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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 01, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 01, 2012Popular ReleasesMetodología General Ajustada - MGA: 01.09.08: Cambios John: Cambios en el MDI: Habilitación del menú e ícono de Imprimir. Deshabilitación de menú Ayuda y opciones de Importar y Exportar del menú Proyectos temporalmente. Integración con código de Crystal Report. Validaciones con Try-Catch al generar los reportes, personalización de los formularios en estilos y botones y validación de selección de tipo de reporte. Creación de instalador con TODOS los cambios y la creación de las carpetas asociadas a los RPT.WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke®: CKEditor Provider 1.14.01: Whats NewAdded New Plugin "Ventrian News Articles Link Selector" to select an Article Link from the News Article Module (This Plugin is not visible by default in your Toolbar, you need to manually add the 'newsarticleslinks' to your toolbarset) http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/CKEditorNewsArticlesLinks.png File-Browser: Added Paging to the Files List. You can define the Page Size in the Options (Default Value: 20) http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/CKEdito...MyRouter (Virtual WiFi Router): MyRouter 1.0 (Beta): A friendlier User Interface. A logger file to catch exceptions so you may send it to use to improve and fix any bugs that may occur. A feedback form because we always love hearing what you guy's think of MyRouter. Check for update menu item for you to stay up to date will the latest changes. Facebook fan page so you may spread the word and share MyRouter with friends and family And Many other exciting features were sure your going to love!WPF Sound Visualization Library: WPF SVL 0.3 (Source, Binaries, Examples, Help): Version 0.3 of WPFSVL. This includes three new controls: an equalizer, a digital clock, and a time editor.Thai Flood Watch: Thai Flood Watch - Source: non commercial use only ** This project supported by Department of Computer Science KhonKaen University Thailand.ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.4.0.0: sync with rev. 2196 of the java version important fix for RGBLuminanceSource generating barcode bitmaps Windows Phone demo client (only tested with emulator, because I don't have a Windows Phone) Barcode generation support for Windows Forms demo client Webcam support for Windows Forms demo clientOrchard Project: Orchard 1.4: Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.4: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-4-Release-Notes.NET Assembly Information: Assembly Information 2.1.0.1: - Fixed the issue in which AnyCPU binaries were shown as 32bit - Added support to show the errors in-case if some dlls failed to load.FluentData -Micro ORM with a fluent API that makes it simple to query a database: FluentData version 1.2: New features: - QueryValues method - Added support for automapping to enumerations (both int and string are supported). Fixed 2 reported issues.NetSqlAzMan - .NET SQL Authorization Manager: 3.6.0.15: 3.6.0.15 28-Feb-2012 • Fix: The communication object, System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel, cannot be used for communication because it is in the Faulted state. Work Item 10435: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/10435 • Fix: Made StorageCache thread safe. Thanks to tangrl. • Fix: Members property of SqlAzManApplicationGroup is not functioning. Thanks to tangrl. Work Item 10267: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/10267 • Fix: Indexer are making database calls. Thanks to t...SCCM Client Actions Tool: Client Actions Tool v1.1: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.1 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Added stop button to stop the ongoing process. Added action "Query update status". Added option "saveOnlineComputers" in config.ini to enable saving list of online computers from last session. Default value for "LatestClientVersion" set to SP2 R3 (4.00.6487.2157). Wuauserv service manual startup mode is considered healthy on Windows 7. Errors are now suppressed in checkReleases...Kinect PowerPoint Control: Kinect PowerPoint Control v1.1: Updated for Kinect SDK 1.0.SharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.8: API Updates: SOLID Extract Method for Archives (7Zip and RAR). ExtractAllEntries method on Archive classes will extract archives as a streaming file. This can offer better 7Zip extraction performance if any of the entries are solid. The IsSolid method on 7Zip archives will return true if any are solid. Removed IExtractionListener was removed in favor of events. Unit tests show example. Bug fixes: PPMd passes tests plus other fixes (Thanks Pavel) Zip used to always write a Post Descri...Social Network Importer for NodeXL: SocialNetImporter(v.1.3): This new version includes: - Download new networks for Facebook fan pages. - New options for downloading more posts - Bug fixes To use the new graph data provider, do the following: Unzip the Zip file into the "PlugIns" folder that can be found in the NodeXL installation folder (i.e "C:\Program Files\Social Media Research Foundation\NodeXL Excel Template\PlugIns") Open NodeXL template and you can access the new importer from the "Import" menuASP.NET REST Services Framework: Release 1.1 - Standard version: Beginning from v1.1 the REST-services Framework is compatible with ASP.NET Routing model as well with CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) principle. These two are often important when building REST API functionality within your application. It also includes ability to apply Filters to a class to target all WebRest methods, as well as some performance enhancements. New version includes Metadata Explorer providing ability exploring the existing services that becomes essential as the number ...SQL Live Monitor: SQL Live Monitor 1.31: A quick fix to make it this version work with SQL 2012. Version 2 already has 2012 working, but am still developing the UI in version 2, so this is just an interim fix to allow user to monitor SQL 2012.Content Slider Module for DotNetNuke: 01.02.00: This release has the following updates and new features: Feature: One-Click Enabling of Pager Setting Feature: Cache Sliders for Performance Feature: Configurable Cache Setting Enhancement: Transitions can be Selected Bug: Secure Folder Images not Viewable Bug: Sliders Disappear on Postback Bug: Remote Images Cause Error Bug: Deleted Images Cause Error System Requirements DotNetNuke v06.00.00 or newer .Net Framework v3.5 SP1 or newer SQL Server 2005 or newerImage Resizer for Windows: Image Resizer 3 Preview 3: Here is yet another iteration toward what will eventually become Image Resizer 3. This release is stable. However, I'm calling it a preview since there are still many features I'd still like to add before calling it complete. Updated on February 28 to fix an issue with installing on multi-user machines. As usual, here is my progress report. Done Preview 3 Fix: 3206 3076 3077 5688 Fix: 7420 Fix: 7527 Fix: 7576 7612 Preview 2 6308 6309 Fix: 7339 Fix: 7357 Preview 1 UI...Finestra Virtual Desktops: 2.5.4500: This is a bug fix release for version 2.5. It fixes several things and adds a couple of minor features. See the 2.5 release notes for more information on the major new features in that version. Important - If Finestra crashes on startup for you, you must install the Visual C++ 2010 runtime from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5555. Fixes a bug with window animations not refreshing the screen on XP and with DWM off Fixes a bug with with crashing on XP due to a bug in t...Media Companion: MC 3.432b Release: General Now remembers window location. Catching a few more exceptions when an image is blank TV A couple of UI tweaks Movies Fixed the actor name displaying HTML Fixed crash when using Save files as "movie.nfo", "movie.tbn", & "fanart.jpg" New CSV template for HTML output function Added <createdate> tag for HTML output A couple of UI tweaks Known Issues Multiepisodes are not handled correctly in MC. The created nfo is valid, but they are not displayed in MC correctly & saving the...New Projectsabac: abac cn websiteAION Launcher: simple aion launcher...just edit the background image of your choosing inside the code and other things such as the links for the buttons and the ip adress and port of the serverAXTFSTool: Dynamics AX tool that connects to your project's TFS and lists the objects your colleagues have changed. Written in C#, still under development and improvements. Useful for team leaders, deployment managers, etc.cookieTopo: Topo map viewerCrmFetchKit.js: Simple Library at allows the execution of fetchxml queries via JavaScript for Dynamics CRM 2011 (using the new WCF endpoints). Like the CrmRestKit this framework uses the promise/A capacities of jQuery. The code and the idea for this framework bases on the CrmServiceToolkit (http://crmtoolkit.codeplex.com/) developed by Daniel Cai. cy univerX engine: ????????DNSAPI.NET: A common API for managing DNS servers on Windows. This project is based on the work I started back in 2002 when I needed to create a web front-end for Windows' DNS server using the .Net framework. The plan is to expand on the project and include support for the BIND server on Windows too. ego.net: ego.netfdTFS: Team Foundation Server Source Control Plugin for FlashDevelopGeoWPS: GeoWPS is an implementation of the OGC WPS. It will be developed in C#. IThink: A new project.King Garden: Boy King's .net practical projects.King Garret: Boy King's .net learning projects.LottoCheck: Follow LottoNot-Terraria: This is a like terraria game but NOT terrariaPassword Protector: Password Protector SharePoint 2010 BlobCache Manager: Manage your web application's blobcache settings directly in the central administration.SharePoint 2010 SilverLight Multiple File Uploader: SharePoint 2010 SilverLight Multiple File Uploader for Documents Libraries with MetaData.Sharepoint Tool Collection: I want to Integrate Various Utilities of Sharepoint at one place. It is for easy working of user or developer. Ex-1. A utility which takes some params & csv file and upload 100s of items on the sharepoint list easily. Ex-2 A utility to upload documents in a library. etc.SQLCLR Cmd Exec Framework Example: For users of MS SQL Server, xp_cmdshell is a utility that we usually want to have disabled. However there are still cases where calling a command line is needed. This project provides an framework/example to make command line calls. It is not meant as an xp_cmdshell replacement but as a workaround.Symmetric Designs Python 3.2: Symmetric Designs for Python 3.2 helps graphical artists to design and develop their own designs freestyle. It uses the pygame module for Python 3.2. It can also be analysed in order to get a grasp of graphics programming in Python.Terminsoft open CLR libraries: Terminsoft open CLR libraries. The first is Terminsoft.Intervals, intended for modeling the sets of intervals with elements, the comparison operation is defined for. The second is Terminsoft.Syntax, intended for text parsing and transformation and built upon regular expressions.Thai Flood Watch: Thai Flood Watch provides useful information, up-to-date and visual access to the major canal in Bangkok, Thailand using data from department of drainage and sewerage. Easily monitor river and canal flow information in Bangkok area, right from your hand.TheNerd: Sample video game source code. Using Sunburn.Unity.WebAPI: A library that allows simple Integration of Microsoft's Unity IoC container with ASP.NET's WebAPI. This project includes a bespoke DependencyResolver that creates a child container per HTTP request and disposes of all registered IDisposable instances at the end of the request.Wholemy.RemoteTouch: The project is a remote touch-sensitive keyboard with a customizable interface which allows to supplement control of another computer, regardless of the wires. For example, if you have not so fast Tablet PC - a client and a fast desktop computer - the server using the network.WindowPlace: WindowPlace makes it possible to save Window positions and sizes to a profile. Switching between profiles will effortlessly move and resize your windows. Help improve productivity - especially for multi-monitor systems. Developed in C# using WPF and a few Windows API calls in the background. WP Error Manager (Devv.Core.WPErrorManager): Library to log, handle and report errors on Windows Phone 7 apps. Fully customizable and extremely easy to implement. Works with any WP7 app. Tested with the emulator, Nokia Lumia 800 and Samsung Focus Flash.WPMatic: Windows Phone7 App to manage Homematic (eQ-3) Devices. The App is like the Homematic Central Configuration Unit (CCU) in German.www.Nabaza.com Freeware and Ebooks: www.Nabaza.com Freeware and Ebooks by William R. NabazaZap: Zap is a light weight .NET communication framework. It is designed for programs running in local area network. Zap provides code generation tool that enables user to call remote methods, add/remote event listener to remote objects, while hides the lower details.

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• nagios NRPE: Unable to read output

