to stay competitive.  There are hundreds, even thousands of options for students, and every provider has to find a way to lure in students and provide them with a good education.  The best kind of online classes know that they need to provide great classes, flexible scheduling, and high quality to attract students – and the student benefit from this kind of attention. 7) You can save money.  The average cost for a college diploma in the US is over $20,000.  I don’t know about you, but that is not the kind of money I just have lying around for a rainy day.  Sometimes I think I’d love to go back to school, but not for that price tag.  Online courses are much, much more affordable.  And even better, you can pick and choose what courses you’d like to take, and avoid all the “electives” in college. 8) Get access to the best minds in the business.  One of the perks of being the best in your field is that you are one person who knows the most about something.  If students are lucky, you will choose to share that knowledge with them on a college campus.  For the hundreds of other students who don’t live in your area and don’t attend your school, they are out of luck.  But luckily for them, more and more online courses is attracting the best minds in the business, and if you enroll online, you can take advantage of these minds, too. 9) Save your time.  Getting a four year degree is a great decision, and I encourage everyone to pursue their Bachelor’s – and beyond.  But if you have already tried to go to school, or already have a degree but are thinking of switching fields, four years of your life is a long time to go back and redo things.  Getting your online degree will save you time by allowing you to work at your own pace, set your own schedule, and take only the classes you’re interested in. 10) Variety of degrees and programs.  If you’re not sure what you’re interested in, or if you only need a few classes here and there to finish a program, online classes are perfect for you.  You can pick and choose what you’d like, and sample a wide variety without spending too much money. I hope I’ve outlined for everyone just a few ways that they could benefit from online learning.  If you’re still unconvinced, just check out a few of my other articles that expand more on these topics. Here are the blog posts relevent to developer trainings: Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Developer Training

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• Run Your Tests With Any NUnit Version

  - by Alois Kraus

  I always thought that the NUnit test runners and the test assemblies need to reference the same NUnit.Framework version. I wanted to be able to run my test assemblies with the newest GUI runner (currently 2.5.3). Ok so all I need to do is to reference both NUnit versions the newest one and the official for the current project. There is a nice article form Kent Bogart online how to reference the same assembly multiple times with different versions. The magic works by referencing one NUnit assembly with an alias which does prefix all types inside it. Then I could decorate my tests with the TestFixture and Test attribute from both NUnit versions and everything worked fine except that this was ugly. After playing a little bit around to make it simpler I found that I did not need to reference both NUnit.Framework assemblies. The test runners do not require the TestFixture and Test attribute in their specific version. That is really neat since the test runners are instructed by attributes what to do in a declarative way there is really no need to tie the runners to a specific version. At its core NUnit has this little method hidden to find matching TestFixtures and Tests   public bool CanBuildFrom(Type type) {     if (!(!type.IsAbstract || type.IsSealed))     {         return false;     }     return (((Reflect.HasAttribute(type,           "NUnit.Framework.TestFixtureAttribute", true) ||               Reflect.HasMethodWithAttribute(type, "NUnit.Framework.TestAttribute"       , true)) ||               Reflect.HasMethodWithAttribute(type, "NUnit.Framework.TestCaseAttribute"   , true)) ||               Reflect.HasMethodWithAttribute(type, "NUnit.Framework.TheoryAttribute"     , true)); } That is versioning and backwards compatibility at its best. I tell NUnit what to do by decorating my tests classes with NUnit Attributes and the runner executes my intent without the need to bind me to a specific version. The contract between NUnit versions is actually a bit more complex (think of AssertExceptions) but this is also handled nicely by using not the concrete type but simply to check for the catched exception type by string. What can we learn from this? Versioning can be easy if the contract is small and the users of your library use it in a declarative way (Attributes). Everything beyond it will force you to reference several versions of the same assembly with all its consequences. Type equality is lost between versions so none of your casts will work. That means that you cannot simply use IBigInterface in two versions. You will need a wrapper to call the correct versioned one. To get out of this mess you can use one (and only one) version agnostic driver to encapsulate your business logic from the concrete versions. This is of course more work but as NUnit shows it can be easy. Simplicity is therefore not a nice thing to have but also requirement number one if you intend to make things more complex in version two and want to support any version (older and newer). Any interaction model above easy will not be maintainable. There are different approached to versioning. Below are my own personal observations how versioning works within the  .NET Framwork and NUnit.   Versioning Models 1. Bug Fixing and New Isolated Features When you only need to fix bugs there is no need to break anything. This is especially true when you have a big API surface. Microsoft did this with the .NET Framework 3.0 which did leave the CLR as is but delivered new assemblies for the features WPF, WCF and Windows Workflow Foundations. Their basic model was that the .NET 2.0 assemblies were declared as red assemblies which must not change (well mostly but each change was carefully reviewed to minimize the risk of breaking changes as much as possible) whereas the new green assemblies of .NET 3,3.5 did not have such obligations since they did implement new unrelated features which did not have any impact on the red assemblies. This is versioning strategy aimed at maximum compatibility and the delivery of new unrelated features. If you have a big API surface you should strive hard to do the same or you will break your customers code with every release. 2. New Breaking Features There are times when really new things need to be added to an existing product. The .NET Framework 4.0 did change the CLR in many ways which caused subtle different behavior although the API´s remained largely unchanged. Sometimes it is possible to simply recompile an application to make it work (e.g. changed method signature void Func() –> bool Func()) but behavioral changes need much more thought and cannot be automated. To minimize the impact .NET 2.0,3.0,3.5 applications will not automatically use the .NET 4.0 runtime when installed but they will keep using the “old” one. What is interesting is that a side by side execution model of both CLR versions (2 and 4) within one process is possible. Key to success was total isolation. You will have 2 GCs, 2 JIT compilers, 2 finalizer threads within one process. The two .NET runtimes cannot talk  (except via the usual IPC mechanisms) to each other. Both runtimes share nothing and run independently within the same process. This enables Explorer plugins written for the CLR 2.0 to work even when a CLR 4 plugin is already running inside the Explorer process. The price for isolation is an increased memory footprint because everything is loaded and running two times.   3. New Non Breaking Features It really depends where you break things. NUnit has evolved and many different Assert, Expect… methods have been added. These changes are all localized in the NUnit.Framework assembly which can be easily extended. As long as the test execution contract (TestFixture, Test, AssertException) remains stable it is possible to write test executors which can run tests written for NUnit 10 because the execution contract has not changed. It is possible to write software which executes other components in a version independent way but this is only feasible if the interaction model is relatively simple.   Versioning software is hard and it looks like it will remain hard since you suddenly work in a severely constrained environment when you try to innovate and to keep everything backwards compatible at the same time. These are contradicting goals and do not play well together. The easiest way out of this is to carefully watch what your customers are doing with your software. Minimizing the impact is much easier when you do not need to guess how many people will be broken when this or that is removed.

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• Installing XULrunner, adding mozilla daily ppa doesn't help

  - by Lester Peabody

  I need to install xulrunner so I can use Redcar, but am unable to do so. I followed the steps in this question verbatim Install XULRunner 2.0. Here's the output from adding the Mozilla PPA: lpeabody@ubuntu:/var/www/drupal-7.8$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa You are about to add the following PPA to your system: Official PPA for Firefox and Thunderbird daily builds daily (or even multiple builds per day) for various mozilla projects and branches. For questions and bugs with software in this archive, please contact <email address hidden> or visit #ubuntu-mozillateam on freenode. More info: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/ppa Press [ENTER] to continue or ctrl-c to cancel adding it Executing: gpg --ignore-time-conflict --no-options --no-default-keyring --secret-keyring /tmp/tmp.n2JGd679HN --trustdb-name /etc/apt/trustdb.gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --primary-keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80/ --recv B34505EA326FEAEA07E3618DEF4186FE247510BE gpg: requesting key 247510BE from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com gpg: key 247510BE: "Launchpad PPA for Ubuntu Mozilla Daily Build Team" not changed gpg: Total number processed: 1 gpg: unchanged: 1 lpeabody@ubuntu:/var/www/drupal-7.8$ sudo apt-get update Ign http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric InRelease Ign http://extras.ubuntu.com oneiric InRelease Ign http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates InRelease Ign http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports InRelease Get:1 http://extras.ubuntu.com oneiric Release.gpg [72 B] Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric Release.gpg Hit http://extras.ubuntu.com oneiric Release Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates Release.gpg Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports Release.gpg Hit http://extras.ubuntu.com oneiric/main Sources Hit http://extras.ubuntu.com oneiric/main i386 Packages Ign http://extras.ubuntu.com oneiric/main TranslationIndex Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric Release Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates Release Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports Release Ign http://extras.ubuntu.com oneiric/main Translation-en_US Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/main Sources Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/restricted Sources Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/universe Sources Ign http://extras.ubuntu.com oneiric/main Translation-en Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/multiverse Sources Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/main i386 Packages Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/restricted i386 Packages Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/universe i386 Packages Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/multiverse i386 Packages Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/main TranslationIndex Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/multiverse TranslationIndex Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/restricted TranslationIndex Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/universe TranslationIndex Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/main Sources Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/restricted Sources Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/universe Sources Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/multiverse Sources Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/main i386 Packages Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/restricted i386 Packages Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/universe i386 Packages Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/multiverse i386 Packages Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/main TranslationIndex Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/multiverse TranslationIndex Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/restricted TranslationIndex Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/universe TranslationIndex Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/main Sources Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/restricted Sources Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/universe Sources Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/multiverse Sources Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/main i386 Packages Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/restricted i386 Packages Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/universe i386 Packages Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/multiverse i386 Packages Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/main TranslationIndex Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/multiverse TranslationIndex Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/restricted TranslationIndex Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/universe TranslationIndex Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/main Translation-en Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/multiverse Translation-en Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/restricted Translation-en Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric/universe Translation-en Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/main Translation-en Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/multiverse Translation-en Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/restricted Translation-en Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-updates/universe Translation-en Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/main Translation-en Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/multiverse Translation-en Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/restricted Translation-en Hit http://us.archive.ubuntu.com oneiric-backports/universe Translation-en Ign http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security InRelease Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric InRelease Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric InRelease Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security Release.gpg Hit http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric Release.gpg Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security Release Get:2 http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric Release.gpg [316 B] Hit http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric Release Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/main Sources Get:3 http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric Release [9,788 B] Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/restricted Sources Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/universe Sources Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/multiverse Sources Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/main i386 Packages Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/restricted i386 Packages Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/universe i386 Packages Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/multiverse i386 Packages Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/main TranslationIndex Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/multiverse TranslationIndex Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/restricted TranslationIndex Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/universe TranslationIndex Hit http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric/main Sources Hit http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric/main i386 Packages Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric/main TranslationIndex Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/main Translation-en Get:4 http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric/main Sources [1,650 B] Get:5 http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric/main i386 Packages [12.6 kB] Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/multiverse Translation-en Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/restricted Translation-en Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric/main TranslationIndex Hit http://security.ubuntu.com oneiric-security/universe Translation-en Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric/main Translation-en_US Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric/main Translation-en Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric/main Translation-en_US Ign http://ppa.launchpad.net oneiric/main Translation-en Fetched 24.5 kB in 5s (4,853 B/s) Reading package lists... Done After running the update, I attempted to install xulrunner, but get the following back: lpeabody@ubuntu:/var/www/drupal-7.8$ sudo apt-get install xulrunner-2.0 xulrunner-2.0-dev xulrunner-2.0-gnome-support xulrunner-dev Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Package xulrunner-2.0-dev is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source Package xulrunner-2.0 is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source E: Package 'xulrunner-2.0' has no installation candidate E: Package 'xulrunner-2.0-dev' has no installation candidate E: Unable to locate package xulrunner-2.0-gnome-support E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'xulrunner-2.0-gnome-support' E: Unable to locate package xulrunner-dev If you need to know anything else please specify, I will be prompt with my answers if asked during the next 2 hours... so 2am EDT.