  - by user555854

  I currently set up a script to restart my http servers + php5 fpm but can't get it to work. I have googled and have found that mostly permissions are the problems of my error but can't figure it out. I start my script using /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H bart -c restart_http This is the output in my syslog on the node I want to restart Jun 27 06:29:35 bart nrpe[8926]: Connection from 192.168.133.17 port 25028 Jun 27 06:29:35 bart nrpe[8926]: Host address is in allowed_hosts Jun 27 06:29:35 bart nrpe[8926]: Handling the connection... Jun 27 06:29:35 bart nrpe[8926]: Host is asking for command 'restart_http' to be run... Jun 27 06:29:35 bart nrpe[8926]: Running command: /usr/bin/sudo /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/http-restart Jun 27 06:29:35 bart nrpe[8926]: Command completed with return code 1 and output: Jun 27 06:29:35 bart nrpe[8926]: Return Code: 1, Output: NRPE: Unable to read output Jun 27 06:29:35 bart nrpe[8926]: Connection from 192.168.133.17 closed. If I run the command myself it runs fine (but asks for a password) (nagios user) This are the script permission and the script contents. -rwxrwxrwx 1 nagios nagios 142 Jun 26 21:41 /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/http-restart #!/bin/bash echo "ok" /etc/init.d/nginx stop /etc/init.d/nginx start /etc/init.d/php5-fpm stop /etc/init.d/php5-fpm start echo "done" I also added this line to visudo nagios ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/ My local nagios nrpe.cfg ############################################################################# # Sample NRPE Config File # Written by: Ethan Galstad ([email protected]) # # # NOTES: # This is a sample configuration file for the NRPE daemon. It needs to be # located on the remote host that is running the NRPE daemon, not the host # from which the check_nrpe client is being executed. ############################################################################# # LOG FACILITY # The syslog facility that should be used for logging purposes. log_facility=daemon # PID FILE # The name of the file in which the NRPE daemon should write it's process ID # number. The file is only written if the NRPE daemon is started by the root # user and is running in standalone mode. pid_file=/var/run/nagios/nrpe.pid # PORT NUMBER # Port number we should wait for connections on. # NOTE: This must be a non-priviledged port (i.e. > 1024). # NOTE: This option is ignored if NRPE is running under either inetd or xinetd server_port=5666 # SERVER ADDRESS # Address that nrpe should bind to in case there are more than one interface # and you do not want nrpe to bind on all interfaces. # NOTE: This option is ignored if NRPE is running under either inetd or xinetd #server_address=127.0.0.1 # NRPE USER # This determines the effective user that the NRPE daemon should run as. # You can either supply a username or a UID. # # NOTE: This option is ignored if NRPE is running under either inetd or xinetd nrpe_user=nagios # NRPE GROUP # This determines the effective group that the NRPE daemon should run as. # You can either supply a group name or a GID. # # NOTE: This option is ignored if NRPE is running under either inetd or xinetd nrpe_group=nagios # ALLOWED HOST ADDRESSES # This is an optional comma-delimited list of IP address or hostnames # that are allowed to talk to the NRPE daemon. # # Note: The daemon only does rudimentary checking of the client's IP # address. I would highly recommend adding entries in your /etc/hosts.allow # file to allow only the specified host to connect to the port # you are running this daemon on. # # NOTE: This option is ignored if NRPE is running under either inetd or xinetd allowed_hosts=127.0.0.1,192.168.133.17 # COMMAND ARGUMENT PROCESSING # This option determines whether or not the NRPE daemon will allow clients # to specify arguments to commands that are executed. This option only works # if the daemon was configured with the --enable-command-args configure script # option. # # *** ENABLING THIS OPTION IS A SECURITY RISK! *** # Read the SECURITY file for information on some of the security implications # of enabling this variable. # # Values: 0=do not allow arguments, 1=allow command arguments dont_blame_nrpe=0 # COMMAND PREFIX # This option allows you to prefix all commands with a user-defined string. # A space is automatically added between the specified prefix string and the # command line from the command definition. # # *** THIS EXAMPLE MAY POSE A POTENTIAL SECURITY RISK, SO USE WITH CAUTION! *** # Usage scenario: # Execute restricted commmands using sudo. For this to work, you need to add # the nagios user to your /etc/sudoers. An example entry for alllowing # execution of the plugins from might be: # # nagios ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/ # # This lets the nagios user run all commands in that directory (and only them) # without asking for a password. If you do this, make sure you don't give # random users write access to that directory or its contents! command_prefix=/usr/bin/sudo # DEBUGGING OPTION # This option determines whether or not debugging messages are logged to the # syslog facility. # Values: 0=debugging off, 1=debugging on debug=1 # COMMAND TIMEOUT # This specifies the maximum number of seconds that the NRPE daemon will # allow plugins to finish executing before killing them off. command_timeout=60 # CONNECTION TIMEOUT # This specifies the maximum number of seconds that the NRPE daemon will # wait for a connection to be established before exiting. This is sometimes # seen where a network problem stops the SSL being established even though # all network sessions are connected. This causes the nrpe daemons to # accumulate, eating system resources. Do not set this too low. connection_timeout=300 # WEEK RANDOM SEED OPTION # This directive allows you to use SSL even if your system does not have # a /dev/random or /dev/urandom (on purpose or because the necessary patches # were not applied). The random number generator will be seeded from a file # which is either a file pointed to by the environment valiable $RANDFILE # or $HOME/.rnd. If neither exists, the pseudo random number generator will # be initialized and a warning will be issued. # Values: 0=only seed from /dev/[u]random, 1=also seed from weak randomness #allow_weak_random_seed=1 # INCLUDE CONFIG FILE # This directive allows you to include definitions from an external config file. #include=<somefile.cfg> # INCLUDE CONFIG DIRECTORY # This directive allows you to include definitions from config files (with a # .cfg extension) in one or more directories (with recursion). #include_dir=<somedirectory> #include_dir=<someotherdirectory> # COMMAND DEFINITIONS # Command definitions that this daemon will run. Definitions # are in the following format: # # command[<command_name>]=<command_line> # # When the daemon receives a request to return the results of <command_name> # it will execute the command specified by the <command_line> argument. # # Unlike Nagios, the command line cannot contain macros - it must be # typed exactly as it should be executed. # # Note: Any plugins that are used in the command lines must reside # on the machine that this daemon is running on! The examples below # assume that you have plugins installed in a /usr/local/nagios/libexec # directory. Also note that you will have to modify the definitions below # to match the argument format the plugins expect. Remember, these are # examples only! # The following examples use hardcoded command arguments... command[check_users]=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_users -w 5 -c 10 command[check_load]=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_load -w 15,10,5 -c 30,25,20 command[check_hda1]=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_disk -w 20% -c 10% -p /dev/hda1 command[check_zombie_procs]=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_procs -w 5 -c 10 -s Z command[check_total_procs]=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_procs -w 150 -c 200 # The following examples allow user-supplied arguments and can # only be used if the NRPE daemon was compiled with support for # command arguments *AND* the dont_blame_nrpe directive in this # config file is set to '1'. This poses a potential security risk, so # make sure you read the SECURITY file before doing this. #command[check_users]=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_users -w $ARG1$ -c $ARG2$ #command[check_load]=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_load -w $ARG1$ -c $ARG2$ #command[check_disk]=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_disk -w $ARG1$ -c $ARG2$ -p $ARG3$ #command[check_procs]=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_procs -w $ARG1$ -c $ARG2$ -s $ARG3$ command[restart_http]=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/http-restart # # local configuration: # if you'd prefer, you can instead place directives here include=/etc/nagios/nrpe_local.cfg # # you can place your config snipplets into nrpe.d/ include_dir=/etc/nagios/nrpe.d/ My Sudoers files # /etc/sudoers # # This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root. # # See the man page for details on how to write a sudoers file. # Defaults env_reset # Host alias specification # User alias specification # Cmnd alias specification # User privilege specification root ALL=(ALL) ALL nagios ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/ # Allow members of group sudo to execute any command # (Note that later entries override this, so you might need to move # it further down) %sudo ALL=(ALL) ALL # #includedir /etc/sudoers.d Hopefully someone can help!

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• JMS Step 4 - How to Create an 11g BPEL Process Which Writes a Message Based on an XML Schema to a JMS Queue

  - by John-Brown.Evans

  JMS Step 4 - How to Create an 11g BPEL Process Which Writes a Message Based on an XML Schema to a JMS Queue ol{margin:0;padding:0} .c11_4{vertical-align:top;width:129.8pt;border-style:solid;background-color:#f3f3f3;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c9_4{vertical-align:top;width:207pt;border-style:solid;background-color:#f3f3f3;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt}.c14{vertical-align:top;width:207pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c17_4{vertical-align:top;width:129.8pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c7_4{vertical-align:top;width:130pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:0pt 5pt 0pt 5pt} .c19_4{vertical-align:top;width:468pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c22_4{background-color:#ffffff} .c20_4{list-style-type:disc;margin:0;padding:0} .c6_4{font-size:8pt;font-family:"Courier New"} .c24_4{color:inherit;text-decoration:inherit} .c23_4{color:#1155cc;text-decoration:underline} .c0_4{height:11pt;direction:ltr} .c10_4{font-size:10pt;font-family:"Courier New"} .c3_4{padding-left:0pt;margin-left:36pt} .c18_4{font-size:8pt} .c8_4{text-align:center} .c12_4{background-color:#ffff00} .c2_4{font-weight:bold} .c21_4{background-color:#00ff00} .c4_4{line-height:1.0} .c1_4{direction:ltr} .c15_4{background-color:#f3f3f3} .c13_4{font-family:"Courier New"} .c5_4{font-style:italic} .c16_4{border-collapse:collapse} .title{padding-top:24pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#000000;font-size:36pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:bold;padding-bottom:6pt} .subtitle{padding-top:18pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666666;font-style:italic;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Georgia";padding-bottom:4pt} li{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial"} p{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;margin:0;font-family:"Arial"} h1{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:18pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h2{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:18pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:bold;padding-bottom:0pt} h3{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:14pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h4{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-style:italic;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial";padding-bottom:0pt} h5{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal;padding-bottom:0pt} h6{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-style:italic;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial";padding-bottom:0pt} This post continues the series of JMS articles which demonstrate how to use JMS queues in a SOA context. The previous posts were: JMS Step 1 - How to Create a Simple JMS Queue in Weblogic Server 11g JMS Step 2 - Using the QueueSend.java Sample Program to Send a Message to a JMS Queue JMS Step 3 - Using the QueueReceive.java Sample Program to Read a Message from a JMS Queue In this example we will create a BPEL process which will write (enqueue) a message to a JMS queue using a JMS adapter. The JMS adapter will enqueue the full XML payload to the queue. This sample will use the following WebLogic Server objects. The first two, the Connection Factory and JMS Queue, were created as part of the first blog post in this series, JMS Step 1 - How to Create a Simple JMS Queue in Weblogic Server 11g. If you haven't created those objects yet, please see that post for details on how to do so. The Connection Pool will be created as part of this example. Object Name Type JNDI Name TestConnectionFactory Connection Factory jms/TestConnectionFactory TestJMSQueue JMS Queue jms/TestJMSQueue eis/wls/TestQueue Connection Pool eis/wls/TestQueue 1. Verify Connection Factory and JMS Queue As mentioned above, this example uses a WLS Connection Factory called TestConnectionFactory and a JMS queue TestJMSQueue. As these are prerequisites for this example, let us verify they exist. Log in to the WebLogic Server Administration Console. Select Services > JMS Modules > TestJMSModule You should see the following objects: If not, or if the TestJMSModule is missing, please see the abovementioned article and create these objects before continuing. 2. Create a JMS Adapter Connection Pool in WebLogic Server The BPEL process we are about to create uses a JMS adapter to write to the JMS queue. The JMS adapter is deployed to the WebLogic server and needs to be configured to include a connection pool which references the connection factory associated with the JMS queue. In the WebLogic Server Console Go to Deployments > Next and select (click on) the JmsAdapter Select Configuration > Outbound Connection Pools and expand oracle.tip.adapter.jms.IJmsConnectionFactory. This will display the list of connections configured for this adapter. For example, eis/aqjms/Queue, eis/aqjms/Topic etc. These JNDI names are actually quite confusing. We are expecting to configure a connection pool here, but the names refer to queues and topics. One would expect these to be called *ConnectionPool or *_CF or similar, but to conform to this nomenclature, we will call our entry eis/wls/TestQueue . This JNDI name is also the name we will use later, when creating a BPEL process to access this JMS queue! Select New, check the oracle.tip.adapter.jms.IJmsConnectionFactory check box and Next. Enter JNDI Name: eis/wls/TestQueue for the connection instance, then press Finish. Expand oracle.tip.adapter.jms.IJmsConnectionFactory again and select (click on) eis/wls/TestQueue The ConnectionFactoryLocation must point to the JNDI name of the connection factory associated with the JMS queue you will be writing to. In our example, this is the connection factory called TestConnectionFactory, with the JNDI name jms/TestConnectionFactory.( As a reminder, this connection factory is contained in the JMS Module called TestJMSModule, under Services > Messaging > JMS Modules > TestJMSModule which we verified at the beginning of this document. )Enter jms/TestConnectionFactory  into the Property Value field for Connection Factory Location. After entering it, you must press Return/Enter then Save for the value to be accepted. If your WebLogic server is running in Development mode, you should see the message that the changes have been activated and the deployment plan successfully updated. If not, then you will manually need to activate the changes in the WebLogic server console. Although the changes have been activated, the JmsAdapter needs to be redeployed in order for the changes to become effective. This should be confirmed by the message Remember to update your deployment to reflect the new plan when you are finished with your changes as can be seen in the following screen shot: The next step is to redeploy the JmsAdapter.Navigate back to the Deployments screen, either by selecting it in the left-hand navigation tree or by selecting the “Summary of Deployments” link in the breadcrumbs list at the top of the screen. Then select the checkbox next to JmsAdapter and press the Update button On the Update Application Assistant page, select “Redeploy this application using the following deployment files” and press Finish. After a few seconds you should get the message that the selected deployments were updated. The JMS adapter configuration is complete and it can now be used to access the JMS queue. To summarize: we have created a JMS adapter connection pool connector with the JNDI name jms/TestConnectionFactory. This is the JNDI name to be accessed by a process such as a BPEL process, when using the JMS adapter to access the previously created JMS queue with the JNDI name jms/TestJMSQueue. In the following step, we will set up a BPEL process to use this JMS adapter to write to the JMS queue. 3. Create a BPEL Composite with a JMS Adapter Partner Link This step requires that you have a valid Application Server Connection defined in JDeveloper, pointing to the application server on which you created the JMS Queue and Connection Factory. You can create this connection in JDeveloper under the Application Server Navigator. Give it any name and be sure to test the connection before completing it. This sample will use the connection name jbevans-lx-PS5, as that is the name of the connection pointing to my SOA PS5 installation. When using a JMS adapter from within a BPEL process, there are various configuration options, such as the operation type (consume message, produce message etc.), delivery mode and message type. One of these options is the choice of the format of the JMS message payload. This can be structured around an existing XSD, in which case the full XML element and tags are passed, or it can be opaque, meaning that the payload is sent as-is to the JMS adapter. In the case of an XSD-based message, the payload can simply be copied to the input variable of the JMS adapter. In the case of an opaque message, the JMS adapter’s input variable is of type base64binary. So the payload needs to be converted to base64 binary first. I will go into this in more detail in a later blog entry. This sample will pass a simple message to the adapter, based on the following simple XSD file, which consists of a single string element: stringPayload.xsd <?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252" ?> <xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns="http://www.example.org" targetNamespace="http://www.example.org" elementFormDefault="qualified" <xsd:element name="exampleElement" type="xsd:string"> </xsd:element> </xsd:schema> The following steps are all executed in JDeveloper. The SOA project will be created inside a JDeveloper Application. If you do not already have an application to contain the project, you can create a new one via File > New > General > Generic Application. Give the application any name, for example JMSTests and, when prompted for a project name and type, call the project JmsAdapterWriteWithXsd and select SOA as the project technology type. If you already have an application, continue below. Create a SOA Project Create a new project and choose SOA Tier > SOA Project as its type. Name it JmsAdapterWriteSchema. When prompted for the composite type, choose Composite With BPEL Process. When prompted for the BPEL Process, name it JmsAdapterWriteSchema too and choose Synchronous BPEL Process as the template. This will create a composite with a BPEL process and an exposed SOAP service. Double-click the BPEL process to open and begin editing it. You should see a simple BPEL process with a Receive and Reply activity. As we created a default process without an XML schema, the input and output variables are simple strings. Create an XSD File An XSD file is required later to define the message format to be passed to the JMS adapter. In this step, we create a simple XSD file, containing a string variable and add it to the project. First select the xsd item in the left-hand navigation tree to ensure that the XSD file is created under that item. Select File > New > General > XML and choose XML Schema. Call it stringPayload.xsd and when the editor opens, select the Source view. then replace the contents with the contents of the stringPayload.xsd example above and save the file. You should see it under the xsd item in the navigation tree. Create a JMS Adapter Partner Link We will create the JMS adapter as a service at the composite level. If it is not already open, double-click the composite.xml file in the navigator to open it. From the Component Palette, drag a JMS adapter over onto the right-hand swim lane, under External References. This will start the JMS Adapter Configuration Wizard. Use the following entries: Service Name: JmsAdapterWrite Oracle Enterprise Messaging Service (OEMS): Oracle Weblogic JMS AppServer Connection: Use an existing application server connection pointing to the WebLogic server on which the above JMS queue and connection factory were created. You can use the “+” button to create a connection directly from the wizard, if you do not already have one. This example uses a connection called jbevans-lx-PS5. Adapter Interface > Interface: Define from operation and schema (specified later) Operation Type: Produce Message Operation Name: Produce_message Destination Name: Press the Browse button, select Destination Type: Queues, then press Search. Wait for the list to populate, then select the entry for TestJMSQueue , which is the queue created earlier. JNDI Name: The JNDI name to use for the JMS connection. This is probably the most important step in this exercise and the most common source of error. This is the JNDI name of the JMS adapter’s connection pool created in the WebLogic Server and which points to the connection factory. JDeveloper does not verify the value entered here. If you enter a wrong value, the JMS adapter won’t find the queue and you will get an error message at runtime, which is very difficult to trace. In our example, this is the value eis/wls/TestQueue . (See the earlier step on how to create a JMS Adapter Connection Pool in WebLogic Server for details.) MessagesURL: We will use the XSD file we created earlier, stringPayload.xsd to define the message format for the JMS adapter. Press the magnifying glass icon to search for schema files. Expand Project Schema Files > stringPayload.xsd and select exampleElement: string. Press Next and Finish, which will complete the JMS Adapter configuration. Wire the BPEL Component to the JMS Adapter In this step, we link the BPEL process/component to the JMS adapter. From the composite.xml editor, drag the right-arrow icon from the BPEL process to the JMS adapter’s in-arrow. This completes the steps at the composite level. 4. Complete the BPEL Process Design Invoke the JMS Adapter Open the BPEL component by double-clicking it in the design view of the composite.xml, or open it from the project navigator by selecting the JmsAdapterWriteSchema.bpel file. This will display the BPEL process in the design view. You should see the JmsAdapterWrite partner link under one of the two swim lanes. We want it in the right-hand swim lane. If JDeveloper displays it in the left-hand lane, right-click it and choose Display > Move To Opposite Swim Lane. An Invoke activity is required in order to invoke the JMS adapter. Drag an Invoke activity between the Receive and Reply activities. Drag the right-hand arrow from the Invoke activity to the JMS adapter partner link. This will open the Invoke editor. The correct default values are entered automatically and are fine for our purposes. We only need to define the input variable to use for the JMS adapter. By pressing the green “+” symbol, a variable of the correct type can be auto-generated, for example with the name Invoke1_Produce_Message_InputVariable. Press OK after creating the variable. ( For some reason, while I was testing this, the JMS Adapter moved back to the left-hand swim lane again after this step. There is no harm in leaving it there, but I find it easier to follow if it is in the right-hand lane, because I kind-of think of the message coming in on the left and being routed through the right. But you can follow your personal preference here.) Assign Variables Drag an Assign activity between the Receive and Invoke activities. We will simply copy the input variable to the JMS adapter and, for completion, so the process has an output to print, again to the process’s output variable. Double-click the Assign activity and create two Copy rules: for the first, drag Variables > inputVariable > payload > client:process > client:input_string to Invoke1_Produce_Message_InputVariable > body > ns2:exampleElement for the second, drag the same input variable to outputVariable > payload > client:processResponse > client:result This will create two copy rules, similar to the following: Press OK. This completes the BPEL and Composite design. 5. Compile and Deploy the Composite We won’t go into too much detail on how to compile and deploy. In JDeveloper, compile the process by pressing the Make or Rebuild icons or by right-clicking the project name in the navigator and selecting Make... or Rebuild... If the compilation is successful, deploy it to the SOA server connection defined earlier. (Right-click the project name in the navigator, select Deploy to Application Server, choose the application server connection, choose the partition on the server (usually default) and press Finish. You should see the message ---- Deployment finished. ---- in the Deployment frame, if the deployment was successful. 6. Test the Composite This is the exciting part. Open two tabs in your browser and log in to the WebLogic Administration Console in one tab and the Enterprise Manager 11g Fusion Middleware Control (EM) for your SOA installation in the other. We will use the Console to monitor the messages being written to the queue and the EM to execute the composite. In the Console, go to Services > Messaging > JMS Modules > TestJMSModule > TestJMSQueue > Monitoring. Note the number of messages under Messages Current. In the EM, go to SOA > soa-infra (soa_server1) > default (or wherever you deployed your composite to) and click on JmsAdapterWriteSchema [1.0], then press the Test button. Under Input Arguments, enter any string into the text input field for the payload, for example Test Message then press Test Web Service. If the instance is successful you should see the same text in the Response message, “Test Message”. In the Console, refresh the Monitoring screen to confirm a new message has been written to the queue. Check the checkbox and press Show Messages. Click on the newest message and view its contents. They should include the full XML of the entered payload. 7. Troubleshooting If you get an exception similar to the following at runtime ... BINDING.JCA-12510 JCA Resource Adapter location error. Unable to locate the JCA Resource Adapter via .jca binding file element The JCA Binding Component is unable to startup the Resource Adapter specified in the element: location='eis/wls/QueueTest'. The reason for this is most likely that either 1) the Resource Adapters RAR file has not been deployed successfully to the WebLogic Application server or 2) the '' element in weblogic-ra.xml has not been set to eis/wls/QueueTest. In the last case you will have to add a new WebLogic JCA connection factory (deploy a RAR). Please correct this and then restart the Application Server at oracle.integration.platform.blocks.adapter.fw.AdapterBindingException. createJndiLookupException(AdapterBindingException.java:130) at oracle.integration.platform.blocks.adapter.fw.jca.cci. JCAConnectionManager$JCAConnectionPool.createJCAConnectionFactory (JCAConnectionManager.java:1387) at oracle.integration.platform.blocks.adapter.fw.jca.cci. JCAConnectionManager$JCAConnectionPool.newPoolObject (JCAConnectionManager.java:1285) ... then this is very likely due to an incorrect JNDI name entered for the JMS Connection in the JMS Adapter Wizard. Recheck those steps. The error message prints the name of the JNDI name used. In this example, it was incorrectly entered as eis/wls/QueueTest instead of eis/wls/TestQueue. This concludes this example. Best regards John-Brown Evans Oracle Technology Proactive Support Delivery

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• JMS Step 7 - How to Write to an AQ JMS (Advanced Queueing JMS) Queue from a BPEL Process

  - by John-Brown.Evans

  JMS Step 7 - How to Write to an AQ JMS (Advanced Queueing JMS) Queue from a BPEL Process ol{margin:0;padding:0} .jblist{list-style-type:disc;margin:0;padding:0;padding-left:0pt;margin-left:36pt} .c4_7{vertical-align:top;width:468pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c3_7{vertical-align:top;width:234pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:0pt 5pt 0pt 5pt} .c6_7{vertical-align:top;width:156pt;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;border-width:1pt;padding:5pt 5pt 5pt 5pt} .c16_7{background-color:#ffffff;padding:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt} .c0_7{height:11pt;direction:ltr} .c9_7{color:#1155cc;text-decoration:underline} .c17_7{color:inherit;text-decoration:inherit} .c5_7{direction:ltr} .c18_7{background-color:#ffff00} .c2_7{background-color:#f3f3f3} .c14_7{height:0pt} .c8_7{text-indent:36pt} .c11_7{text-align:center} .c7_7{font-style:italic} .c1_7{font-family:"Courier New"} .c13_7{line-height:1.0} .c15_7{border-collapse:collapse} .c12_7{font-weight:bold} .c10_7{font-size:8pt} .title{padding-top:24pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#000000;font-size:36pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:bold;padding-bottom:6pt} .subtitle{padding-top:18pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#666666;font-style:italic;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Georgia";padding-bottom:4pt} li{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial"} p{color:#000000;font-size:10pt;margin:0;font-family:"Arial"} h1{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:24pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h2{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:18pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h3{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:14pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h4{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h5{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} h6{padding-top:0pt;line-height:1.15;text-align:left;color:#888;font-size:10pt;font-family:"Arial";font-weight:normal} This post continues the series of JMS articles which demonstrate how to use JMS queues in a SOA context. The previous posts were: JMS Step 1 - How to Create a Simple JMS Queue in Weblogic Server 11g JMS Step 2 - Using the QueueSend.java Sample Program to Send a Message to a JMS Queue JMS Step 3 - Using the QueueReceive.java Sample Program to Read a Message from a JMS Queue JMS Step 4 - How to Create an 11g BPEL Process Which Writes a Message Based on an XML Schema to a JMS Queue JMS Step 5 - How to Create an 11g BPEL Process Which Reads a Message Based on an XML Schema from a JMS Queue JMS Step 6 - How to Set Up an AQ JMS (Advanced Queueing JMS) for SOA Purposes This example demonstrates how to write a simple message to an Oracle AQ via the the WebLogic AQ JMS functionality from a BPEL process and a JMS adapter. If you have not yet reviewed the previous posts, please do so first, especially the JMS Step 6 post, as this one references objects created there. 1. Recap and Prerequisites In the previous example, we created an Oracle Advanced Queue (AQ) and some related JMS objects in WebLogic Server to be able to access it via JMS. Here are the objects which were created and their names and JNDI names: Database Objects Name Type AQJMSUSER Database User MyQueueTable Advanced Queue (AQ) Table UserQueue Advanced Queue WebLogic Server Objects Object Name Type JNDI Name aqjmsuserDataSource Data Source jdbc/aqjmsuserDataSource AqJmsModule JMS System Module AqJmsForeignServer JMS Foreign Server AqJmsForeignServerConnectionFactory JMS Foreign Server Connection Factory AqJmsForeignServerConnectionFactory AqJmsForeignDestination AQ JMS Foreign Destination queue/USERQUEUE eis/aqjms/UserQueue Connection Pool eis/aqjms/UserQueue 2 . Create a BPEL Composite with a JMS Adapter Partner Link This step requires that you have a valid Application Server Connection defined in JDeveloper, pointing to the application server on which you created the JMS Queue and Connection Factory. You can create this connection in JDeveloper under the Application Server Navigator. Give it any name and be sure to test the connection before completing it. This sample will write a simple XML message to the AQ JMS queue via the JMS adapter, based on the following XSD file, which consists of a single string element: stringPayload.xsd <?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252" ?> <xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"                xmlns="http://www.example.org"                targetNamespace="http://www.example.org"                elementFormDefault="qualified">  <xsd:element name="exampleElement" type="xsd:string">  </xsd:element> </xsd:schema> The following steps are all executed in JDeveloper. The SOA project will be created inside a JDeveloper Application. If you do not already have an application to contain the project, you can create a new one via File > New > General > Generic Application. Give the application any name, for example JMSTests and, when prompted for a project name and type, call the project   JmsAdapterWriteAqJms  and select SOA as the project technology type. If you already have an application, continue below. Create a SOA Project Create a new project and select SOA Tier > SOA Project as its type. Name it JmsAdapterWriteAqJms . When prompted for the composite type, choose Composite With BPEL Process. When prompted for the BPEL Process, name it JmsAdapterWriteAqJms too and choose Synchronous BPEL Process as the template. This will create a composite with a BPEL process and an exposed SOAP service. Double-click the BPEL process to open and begin editing it. You should see a simple BPEL process with a Receive and Reply activity. As we created a default process without an XML schema, the input and output variables are simple strings. Create an XSD File An XSD file is required later to define the message format to be passed to the JMS adapter. In this step, we create a simple XSD file, containing a string variable and add it to the project. First select the xsd item in the left-hand navigation tree to ensure that the XSD file is created under that item. Select File > New > General > XML and choose XML Schema. Call it stringPayload.xsd  and when the editor opens, select the Source view. then replace the contents with the contents of the stringPayload.xsd example above and save the file. You should see it under the XSD item in the navigation tree. Create a JMS Adapter Partner Link We will create the JMS adapter as a service at the composite level. If it is not already open, double-click the composite.xml file in the navigator to open it. From the Component Palette, drag a JMS adapter over onto the right-hand swim lane, under External References. This will start the JMS Adapter Configuration Wizard. Use the following entries: Service Name: JmsAdapterWrite Oracle Enterprise Messaging Service (OEMS): Oracle Advanced Queueing AppServer Connection: Use an existing application server connection pointing to the WebLogic server on which the connection factory created earlier is located. You can use the “+” button to create a connection directly from the wizard, if you do not already have one. Adapter Interface > Interface: Define from operation and schema (specified later) Operation Type: Produce Message Operation Name: Produce_message Produce Operation Parameters Destination Name: Wait for the list to populate. (Only foreign servers are listed here, because Oracle Advanced Queuing was selected earlier, in step 3) .         Select the foreign server destination created earlier, AqJmsForeignDestination (queue) . This will automatically populate the Destination Name field with the name of the foreign destination, queue/USERQUEUE . JNDI Name: The JNDI name to use for the JMS connection. This is the JNDI name of the connection pool created in the WebLogic Server.JDeveloper does not verify the value entered here. If you enter a wrong value, the JMS adapter won’t find the queue and you will get an error message at runtime. In our example, this is the value eis/aqjms/UserQueue Messages URL: We will use the XSD file we created earlier, stringPayload.xsd to define the message format for the JMS adapter. Press the magnifying glass icon to search for schema files. Expand Project Schema Files > stringPayload.xsd and select exampleElement : string . Press Next and Finish, which will complete the JMS Adapter configuration. Wire the BPEL Component to the JMS Adapter In this step, we link the BPEL process/component to the JMS adapter. From the composite.xml editor, drag the right-arrow icon from the BPEL process to the JMS adapter’s in-arrow.   This completes the steps at the composite level. 3. Complete the BPEL Process Design Invoke the JMS Adapter Open the BPEL component by double-clicking it in the design view of the composite.xml. This will display the BPEL process in the design view. You should see the JmsAdapterWrite partner link under one of the two swim lanes. We want it in the right-hand swim lane. If JDeveloper displays it in the left-hand lane, right-click it and choose Display > Move To Opposite Swim Lane. An Invoke activity is required in order to invoke the JMS adapter. Drag an Invoke activity between the Receive and Reply activities. Drag the right-hand arrow from the Invoke activity to the JMS adapter partner link. This will open the Invoke editor. The correct default values are entered automatically and are fine for our purposes. We only need to define the input variable to use for the JMS adapter. By pressing the green “+” symbol, a variable of the correct type can be auto-generated, for example with the name Invoke1_Produce_Message_InputVariable. Press OK after creating the variable. Assign Variables Drag an Assign activity between the Receive and Invoke activities. We will simply copy the input variable to the JMS adapter and, for completion, so the process has an output to print, again to the process’s output variable. Double-click the Assign activity and create two Copy rules: for the first, drag Variables > inputVariable > payload > client:process > client:input_string to Invoke1_Produce_Message_InputVariable > body > ns2:exampleElement for the second, drag the same input variable to outputVariable > payload > client:processResponse > client:result This will create two copy rules, similar to the following: Press OK. This completes the BPEL and Composite design. 4. Compile and Deploy the Composite Compile the process by pressing the Make or Rebuild icons or by right-clicking the project name in the navigator and selecting Make... or Rebuild... If the compilation is successful, deploy it to the SOA server connection defined earlier. (Right-click the project name in the navigator, select Deploy to Application Server, choose the application server connection, choose the partition on the server (usually default) and press Finish. You should see the message ----  Deployment finished.  ---- in the Deployment frame, if the deployment was successful. 5. Test the Composite Execute a Test Instance In a browser, log in to the Enterprise Manager 11g Fusion Middleware Control (EM) for your SOA installation. Navigate to SOA > soa-infra (soa_server1) > default (or wherever you deployed your composite) and click on  JmsAdapterWriteAqJms [1.0] , then press the Test button. Enter any string into the text input field, for example “Test message from JmsAdapterWriteAqJms” then press Test Web Service. If the instance is successful, you should see the same text you entered in the Response payload frame. Monitor the Advanced Queue The test message will be written to the advanced queue created at the top of this sample. To confirm it, log in to the database as AQJMSUSER and query the MYQUEUETABLE database table. For example, from a shell window with SQL*Plus sqlplus aqjmsuser/aqjmsuser SQL> SELECT user_data FROM myqueuetable; which will display the message contents, for example Similarly, you can use the JDeveloper Database Navigator to view the contents. Use a database connection to the AQJMSUSER and in the navigator, expand Queues Tables and select MYQUEUETABLE. Select the Data tab and scroll to the USER_DATA column to view its contents. This concludes this example. The following post will be the last one in this series. In it, we will learn how to read the message we just wrote using a BPEL process and AQ JMS. Best regards John-Brown Evans Oracle Technology Proactive Support Delivery