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• SharePoint 2010 Replaceable Parameter, some observations…

  - by svdoever

  SharePoint Tools for Visual Studio 2010 provides a rudimentary mechanism for replaceable parameters that you can use in files that are not compiled, like ascx files and your project property settings. The basics on this can be found in the documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee231545.aspx. There are some quirks however. For example: My Package name is MacawMastSP2010Templates, as defined in my Package properties: I want to use the $SharePoint.Package.Name$ replaceable parameter in my feature properties. But this parameter does not work in the “Deployment Path” property, while other parameters work there, while it works in the “Image Url” property. It just does not get expanded. So I had to resort to explicitly naming the first path of the deployment path: : You also see a special property for the “Receiver Class” in the format $SharePoint.Type.<GUID>.FullName$. The documentation gives the following description:The full name of the type matching the GUID in the token. The format of the GUID is lowercase and corresponds to the Guid.ToString(“D”) format (that is, xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx). Not very clear. After some searching it happened to be the guid as declared in my feature receiver code: In other properties you see a different set of replaceable parameters: We use a similar mechanism for replaceable parameter for years in our Macaw Solutions Factory for SharePoint 2007 development, where each replaceable parameter is a PowerShell function. This provides so much more power. For example in a feature declaration we can say: Code Snippet <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <!-- Template expansion      [[ProductDependency]] -> Wss3 or Moss2007      [[FeatureReceiverAssemblySignature]] -> for example: Macaw.Mast.Wss3.Templates.SharePoint.Features, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=6e9d15db2e2a0be5      [[FeatureReceiverClass]] -> for example: Macaw.Mast.Wss3.Templates.SharePoint.Features.SampleFeature.FeatureReceiver.SampleFeatureFeatureReceiver --> <Feature Id="[[$Feature.SampleFeature.ID]]"   Title="MAST [[$MastSolutionName]] Sample Feature"   Description="The MAST [[$MastSolutionName]] Sample Feature, where all possible elements in a feature are showcased"   Version="1.0.0.0"   Scope="Site"   Hidden="FALSE"   ImageUrl="[[FeatureImage]]"   ReceiverAssembly="[[FeatureReceiverAssemblySignature]]"   ReceiverClass="[[FeatureReceiverClass]]"   xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">     <ElementManifests>         <ElementManifest Location="ExampleCustomActions.xml" />         <ElementManifest Location="ExampleSiteColumns.xml" />         <ElementManifest Location="ExampleContentTypes.xml" />         <ElementManifest Location="ExampleDocLib.xml" />         <ElementManifest Location="ExampleMasterPages.xml" />           <!-- Element files -->         [[GenerateXmlNodesForFiles -path 'ExampleDocLib\*.*' -node 'ElementFile' -attributes @{Location = { RelativePathToExpansionSourceFile -path $_ }}]]         [[GenerateXmlNodesForFiles -path 'ExampleMasterPages\*.*' -node 'ElementFile' -attributes @{Location = { RelativePathToExpansionSourceFile -path $_ }}]]         [[GenerateXmlNodesForFiles -path 'Resources\*.resx' -node 'ElementFile' -attributes @{Location = { RelativePathToExpansionSourceFile -path $_ }}]]     </ElementManifests> </Feature> We have a solution level PowerShell script file named TemplateExpansionConfiguration.ps1 where we declare our variables (starting with a $) and include helper functions: Code Snippet # ============================================================================================== # NAME: product:\src\Wss3\Templates\TemplateExpansionConfiguration.ps1 # # AUTHOR: Serge van den Oever, Macaw # DATE  : May 24, 2007 # # COMMENT: # Nota bene: define variable and function definitions global to be visible during template expansion. # # ============================================================================================== Set-PSDebug -strict -trace 0 #variables must have value before usage $global:ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop' # Stop on errors $global:VerbosePreference = 'Continue' # set to SilentlyContinue to get no verbose output   # Load template expansion utility functions . product:\tools\Wss3\MastDeploy\TemplateExpansionUtil.ps1   # If exists add solution expansion utility functions $solutionTemplateExpansionUtilFile = $MastSolutionDir + "\TemplateExpansionUtil.ps1" if ((Test-Path -Path $solutionTemplateExpansionUtilFile)) {     . $solutionTemplateExpansionUtilFile } # ==============================================================================================   # Expected: $Solution.ID; Unique GUID value identifying the solution (DON'T INCLUDE BRACKETS). # function: guid:UpperCaseWithoutCurlies -guid '{...}' ensures correct syntax $global:Solution = @{     ID = GuidUpperCaseWithoutCurlies -guid '{d366ced4-0b98-4fa8-b256-c5a35bcbc98b}'; }   #  DON'T INCLUDE BRACKETS for feature id's!!! # function: GuidUpperCaseWithoutCurlies -guid '{...}' ensures correct syntax $global:Feature = @{     SampleFeature = @{         ID = GuidUpperCaseWithoutCurlies -guid '{35de59f4-0c8e-405e-b760-15234fe6885c}';     } }   $global:SiteDefinition = @{     TemplateBlankSite = @{         ID = '12346';     } }   # To inherit from this content type add the delimiter (00) and then your own guid # ID: <base>00<newguid> $global:ContentType = @{     ExampleContentType = @{         ID = '0x01008e5e167ba2db4bfeb3810c4a7ff72913';     } }   #  INCLUDE BRACKETS for column id's and make them LOWER CASE!!! # function: GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{...}' ensures correct syntax $global:SiteColumn = @{     ExampleChoiceField = @{         ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{69d38ce4-2771-43b4-a861-f14247885fe9}';     };     ExampleBooleanField = @{         ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{76f794e6-f7bd-490e-a53e-07efdf967169}';     };     ExampleDateTimeField = @{         ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{6f176e6e-22d2-453a-8dad-8ab17ac12387}';     };     ExampleNumberField = @{         ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{6026947f-f102-436b-abfd-fece49495788}';     };     ExampleTextField = @{         ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{23ca1c29-5ef0-4b3d-93cd-0d1d2b6ddbde}';     };     ExampleUserField = @{         ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{ee55b9f1-7b7c-4a7e-9892-3e35729bb1a5}';     };     ExampleNoteField = @{         ID = GuidLowerCaseWithCurlies -guid '{f9aa8da3-1f30-48a6-a0af-aa0a643d9ed4}';     }; } This gives so much more possibilities, like for example the elements file expansion where a PowerShell function iterates through a folder and generates the required XML nodes. I think I will bring back this mechanism, so it can work together with the built-in replaceable parameters, there are hooks to define you custom replacements as described by Waldek in this blog post.

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• Integrate BING API for Search inside ASP.Net web application

  - by sreejukg

  As you might already know, Bing is the Microsoft Search engine and is getting popular day by day. Bing offers APIs that can be integrated into your website to increase your website functionality. At this moment, there are two important APIs available. They are Bing Search API Bing Maps The Search API enables you to build applications that utilize Bing’s technology. The API allows you to search multiple source types such as web; images, video etc. and supports various output prototypes such as JSON, XML, and SOAP. Also you will be able to customize the search results as you wish for your public facing website. Bing Maps API allows you to build robust applications that use Bing Maps. In this article I am going to describe, how you can integrate Bing search into your website. In order to start using Bing, First you need to sign in to http://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingdeveloper/ using your windows live credentials. Click on the Sign in button, you will be asked to enter your windows live credentials. Once signed in you will be redirected to the Developer page. Here you can create applications and get AppID for each application. Since I am a first time user, I don’t have any applications added. Click on the Add button to add a new application. You will be asked to enter certain details about your application. The fields are straight forward, only thing you need to note is the website field, here you need to enter the website address from where you are going to use this application, and this field is optional too. Of course you need to agree on the terms and conditions and then click Save. Once you click on save, the application will be created and application ID will be available for your use. Now we got the APP Id. Basically Bing supports three protocols. They are JSON, XML and SOAP. JSON is useful if you want to call the search requests directly from the browser and use JavaScript to parse the results, thus JSON is the favorite choice for AJAX application. XML is the alternative for applications that does not support SOAP, e.g. flash/ Silverlight etc. SOAP is ideal for strongly typed languages and gives a request/response object model. In this article I am going to demonstrate how to search BING API using SOAP protocol from an ASP.Net application. For the purpose of this demonstration, I am going to create an ASP.Net project and implement the search functionality in an aspx page. Open Visual Studio, navigate to File-> New Project, select ASP.Net empty web application, I named the project as “BingSearchSample”. Add a Search.aspx page to the project, once added the solution explorer will looks similar to the following. Now you need to add a web reference to the SOAP service available from Bing. To do this, from the solution explorer, right click your project, select Add Service Reference. Now the new service reference dialog will appear. In the left bottom of the dialog, you can find advanced button, click on it. Now the service reference settings dialog will appear. In the bottom left, you can find Add Web Reference button, click on it. The add web reference dialog will appear now. Enter the URL as http://api.bing.net/search.wsdl?AppID=<YourAppIDHere>&version=2.2 (replace <yourAppIDHere> with the appID you have generated previously) and click on the button next to it. This will find the web service methods available. You can change the namespace suggested by Bing, but for the purpose of this demonstration I have accepted all the default settings. Click on the Add reference button once you are done. Now the web reference to Search service will be added your project. You can find this under solution explorer of your project. Now in the Search.aspx, that you previously created, place one textbox, button and a grid view. For the purpose of this demonstration, I have given the identifiers (ID) as txtSearch, btnSearch, gvSearch respectively. The idea is to search the text entered in the text box using Bing service and show the results in the grid view. In the design view, the search.aspx looks as follows. In the search.aspx.cs page, add a using statement that points to net.bing.api. I have added the following code for button click event handler. The code is very straight forward. It just calls the service with your AppID, a query to search and a source for searching. Let us run this page and see the output when I enter Microsoft in my textbox. If you want to search a specific site, you can include the site name in the query parameter. For e.g. the following query will search the word Microsoft from www.microsoft.com website. searchRequest.Query = “site:www.microsoft.com Microsoft”; The output of this query is as follows. Integrating BING search API to your website is easy and there is no limit on the customization of the interface you can do. There is no Bing branding required so I believe this is a great option for web developers when they plan for site search.