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• Built-in GZip/Deflate Compression on IIS 7.x

  - by Rick Strahl

  IIS 7 improves internal compression functionality dramatically making it much easier than previous versions to take advantage of compression that’s built-in to the Web server. IIS 7 also supports dynamic compression which allows automatic compression of content created in your own applications (ASP.NET or otherwise!). The scheme is based on content-type sniffing and so it works with any kind of Web application framework. While static compression on IIS 7 is super easy to set up and turned on by default for most text content (text/*, which includes HTML and CSS, as well as for JavaScript, Atom, XAML, XML), setting up dynamic compression is a bit more involved, mostly because the various default compression settings are set in multiple places down the IIS –> ASP.NET hierarchy. Let’s take a look at each of the two approaches available: Static Compression Compresses static content from the hard disk. IIS can cache this content by compressing the file once and storing the compressed file on disk and serving the compressed alias whenever static content is requested and it hasn’t changed. The overhead for this is minimal and should be aggressively enabled. Dynamic Compression Works against application generated output from applications like your ASP.NET apps. Unlike static content, dynamic content must be compressed every time a page that requests it regenerates its content. As such dynamic compression has a much bigger impact than static caching. How Compression is configured Compression in IIS 7.x  is configured with two .config file elements in the <system.WebServer> space. The elements can be set anywhere in the IIS/ASP.NET configuration pipeline all the way from ApplicationHost.config down to the local web.config file. The following is from the the default setting in ApplicationHost.config (in the %windir%\System32\inetsrv\config forlder) on IIS 7.5 with a couple of small adjustments (added json output and enabled dynamic compression): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <configuration> <system.webServer> <httpCompression directory="%SystemDrive%\inetpub\temp\IIS Temporary Compressed Files"> <scheme name="gzip" dll="%Windir%\system32\inetsrv\gzip.dll" staticCompressionLevel="9" /> <dynamicTypes> <add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/x-javascript" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/json" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" /> </dynamicTypes> <staticTypes> <add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/x-javascript" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/atom+xml" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/xaml+xml" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" /> </staticTypes> </httpCompression> <urlCompression doStaticCompression="true" doDynamicCompression="true" /> </system.webServer> </configuration> You can find documentation on the httpCompression and urlCompression keys here respectively: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms690689%28v=vs.90%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa347437%28v=vs.90%29.aspx The httpCompression Element – What and How to compress Basically httpCompression configures what types to compress and how to compress them. It specifies the DLL that handles gzip encoding and the types of documents that are to be compressed. Types are set up based on mime-types which looks at returned Content-Type headers in HTTP responses. For example, I added the application/json to mime type to my dynamic compression types above to allow that content to be compressed as well since I have quite a bit of AJAX content that gets sent to the client. The UrlCompression Element – Enables and Disables Compression The urlCompression element is a quick way to turn compression on and off. By default static compression is enabled server wide, and dynamic compression is disabled server wide. This might be a bit confusing because the httpCompression element also has a doDynamicCompression attribute which is set to true by default, but the urlCompression attribute by the same name actually overrides it. The urlCompression element only has three attributes: doStaticCompression, doDynamicCompression and dynamicCompressionBeforeCache. The doCompression attributes are the final determining factor whether compression is enabled, so it’s a good idea to be explcit! The default for doDynamicCompression='false”, but doStaticCompression="true"! Static Compression is enabled by Default, Dynamic Compression is not Because static compression is very efficient in IIS 7 it’s enabled by default server wide and there probably is no reason to ever change that setting. Dynamic compression however, since it’s more resource intensive, is turned off by default. If you want to enable dynamic compression there are a few quirks you have to deal with, namely that enabling it in ApplicationHost.config doesn’t work. Setting: <urlCompression doDynamicCompression="true" /> in applicationhost.config appears to have no effect and I had to move this element into my local web.config to make dynamic compression work. This is actually a smart choice because you’re not likely to want dynamic compression in every application on a server. Rather dynamic compression should be applied selectively where it makes sense. However, nowhere is it documented that the setting in applicationhost.config doesn’t work (or more likely is overridden somewhere and disabled lower in the configuration hierarchy). So: remember to set doDynamicCompression=”true” in web.config!!! How Static Compression works Static compression works against static content loaded from files on disk. Because this content is static and not bound to change frequently – such as .js, .css and static HTML content – it’s fairly easy for IIS to compress and then cache the compressed content. The way this works is that IIS compresses the files into a special folder on the server’s hard disk and then reads the content from this location if already compressed content is requested and the underlying file resource has not changed. The semantics of serving an already compressed file are very efficient – IIS still checks for file changes, but otherwise just serves the already compressed file from the compression folder. The compression folder is located at: %windir%\inetpub\temp\IIS Temporary Compressed Files\ApplicationPool\ If you look into the subfolders you’ll find compressed files: These files are pre-compressed and IIS serves them directly to the client until the underlying files are changed. As I mentioned before – static compression is on by default and there’s very little reason to turn that functionality off as it is efficient and just works out of the box. The one tweak you might want to do is to set the compression level to maximum. Since IIS only compresses content very infrequently it would make sense to apply maximum compression. You can do this with the staticCompressionLevel setting on the scheme element: <scheme name="gzip" dll="%Windir%\system32\inetsrv\gzip.dll" staticCompressionLevel="9" /> Other than that the default settings are probably just fine. Dynamic Compression – not so fast! By default dynamic compression is disabled and that’s actually quite sensible – you should use dynamic compression very carefully and think about what content you want to compress. In most applications it wouldn’t make sense to compress *all* generated content as it would generate a significant amount of overhead. Scott Fortsyth has a great post that details some of the performance numbers and how much impact dynamic compression has. Depending on how busy your server is you can play around with compression and see what impact it has on your server’s performance. There are also a few settings you can tweak to minimize the overhead of dynamic compression. Specifically the httpCompression key has a couple of CPU related keys that can help minimize the impact of Dynamic Compression on a busy server: dynamicCompressionDisableCpuUsage dynamicCompressionEnableCpuUsage By default these are set to 90 and 50 which means that when the CPU hits 90% compression will be disabled until CPU utilization drops back down to 50%. Again this is actually quite sensible as it utilizes CPU power from compression when available and falling off when the threshold has been hit. It’s a good way some of that extra CPU power on your big servers to use when utilization is low. Again these settings are something you likely have to play with. I would probably set the upper limit a little lower than 90% maybe around 70% to make this a feature that kicks in only if there’s lots of power to spare. I’m not really sure how accurate these CPU readings that IIS uses are as Cpu usage on Web Servers can spike drastically even during low loads. Don’t trust settings – do some load testing or monitor your server in a live environment to see what values make sense for your environment. Finally for dynamic compression I tend to add one Mime type for JSON data, since a lot of my applications send large chunks of JSON data over the wire. You can do that with the application/json content type: <add mimeType="application/json" enabled="true" /> What about Deflate Compression? The default compression is GZip. The documentation hints that you can use a different compression scheme and mentions Deflate compression. And sure enough you can change the compression settings to: <scheme name="deflate" dll="%Windir%\system32\inetsrv\gzip.dll" staticCompressionLevel="9" /> to get deflate style compression. The deflate algorithm produces slightly more compact output so I tend to prefer it over GZip but more HTTP clients (other than browsers) support GZip than Deflate so be careful with this option if you build Web APIs. I also had some issues with the above value actually being applied right away. Changing the scheme in applicationhost.config didn’t show up on the site  right away. It required me to do a full IISReset to get that change to show up before I saw the change over to deflate compressed content. Content was slightly more compressed with deflate – not sure if it’s worth the slightly less common compression type, but the option at least is available. IIS 7 finally makes GZip Easy In summary IIS 7 makes GZip easy finally, even if the configuration settings are a bit obtuse and the documentation is seriously lacking. But once you know the basic settings I’ve described here and the fact that you can override all of this in your local web.config it’s pretty straight forward to configure GZip support and tweak it exactly to your needs. Static compression is a total no brainer as it adds very little overhead compared to direct static file serving and provides solid compression. Dynamic Compression is a little more tricky as it does add some overhead to servers, so it probably will require some tweaking to get the right balance of CPU load vs. compression ratios. Looking at large sites like Amazon, Yahoo, NewEgg etc. – they all use Related Content Code based ASP.NET GZip Caveats HttpWebRequest and GZip Responses © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in IIS7   ASP.NET  

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• Why does DEP kill IE when accessing Microsoft FTP?

  - by Sammy

  I start up IE (9.0.8112.16421) with about:blank and I go to ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/ I press Alt, click View and then Open FTP Site in Windows Explorer. At this point IE stops responding and eventually crashes (though the window is still active, sometimes) and I get the usual Windows dialog box saying that the program has stopped working. From this dialog box I click on the option to try to find solutions to the problem and the progress bar just keeps scrolling without giving me any result page whatsoever, so I have to abort by clicking Cancel. Then I get the bubble type of pop-up message from the system tray saying that DEP has stopped the program from executing. What gives? Why would DEP (part of Microsoft Windows) be preventing IE (a Microsoft product) from performing a perfectly legitimate action from Microsoft's own FTP site? The OS is Windows Vista HP SP2, Swedish locale. Screenshots as follows... Update: I normally have UAC disabled, but I have discovered that enabling it has an effect on IE when I click the FTP option from the View menu, just as I suspected. I basically tried starting IE in its 32-bit and 64-bit version, with and without add-ons, and switching UAC on and off, and then trying to go to View and the FTP option (as shown above). Here are the results. With UAC off and DEP on Action: IE 32-bit, normal start, go to ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/, view menu, FTP option. Result: crash Action: IE 32-bit, extoff, go to ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/, view menu, FTP option. Result: crash Action: IE 64-bit, normal start, go to ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/, view menu, FTP option. Result: information & warning message Action: IE 64-bit, extoff, go to ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/, view menu, FTP option. Result: information & warning message This is the information and warning message I get if I use IE 64-bit: The first message is an FTP proxy warning. It says that the folder ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/ will be write-protected because proxy server is not configured to allow full access. It goes on to say that if I want to move, paste, change name or delete files I must use another type of proxy, and that I should contact the system admin for more information (the usual recommendation when they have no clue of what's going on). What the heck is all this about? I don't even use a proxy server, as you can see from the next screenshot (Internet Options, Connections, LAN settings dialog). That second message only states that the FTP site cannot be viewed in (Windows) Explorer. With UAC off, I always get these two messages when running the 64-bit version of IE. With UAC on and DEP on Action: IE 32-bit, normal start, go to ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/, view menu, FTP option. Result: crash Action: IE 32-bit, extoff, go to ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/, view menu, FTP option. Result: security warning message, prompts to allow action Action: IE 64-bit, normal start, go to ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/, view menu, FTP option. Result: security warning message, prompts to allow action Action: IE 64-bit, extoff, go to ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/, view menu, FTP option. Result: security warning message, prompts to allow action As you can see from this list, if I have UAC enabled I actually get rid of these messages and opening the FTP site in Windows Explorer (from IE) actually works (except for 32-bit version which still crashes). Here is the security warning message: The fact that the 32-bit IE still crashes could be an indicator that this has something to do with one or several add-ons in that bit-version of IE. The 32-bit IE doesn't crash if it's started with the extoff flag. If this is affecting only the 32-bit IE then it's only normal that the 64-bit IE doesn't have this problem because it would not be using any of the add-ons used by the 32-bit version, they are not compatible with 64-bit (although some add-ons work both with 32-bit and 64-bit IE). Figuring out which add-on (if any) is causing this problem is a whole new question... but I seem to be closer to an answer now, and a possible solution. I could of course just add IE (32-bit) in the exclusion list of DEP. In fact, I have already tested this and it causes IE to perform this task without hiccups. But I don't really want to disable DEP, or force it on all Windows programs and services (except the ones I strictly specify in the exception list). (In other words DEP can't really be completely disabled, you can only switch between two modes of operation.) Update 2: This is interesting... I start 32-bit IE, go to ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/ and click on View, and Open FTP Site in Windows Explorer. The result is a crash!! Then I start 32-bit IE with extoff flag to disable add-ons, I go to ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/ and click on View, and Open FTP Site in Windows Explorer. I get the security warning, as expected with UAC enabled, and it opens up in Windows Explorer. Now... I close Windows Explorer, and I close IE. I then start 32-bit IE (normal start, with add-ons), I go to ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/ and click on View, and Open FTP Site in Windows Explorer. Now this time it doesn't crash! Instead, I get the screenshot number 5 as seen above. This is the FTP proxy warning message. Now get this... if I click the close button to get rid of this message, what happens is that Firefox starts up, and it goes to ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/ The fact that this works with 32-bit IE (with add-ons) the second time around, is because I am still logged in as anonymous to the FTP server. The log-in has not timed out yet. Standard log-in timeout for FTP servers is usually 60 to 120 seconds. I got logged in to it the first time I ran 32-bit IE with the extoff flag (no add-ons) which actually works and connects using Windows Explorer. Update 3: The connection to the FTP server has timed out by now. So now if I run 32-bit IE (with add-ons) and repeat the steps as before it crashes, just as expected... In conclusion: If I have already been connected to the FTP server via Windows Explorer, and I go to this FTP address in 32-bit IE and I pick the FTP option from the view menu to open it in Windows Explorer, it gives me a FTP proxy server warning and then opens the address in default web browser (Firefox in my case). If I have not been connected to the FTP server via Windows Explorer previously, and I go to this FTP address in 32-bit IE and I pick the FTP option from the view menu top open it in Windows Explorer, then it crashes IE! This is just great... It's not that I care much for using Internet Explorer or the Windows Explorer to log in to FTP servers. This just shows why IE is not the best browser choice. This reminds me of the time when Microsoft was enforcing the use of Internet Explorer as default browser for opening web links and other web resources, despite the fact that the user had installed an alternative browser on the system. Even if the user explicitly set the default browser to be something else and not Internet Explorer in the Windows options, IE would still pop up sometimes, depending on what web resources the user was trying to access. Setting default browser had no effect. It was hard-coded that IE is the browser of choice, especially when accessing Microsoft product or help pages. The web page would actually say that you are not using IE, and that you must open it in IE to view it. Unfortunately you would not be able to open it manually in a different browser by simply copying and pasting the URL from the address bar, because it would show a different URL, and the original URL would re-direct to the "you are using the wrong browser" page so you would not have the time to cut it to clipboard. Thankfully those days are over. Now-days Microsoft is forced to distribute IE and WMP free versions of Windows for the EU market. The way it should be! These programs have to be optional, not mandatory.

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• Simple MSBuild Configuration: Updating Assemblies With A Version Number

  - by srkirkland

  When distributing a library you often run up against versioning problems, once facet of which is simply determining which version of that library your client is running.  Of course, each project in your solution has an AssemblyInfo.cs file which provides, among other things, the ability to set the Assembly name and version number.  Unfortunately, setting the assembly version here would require not only changing the version manually for each build (depending on your schedule), but keeping it in sync across all projects.  There are many ways to solve this versioning problem, and in this blog post I’m going to try to explain what I think is the easiest and most flexible solution.  I will walk you through using MSBuild to create a simple build script, and I’ll even show how to (optionally) integrate with a Team City build server.  All of the code from this post can be found at https://github.com/srkirkland/BuildVersion. Create CommonAssemblyInfo.cs The first step is to create a common location for the repeated assembly info that is spread across all of your projects.  Create a new solution-level file (I usually create a Build/ folder in the solution root, but anywhere reachable by all your projects will do) called CommonAssemblyInfo.cs.  In here you can put any information common to all your assemblies, including the version number.  An example CommonAssemblyInfo.cs is as follows: using System.Reflection; using System.Resources; using System.Runtime.InteropServices;   [assembly: AssemblyCompany("University of California, Davis")] [assembly: AssemblyProduct("BuildVersionTest")] [assembly: AssemblyCopyright("Scott Kirkland & UC Regents")] [assembly: AssemblyConfiguration("")] [assembly: AssemblyTrademark("")]   [assembly: ComVisible(false)]   [assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.2.3.4")] //Will be replaced   [assembly: NeutralResourcesLanguage("en-US")] .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   Cleanup AssemblyInfo.cs & Link CommonAssemblyInfo.cs For each of your projects, you’ll want to clean up your assembly info to contain only information that is unique to that assembly – everything else will go in the CommonAssemblyInfo.cs file.  For most of my projects, that just means setting the AssemblyTitle, though you may feel AssemblyDescription is warranted.  An example AssemblyInfo.cs file is as follows: using System.Reflection;   [assembly: AssemblyTitle("BuildVersionTest")] .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Next, you need to “link” the CommonAssemblyinfo.cs file into your projects right beside your newly lean AssemblyInfo.cs file.  To do this, right click on your project and choose Add | Existing Item from the context menu.  Navigate to your CommonAssemblyinfo.cs file but instead of clicking Add, click the little down-arrow next to add and choose “Add as Link.”  You should see a little link graphic similar to this: We’ve actually reduced complexity a lot already, because if you build all of your assemblies will have the same common info, including the product name and our static (fake) assembly version.  Let’s take this one step further and introduce a build script. Create an MSBuild file What we want from the build script (for now) is basically just to have the common assembly version number changed via a parameter (eventually to be passed in by the build server) and then for the project to build.  Also we’d like to have a flexibility to define what build configuration to use (debug, release, etc). In order to find/replace the version number, we are going to use a Regular Expression to find and replace the text within your CommonAssemblyInfo.cs file.  There are many other ways to do this using community build task add-ins, but since we want to keep it simple let’s just define the Regular Expression task manually in a new file, Build.tasks (this example taken from the NuGet build.tasks file). <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Project ToolsVersion="4.0" DefaultTargets="Go" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"> <UsingTask TaskName="RegexTransform" TaskFactory="CodeTaskFactory" AssemblyFile="$(MSBuildToolsPath)\Microsoft.Build.Tasks.v4.0.dll"> <ParameterGroup> <Items ParameterType="Microsoft.Build.Framework.ITaskItem[]" /> </ParameterGroup> <Task> <Using Namespace="System.IO" /> <Using Namespace="System.Text.RegularExpressions" /> <Using Namespace="Microsoft.Build.Framework" /> <Code Type="Fragment" Language="cs"> <![CDATA[ foreach(ITaskItem item in Items) { string fileName = item.GetMetadata("FullPath"); string find = item.GetMetadata("Find"); string replaceWith = item.GetMetadata("ReplaceWith"); if(!File.Exists(fileName)) { Log.LogError(null, null, null, null, 0, 0, 0, 0, String.Format("Could not find version file: {0}", fileName), new object[0]); } string content = File.ReadAllText(fileName); File.WriteAllText( fileName, Regex.Replace( content, find, replaceWith ) ); } ]]> </Code> </Task> </UsingTask> </Project> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If you glance at the code, you’ll see it’s really just going a Regex.Replace() on a given file, which is exactly what we need. Now we are ready to write our build file, called (by convention) Build.proj. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Project ToolsVersion="4.0" DefaultTargets="Go" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"> <Import Project="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\Build.tasks" /> <PropertyGroup> <Configuration Condition="'$(Configuration)' == ''">Debug</Configuration> <SolutionRoot>$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)</SolutionRoot> </PropertyGroup>   <ItemGroup> <RegexTransform Include="$(SolutionRoot)\CommonAssemblyInfo.cs"> <Find>(?&lt;major&gt;\d+)\.(?&lt;minor&gt;\d+)\.\d+\.(?&lt;revision&gt;\d+)</Find> <ReplaceWith>$(BUILD_NUMBER)</ReplaceWith> </RegexTransform> </ItemGroup>   <Target Name="Go" DependsOnTargets="UpdateAssemblyVersion; Build"> </Target>   <Target Name="UpdateAssemblyVersion" Condition="'$(BUILD_NUMBER)' != ''"> <RegexTransform Items="@(RegexTransform)" /> </Target>   <Target Name="Build"> <MSBuild Projects="$(SolutionRoot)\BuildVersionTest.sln" Targets="Build" /> </Target>   </Project> Reviewing this MSBuild file, we see that by default the “Go” target will be called, which in turn depends on “UpdateAssemblyVersion” and then “Build.”  We go ahead and import the Bulid.tasks file and then setup some handy properties for setting the build configuration and solution root (in this case, my build files are in the solution root, but we might want to create a Build/ directory later).  The rest of the file flows logically, we setup the RegexTransform to match version numbers such as <major>.<minor>.1.<revision> (1.2.3.4 in our example) and replace it with a $(BUILD_NUMBER) parameter which will be supplied externally.  The first target, “UpdateAssemblyVersion” just runs the RegexTransform, and the second target, “Build” just runs the default MSBuild on our solution. Testing the MSBuild file locally Now we have a build file which can replace assembly version numbers and build, so let’s setup a quick batch file to be able to build locally.  To do this you simply create a file called Build.cmd and have it call MSBuild on your Build.proj file.  I’ve added a bit more flexibility so you can specify build configuration and version number, which makes your Build.cmd look as follows: set config=%1 if "%config%" == "" ( set config=debug ) set version=%2 if "%version%" == "" ( set version=2.3.4.5 ) %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\msbuild Build.proj /p:Configuration="%config%" /p:build_number="%version%" .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now if you click on the Build.cmd file, you will get a default debug build using the version 2.3.4.5.  Let’s run it in a command window with the parameters set for a release build version 2.0.1.453.   Excellent!  We can now run one simple command and govern the build configuration and version number of our entire solution.  Each DLL produced will have the same version number, making determining which version of a library you are running very simple and accurate. Configure the build server (TeamCity) Of course you are not really going to want to run a build command manually every time, and typing in incrementing version numbers will also not be ideal.  A good solution is to have a computer (or set of computers) act as a build server and build your code for you, providing you a consistent environment, excellent reporting, and much more.  One of the most popular Build Servers is JetBrains’ TeamCity, and this last section will show you the few configuration parameters to use when setting up a build using your MSBuild file created earlier.  If you are using a different build server, the same principals should apply. First, when setting up the project you want to specify the “Build Number Format,” often given in the form <major>.<minor>.<revision>.<build>.  In this case you will set major/minor manually, and optionally revision (or you can use your VCS revision number with %build.vcs.number%), and then build using the {0} wildcard.  Thus your build number format might look like this: 2.0.1.{0}.  During each build, this value will be created and passed into the $BUILD_NUMBER variable of our Build.proj file, which then uses it to decorate your assemblies with the proper version. After setting up the build number, you must choose MSBuild as the Build Runner, then provide a path to your build file (Build.proj).  After specifying your MSBuild Version (equivalent to your .NET Framework Version), you have the option to specify targets (the default being “Go”) and additional MSBuild parameters.  The one parameter that is often useful is manually setting the configuration property (/p:Configuration="Release") if you want something other than the default (which is Debug in our example).  Your resulting configuration will look something like this: [Under General Settings] [Build Runner Settings]   Now every time your build is run, a newly incremented build version number will be generated and passed to MSBuild, which will then version your assemblies and build your solution.   A Quick Review Our goal was to version our output assemblies in an automated way, and we accomplished it by performing a few quick steps: Move the common assembly information, including version, into a linked CommonAssemblyInfo.cs file Create a simple MSBuild script to replace the common assembly version number and build your solution Direct your build server to use the created MSBuild script That’s really all there is to it.  You can find all of the code from this post at https://github.com/srkirkland/BuildVersion. Enjoy!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 18, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 18, 2010New ProjectsBordecal tools for FxCop: Bordecal tools for FxCop provides an extended framework for FxCop rule development. It allows rule developers to avoid using embedded XML resource...DotNetNuke® Skin City: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by allsnnskins. We integrate orange color and black colour in this ...DotNetNuke® Skin Dawn: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Out of the box" category by allsnnskins. This design reflects the theme of daylight. U...DotNetNuke® Skin Dream: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by WhNuke. Uses the DNNJDMenu skin object.DotNetNuke® Skin Expression: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Out of the box" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. This is a pure CSS skin with ...DotNetNuke® Skin ModernBiz: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by allsnnskins. This simple and unaffected company skin uses...DotNetNuke® Skin Profound: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by WhNuke Technology. This skin is simple and clean and the ...DotNetNuke® Skin Technology: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Standards" category by allsnnskins. It's compatible with common browsers such ...DotNetNuke® Skin Unravel: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. This is a pure CSS skin wit...E! - ECMAScript Runtime Environment: E! (pronounced E-Bang) is a lightweight runtime environment for editing basic ECMAScript scripts with access to .NET Framework class libraries.Easy ArcGIS Library: Easy ArcGIS Library is a set of C# .net classes that wrap the common functionality of ArcObjects, that help ArcGIS developers do a lot of common fu...File Categorizer: The File Categorizer will help people tag the files on their system for easy searching. Instead of keyword searches, you can find files based on v...GMFS Cosmos: This is a file system for Cosmos a OS that was built with C# and we will be implementing this for windows and linuxIFilter Core Implementation (interface and structures): IFilter C# implementation for you to embed when writing Windows Search capabilities into your application.Image Wall Control for Silverlight: A control for Silverlight that emulates the wall of images in the Zune. imenik_za _dev4fun: imenik is a very simple program and easy to use where you can save and organise your contacts.LegoPhysX: LegoPhysX is an atomic based physics enginePersonal Accounting: Personal system for managing financial accounts, which supports multiple accounts in different currencies. It has movement imputation and basic que...Pipes & Filters Engine: The Pipes & Filters Engine allows you to process a sequence of separate operations (filters) asynchronously in a multi-threaded manner. Filters wil...Prerequisites Checker: Check preqrequisites for software. Example: Software S1 is delivered. S1 has prerequisites PR1, PR2... PRN You may load the config file for S...Puzzle Lib: A library for creating grid-and-tile puzzles. Includes two separate UIs for the Tetriminoes puzzle as examples.QuotesPlugin for Windows Live Writer: The QuotesPlugin for Windows Live Writer lists quotes from web sites such as quotes4all.net. It's very easy for you to select your favourite ones a...RobiJ2se: Robi j2se Learning!SkinEngine: This is a Skin Framework for C# Winform, It use easy.and Create Skin GreatSQL Azure .NET Connection: This is a demo application that shows how to connect with SQL AzureSupermarket Soft: WPF Application that helps you manage your supermarket shoppings.Tally Marks for Windows Phone 7 Series: Tally Marks is a counting application. It can count almost anything you'd like to count, and it does it with tally marks! Count the number of peo...TwitCast: TwitCast is a simple notifier for Twitter using the [url:http://linqtotwitter.codeplex.com/] LINQ 2 Twitter library.WodnySwiat: Projekt grupowy wodny światWSS Task Manager Activity: A custom task creation activity that can be used in a sequential or state machine workflow. The activity was specifically developed to handle task ...New ReleasesAddress Book: Address Book: Address BookAutoAudit: AutoAudit 1.10c: Veresion 1.10 includes most of the bug fix requests. adds createdby and modifiedby columns to the audited base tables. If the user name is set by...blog for umbraco 4: Blog 4 Umbraco 2.0.26: Fixes: -Regex bug in base -Directory urls and rss link bug -Open reader bug -Rss bugDotNetNuke® Skin City: City Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by allsnnskins. 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This is a pure CSS skin with...E! - ECMAScript Runtime Environment: E! beta 1: This is really meant as a learning project for playing with dynamically compiled code, so you'd be better off getting the source code.Easy ArcGIS Library: EAGL Binaries: Easy ArcGIS Library Last Build (Version 1.1.2.4139)Easy ArcGIS Library: EAGL Binaries And Documentation: EAGL Latest Build With DocumentationEasy ArcGIS Library: EAGL Documentation: EAGL 1.1.2.4139 DocumentationEnterprise Library Extensions: Release 1.1: This is a service release for version 1.0 The installation process now works as intended. The assemblies are now visible in the Visual Studio As...Family Tree Analyzer: Version 1.2.1.0: Version 1.2.1.0 Fixed GB radio button not working renamed UK Added fixes for UK regions/shires/counties where country is missing Add country reco...Family Tree Analyzer: Version 1.3.0.0: Version 1.3.0.0 Added IGI Search results viewer Tweaked filenames of IGI search so that results window has more informative displayFile Archive: File Archive: If your computer is only word processing machine or document merge machine, this program is really fit for you. It's so...o useful! This program ar...GameStore League Manager: League Manager 1.0.4: Fixes bug 7434. Changed version number to the standard format of Major.Minor.ReleaseIFilter Core Implementation (interface and structures): Stable release: First release of interface implementation.IFilter Core Implementation (interface and structures): System.Search.Core: Ifilter interface for implementation in your own Search Providers.imenik_za _dev4fun: imenik_aplikacija: imenik aplikacija is an application easy to use where you can save and organise your contacts.KDRE - kernel debugger regular expression extension: KDRE 0.0.2: KDRE - Windbg regexp extension Changes: - amd64 build addedMapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi (March 17): This release introduces some minor tweaks to the source code exposing more buffering functionality. This also fixes a problem with selecting point...MockingBird: MockingBird_2.0_RC: This is the V2.0 RC release. The documentation includes notes about the WCF components. Check this blog post for more details about the release. ...MPF for Projects - Visual Studio 2010: Visual Studio 2010 - Final Release: This contains the source code for the release of MPF for Projects corresponding to Visual Studio 2010. For Beta 2, you will need the Beta 2 release...Physics Helper for Silverlight, WPF, Blend, and Farseer: PhysicsHelper 3.0.0.4 ALPHA: This is an initial release that supports Windows Phone 7 Series Development, along with the Silverlight 3 and WPF support. It requires Visual Studi...Pocket GPW: Pocket GPW 1.2: Modyfikacje wg. change set-a 56678. Poprzednia baza danych (z wersji 1.1) jest zgodna z aktualną. Przed instalacją skopiuj poprzednią bazę danych ...Prerequisites Checker: Prerequisites Checker: Check your software prerequisitesPuzzle Lib: Puzzle Lib examples: Tetriminoes examples using a common Puzzle LIB and common Puzzle Implementation library, demonstrating a basic MVC architecture for game developmentRoTwee: RoTwee (8.0.7.0): Now you can rotate tweets by your hand !SharePoint Icon Integration: SharePoint Icon Integration PDF: This is the first stable release of the SPIconIntegration. To install the PDF Icon integration just start the setup.exe file that you will find in ...SkinEngine: SkinEngine-Src-2010-03-17: this is a release on 2010-03-17Spell Corrector: Spell Corrector 0.2 Binary: Fixed a bug in the word indexing in the database.Spell Corrector: Spell Corrector 0.2 Code: Fixed a bug in the indexing of the words in the database. Now insertion of new words in the database is faster.SQL Azure .NET Connection: LittleBlackBook.NET Release 1.0: This was a demo project for a SQL Azure Presentation at ConfooSQL Server Extended Properties Quick Editor: New release 1.5.5: Whats new: Move preferences to application settings and add a form to edit preferences. Support to add, modify and delete operations could be made ...SuperModel - A Dynamic View-Model Generator: 1.0.0.1 - Tyra+: Resolving a couple of bugs; models generated using INotifyPropertyChanged were not being created correctly. Property resolution on proxied types w...Survey - web survey & form engine: Survey 1.2.0: The Survey 1.2.0 release is based on the original sources of the Nsurvey 1.9 application. Compared to the Survey 1.1.0 version many new features ...T.S.T. the T-SQL Test Tool: Version 1.5: Version 1.5 changes: Bug fix. In V1.4 and earlier table comparison failed if the tables compared had columns with spaces in them.TwitCast: TwitCast 1.0.0.0: First release of TwitCast. Be warned that this is just a development release and there are a lot of things that remain to be done.unbinder: Unbound.dll: from change set ef6f2303dd32VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30317.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.02.00: Whats New Show only Tags from Pages the Current User has View Acess (As Option) A Url can be specified for a Custom tag Added Module Package fo...WSS Task Manager Activity: 1.0: Download either the source for Moss Task Manager Activity, Workflow sample if you are interested to see how to use the activity in the workflow or ...XML pretty print for python (xmlpp): version 0.92b: Fixes issues when element name contains :Xpress - ASP.NET MVC 个人博客程序: xpress2.1.1.0317.beta: 最新beta版 更改内容： 模板与系统所需配置文件移动到App_Data中 Service对象注入到Controller中 Controller对象放入IOC容器中 邮件发送BUG修正Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPDirectQOpen Data App Framework (ODAF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesMapWindow6NB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• The broken Promise of the Mobile Web