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• Oracle Enterprise Data Quality: Ever Integration-ready

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  It is closing in on a year now since Oracle’s acquisition of Datanomic, and the addition of Oracle Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ) to the Oracle software family. The big move has caused some big shifts in emphasis and some very encouraging excitement from the field.  To give an illustration, combined with a shameless promotion of how EDQ can help to give quick insights into your data, I did a quick Phrase Profile of the subject field of emails to the Global EDQ mailing list since it was set up last September. The results revealed a very clear theme:   Integration, Integration, Integration! As well as the important Siebel and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) integrations, we have been asked about integration with a huge variety of Oracle applications, including EBS, Peoplesoft, CRM on Demand, Fusion, DRM, Endeca, RightNow, and more - and we have not stood still! While it would not have been possible to develop specific pre-integrations with all of the above within a year, we have developed a package of feature-rich out-of-the-box web services and batch processes that can be plugged into any application or middleware technology with ease. And with Siebel, they work out of the box. Oracle Enterprise Data Quality version 9.0.4 includes the Customer Data Services (CDS) pack – a ready set of standard processes with standard interfaces, to provide integrated: Address verification and cleansing  Individual matching Organization matching The services can are suitable for either Batch or Real-Time processing, and are enabled for international data, with simple configuration options driving the set of locale-specific dictionaries that are used. For example, large dictionaries are provided to support international name transcription and variant matching, including highly specialized handling for Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Korean data. In total across all locales, CDS includes well over a million dictionary entries.   Excerpt from EDQ’s CDS Individual Name Standardization Dictionary CDS has been developed to replace the OEM of Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR) for attached Data Quality on the Oracle price list, but does this in a way that creates a ‘best of both worlds’ situation for customers, who can harness not only the out-of-the-box functionality of pre-packaged matching and standardization services, but also the flexibility of OEDQ if they want to customize the interfaces or the process logic, without having to learn more than one product. From a competitive point of view, we believe this stands us in good stead against our key competitors, including Informatica, who have separate ‘Identity Resolution’ and general DQ products, and IBM, who provide limited out-of-the-box capabilities (with a steep learning curve) in both their QualityStage data quality and Initiate matching products. Here is a brief guide to the main services provided in the pack: Address Verification and Standardization EDQ’s CDS Address Cleaning Process The Address Verification and Standardization service uses EDQ Address Verification (an OEM of Loqate software) to verify and clean addresses in either real-time or batch. The Address Verification processor is wrapped in an EDQ process – this adds significant capabilities over calling the underlying Address Verification API directly, specifically: Country-specific thresholds to determine when to accept the verification result (and therefore to change the input address) based on the confidence level of the API Optimization of address verification by pre-standardizing data where required Formatting of output addresses into the input address fields normally used by applications Adding descriptions of the address verification and geocoding return codes The process can then be used to provide real-time and batch address cleansing in any application; such as a simple web page calling address cleaning and geocoding as part of a check on individual data.     Duplicate Prevention Unlike Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR), EDQ uses stateless services for duplicate prevention to avoid issues caused by complex replication and synchronization of large volume customer data. When a record is added or updated in an application, the EDQ Cluster Key Generation service is called, and returns a number of key values. These are used to select other records (‘candidates’) that may match in the application data (which has been pre-seeded with keys using the same service). The ‘driving record’ (the new or updated record) is then presented along with all selected candidates to the EDQ Matching Service, which decides which of the candidates are a good match with the driving record, and scores them according to the strength of match. In this model, complex multi-locale EDQ techniques can be used to generate the keys and ensure that the right balance between performance and matching effectiveness is maintained, while ensuring that the application retains control of data integrity and transactional commits. The process is explained below: EDQ Duplicate Prevention Architecture Note that where the integration is with a hub, there may be an additional call to the Cluster Key Generation service if the master record has changed due to merges with other records (and therefore needs to have new key values generated before commit). Batch Matching In order to allow customers to use different match rules in batch to real-time, separate matching templates are provided for batch matching. For example, some customers want to minimize intervention in key user flows (such as adding new customers) in front end applications, but to conduct a more exhaustive match on a regular basis in the back office. The batch matching jobs are also used when migrating data between systems, and in this case normally a more precise (and automated) type of matching is required, in order to minimize the review work performed by Data Stewards.  In batch matching, data is captured into EDQ using its standard interfaces, and records are standardized, clustered and matched in an EDQ job before matches are written out. As with all EDQ jobs, batch matching may be called from Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) if required. When working with Siebel CRM (or master data in Siebel UCM), Siebel’s Data Quality Manager is used to instigate batch jobs, and a shared staging database is used to write records for matching and to consume match results. The CDS batch matching processes automatically adjust to Siebel’s ‘Full Match’ (match all records against each other) and ‘Incremental Match’ (match a subset of records against all of their selected candidates) modes. The Future The Customer Data Services Pack is an important part of the Oracle strategy for EDQ, offering a clear path to making Data Quality Assurance an integral part of enterprise applications, and providing a strong value proposition for adopting EDQ. We are planning various additions and improvements, including: An out-of-the-box Data Quality Dashboard Even more comprehensive international data handling Address search (suggesting multiple results) Integrated address matching The EDQ Customer Data Services Pack is part of the Enterprise Data Quality Media Pack, available for download at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/oedq/downloads/index.html.

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• Open Source but not Free Software (or vice versa)

  - by TRiG

  The definition of "Free Software" from the Free Software Foundation: “Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program's users have the four essential freedoms: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms. Thus, you should be free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere. Being free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission to do so. The definition of "Open Source Software" from the Open Source Initiative: Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria: Free Redistribution The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale. Source Code The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed. Derived Works The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software. Integrity of The Author's Source Code The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research. Distribution of License The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution. License Must Not Restrict Other Software The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software. License Must Be Technology-Neutral No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface. These definitions, although they derive from very different ideologies, are broadly compatible, and most Free Software is also Open Source Software and vice versa. I believe, however, that it is possible for this not to be the case: It is possible for software to be Open Source without being Free, or to be Free without being Open Source. Questions Is my belief correct? Is it possible for software to fall into one camp and not the other? Does any such software actually exist? Please give examples. Clarification I've already accepted an answer now, but I seem to have confused a lot of people, so perhaps a clarification is in order. I was not asking about the difference between copyleft (or "viral", though I don't like that term) and non-copyleft ("permissive") licenses. Nor was I asking about your personal idiosyncratic definitions of "Free" and "Open". I was asking about "Free Software as defined by the FSF" and "Open Source Software as defined by the OSI". Are the two always the same? Is it possible to be one without being the other? And the answer, it seems, is that it's impossible to be Free without being Open, but possible to be Open without being Free. Thank you everyone who actually answered the question.

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• ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: ASP.NET MVC 3 First Look

  - by mbridge

  MVC 3 View Enhancements MVC 3 introduces two improvements to the MVC view engine: - Ability to select the view engine to use. MVC 3 allows you to select from any of your  installed view engines from Visual Studio by selecting Add > View (including the newly introduced ASP.NET “Razor” engine”): - Support for the next ASP.NET “Razor” syntax. The newly previewed Razor syntax is a concise lightweight syntax. MVC 3 Control Enhancements - Global Filters: ASP.NET MVC 3  allows you to specify that a filter which applies globally to all Controllers within an app by adding it to the GlobalFilters collection.  The RegisterGlobalFilters() method is now included in the default Global.asax class template and so provides a convenient place to do this since is will then be called by the Application_Start() method: void RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilterCollection filters) { filters.Add(new HandleLoggingAttribute()); filters.Add(new HandleErrorAttribute()); } void Application_Start() { RegisterGlobalFilters (GlobalFilters.Filters); } - Dynamic ViewModel Property : MVC 3 augments the ViewData API with a new “ViewModel” property on Controller which is of type “dynamic” – and therefore enables you to use the new dynamic language support in C# and VB pass ViewData items using a cleaner syntax than the current dictionary API. Public ActionResult Index() { ViewModel.Message = "Hello World"; return View(); } - New ActionResult Types : MVC 3 includes three new ActionResult types and helper methods: 1. HttpNotFoundResult – indicates that a resource which was requested by the current URL was not found. HttpNotFoundResult will return a 404 HTTP status code to the calling client. 2. PermanentRedirects – The HttpRedirectResult class contains a new Boolean “Permanent” property which is used to indicate that a permanent redirect should be done. Permanent redirects use a HTTP 301 status code.  The Controller class  includes three new methods for performing these permanent redirects: RedirectPermanent(), RedirectToRoutePermanent(), andRedirectToActionPermanent(). All  of these methods will return an instance of the HttpRedirectResult object with the Permanent property set to true. 3. HttpStatusCodeResult – used for setting an explicit response status code and its associated description. MVC 3 AJAX and JavaScript Enhancements MVC 3 ships with built-in JSON binding support which enables action methods to receive JSON-encoded data and then model-bind it to action method parameters. For example a jQuery client-side JavaScript could define a “save” event handler which will be invoked when the save button is clicked on the client. The code in the event handler then constructs a client-side JavaScript “product” object with 3 fields with their values retrieved from HTML input elements. Finally, it uses jQuery’s .ajax() method to POST a JSON based request which contains the product to a /theStore/UpdateProduct URL on the server: $('#save').click(function () { var product = { ProdName: $('#Name').val() Price: $('#Price').val(), } $.ajax({ url: '/theStore/UpdateProduct', type: "POST"; data: JSON.stringify(widget), datatype: "json", contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", success: function () { $('#message').html('Saved').fadeIn(), }, error: function () { $('#message').html('Error').fadeIn(), } }); return false; }); MVC will allow you to implement the /theStore/UpdateProduct URL on the server by using an action method as below. The UpdateProduct() action method will accept a strongly-typed Product object for a parameter. MVC 3 can now automatically bind an incoming JSON post value to the .NET Product type on the server without having to write any custom binding. [HttpPost] public ActionResult UpdateProduct(Product product) { // save logic here return null } MVC 3 Model Validation Enhancements MVC 3 builds on the MVC 2 model validation improvements by adding   support for several of the new validation features within the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace in .NET 4.0: - Support for the new DataAnnotations metadata attributes like DisplayAttribute. - Support for the improvements made to the ValidationAttribute class which now supports a new IsValid overload that provides more info on  the current validation context, like what object is being validated. - Support for the new IValidatableObject interface which enables you to perform model-level validation and also provide validation error messages which are specific to the state of the overall model. MVC 3 Dependency Injection Enhancements MVC 3 includes better support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) and also integrating with Dependency Injection/IOC containers. Currently MVC 3 Preview 1 has support for DI in the below places: - Controllers (registering & injecting controller factories and injecting controllers) - Views (registering & injecting view engines, also for injecting dependencies into view pages) - Action Filters (locating and  injecting filters) And this is another important blog about Microsoft .NET and technology: - Windows 2008 Blog - SharePoint 2010 Blog - .NET 4 Blog And you can visit here if you're looking for ASP.NET MVC 3 hosting