  - by Rick Strahl

  High end mobile devices have been with us now for almost 7 years and they have utterly transformed the way we access information. Mobile phones and smartphones that have access to the Internet and host smart applications are in the hands of a large percentage of the population of the world. In many places even very remote, cell phones and even smart phones are a common sight. I’ll never forget when I was in India in 2011 I was up in the Southern Indian mountains riding an elephant out of a tiny local village, with an elephant herder in front riding atop of the elephant in front of us. He was dressed in traditional garb with the loin wrap and head cloth/turban as did quite a few of the locals in this small out of the way and not so touristy village. So we’re slowly trundling along in the forest and he’s lazily using his stick to guide the elephant and… 10 minutes in he pulls out his cell phone from his sash and starts texting. In the middle of texting a huge pig jumps out from the side of the trail and he takes a picture running across our path in the jungle! So yeah, mobile technology is very pervasive and it’s reached into even very buried and unexpected parts of this world. Apps are still King Apps currently rule the roost when it comes to mobile devices and the applications that run on them. If there’s something that you need on your mobile device your first step usually is to look for an app, not use your browser. But native app development remains a pain in the butt, with the requirement to have to support 2 or 3 completely separate platforms. There are solutions that try to bridge that gap. Xamarin is on a tear at the moment, providing their cross-device toolkit to build applications using C#. While Xamarin tools are impressive – and also *very* expensive – they only address part of the development madness that is app development. There are still specific device integration isssues, dealing with the different developer programs, security and certificate setups and all that other noise that surrounds app development. There’s also PhoneGap/Cordova which provides a hybrid solution that involves creating local HTML/CSS/JavaScript based applications, and then packaging them to run in a specialized App container that can run on most mobile device platforms using a WebView interface. This allows for using of HTML technology, but it also still requires all the set up, configuration of APIs, security keys and certification and submission and deployment process just like native applications – you actually lose many of the benefits that  Web based apps bring. The big selling point of Cordova is that you get to use HTML have the ability to build your UI once for all platforms and run across all of them – but the rest of the app process remains in place. Apps can be a big pain to create and manage especially when we are talking about specialized or vertical business applications that aren’t geared at the mainstream market and that don’t fit the ‘store’ model. If you’re building a small intra department application you don’t want to deal with multiple device platforms and certification etc. for various public or corporate app stores. That model is simply not a good fit both from the development and deployment perspective. Even for commercial, big ticket apps, HTML as a UI platform offers many advantages over native, from write-once run-anywhere, to remote maintenance, single point of management and failure to having full control over the application as opposed to have the app store overloads censor you. In a lot of ways Web based HTML/CSS/JavaScript applications have so much potential for building better solutions based on existing Web technologies for the very same reasons a lot of content years ago moved off the desktop to the Web. To me the Web as a mobile platform makes perfect sense, but the reality of today’s Mobile Web unfortunately looks a little different… Where’s the Love for the Mobile Web? Yet here we are in the middle of 2014, nearly 7 years after the first iPhone was released and brought the promise of rich interactive information at your fingertips, and yet we still don’t really have a solid mobile Web platform. I know what you’re thinking: “But we have lots of HTML/JavaScript/CSS features that allows us to build nice mobile interfaces”. I agree to a point – it’s actually quite possible to build nice looking, rich and capable Web UI today. We have media queries to deal with varied display sizes, CSS transforms for smooth animations and transitions, tons of CSS improvements in CSS 3 that facilitate rich layout, a host of APIs geared towards mobile device features and lately even a number of JavaScript framework choices that facilitate development of multi-screen apps in a consistent manner. Personally I’ve been working a lot with AngularJs and heavily modified Bootstrap themes to build mobile first UIs and that’s been working very well to provide highly usable and attractive UI for typical mobile business applications. From the pure UI perspective things actually look very good. Not just about the UI But it’s not just about the UI - it’s also about integration with the mobile device. When it comes to putting all those pieces together into what amounts to a consolidated platform to build mobile Web applications, I think we still have a ways to go… there are a lot of missing pieces to make it all work together and integrate with the device more smoothly, and more importantly to make it work uniformly across the majority of devices. I think there are a number of reasons for this. Slow Standards Adoption HTML standards implementations and ratification has been dreadfully slow, and browser vendors all seem to pick and choose different pieces of the technology they implement. The end result is that we have a capable UI platform that’s missing some of the infrastructure pieces to make it whole on mobile devices. There’s lots of potential but what is lacking that final 10% to build truly compelling mobile applications that can compete favorably with native applications. Some of it is the fragmentation of browsers and the slow evolution of the mobile specific HTML APIs. A host of mobile standards exist but many of the standards are in the early review stage and they have been there stuck for long periods of time and seem to move at a glacial pace. Browser vendors seem even slower to implement them, and for good reason – non-ratified standards mean that implementations may change and vendor implementations tend to be experimental and  likely have to be changed later. Neither Vendors or developers are not keen on changing standards. This is the typical chicken and egg scenario, but without some forward momentum from some party we end up stuck in the mud. It seems that either the standards bodies or the vendors need to carry the torch forward and that doesn’t seem to be happening quickly enough. Mobile Device Integration just isn’t good enough Current standards are not far reaching enough to address a number of the use case scenarios necessary for many mobile applications. While not every application needs to have access to all mobile device features, almost every mobile application could benefit from some integration with other parts of the mobile device platform. Integration with GPS, phone, media, messaging, notifications, linking and contacts system are benefits that are unique to mobile applications and could be widely used, but are mostly (with the exception of GPS) inaccessible for Web based applications today. Unfortunately trying to do most of this today only with a mobile Web browser is a losing battle. Aside from PhoneGap/Cordova’s app centric model with its own custom API accessing mobile device features and the token exception of the GeoLocation API, most device integration features are not widely supported by the current crop of mobile browsers. For example there’s no usable messaging API that allows access to SMS or contacts from HTML. Even obvious components like the Media Capture API are only implemented partially by mobile devices. There are alternatives and workarounds for some of these interfaces by using browser specific code, but that’s might ugly and something that I thought we were trying to leave behind with newer browser standards. But it’s not quite working out that way. It’s utterly perplexing to me that mobile standards like Media Capture and Streams, Media Gallery Access, Responsive Images, Messaging API, Contacts Manager API have only minimal or no traction at all today. Keep in mind we’ve had mobile browsers for nearly 7 years now, and yet we still have to think about how to get access to an image from the image gallery or the camera on some devices? Heck Windows Phone IE Mobile just gained the ability to upload images recently in the Windows 8.1 Update – that’s feature that HTML has had for 20 years! These are simple concepts and common problems that should have been solved a long time ago. It’s extremely frustrating to see build 90% of a mobile Web app with relative ease and then hit a brick wall for the remaining 10%, which often can be show stoppers. The remaining 10% have to do with platform integration, browser differences and working around the limitations that browsers and ‘pinned’ applications impose on HTML applications. The maddening part is that these limitations seem arbitrary as they could easily work on all mobile platforms. For example, SMS has a URL Moniker interface that sort of works on Android, works badly with iOS (only works if the address is already in the contact list) and not at all on Windows Phone. There’s no reason this shouldn’t work universally using the same interface – after all all phones have supported SMS since before the year 2000! But, it doesn’t have to be this way Change can happen very quickly. Take the GeoLocation API for example. Geolocation has taken off at the very beginning of the mobile device era and today it works well, provides the necessary security (a big concern for many mobile APIs), and is supported by just about all major mobile and even desktop browsers today. It handles security concerns via prompts to avoid unwanted access which is a model that would work for most other device APIs in a similar fashion. One time approval and occasional re-approval if code changes or caches expire. Simple and only slightly intrusive. It all works well, even though GeoLocation actually has some physical limitations, such as representing the current location when no GPS device is present. Yet this is a solved problem, where other APIs that are conceptually much simpler to implement have failed to gain any traction at all. Technically none of these APIs should be a problem to implement, but it appears that the momentum is just not there. Inadequate Web Application Linking and Activation Another important piece of the puzzle missing is the integration of HTML based Web applications. Today HTML based applications are not first class citizens on mobile operating systems. When talking about HTML based content there’s a big difference between content and applications. Content is great for search engine discovery and plain browser usage. Content is usually accessed intermittently and permanent linking is not so critical for this type of content.  But applications have different needs. Applications need to be started up quickly and must be easily switchable to support a multi-tasking user workflow. Therefore, it’s pretty crucial that mobile Web apps are integrated into the underlying mobile OS and work with the standard task management features. Unfortunately this integration is not as smooth as it should be. It starts with actually trying to find mobile Web applications, to ‘installing’ them onto a phone in an easily accessible manner in a prominent position. The experience of discovering a Mobile Web ‘App’ and making it sticky is by no means as easy or satisfying. Today the way you’d go about this is: Open the browser Search for a Web Site in the browser with your search engine of choice Hope that you find the right site Hope that you actually find a site that works for your mobile device Click on the link and run the app in a fully chrome’d browser instance (read tiny surface area) Pin the app to the home screen (with all the limitations outline above) Hope you pointed at the right URL when you pinned Even for you and me as developers, there are a few steps in there that are painful and annoying, but think about the average user. First figuring out how to search for a specific site or URL? And then pinning the app and hopefully from the right location? You’ve probably lost more than half of your audience at that point. This experience sucks. For developers too this process is painful since app developers can’t control the shortcut creation directly. This problem often gets solved by crazy coding schemes, with annoying pop-ups that try to get people to create shortcuts via fancy animations that are both annoying and add overhead to each and every application that implements this sort of thing differently. And that’s not the end of it - getting the link onto the home screen with an application icon varies quite a bit between browsers. Apple’s non-standard meta tags are prominent and they work with iOS and Android (only more recent versions), but not on Windows Phone. Windows Phone instead requires you to create an actual screen or rather a partial screen be captured for a shortcut in the tile manager. Who had that brilliant idea I wonder? Surprisingly Chrome on recent Android versions seems to actually get it right – icons use pngs, pinning is easy and pinned applications properly behave like standalone apps and retain the browser’s active page state and content. Each of the platforms has a different way to specify icons (WP doesn’t allow you to use an icon image at all), and the most widely used interface in use today is a bunch of Apple specific meta tags that other browsers choose to support. The question is: Why is there no standard implementation for installing shortcuts across mobile platforms using an official format rather than a proprietary one? Then there’s iOS and the crazy way it treats home screen linked URLs using a crazy hybrid format that is neither as capable as a Web app running in Safari nor a WebView hosted application. Moving off the Web ‘app’ link when switching to another app actually causes the browser and preview it to ‘blank out’ the Web application in the Task View (see screenshot on the right). Then, when the ‘app’ is reactivated it ends up completely restarting the browser with the original link. This is crazy behavior that you can’t easily work around. In some situations you might be able to store the application state and restore it using LocalStorage, but for many scenarios that involve complex data sources (like say Google Maps) that’s not a possibility. The only reason for this screwed up behavior I can think of is that it is deliberate to make Web apps a pain in the butt to use and forcing users trough the App Store/PhoneGap/Cordova route. App linking and management is a very basic problem – something that we essentially have solved in every desktop browser – yet on mobile devices where it arguably matters a lot more to have easy access to web content we have to jump through hoops to have even a remotely decent linking/activation experience across browsers. Where’s the Money? It’s not surprising that device home screen integration and Mobile Web support in general is in such dismal shape – the mobile OS vendors benefit financially from App store sales and have little to gain from Web based applications that bypass the App store and the cash cow that it presents. On top of that, platform specific vendor lock-in of both end users and developers who have invested in hardware, apps and consumables is something that mobile platform vendors actually aspire to. Web based interfaces that are cross-platform are the anti-thesis of that and so again it’s no surprise that the mobile Web is on a struggling path. But – that may be changing. More and more we’re seeing operations shifting to services that are subscription based or otherwise collect money for usage, and that may drive more progress into the Web direction in the end . Nothing like the almighty dollar to drive innovation forward. Do we need a Mobile Web App Store? As much as I dislike moderated experiences in today’s massive App Stores, they do at least provide one single place to look for apps for your device. I think we could really use some sort of registry, that could provide something akin to an app store for mobile Web apps, to make it easier to actually find mobile applications. This could take the form of a specialized search engine, or maybe a more formal store/registry like structure. Something like apt-get/chocolatey for Web apps. It could be curated and provide at least some feedback and reviews that might help with the integrity of applications. Coupled to that could be a native application on each platform that would allow searching and browsing of the registry and then also handle installation in the form of providing the home screen linking, plus maybe an initial security configuration that determines what features are allowed access to for the app. I’m not holding my breath. In order for this sort of thing to take off and gain widespread appeal, a lot of coordination would be required. And in order to get enough traction it would have to come from a well known entity – a mobile Web app store from a no name source is unlikely to gain high enough usage numbers to make a difference. In a way this would eliminate some of the freedom of the Web, but of course this would also be an optional search path in addition to the standard open Web search mechanisms to find and access content today. Security Security is a big deal, and one of the perceived reasons why so many IT professionals appear to be willing to go back to the walled garden of deployed apps is that Apps are perceived as safe due to the official review and curation of the App stores. Curated stores are supposed to protect you from malware, illegal and misleading content. It doesn’t always work out that way and all the major vendors have had issues with security and the review process at some time or another. Security is critical, but I also think that Web applications in general pose less of a security threat than native applications, by nature of the sandboxed browser and JavaScript environments. Web applications run externally completely and in the HTML and JavaScript sandboxes, with only a very few controlled APIs allowing access to device specific features. And as discussed earlier – security for any device interaction can be granted the same for mobile applications through a Web browser, as they can for native applications either via explicit policies loaded from the Web, or via prompting as GeoLocation does today. Security is important, but it’s certainly solvable problem for Web applications even those that need to access device hardware. Security shouldn’t be a reason for Web apps to be an equal player in mobile applications. Apps are winning, but haven’t we been here before? So now we’re finding ourselves back in an era of installed app, rather than Web based and managed apps. Only it’s even worse today than with Desktop applications, in that the apps are going through a gatekeeper that charges a toll and censors what you can and can’t do in your apps. Frankly it’s a mystery to me why anybody would buy into this model and why it’s lasted this long when we’ve already been through this process. It’s crazy… It’s really a shame that this regression is happening. We have the technology to make mobile Web apps much more prominent, but yet we’re basically held back by what seems little more than bureaucracy, partisan bickering and self interest of the major parties involved. Back in the day of the desktop it was Internet Explorer’s 98+%  market shareholding back the Web from improvements for many years – now it’s the combined mobile OS market in control of the mobile browsers. If mobile Web apps were allowed to be treated the same as native apps with simple ways to install and run them consistently and persistently, that would go a long way to making mobile applications much more usable and seriously viable alternatives to native apps. But as it is mobile apps have a severe disadvantage in placement and operation. There are a few bright spots in all of this. Mozilla’s FireFoxOs is embracing the Web for it’s mobile OS by essentially building every app out of HTML and JavaScript based content. It supports both packaged and certified package modes (that can be put into the app store), and Open Web apps that are loaded and run completely off the Web and can also cache locally for offline operation using a manifest. Open Web apps are treated as full class citizens in FireFoxOS and run using the same mechanism as installed apps. Unfortunately FireFoxOs is getting a slow start with minimal device support and specifically targeting the low end market. We can hope that this approach will change and catch on with other vendors, but that’s also an uphill battle given the conflict of interest with platform lock in that it represents. Recent versions of Android also seem to be working reasonably well with mobile application integration onto the desktop and activation out of the box. Although it still uses the Apple meta tags to find icons and behavior settings, everything at least works as you would expect – icons to the desktop on pinning, WebView based full screen activation, and reliable application persistence as the browser/app is treated like a real application. Hopefully iOS will at some point provide this same level of rudimentary Web app support. What’s also interesting to me is that Microsoft hasn’t picked up on the obvious need for a solid Web App platform. Being a distant third in the mobile OS war, Microsoft certainly has nothing to lose and everything to gain by using fresh ideas and expanding into areas that the other major vendors are neglecting. But instead Microsoft is trying to beat the market leaders at their own game, fighting on their adversary’s terms instead of taking a new tack. Providing a kick ass mobile Web platform that takes the lead on some of the proposed mobile APIs would be something positive that Microsoft could do to improve its miserable position in the mobile device market. Where are we at with Mobile Web? It sure sounds like I’m really down on the Mobile Web, right? I’ve built a number of mobile apps in the last year and while overall result and response has been very positive to what we were able to accomplish in terms of UI, getting that final 10% that required device integration dialed was an absolute nightmare on every single one of them. Big compromises had to be made and some features were left out or had to be modified for some devices. In two cases we opted to go the Cordova route in order to get the integration we needed, along with the extra pain involved in that process. Unless you’re not integrating with device features and you don’t care deeply about a smooth integration with the mobile desktop, mobile Web development is fraught with frustration. So, yes I’m frustrated! But it’s not for lack of wanting the mobile Web to succeed. I am still a firm believer that we will eventually arrive a much more functional mobile Web platform that allows access to the most common device features in a sensible way. It wouldn't be difficult for device platform vendors to make Web based applications first class citizens on mobile devices. But unfortunately it looks like it will still be some time before this happens. So, what’s your experience building mobile Web apps? Are you finding similar issues? Just giving up on raw Web applications and building PhoneGap apps instead? Completely skipping the Web and going native? Leave a comment for discussion. Resources Rick Strahl on DotNet Rocks talking about Mobile Web© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in HTML5  Mobile   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• SQL Developer Q&A from ODTUG Tips & Tricks Webcast