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• FAT Volume and CE

  - by Kate Moss' Open Space

  Whenever we format a disk volume, it is a good idea to name the label so it will be easier to categorize. To label a volume, we can use LABEL command or UI depends on your preference. Windows CE does provide FAT driver and support various format (FAT12, FAT16,FAT32, ExFAT and TFAT - transaction-safe FAT) and many feature to let you scan and even defrag the volume but not labeling. At any time you format a volume in CE and then mount it on PC, the label is always empty! Of course, you can always label the volume on PC, even it is formatted in CE. So looks like CE does not care about the volume label at all, neither report the label to OS nor changing the label on FAT.So how can we set the volume label in CE? To Answer this question, we need to know how does FAT stores the volume label. Here are some on-line resources are handy for parsing FAT. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table http://www.pjrc.com/tech/8051/ide/fat32.html http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/fatgen.mspx You can refer to PUBLIC\COMMON\OAK\DRIVERS\FSD\FATUTIL\MAIN\bootsec.h and dosbpb.h or the above links for the fields we discuss here. The first sector of a FAT Volume (it is not necessary to be the first sector of a disk.) is a FAT boot sector and BPB (BIOS Parameter Block). And at offset 43, bgbsVolumeLabel (or bsVolumeLabel on FAT16) is for storing the volume lable, but note in the spec also indicates "FAT file system drivers should make sure that they update this field when the volume label file in the root directory has its name changed or created.". So we can't just simply update the bgbsVolumeLabel but also need to create a volume lable file in root directory. The volume lable file is not a real file but just a file entry in root directory with zero file lenth and a very special file attribute, ATTR_VOLUME_ID. (defined in public\common\oak\drivers\fsd\fatutil\MAIN\fatutilp.h) Locating and accessing bootsector is quite straight forward, as long as we know the starting sector of a FAT volume, that's it. But where is the root directory? The layout of a typical FAT is like this Boot sector (Volume ID in the figure) followed by Reserved Sectors (1 on FAT12/16 and 32 on FAT32), then FAT chain table(s) (can be 1 or 2), after that is the root directory (FAT12/16 and not shows in the figure) then begining of the File and Directories. In FAT12/16, the root directory is placed right after FAT so it is not hard to caculate the offset in the volume. But in FAT32, this rule is no longer true: the first cluster of the root directory is determined by BGBPB_RootDirStrtClus (or offset 44 in boot sector). Although this field is usually 0x00000002 (it is how CE initial the root directory after formating a volume. Note we should never assume it is always true) which means the first cluster contains data but not like the root directory is contiguous in FAT12/16, it is just like a regular file can be fragmented. So we need to access the root directory (of FAT32) hopping one cluster to another by traversing FAT table. Let's trace the code now. Although the source of FAT driver is not available in CE Shared Source program, but the formatter, Fatutil.dll, is available in public\common\oak\drivers\fsd\fatutil\MAIN\formatdisk.cpp. Be aware the public code only provides formatter for FAT12/16/32 for ExFAT it is still not available. FormatVolumeInternal is the main worker function. With the knowledge here, you should be able the trace the code easily. But I would like to discuss the following code pieces     dwReservedSectors = (fo.dwFatVersion == 32) ? 32 : 1;     dwRootEntries = (fo.dwFatVersion == 32) ? 0 : fo.dwRootEntries; Note the dwReservedSectors is 32 in FAT32 and 1 in FAT12/16. Root Entries is another different mentioned in previous paragraph, 0 for FAT32 (dynamic allocated) and fixed size (usually 512, defined in DEFAULT_ROOT_ENTRIES in public\common\sdk\inc\fatutil.h) And then here   memset(pBootSec->bsVolumeLabel, 0x20, sizeof(pBootSec->bsVolumeLabel)); It sets the Volume Label as empty string. Now let's carry on to the next section - write the root directory.     if (fo.dwFatVersion == 32) {         if (!(fo.dwFlags & FATUTIL_FORMAT_TFAT)) {             dwRootSectors = dwSectorsPerCluster;         }         else {             DIRENTRY    dirEntry;             DWORD       offset;             int               iVolumeNo;             memset(pbBlock, 0, pdi->di_bytes_per_sect);             memset(&dirEntry, 0, sizeof(DIRENTRY));                         dirEntry.de_attr = ATTR_VOLUME_ID;             // the first one is volume label             memcpy(dirEntry.de_name, "TFAT       ", sizeof (dirEntry.de_name));             memcpy(pbBlock, &dirEntry, sizeof(dirEntry));              ...             // Skip the next step of zeroing out clusters             dwCurrentSec += dwSectorsPerCluster;             dwRootSectors = 0;         }     }     // Each new root directory sector needs to be zeroed.     memset(pbBlock, 0, cbSizeBlk);     iRootSec=0;     while ( iRootSec < dwRootSectors) { Basically, the code zero out the each entry in root directory depends on dwRootSectors. In FAT12/16, the dwRootSectors is calculated as the sectors we need for the root entries (512 for most of the case) and in FAT32 it just zero out the one cluster. Please note that, if it is a TFAT volume, it initialize the root directory with special volume label entries for some special purpose. Despite to its unusual initialization process for TFAT, it does provide a example for how to create a volume entry. With some minor modification, we can assign the volume label in FAT formatter and also remember to sync the volume label with bsVolumeLabel or bgbsVolumeLabel in boot sector.

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• Life Technologies: Making Life Easier to Manage

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} When we’re thinking about customer engagement, we’re acutely aware of all the forces at play competing for our customer’s attention. Solutions that make life easier for our customers draw attention to themselves. We tend to engage more when there is a distinct benefit and we can take a deep breath and accept that there is hope in the world and everything isn’t designed to frustrate us and make our lives miserable. (sigh…) When products are designed to automate processes that were consuming hours of our time with no relief in sight, they deserve to be recognized. One of our recent Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award Winners in the WebCenter category, Life Technologies, has recently posted a video promoting their “award winning” solution. The Oracle Innovation Awards are part of the overall Oracle Excellence awards given to customers for innovation with Oracle products. More info here. Their award nomination included this description: Life Technologies delivered the My Life Service Portal as part of a larger Digital Hub strategy. This Portal is the first of its kind in the biotechnology service providing industry. The Portal provides access to Life Technologies cloud based service monitoring system where all customer deployed instruments can be remotely monitored and proactively repaired. The portal provides alerts from these cloud based monitoring services directly to the customer and to Life Technologies Field Engineers. The Portal provides insight into the instruments and services customers purchased for the purpose of analyzing and anticipating future customer needs and creating targeted sales and service programs. This portal not only provides benefits for Life Technologies internal sales and service teams but provides customers a central place to track all pertinent instrument information including: instrument service history instrument status and previous activities instrument performance analytics planned service visits warranty/contract information discussion forums social networks for lab management and collaboration alerts and notifications on all of the above team scheduling for instrument usage promote optional reagents required to keep instruments performing From their website The Life Technologies Instruments & Services Portal Helps You Save Time and Gain Peace of Mind Introducing the new, award-winning, free online tool that enables easier management of your instrument use and care, faster response to requests for service or service quotes, and instant sharing of key instrument and service information with your colleagues. Now – this unto itself is obviously beneficial for their customers who were previously burdened with having to do all of these tasks separately, manually and inconsistently by nature. Now – all in one place and free to their customers – a portal that ties it all together. They now have built the platform to give their customers yet another reason to do business with them – Their headline on their product page says it all: “Life is now easier to manage - All your instrument use and care in one place – the no-cost, no-hassle Instruments and Services Portal.” Of course – it’s very convenient that the company name includes “Life” and now can also promote to their clients and prospects that doing business with them is easy and their sophisticated lab equipment is easy to manage. In an industry full of PhD’s – “Easy” isn’t usually the first word that comes to mind, but Life Technologies has now tied the word to their brand in a very eloquent way. Between our work lives and family or personal lives, getting any mono-focused minutes of dedicated attention has become such a rare occurrence in our current era of multi-tasking that those moments of focus are highly prized. So – when something is done really well – so well that it becomes captivating and urges sharing impulses – I take notice and dig deeper and most of the time I discover other gems not so hidden below the surface. And then I share with those I know would enjoy and understand. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit here that the first person I shared the videos below with was my daughter. She’s in her senior year of high school in the midst of her college search. She’s passionate about her academics and has already decided that she wants to study Neuroscience in college and like her mother will be in for the long haul to a PhD eventually. In a summer science program at Smith College 2 summers ago – she sent the family famous text to me – “I just dissected a sheep’s brain – wicked cool!” – This was followed by an equally memorable text this past summer in a research mentorship in Neuroscience at UConn – “Just sliced up some rat brain. Reminded me of a deli slicer at the supermarket… sorry I forgot to call last night…” So… needless to say – I knew I had an audience that would enjoy and understand these videos below and are now being shared among her science classmates and faculty. And evidently - so does Life Technologies! They’ve done a great job on these making them fun and something that will easily be shared among their customers social networks. They’ve created a neuro-archetypal character, “Ph.Diddy” and know that their world of clients in academics, research, and other institutions would understand and enjoy the “edutainment” value in this series of videos on their YouTube channel that pokes fun at the stereotypes while also promoting their products at the same time. They use their Facebook page for additional engagement with their clients and as another venue to promote these videos. Enjoy this one as well! More to be found here: http://www.youtube.com/lifetechnologies Stay tuned to this Oracle WebCenter blog channel. Tomorrow we'll be taking a look at another winner of the Innovation Awards, LADWP - helping to keep the citizens of Los Angeles engaged with their Water and Power provider.