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Another great webcast yesterday – if you’re a paying member of ODTUG you can watch the show for yourself in their archives. If not, you can get my slide deck off of SlideShare. About 150 of you brave souls sat through an entire hour of me talking and then 10 more minutes of Q&A. We went through everything rapid-fire style, so I thought I would post the questions and my refined answers here for your perusal. In the order in which I received them: You showed the preference to choose between resultsets in same tab or ain a new tab. I understand that we can not have it both using different hotkeys? For example: F5 run and resultset to same tab, ctrl-f5 same but to new tab? Sometimes you want the one other times the other. The questioner is asking about this preference, Tools Preferences Database Worksheet ‘Show query results in new tabs.’ This is an all or nothing proposition. But, there’s another, perhaps better way: the document PINs. If you have a result set you don’t want to lose, ‘pin it.’ Pin multiple result sets or plans for review and comparisons. You mentioned that sometimes it’s hard to remember where a certain preference is. I agree. So enhancement request: add a search-box to the preferences window. Maybe like in, for example, UltraEdit. It shows you all preferences containing your search criteria. Actually, we do have a search mechanism type the search string, we auto-filter the preferences Is there a version of SQL Developer that will connect to an 8i database (Yes, I realize how old that database version is!) Sorry, no. We also don’t have a version that will run on Windows 3.11 for Workgroups…probably. How do we access your blog? Carefully, and with much trepidation. When you’re ready, go to http://www.thatjeffsmith.com Is there a way to get good formatting with predefined settings? I believe the questioner is referring to the script output a la SQL*Plus formatting commands. Yes, there is. You can build your formatting commands into your login.sql script, and those will be applied for your script execution sessions. Example here. Why this version 4.0 doesn’t support external plugins? It does, it just requires the plugin developer to re-factor it for OSGi. This came about when we updated the JDeveloper framework to the later 11g/12c stuff. Any change in hookup with SVN? The only change with Subversion is that internally we’re using 1.7 stuff now. You can use SQLDev to work with a 1.8 SVN server, but if you get a working copy with a 1.8 client SQLDev won’t be able to do anything with it… Command line utilities ? improvements Yes! The long answer is here. Is that a Hint or a Comment?? /*CSV*/ It’s a comment – the database won’t recognize it, but SQLDev does when it goes through our statement pre-processor. We’ll redirect the output through our CSV formatter before displaying the results in the Script Output panel. That’s why this will ONLY work in SQL Developer. Are you selecting “”Run Script”" to get that CSV or HTML output, rather than “”Run Statement”"? Yes, the formatter hints like the CSV one mentioned above only make sense in a script output panel vs a grid. How do you save relational models once they’re defined? I’ve had trouble with setting one up, “”saving”" it, then the design work I did is longer there when loading it later. File – Data Modeler – Save. If you’re running the Modeler inside of SQL Developer, the menu’ing interface can get a bit tricky. That’s why I recommend using the stand along if you’re doing anything with a model that takes more than 5 minutes. See how the Data Modeler menus are folded up under the SQL Dev menus? Can u unplug and plug into another container in a database with only sqldeveloper? Yes, you can ‘Detach’ a multitentant 12c Database ‘pluggable’ and plug it into another instance. You have the option to copy or move the files. This isn’t a trivial operation, pay attention Can you run APEX code directly on the adopter? No, at least not as I understand your question. Give me an example and I can give you a better example. Is there a way that when u click on a particular table it wouldn’t show the table with the info but just to see the columns underneath clicking on the node? Yes, another one of my tips! Disable Tools Preferences Datbase ObjectViewer ‘Open Object on Single Click.’ Is there a patch to allow a double click on a procedure on an open package body to take you to that procedure in the editor? This has been fixed for EA3 – to be released soon. Can you open the spec with the body? You can open the spec or the body, and then also open the other. But you can’t open both with a single click. So if you want you can set it to CSV but can you also see it as a regular result set in rows and then click in the results to export to excel? If you run your query as a statement with Ctrl-Enter, you can send the data to Excel via the Export dialog. Will it do intellisense like using the alias and pop up the column, object names? Yes! You can select more than one column… Can a DBA turn off items from a high level for users so the only thing they can perform would be selects? A DBA should turn things ON, not OFF. Create a user with only CONNECT and required SELECT privs and you’re good to go, regardless of which application they are using. I use PL/SQL Developer from allround automations and was SQL Developer illiterate and now I like this for myself as a DBA. Now I get to train developers on this tool since they have been asking how to use this tool. Thank you. No, THANK YOU! Can you run multi queries in the worksheet after you added it to the worksheet? Yes, highlight what you want to run, and hit Ctrl-Enter. Can you export the result sets to excel, etc. Yes. In version 4.0 and going forward, I recommend you use the XLSX option for exports. It will run faster and consume much, much less memory. Will this be available after the webinar? If you are a ODTUG member, check out the webinar recordings in the archives. That’s worth the $99 right there. Ask your boss if they have $99 in their training budget for you. If not, maybe time to look for another job? Can you run command lines from this tool? Like executes without issuing a command line prompt? Ok, I’m stumped on this one. Not sure what you’re asking. You can setup external tools under the Tools menu, and from there you could probably rig what you’re looking for, but I’m not sure what you’re looking for… This maybe?Where and when to put the program Is there any way to save a copy database command set (certain tables/views etc) in a script? Yes! Create a cart with the objects you want to be used in the Copy. Then use the new command-line interface to kick off SQL Developer to do the copy of those said objects. How can we export the preference and then import them into different or same version of SQL Developer ? Today, there’s no interface for this. But you could copy the files around manually…Kris Rice has a cool idea where you can set your preferences to be saved to your local drop box folder and then you can use SQL Developer from anywhere with the same preferences What happens to SQL*Plus commands like COL & BREAK Nothing. Those are not currently supported. Is there a place where all “”hotkey”" functionality is listed? thanks Yes. Tools – Preferences – Shortcut Keys. And you can change them! Any tips for the DBA side of things? will the SQL generated for objects have more information (e.g. user privileges) in v4? You can get this now. In Tools – Preferences – Database – Utilities – Export, check ‘Grants.’ Voila! You now have the code necessary to recreate your object privileges Is there a limit on the number of rows that could be imported / exported from/to excel ? The only hard-coded limit lies in Excel. For best performance, use v4 and XLSX formats for Exports. Is there a way to see/watch active sessions to see current SQL and the explain plan being used, etc. Kind of like that frog product. Cough, yes. Tools – Monitor Sessions. Click on session, see SQL and plan. The plan was added in v4. If you’re not in version 4, use the Reports – Active Sessions to get the plans. In the DBA section is there a way to manage say tablespaces to add data files, shrink, edit profiles, etc. Yes, we support all of that. View – DBA. Connect, go to the Storage node. Are you (Jeff) available for a live presentation at our Oracle User Group here in Indiana? Maybe. Email me and we’ll see, [email protected] Where do I go to download sql developer 4.0? The Internet of course! Can you directly edit query results? Nope. But what I think you’re asking is, can I edit the data in the tables that are reflected in my query results? You can change the query results by changing your query of course. Or this. Can you show html example? Sure. I’d embed the HTML here, but it’s a lot of code, try it for yourself! How can I quickly close many SQL worksheet windows, but not all? Window – Documents. Multi-select, hit the ‘Close Document(s)’ button. What does the vertical red line denote? That’s the margin. Tells you when you’ve typed too far and it’s time for a carriage return. Did DBA/Database Status/Instance Viewer make it officially into 4.0? It was sort-of included in the first EA. I have NO idea what you’re talking about, WINK-WINK. No, it’s not in v4.0. Is there a “”handy”" way to debug trigger code? Yes, open your trigger. Hit the debug button. Works great as long as it’s a DML trigger. Will you make your presentation file available for us ( in PPT and/or PDF format ) ? It’s on SlideShare. How do you get SqlDeveloper to escape ‘ correctly when you use the wizard to export data as insert statements? If it’s not doing that, it’s a bug. I’ll take a look at that scenario ASAP.