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• Creating A SharePoint Parent/Child List Relationship&ndash; SharePoint 2010 Edition

  - by Mark Rackley

  Hey blog readers… It has been almost 2 years since I posted my most read blog on creating a Parent/Child list relationship in SharePoint 2007: Creating a SharePoint List Parent / Child Relationship - Out of the Box And then a year ago I improved on my method and redid the blog post… still for SharePoint 2007: Creating a SharePoint List Parent/Child Relationship – VIDEO REMIX Since then many of you have been asking me how to get this to work in SharePoint 2010, and frankly I have just not had time to look into it. I wish I could have jumped into this sooner, but have just recently began to look at it. Well.. after all this time I have actually come up with two solutions that work, neither of them are as clean as I’d like them to be, but I wanted to get something in your hands that you can start using today. Hopefully in the coming weeks and months I’ll be able to improve upon this further and give you guys some better options. For the most part, the process is identical to the 2007 process, but you have probably found out that the list view web parts in 2010 behave differently, and getting the Parent ID to your new child form can be a pain in the rear (at least that’s what I’ve discovered). Anyway, like I said, I have found a couple of solutions that work. If you know of a better one, please let us know as it bugs me that this not as eloquent as my 2007 implementation. Getting on the same page First thing I’d recommend is recreating this blog: Creating a SharePoint List Parent/Child Relationship – VIDEO REMIX in SharePoint 2010… There are some vague differences, but it’s basically the same…  Here’s a quick video of me doing this in SP 2010: Creating Lists necessary for this blog post Now that you have the lists created, lets set up the New Time form to use a QueryString variable to populate the Parent ID field: Creating parameters in Child’s new item form to set parent ID Did I talk fast enough through both of those videos? Hopefully by now that stuff is old hat to you, but I wanted to make sure everyone could get on the same page.  Okay… let’s get started. Solution 1 – XSLTListView with Javascript This solution is the more elegant of the two, however it does require the use of a little javascript.  The other solution does not use javascript, but it also doesn’t use the pretty new SP 2010 pop-ups.  I’ll let you decide which you like better. The basic steps of this solution are: Inserted a Related Item View Insert a ContentEditorWebPart Insert script in ContentEditorWebPart that pulls the ID from the Query string and calls the method to insert a new item on the child entry form Hide the toolbar from data view to remove “add new item” link. Again, you don’t HAVE to use a CEWP, you could just put the javascript directly in the page using SPD.  Anyway, here is how I did it: Using Related Item View / JavaScript Here’s the JavaScript I used in my Content Editor Web Part: <script type="text/javascript"> function NewTime() { // Get the Query String values and split them out into the vals array var vals = new Object(); var qs = location.search.substring(1, location.search.length); var args = qs.split("&"); for (var i=0; i < args.length; i++) { var nameVal = args[i].split("="); var temp = unescape(nameVal[1]).split('+'); nameVal[1] = temp.join(' '); vals[nameVal[0]] = nameVal[1]; } var issueID = vals["ID"]; //use this to bring up the pretty pop up NewItem2(event,"http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID=" + issueID); //use this to open a new window //window.location="http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID=" + issueID; } </script> Solution 2 – DataFormWebPart and exact same 2007 Process This solution is a little more of a hack, but it also MUCH more close to the process we did in SP 2007. So, if you don’t mind not having the pretty pop-up and prefer the comforts of what you are used to, you can give this one a try.  The basics steps are: Insert a DataFormWebPart instead of the List Data View Create a Parameter on DataFormWebPart to store “ID” Query String Variable Filter DataFormWebPart using Parameter Insert a link at bottom of DataForm Web part that points to the Child’s new item form and passes in the Parent Id using the Parameter. See.. like I told you, exact same process as in 2007 (except using the DataFormWeb Part). The DataFormWebPart also requires a lot more work to make it look “pretty” but it’s just table rows and cells, and can be configured pretty painlessly.  Here is that video: Using DataForm Web Part One quick update… if you change the link in this solution from: <tr> <td><a href="http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID={$IssueIDParam}">Click here to create new item...</a> </td> </tr> to: <tr> <td> <a href="javascript:NewItem2(event,'http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID={$IssueIDParam}');">Click here to create new item...</a> </td> </tr> It will open up in the pretty pop up and act the same as solution one… So… both Solutions will now behave the same to the end user. Just depends on which you want to implement. That’s all for now… Remember in both solutions when you have them working, you can make the “IssueID” invisible to users by using the “ms-hidden” class (it’s my previous blog post on the subject up there). That’s basically all there is to it! No pithy or witty closing this time… I am sorry it took me so long to dive into this and I hope your questions are answered. As I become more polished myself I will try to come up with a cleaner solution that will make everyone happy… As always, thanks for taking the time to stop by.

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• RequestValidation Changes in ASP.NET 4.0

  - by Rick Strahl

  There’s been a change in the way the ValidateRequest attribute on WebForms works in ASP.NET 4.0. I noticed this today while updating a post on my WebLog all of which contain raw HTML and so all pretty much trigger request validation. I recently upgraded this app from ASP.NET 2.0 to 4.0 and it’s now failing to update posts. At first this was difficult to track down because of custom error handling in my app – the custom error handler traps the exception and logs it with only basic error information so the full detail of the error was initially hidden. After some more experimentation in development mode the error that occurs is the typical ASP.NET validate request error (‘A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detetected…’) which looks like this in ASP.NET 4.0: At first when I got this I was real perplexed as I didn’t read the entire error message and because my page does have: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="NewEntry.aspx.cs" Inherits="Westwind.WebLog.NewEntry" MasterPageFile="~/App_Templates/Standard/AdminMaster.master" ValidateRequest="false" EnableEventValidation="false" EnableViewState="false" %> WTF? ValidateRequest would seem like it should be enough, but alas in ASP.NET 4.0 apparently that setting alone is no longer enough. Reading the fine print in the error explains that you need to explicitly set the requestValidationMode for the application back to V2.0 in web.config: <httpRuntime executionTimeout="300" requestValidationMode="2.0" /> Kudos for the ASP.NET team for putting up a nice error message that tells me how to fix this problem, but excuse me why the heck would you change this behavior to require an explicit override to an optional and by default disabled page level switch? You’ve just made a relatively simple fix to a solution a nasty morass of hard to discover configuration settings??? The original way this worked was perfectly discoverable via attributes in the page. Now you can set this setting in the page and get completely unexpected behavior and you are required to set what effectively amounts to a backwards compatibility flag in the configuration file. It turns out the real reason for the .config flag is that the request validation behavior has moved from WebForms pipeline down into the entire ASP.NET/IIS request pipeline and is now applied against all requests. Here’s what the breaking changes page from Microsoft says about it: The request validation feature in ASP.NET provides a certain level of default protection against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. In previous versions of ASP.NET, request validation was enabled by default. However, it applied only to ASP.NET pages (.aspx files and their class files) and only when those pages were executing. In ASP.NET 4, by default, request validation is enabled for all requests, because it is enabled before the BeginRequest phase of an HTTP request. As a result, request validation applies to requests for all ASP.NET resources, not just .aspx page requests. This includes requests such as Web service calls and custom HTTP handlers. Request validation is also active when custom HTTP modules are reading the contents of an HTTP request. As a result, request validation errors might now occur for requests that previously did not trigger errors. To revert to the behavior of the ASP.NET 2.0 request validation feature, add the following setting in the Web.config file: <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" /> However, we recommend that you analyze any request validation errors to determine whether existing handlers, modules, or other custom code accesses potentially unsafe HTTP inputs that could be XSS attack vectors. Ok, so ValidateRequest of the form still works as it always has but it’s actually the ASP.NET Event Pipeline, not WebForms that’s throwing the above exception as request validation is applied to every request that hits the pipeline. Creating the runtime override removes the HttpRuntime checking and restores the WebForms only behavior. That fixes my immediate problem but still leaves me wondering especially given the vague wording of the above explanation. One thing that’s missing in the description is above is one important detail: The request validation is applied only to application/x-www-form-urlencoded POST content not to all inbound POST data. When I first read this this freaked me out because it sounds like literally ANY request hitting the pipeline is affected. To make sure this is not really so I created a quick handler: public class Handler1 : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World <hr>" + context.Request.Form.ToString()); } public bool IsReusable { get { return false; } } } and called it with Fiddler by posting some XML to the handler using a default form-urlencoded POST content type: and sure enough – hitting the handler also causes the request validation error and 500 server response. Changing the content type to text/xml effectively fixes the problem however, bypassing the request validation filter so Web Services/AJAX handlers and custom modules/handlers that implement custom protocols aren’t affected as long as they work with special input content types. It also looks that multipart encoding does not trigger event validation of the runtime either so this request also works fine: POST http://rasnote/weblog/handler1.ashx HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=------7cf2a327f01ae User-Agent: West Wind Internet Protocols 5.53 Host: rasnote Content-Length: 40 Pragma: no-cache <xml>asdasd</xml>--------7cf2a327f01ae *That* probably should trigger event validation – since it is a potential HTML form submission, but it doesn’t. New Runtime Feature, Global Scope Only? Ok, so request validation is now a runtime feature but sadly it’s a feature that’s scoped to the ASP.NET Runtime – effective scope to the entire running application/app domain. You can still manually force validation using Request.ValidateInput() which gives you the option to do this in code, but that realistically will only work with the requestValidationMode set to V2.0 as well since the 4.0 mode auto-fires before code ever gets a chance to intercept the call. Given all that, the new setting in ASP.NET 4.0 seems to limit options and makes things more difficult and less flexible. Of course Microsoft gets to say ASP.NET is more secure by default because of it but what good is that if you have to turn off this flag the very first time you need to allow one single request that bypasses request validation??? This is really shortsighted design… <sigh>© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• Speaker at the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004

  The following is an excerpt from the UniversalThread conference coverage of the German Visual FoxPro Developer Conference 2004 written by Hans-Otto Lochmann, Armin Neudert and myself. TRACK Active FoxPro Pages Back in 1996 Peter Herzog invented a FoxPro based solution to provide intranet capabilities for one of his customers. Nearly at the same time Rick Strahl had the same task and created WestWind Web Connection (WWWC). The aspect that developers have to have a full Visual FoxPro development environment to create WWWC solutions was the starting point of a "personal sportive competition" of Peter to write his own solution. But the main aspect has to be that it doesn't rely on a full VFP version in order to run. The VFP runtime should enough and the source code has to be compiled and interpreted on the fly. So, as Microsoft released Active Server Pages a name for Peter's solution was found: Active FoxPro Pages (AFP). During the years many drawbacks, design aspects as well as technological hassles forced ProLib Software to refactor the product. This way many limits like DCOM configuration, file-based information transfer between Web server and AFP, missing features (like upload forms or other Web servers than IIS) and extensibility were eliminated. As a consequence ProLib Software decided to rewrite Active FoxPro Pages in mid of 2002 completely. Christof Wollenhaupt, before his marriage known as Christof Lange, and Jochen Kirstätter had to solve this task. AFP 3.0 was officially released at German Devcon in November 2002. Today AFP has six distributors world-wide and there is a lot more information available online than before version 3.0. Directly after a short welcome speech by Rainer Becker, Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - opened today's AFP track and introduced the basic concepts how Active FoxPro Pages works in general, explained the AFP terminilogy and every single component, and presented a small Walk-Through about how to write an AFP-based Web solution. Actually his presentation slides themselves were an AFP Web application. This way it was easy to integrate accompanying AFP samples on the fly. Additionally it was shown that no Visual FoxPro development environment is needed to create a Web application. A simple text editor like NotePad or any WYSIWYG editor on the market is usable to fullfil customer's requirements.Welcome at least two new speakers - Nina Schwanzer and Bernhard Reiter. Both are working at ProLib Software and this year's conference is their first time as speakers. And they did their job very well. The whole session was kind of a "ping pong" game and those two complemented each other to keep the audience in tension. First, they described typical requirements a modern desktop application should fullfil - online registration and activation, auto-update capabilities, or even frontend to administer a Web application on a remote system via internet, and explained how possible solutions like Web Services (using the SOAP interface), DCOM, and even .NET might solve those requirements. But any of those ways has different drawbacks like complicated installation or configuration, or extraordinary download sizes. Next, they introduced a technology they developed and used in a customer's project: Active FoxPro Pages Remote Procedure Call (AFP RPC). [...]   In the next session JoKi described how to extend Active FoxPro Pages. On the one hand AFP provides a plugin interface, and on the other hand any addon for Visual FoxPro might be usable as well. During the first half he spoke about the plugin interface and wrote live a new AFP extension - the Devcon plugin. Later he questioned any former step and showed that a single AFP document may solve the problem as well. So, developing extensions is only interesting if they are re-usable and generic. At the end he talked about multiple interfaces for the same business logic. For instance plain VFP class, COM server and .NET integration. Currently there are several specialized AFP extensions for sending mail, for using cryptographic routines (ie. based on .NET classes), or enhanced methods to handle HTML/XML strings.Rainer Becker and Peter Herzog introduced a new development for Visual Extend (VFX) - an AFP form builder. With this builder creating an AFP Web form designed with Visual FoxPro's form designer was a matter of seconds. The builder itself is currently in pre-release status and will be part of the VFX framework in the future. It was very impressive to see that the whole design of a form as well as most parts of its functionality were exported to a combination of HTML, JavaScript and Active FoxPro Pages. At half-time Jürgen "wOOdy" Wondzinski and JoKi changed places with Rainer and Peter, and presented some Web solutions in AFP. [...] Visual FoxPro 9.0 und Linux Is Linux still a topic for Visual FoxPro developers based on the activities during this year? In his session Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - went not through the technical steps and requirements on how to setup and run FoxPro on a Linux client. Instead, he explained what Linux actually is, and talked about the high variety of distributions. In fact there are a lot of distributions around but since some several years there are some specialized ones available: Live Distributions (aka LiveCDs).The intension of LiveCDs is to run a full-featured Linux operating system on any personal computer directly from a bootable medium, like CD, DVD, or even USB memory stick, without installation on a hard disk. One of the first Linux LiveCDs was made by Klaus Knopper and is well-known as Knoppix. Today, many other LiveCDs are based on the concepts of Knoppix. During the session Jochen booted Morphix, a very light-weighted LiveCD, on his notebook, and actually showed the attendees that testing and playing around with Linux is absolutely easy. Running a text processing application swept away most of the contrary aspects the audience had. Okay, where is the part about FoxPro? Well, there are several scenarios a customer might require usage of Linux, and actually with all of them FoxPro could deal with. I guess that one of the more common ones is the situation that a customer has a heterogeneous intranet with Windows clients and Linux servers, i.e. Windows XP Professional and any Linux distribution on their servers. Even in this scenario there are two variants hidden! Why? Well, on the one hand there is a software package called Samba, that provides Windows server capabilities to a Linux system, and on the other hand there are several SQL servers for Linux, like PostgreSQL, DB2 and MySQL. Either way, FoxPro is able to deal with these scenarios, but you as developer have to know what you are talking about with your customers. And even if there's no Windows operating system, you are able to provide a FoxPro-based solution. Using the wine library - wine stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator - you are able to run your VFP applications on Linux clients, too; but not without reading VFP's EULA. Licenses were also part the session, and Jochen discussed the meaning of Open Source and its misunderstanding throughout most developers. Open Source does not mean that it's without a fee. Instead, it stands for access to the source code of an application or tool. And, VFP itself is one of the best samples to explain Open Source due to fact that since years, VFP is shipped with the xSource.zip archive. [...]

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• The APEX of Business Value...or...the Business Value of APEX? Oracle Cloud Takes Oracle APEX to New Heights!

  - by Gene Eun

  The attraction of Oracle Application Express (APEX) has increased tremendously with the recent launch of the Oracle Cloud. APEX already supported departmental development and deployment of business applications with minimal involvement from the IT department. Positioned as the ideal replacement for MS Access, APEX probably has managed better to capture the eye of developers and was used for enterprise application development at least as much as for the kind of tactical applications that Oracle strategically positioned it for. With APEX as PaaS from the Oracle Cloud, a leap is made to a much higher level of business value. Now the IT department is not even needed to make infrastructure available with a database running  on it. All the business needs is a credit card. And the business application that is developed, managed and used from the cloud through a standard browser can now just as easily be accessed by users from around the world as by users from the business department itself. As a bonus – the development of the APEX application is also done in the cloud – with no special demands on the location or the enterprise access privileges of the developers. To sum it up: APEX from Oracle Cloud Database Service get the development environment up and running in minutes no involvement from the internal IT department required (not for infrastructure, platform, or development) superior availability and scalability is offered by Oracle users from anywhere in the world can be invited to access the application developers from anywhere in the world can participate in creating and maintaining the application In addition: because the Oracle Cloud platform is the same as the on-premise platform, you can still decide to move the APEX application between the cloud and the local environment – and back again. The REST-ful services that are available through APEX allow programmatic interaction with the database under the APEX application. That means that this database can be synchronized with on premise databases or data stores in (other) clouds. Through the Oracle Cloud Messaging Service, the APEX application can easily enter into asynchronous conversations with other APEX applications, Fusion Middleware applications (ADF, SOA, BPM) and any other type of REST-enabled application. In my opinion, now, for the first time perhaps, APEX offers the attraction to the business that has been suggested before: because of the cloud, all the business needs is  a credit card (a budget of $175 per month), an internet-connection and a browser. Not like before, with a PC hidden under a desk or a database running somewhere in the data center. No matter how unattended: equipment is needed, power is consumed, the database needs to be kept running and if Oracle Database XE does not suffice, software licenses are required as well. And this set up always has a security challenge associated with it. The cloud fee for the Oracle Cloud Database Service includes infrastructure, power, licenses, availability, platform upgrades, a collection of reusable application components and the development and runtime environments containing the APEX platform. Of course this not only means that business departments can move quickly without having to convince their IT colleagues to move along – it also means that small organizations that do not even have IT colleagues can do the same. Getting tailored applications or applications up and running to get in touch with users and customers all over the world is now within easy reach for small outfits – without any investment. My misunderstanding For a long time, I was under the impression that the essence of APEX was that the business could create applications themselves – meaning that business ‘people’ would actually go into APEX to create the application. To me APEX was too much of a developers’ tool to see that happen – apart from the odd business analyst who missed his or her calling as an IT developer. Having looked at various other cloud based development offerings – including Force.com, Mendix, WaveMaker, WorkXpress, OrangeScape, Caspio and Cordys- I have come to realize my mistake. All these platforms are positioned for 'the business' but require a fair amount of coding and technical expertise. However, they make the business happy nevertheless, because they allow the  business to completely circumvent the IT department. That is the essence. Not having to go through the red tape, not having to wait for IT staff who (justifiably) need weeks or months to provide an environment, not having to deal with administrators (again, justifiably) refusing to take on that 'strange environment'. Being able to think of an initiative and turn into action right away. The business does not have to build the application - it can easily hire some external developers or even that nerdy boy next door. They can get started, get an application up and running and invite users in – especially external users such as customers. They will worry later about upgrades and life cycle management and integration. To get applications up and running quickly and start turning ideas into action and results rightaway. That is the key selling point for all these cloud offerings, including APEX from the Cloud. And it is a compelling story. For APEX probably even more so than for the others. While I consider APEX a somewhat proprietary framework compared with ‘regular’ Java/JEE web development (or even .NET and PHP  development), it is still far more open than most cloud environments. APEX is SQL and PL/SQL based – nothing special about those languages – and can run just as easily on site as in the cloud. It has been around since 2004 (that is not including several predecessors that fed straight into APEX) so it can be considered pretty mature. Oracle as a company seems pretty stable – so investments in its technology are bound to last for some time to come. By the way: neither APEX nor the other Cloud DevaaS offerings are targeted at creating applications with enormous life times. They fit into a trend of agile development and rapid life cycle management, with fairly light weight user interfaces that quickly adapt to taste, technology trends and functional requirements and that are easily replaced. APEX and ADF – a match made in heaven?! (or at least in the sky) Note that using APEX only for cloud based database with REST-ful Services is also a perfectly viable scenario: any UI – mobile or browser based – capable of consuming REST-ful services can be created against such a business tier. Creating an ADF Mobile application for example that runs aginst REST-ful services is a best practice for mobile development. Such REST-ful services can be consumed from any service provider – including the Cloud based APEX powered REST-ful services running against the Oracle Cloud Database Service! The ADF Mobile architecture overview can easily be morphed to fit the APEX services in – allowing for a cloud based mobile app: Want to learn more about Oracle Database Cloud Service or Oracle Cloud, just visit cloud.oracle.com  or oracle.com/cloud. Repost of a blog entry by Rick Greenwald, Director of Product Management, Oracle Database Cloud Service.

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• How-to filter table filter input to only allow numeric input

  - by frank.nimphius

  In a previous ADF Code Corner post, I explained how to change the table filter behavior by intercepting the query condition in a query filter. See sample #30 at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/adf/learnmore/index-101235.html In this OTN Harvest post I explain how to prevent users from providing invalid character entries as table filter criteria to avoid problems upon re-querying the table. In the example shown next, only numeric values are allowed for a table column filter. To create a table that allows data filtering, drag a View Object – or a data collection of a Web Service or JPA business service – from the DataControls panel and drop it as a table. Choose the Enable Filtering option in the Edit Table Columns dialog so the table renders with the column filter boxes displayed. The table filter fields are created using implicit af:inputText components that need to be customized for you to apply a custom filter input component, or to change the input behavior. To change the input filter, so only a defined set of input keys is allowed, you need to change the default filter field with your own af:inputText field to which you apply an af:clientListener tag that filters user keyboard entries. For this, in the Oracle JDeveloper visual editor, select the column which filter you want to change and expand the column node in the Oracle JDeveloper Structure Window. Part of the column definition is the Column facet node. Expand the facets so you see the filter facet entry. The filter facet is grayed out as there is no custom facet defined. In a next step, open theComponent Palette (ctrl+shift+P) and drag an Input Text component onto the facet. This demarks the first part in the filter customization. To make the custom filter component work, you need to map the af:inputText component value property to the ADF filter criteria that is exposed in the Expression Builder. Open the Expression Builder for the filter input component value property by clicking the arrow icon to its right. In the Expression Builder expand the JSP Objects | vs | filterCriteria node to select the attribute name represented by the table column. The vs entry is the name of a variable that is defined on the table and that grants you access to the table attributes. Now that the filter works as before – though using a custom filter input component – you can add the af:clientListener tag to your custom filter component – af:inputText – to call out to JavaScript when users type in the column filter field Point the client filter method property to a JavaScript function that you reference or add through using the af:resource tag and set the type property value to keyDown. <af:document id="d1">     <af:resource type="javascript" source="/js/filterHandler.js"/> … The filter definition looks as shown below <af:inputText label="Label 1" id="it1"                         value="#{vs.filterCriteria.Employe        <af:clientListener method="suppressCharacterInput"                                     type="keyDown"/> </af:inputText> The JavaScript code that you can use to either filter character inputs or numeric inputs is shown below. Just store this code in an external JavaScript (.js) file and reference it from the af:resource tag. //Allow numbers, cursor control keys and delete keys function suppressCharacterInput(evt) {     var _keyCode = evt.getKeyCode();     var _filterField = evt.getCurrentTarget();     var _oldValue = _filterField.getValue();     if (!((_keyCode < 57) ||(_keyCode > 96 && _keyCode < 105))) {         _filterField.setValue(_oldValue);         evt.cancel();     } } //Allow characters, cursor control keys and delete keys function suppressNumericInput(evt) {  var _keyCode = evt.getKeyCode();  var _filterField = evt.getCurrentTarget();  var _oldValue = _filterField.getValue();  //check for numbers  if ((_keyCode < 57 && _keyCode > 47) ||      (_keyCode > 96 && _keyCode < 105)){     _filterField.setValue(_oldValue);     evt.cancel();   } } But what if browsers don't allow JavaScript ? Don't worry about this. If browsers would not support JavaScript then ADF Faces as a whole would not work and you had a different problem.

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• Class Loading Deadlocks

  - by tomas.nilsson

  Mattis follows up on his previous post with one more expose on Class Loading Deadlocks As I wrote in a previous post, the class loading mechanism in Java is very powerful. There are many advanced techniques you can use, and when used wrongly you can get into all sorts of trouble. But one of the sneakiest deadlocks you can run into when it comes to class loading doesn't require any home made class loaders or anything. All you need is classes depending on each other, and some bad luck. First of all, here are some basic facts about class loading: 1) If a thread needs to use a class that is not yet loaded, it will try to load that class 2) If another thread is already loading the class, the first thread will wait for the other thread to finish the loading 3) During the loading of a class, one thing that happens is that the <clinit method of a class is being run 4) The <clinit method initializes all static fields, and runs any static blocks in the class. Take the following class for example: class Foo { static Bar bar = new Bar(); static { System.out.println("Loading Foo"); } } The first time a thread needs to use the Foo class, the class will be initialized. The <clinit method will run, creating a new Bar object and printing "Loading Foo" But what happens if the Bar object has never been used before either? Well, then we will need to load that class as well, calling the Bar <clinit method as we go. Can you start to see the potential problem here? A hint is in fact #2 above. What if another thread is currently loading class Bar? The thread loading class Foo will have to wait for that thread to finish loading. But what happens if the <clinit method of class Bar tries to initialize a Foo object? That thread will have to wait for the first thread, and there we have the deadlock. Thread one is waiting for thread two to initialize class Bar, thread two is waiting for thread one to initialize class Foo. All that is needed for a class loading deadlock is static cross dependencies between two classes (and a multi threaded environment): class Foo { static Bar b = new Bar(); } class Bar { static Foo f = new Foo(); } If two threads cause these classes to be loaded at exactly the same time, we will have a deadlock. So, how do you avoid this? Well, one way is of course to not have these circular (static) dependencies. On the other hand, it can be very hard to detect these, and sometimes your design may depend on it. What you can do in that case is to make sure that the classes are first loaded single threadedly, for example during an initialization phase of your application. The following program shows this kind of deadlock. To help bad luck on the way, I added a one second sleep in the static block of the classes to trigger the unlucky timing. Notice that if you uncomment the "//Foo f = new Foo();" line in the main method, the class will be loaded single threadedly, and the program will terminate as it should. public class ClassLoadingDeadlock { // Start two threads. The first will instansiate a Foo object, // the second one will instansiate a Bar object. public static void main(String[] arg) { // Uncomment next line to stop the deadlock // Foo f = new Foo(); new Thread(new FooUser()).start(); new Thread(new BarUser()).start(); } } class FooUser implements Runnable { public void run() { System.out.println("FooUser causing class Foo to be loaded"); Foo f = new Foo(); System.out.println("FooUser done"); } } class BarUser implements Runnable { public void run() { System.out.println("BarUser causing class Bar to be loaded"); Bar b = new Bar(); System.out.println("BarUser done"); } } class Foo { static { // We are deadlock prone even without this sleep... // The sleep just makes us more deterministic try { Thread.sleep(1000); } catch(InterruptedException e) {} } static Bar b = new Bar(); } class Bar { static { try { Thread.sleep(1000); } catch(InterruptedException e) {} } static Foo f = new Foo(); }

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• Database continuous integration step by step

  - by David Atkinson

  This post will describe how to set up basic database continuous integration using TeamCity to initiate the build process, SQL Source Control to put your database under source control, and the SQL Compare command line to keep a test database up to date. In my example I will be using Subversion as my source control repository. If you wish to follow my steps verbatim, please make sure you have TortoiseSVN, SQL Compare and SQL Source Control installed. Downloading and Installing TeamCity TeamCity (http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/index.html) is free for up to three agents, so it a great no-risk tool you can use to experiment with. 1. Download the latest version from the JetBrains website. For some reason the TeamCity executable didn't download properly for me, stalling frustratingly at 99%, so I tried again with the zip file download option (see screenshot below), which worked flawlessly. 2. Run the installer using the defaults. This results in a set-up with the server component and agent installed on the same machine, which is ideal for getting started with ease. 3. Check that the build agent is pointing to the server correctly. This has caught me out a few times before. This setting is in C:\TeamCity\buildAgent\conf\buildAgent.properties and for my installation is serverUrl=http\://localhost\:80 . If you need to change this value, if for example you've had to install the Server console to a different port number, the TeamCity Build Agent Service will need to be restarted for the change to take effect. 4. Open the TeamCity admin console on http://localhost , and specify your own designated username and password at first startup. Putting your database in source control using SQL Source Control 5. Assuming you've got SQL Source Control installed, select a development database in the SQL Server Management Studio Object Explorer and select Link Database to Source Control. 6. For the Link step you can either create your own empty folder in source control, or you can select Just Evaluating, which just creates a local subversion repository for you behind the scenes. 7. Once linked, note that your database turns green in the Object Explorer. Visit the Commit tab to do an initial commit of your database objects by typing in an appropriate comment and clicking Commit. 8. There is a hidden feature in SQL Source Control that opens up TortoiseSVN (provided it is installed) pointing to the linked repository. Keep Shift depressed and right click on the text to the right of 'Linked to', in the example below, it's the red Evaluation Repository text. Select Open TortoiseSVN Repo Browser. This screen should give you an idea of how SQL Source Control manages the object files behind the scenes. Back in the TeamCity admin console, we'll now create a new project to monitor the above repository location and to trigger a 'build' each time the repository changes. 9. In TeamCity Adminstration, select Create Project and give it a name, such as "My first database CI", and click Create. 10. Click on Create Build Configuration, and name it something like "Integration build". 11. Click VCS settings and then Create And Attach new VCS root. This is where you will tell TeamCity about the repository it should monitor. 12. In my case since I'm using the Just Evaluating option in SQL Source Control, I should select Subversion. 13. In the URL field paste your repository location. In my case this is file:///C:/Users/David.Atkinson/AppData/Local/Red Gate/SQL Source Control 3/EvaluationRepositories/WidgetDevelopment/WidgetDevelopment 14. Click on Test Connection to ensure that you can communicate with your source control system. Click Save. 15. Click Add Build Step, and Runner Type: Command Line. Should you be familiar with the other runner types, such as NAnt, MSBuild or Powershell, you can opt for these, but for the same of keeping it simple I will pick the simplest option. 16. If you have installed SQL Compare in the default location, set the Command Executable field to: C:\Program Files (x86)\Red Gate\SQL Compare 10\sqlcompare.exe 17. Flip back to SSMS briefly and add a new database to your server. This will be the database used for continuous integration testing. 18. Set the command parameters according to your server and the name of the database you have created. In my case I created database RedGateCI on server .\sql2008r2 /scripts1:. /server2:.\sql2008r2 /db2:RedGateCI /sync /verbose Note that if you pick a server instance that isn't on your local machine, you'll need the TCP/IP protocol enabled in SQL Server Configuration Manager otherwise the SQL Compare command line will not be able to connect. 19. Save and select Build Triggering / Add New Trigger / VCS Trigger. This is where you tell TeamCity when it should initiate a build. Click Save. 20. Now return to SQL Server Management Studio and make a schema change (eg add a new object) to your linked development database. A blue indicator will appear in the Object Explorer. Commit this change, typing in an appropriate check-in comment. All being good, within 60 seconds (a TeamCity default that can be changed) a build will be triggered. 21. Click on Projects in TeamCity to get back to the overview screen: The build log will show you the console output, which is useful for troubleshooting any issues: That's it! You now have continuous integration on your database. In future posts I'll cover how you can generate and test the database creation script, the database upgrade script, and run database unit tests as part of your continuous integration script. If you have any trouble getting this up and running please let me know, either by commenting on this post, or email me directly using the email address below. Technorati Tags: SQL Server

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• VS 2010 Debugger Improvements (BreakPoints, DataTips, Import/Export)

  - by ScottGu

  This is the twenty-first in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today’s blog post covers a few of the nice usability improvements coming with the VS 2010 debugger.  The VS 2010 debugger has a ton of great new capabilities.  Features like Intellitrace (aka historical debugging), the new parallel/multithreaded debugging capabilities, and dump debuging support typically get a ton of (well deserved) buzz and attention when people talk about the debugging improvements with this release.  I’ll be doing blog posts in the future that demonstrate how to take advantage of them as well.  With today’s post, though, I thought I’d start off by covering a few small, but nice, debugger usability improvements that were also included with the VS 2010 release, and which I think you’ll find useful. Breakpoint Labels VS 2010 includes new support for better managing debugger breakpoints.  One particularly useful feature is called “Breakpoint Labels” – it enables much better grouping and filtering of breakpoints within a project or across a solution.  With previous releases of Visual Studio you had to manage each debugger breakpoint as a separate item. Managing each breakpoint separately can be a pain with large projects and for cases when you want to maintain “logical groups” of breakpoints that you turn on/off depending on what you are debugging.  Using the new VS 2010 “breakpoint labeling” feature you can now name these “groups” of breakpoints and manage them as a unit. Grouping Multiple Breakpoints Together using a Label Below is a screen-shot of the breakpoints window within Visual Studio 2010.  This lists all of the breakpoints defined within my solution (which in this case is the ASP.NET MVC 2 code base): The first and last breakpoint in the list above breaks into the debugger when a Controller instance is created or released by the ASP.NET MVC Framework. Using VS 2010, I can now select these two breakpoints, right-click, and then select the new “Edit labels…” menu command to give them a common label/name (making them easier to find and manage): Below is the dialog that appears when I select the “Edit labels” command.  We can use it to create a new string label for our breakpoints or select an existing one we have already defined.  In this case we’ll create a new label called “Lifetime Management” to describe what these two breakpoints cover: When we press the OK button our two selected breakpoints will be grouped under the newly created “Lifetime Management” label: Filtering/Sorting Breakpoints by Label We can use the “Search” combobox to quickly filter/sort breakpoints by label.  Below we are only showing those breakpoints with the “Lifetime Management” label: Toggling Breakpoints On/Off by Label We can also toggle sets of breakpoints on/off by label group.  We can simply filter by the label group, do a Ctrl-A to select all the breakpoints, and then enable/disable all of them with a single click: Importing/Exporting Breakpoints VS 2010 now supports importing/exporting breakpoints to XML files – which you can then pass off to another developer, attach to a bug report, or simply re-load later.  To export only a subset of breakpoints, you can filter by a particular label and then click the “Export breakpoint” button in the Breakpoints window: Above I’ve filtered my breakpoint list to only export two particular breakpoints (specific to a bug that I’m chasing down).  I can export these breakpoints to an XML file and then attach it to a bug report or email – which will enable another developer to easily setup the debugger in the correct state to investigate it on a separate machine.  Pinned DataTips Visual Studio 2010 also includes some nice new “DataTip pinning” features that enable you to better see and track variable and expression values when in the debugger.  Simply hover over a variable or expression within the debugger to expose its DataTip (which is a tooltip that displays its value)  – and then click the new “pin” button on it to make the DataTip always visible: You can “pin” any number of DataTips you want onto the screen.  In addition to pinning top-level variables, you can also drill into the sub-properties on variables and pin them as well.  Below I’ve “pinned” three variables: “category”, “Request.RawUrl” and “Request.LogonUserIdentity.Name”.  Note that these last two variable are sub-properties of the “Request” object.   Associating Comments with Pinned DataTips Hovering over a pinned DataTip exposes some additional UI within the debugger: Clicking the comment button at the bottom of this UI expands the DataTip - and allows you to optionally add a comment with it: This makes it really easy to attach and track debugging notes: Pinned DataTips are usable across both Debug Sessions and Visual Studio Sessions Pinned DataTips can be used across multiple debugger sessions.  This means that if you stop the debugger, make a code change, and then recompile and start a new debug session - any pinned DataTips will still be there, along with any comments you associate with them.  Pinned DataTips can also be used across multiple Visual Studio sessions.  This means that if you close your project, shutdown Visual Studio, and then later open the project up again – any pinned DataTips will still be there, along with any comments you associate with them. See the Value from Last Debug Session (Great Code Editor Feature) How many times have you ever stopped the debugger only to go back to your code and say: $#@! – what was the value of that variable again??? One of the nice things about pinned DataTips is that they keep track of their “last value from debug session” – and you can look these values up within the VB/C# code editor even when the debugger is no longer running.  DataTips are by default hidden when you are in the code editor and the debugger isn’t running.  On the left-hand margin of the code editor, though, you’ll find a push-pin for each pinned DataTip that you’ve previously setup: Hovering your mouse over a pinned DataTip will cause it to display on the screen.  Below you can see what happens when I hover over the first pin in the editor - it displays our debug session’s last values for the “Request” object DataTip along with the comment we associated with them: This makes it much easier to keep track of state and conditions as you toggle between code editing mode and debugging mode on your projects. Importing/Exporting Pinned DataTips As I mentioned earlier in this post, pinned DataTips are by default saved across Visual Studio sessions (you don’t need to do anything to enable this). VS 2010 also now supports importing/exporting pinned DataTips to XML files – which you can then pass off to other developers, attach to a bug report, or simply re-load later. Combined with the new support for importing/exporting breakpoints, this makes it much easier for multiple developers to share debugger configurations and collaborate across debug sessions. Summary Visual Studio 2010 includes a bunch of great new debugger features – both big and small.  Today’s post shared some of the nice debugger usability improvements. All of the features above are supported with the Visual Studio 2010 Professional edition (the Pinned DataTip features are also supported in the free Visual Studio 2010 Express Editions)  I’ll be covering some of the “big big” new debugging features like Intellitrace, parallel/multithreaded debugging, and dump file analysis in future blog posts.  Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• SQL SERVER – Solution – Puzzle – SELECT * vs SELECT COUNT(*)

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier I have published Puzzle Why SELECT * throws an error but SELECT COUNT(*) does not. This question have received many interesting comments. Let us go over few of the answers, which are valid. Before I start the same, let me acknowledge Rob Farley who has not only answered correctly very first but also started interesting conversation in the same thread. The usual question will be what is the right answer. I would like to point to official Microsoft Connect Items which discusses the same. RGarvao https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/671475/select-test-where-exists-select tiberiu utan http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/338532/count-returns-a-value-1 Rob Farley count(*) is about counting rows, not a particular column. It doesn’t even look to see what columns are available, it’ll just count the rows, which in the case of a missing FROM clause, is 1. “select *” is designed to return columns, and therefore barfs if there are none available. Even more odd is this one: select ‘blah’ where exists (select *) You might be surprised at the results… Koushik The engine performs a “Constant scan” for Count(*) where as in the case of “SELECT *” the engine is trying to perform either Index/Cluster/Table scans. amikolaj When you query ‘select * from sometable’, SQL replaces * with the current schema of that table. With out a source for the schema, SQL throws an error. so when you query ‘select count(*)’, you are counting the one row. * is just a constant to SQL here. Check out the execution plan. Like the description states – ‘Scan an internal table of constants.’ You could do ‘select COUNT(‘my name is adam and this is my answer’)’ and get the same answer. Netra Acharya SELECT * Here, * represents all columns from a table. So it always looks for a table (As we know, there should be FROM clause before specifying table name). So, it throws an error whenever this condition is not satisfied. SELECT COUNT(*) Here, COUNT is a Function. So it is not mandetory to provide a table. Check it out this: DECLARE @cnt INT SET @cnt = COUNT(*) SELECT @cnt SET @cnt = COUNT(‘x’) SELECT @cnt Naveen Select 1 / Select ‘*’ will return 1/* as expected. Select Count(1)/Count(*) will return the count of result set of select statement. Count(1)/Count(*) will have one 1/* for each row in the result set of select statement. Select 1 or Select ‘*’ result set will contain only 1 result. so count is 1. Where as “Select *” is a sysntax which expects the table or equauivalent to table (table functions, etc..). It is like compilation error for that query. Ramesh Hi Friends, Count is an aggregate function and it expects the rows (list of records) for a specified single column or whole rows for *. So, when we use ‘select *’ it definitely give and error because ‘*’ is meant to have all the fields but there is not any table and without table it can only raise an error. So, in the case of ‘Select Count(*)’, there will be an error as a record in the count function so you will get the result as ’1'. Try using : Select COUNT(‘RAMESH’) and think there is an error ‘Must specify table to select from.’ in place of ‘RAMESH’ Pinal : If i am wrong then please clarify this. Sachin Nandanwar Any aggregate function expects a constant or a column name as an expression. DO NOT be confused with * in an aggregate function.The aggregate function does not treat it as a column name or a set of column names but a constant value, as * is a key word in SQL. You can replace any value instead of * for the COUNT function.Ex Select COUNT(5) will result as 1. The error resulting from select * is obvious it expects an object where it can extract the result set. I sincerely thank you all for wonderful conversation, I personally enjoyed it and I am sure all of you have the same feeling. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: CodeProject, Pinal Dave, PostADay, Readers Contribution, Readers Question, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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