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• jQuery, ASP.NET, and Browser History

  - by Stephen Walther

  One objection that people always raise against Ajax applications concerns browser history. Because an Ajax application updates its content by performing sneaky Ajax postbacks, the browser backwards and forwards buttons don’t work as you would normally expect. In a normal, non-Ajax application, when you click the browser back button, you return to a previous state of the application. For example, if you are paging through a set of movie records, you might return to the previous page of records. In an Ajax application, on the other hand, the browser backwards and forwards buttons do not work as you would expect. If you navigate to the second page in a list of records and click the backwards button, you won’t return to the previous page. Most likely, you will end up navigating away from the application entirely (which is very unexpected and irritating). Bookmarking presents a similar problem. You cannot bookmark a particular page of records in an Ajax application because the address bar does not reflect the state of the application. The Ajax Solution There is a solution to both of these problems. To solve both of these problems, you must take matters into your own hands and take responsibility for saving and restoring your application state yourself. Furthermore, you must ensure that the address bar gets updated to reflect the state of your application. In this blog entry, I demonstrate how you can take advantage of a jQuery library named bbq that enables you to control browser history (and make your Ajax application bookmarkable) in a cross-browser compatible way. The JavaScript Libraries In this blog entry, I take advantage of the following four JavaScript files: jQuery-1.4.2.js – The jQuery library. Available from the Microsoft Ajax CDN at http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js jquery.pager.js – Used to generate pager for navigating records. Available from http://plugins.jquery.com/project/Pager microtemplates.js – John Resig’s micro-templating library. Available from http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/ jquery.ba-bbq.js – The Back Button and Query (BBQ) Library. Available from http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-bbq-plugin/ All of these libraries, with the exception of the Micro-templating library, are available under the MIT open-source license. The Ajax Application Let’s start by building a simple Ajax application that enables you to page through a set of movie database records, 3 records at a time. We’ll use my favorite database named MoviesDB. This database contains a Movies table that looks like this: We’ll create a data model for this database by taking advantage of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. The data model looks like this: Finally, we’ll expose the data to the universe with the help of a WCF Data Service named MovieService.svc. The code for the data service is contained in Listing 1. Listing 1 – MovieService.svc using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; namespace WebApplication1 { public class MovieService : DataService<MoviesDBEntities> { public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("Movies", EntitySetRights.AllRead); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } } The WCF Data Service in Listing 1 exposes the movies so that you can query the movie database table with URLs that looks like this: http://localhost:2474/MovieService.svc/Movies -- Returns all movies http://localhost:2474/MovieService.svc/Movies?$top=5 – Returns 5 movies The HTML page in Listing 2 enables you to page through the set of movies retrieved from the WCF Data Service. Listing 2 – Original.html <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Movies with History</title> <link href="Design/Pager.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <h1>Page <span id="pageNumber"></span> of <span id="pageCount"></span></h1> <div id="pager"></div> <br style="clear:both" /><br /> <div id="moviesContainer"></div> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="App_Scripts/Microtemplates.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="App_Scripts/jquery.pager.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> var pageSize = 3, pageIndex = 0; // Show initial page of movies showMovies(); function showMovies() { // Build OData query var query = "/MovieService.svc" // base URL + "/Movies" // top-level resource + "?$skip=" + pageIndex * pageSize // skip records + "&$top=" + pageSize // take records + " &$inlinecount=allpages"; // include total count of movies // Make call to WCF Data Service $.ajax({ dataType: "json", url: query, success: showMoviesComplete }); } function showMoviesComplete(result) { // unwrap results var movies = result["d"]["results"]; var movieCount = result["d"]["__count"] // Show movies using template var showMovie = tmpl("<li><%=Id%> - <%=Title %></li>"); var html = ""; for (var i = 0; i < movies.length; i++) { html += showMovie(movies[i]); } $("#moviesContainer").html(html); // show pager $("#pager").pager({ pagenumber: (pageIndex + 1), pagecount: Math.ceil(movieCount / pageSize), buttonClickCallback: selectPage }); // Update page number and page count $("#pageNumber").text(pageIndex + 1); $("#pageCount").text(movieCount); } function selectPage(pageNumber) { pageIndex = pageNumber - 1; showMovies(); } </script> </body> </html> The page in Listing 3 has the following three functions: showMovies() – Performs an Ajax call against the WCF Data Service to retrieve a page of movies. showMoviesComplete() – When the Ajax call completes successfully, this function displays the movies by using a template. This function also renders the pager user interface. selectPage() – When you select a particular page by clicking on a page number in the pager UI, this function updates the current page index and calls the showMovies() function. Figure 1 illustrates what the page looks like when it is opened in a browser. Figure 1 If you click the page numbers then the browser history is not updated. Clicking the browser forward and backwards buttons won’t move you back and forth in browser history. Furthermore, the address displayed in the address bar does not change when you navigate to different pages. You cannot bookmark any page except for the first page. Adding Browser History The Back Button and Query (bbq) library enables you to add support for browser history and bookmarking to a jQuery application. The bbq library supports two important methods: jQuery.bbq.pushState(object) – Adds state to browser history. jQuery.bbq.getState(key) – Gets state from browser history. The bbq library also supports one important event: hashchange – This event is raised when the part of an address after the hash # is changed. The page in Listing 3 demonstrates how to use the bbq library to add support for browser navigation and bookmarking to an Ajax page. Listing 3 – Default.html <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Movies with History</title> <link href="Design/Pager.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <h1>Page <span id="pageNumber"></span> of <span id="pageCount"></span></h1> <div id="pager"></div> <br style="clear:both" /><br /> <div id="moviesContainer"></div> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="App_Scripts/jquery.ba-bbq.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="App_Scripts/Microtemplates.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="App_Scripts/jquery.pager.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> var pageSize = 3, pageIndex = 0; $(window).bind('hashchange', function (e) { pageIndex = e.getState("pageIndex") || 0; pageIndex = parseInt(pageIndex); showMovies(); }); $(window).trigger('hashchange'); function showMovies() { // Build OData query var query = "/MovieService.svc" // base URL + "/Movies" // top-level resource + "?$skip=" + pageIndex * pageSize // skip records + "&$top=" + pageSize // take records +" &$inlinecount=allpages"; // include total count of movies // Make call to WCF Data Service $.ajax({ dataType: "json", url: query, success: showMoviesComplete }); } function showMoviesComplete(result) { // unwrap results var movies = result["d"]["results"]; var movieCount = result["d"]["__count"] // Show movies using template var showMovie = tmpl("<li><%=Id%> - <%=Title %></li>"); var html = ""; for (var i = 0; i < movies.length; i++) { html += showMovie(movies[i]); } $("#moviesContainer").html(html); // show pager $("#pager").pager({ pagenumber: (pageIndex + 1), pagecount: Math.ceil(movieCount / pageSize), buttonClickCallback: selectPage }); // Update page number and page count $("#pageNumber").text(pageIndex + 1); $("#pageCount").text(movieCount); } function selectPage(pageNumber) { pageIndex = pageNumber - 1; $.bbq.pushState({ pageIndex: pageIndex }); } </script> </body> </html> Notice the first chunk of JavaScript code in Listing 3: $(window).bind('hashchange', function (e) { pageIndex = e.getState("pageIndex") || 0; pageIndex = parseInt(pageIndex); showMovies(); }); $(window).trigger('hashchange'); When the hashchange event occurs, the current pageIndex is retrieved by calling the e.getState() method. The value is returned as a string and the value is cast to an integer by calling the JavaScript parseInt() function. Next, the showMovies() method is called to display the page of movies. The $(window).trigger() method is called to raise the hashchange event so that the initial page of records will be displayed. When you click a page number, the selectPage() method is invoked. This method adds the current page index to the address by calling the following method: $.bbq.pushState({ pageIndex: pageIndex }); For example, if you click on page number 2 then page index 1 is saved to the URL. The URL looks like this: Notice that when you click on page 2 then the browser address is updated to look like: /Default.htm#pageIndex=1 If you click on page 3 then the browser address is updated to look like: /Default.htm#pageIndex=2 Because the browser address is updated when you navigate to a new page number, the browser backwards and forwards button will work to navigate you backwards and forwards through the page numbers. When you click page 2, and click the backwards button, you will navigate back to page 1. Furthermore, you can bookmark a particular page of records. For example, if you bookmark the URL /Default.htm#pageIndex=1 then you will get the second page of records whenever you open the bookmark. Summary You should not avoid building Ajax applications because of worries concerning browser history or bookmarks. By taking advantage of a JavaScript library such as the bbq library, you can make your Ajax applications behave in exactly the same way as a normal web application.

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• The Art of Productivity

  - by dwahlin

  Getting things done has always been a challenge regardless of gender, age, race, skill, or job position. No matter how hard some people try, they end up procrastinating tasks until the last minute. Some people simply focus better when they know they’re out of time and can’t procrastinate any longer. How many times have you put off working on a term paper in school until the very last minute? With only a few hours left your mental energy and focus seem to kick in to high gear especially as you realize that you either get the paper done now or risk failing. It’s amazing how a little pressure can turn into a motivator and allow our minds to focus on a given task. Some people seem to specialize in procrastinating just about everything they do while others tend to be the “doers” who get a lot done and ultimately rise up the ladder at work. What’s the difference between these types of people? Is it pure laziness or are other factors at play? I think that some people are certainly more motivated than others, but I also think a lot of it is based on the process that “doers” tend to follow - whether knowingly or unknowingly. While I’ve certainly fought battles with procrastination, I’ve always had a knack for being able to get a lot done in a relatively short amount of time. I think a lot of my “get it done” attitude goes back to the the strong work ethic my parents instilled in me at a young age. I remember my dad saying, “You need to learn to work hard!” when I was around 5 years old. I remember that moment specifically because I was on a tractor with him the first time I heard it while he was trying to move some large rocks into a pile. The tractor was big but so were the rocks and my dad had to balance the tractor perfectly so that it didn’t tip forward too far. It was challenging work and somewhat tedious but my dad finished the task and taught me a few important lessons along the way including persistence, the importance of having a skill, and getting the job done right without skimping along the way. In this post I’m going to list a few of the techniques and processes I follow that I hope may be beneficial to others. I blogged about the general concept back in 2009 but thought I’d share some updated information and lessons learned since then. Most of the ideas that follow came from learning and refining my daily work process over the years. However, since most of the ideas are common sense (at least in my opinion), I suspect they can be found in other productivity processes that are out there. Let’s start off with one of the most important yet simple tips: Start Each Day with a List. Start Each Day with a List What are you planning to get done today? Do you keep track of everything in your head or rely on your calendar? While most of us think that we’re pretty good at managing “to do” lists strictly in our head you might be surprised at how affective writing out lists can be. By writing out tasks you’re forced to focus on the most important tasks to accomplish that day, commit yourself to those tasks, and have an easy way to track what was supposed to get done and what actually got done. Start every morning by making a list of specific tasks that you want to accomplish throughout the day. I’ll even go so far as to fill in times when I’d like to work on tasks if I have a lot of meetings or other events tying up my calendar on a given day. I’m not a big fan of using paper since I type a lot faster than I write (plus I write like a 3rd grader according to my wife), so I use the Sticky Notes feature available in Windows. Here’s an example of yesterday’s sticky note: What do you add to your list? That’s the subject of the next tip. Focus on Small Tasks It’s no secret that focusing on small, manageable tasks is more effective than trying to focus on large and more vague tasks. When you make your list each morning only add tasks that you can accomplish within a given time period. For example, if I only have 30 minutes blocked out to work on an article I don’t list “Write Article”. If I do that I’ll end up wasting 30 minutes stressing about how I’m going to get the article done in 30 minutes and ultimately get nothing done. Instead, I’ll list something like “Write Introductory Paragraphs for Article”. The next day I may add, “Write first section of article” or something that’s small and manageable – something I’m confident that I can get done. You’ll find that once you’ve knocked out several smaller tasks it’s easy to continue completing others since you want to keep the momentum going. In addition to keeping my tasks focused and small, I also make a conscious effort to limit my list to 4 or 5 tasks initially. I’ve found that if I list more than 5 tasks I feel a bit overwhelmed which hurts my productivity. It’s easy to add additional tasks as you complete others and you get the added benefit of that confidence boost of knowing that you’re being productive and getting things done as you remove tasks and add others. Getting Started is the Hardest (Yet Easiest) Part I’ve always found that getting started is the hardest part and one of the biggest contributors to procrastination. Getting started working on tasks is a lot like getting a large rock pushed to the bottom of a hill. It’s difficult to get the rock rolling at first, but once you manage to get it rocking some it’s really easy to get it rolling on its way to the bottom. As an example, I’ve written 100s of articles for technical magazines over the years and have really struggled with the initial introductory paragraphs. Keep in mind that these are the paragraphs that don’t really add that much value (in my opinion anyway). They introduce the reader to the subject matter and nothing more. What a waste of time for me to sit there stressing about how to start the article. On more than one occasion I’ve spent more than an hour trying to come up with 2-3 paragraphs of text.  Talk about a productivity killer! Whether you’re struggling with a writing task, some code for a project, an email, or other tasks, jumping in without thinking too much is the best way to get started I’ve found. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have an overall plan when jumping into a task, but on some occasions you’ll find that if you simply jump into the task and stop worrying about doing everything perfectly that things will flow more smoothly. For my introductory paragraph problem I give myself 5 minutes to write out some general concepts about what I know the article will cover and then spend another 10-15 minutes going back and refining that information. That way I actually have some ideas to work with rather than a blank sheet of paper. If I still find myself struggling I’ll write the rest of the article first and then circle back to the introductory paragraphs once I’m done. To sum this tip up: Jump into a task without thinking too hard about it. It’s better to to get the rock at the top of the hill rocking some than doing nothing at all. You can always go back and refine your work.   Learn a Productivity Technique and Stick to It There are a lot of different productivity programs and seminars out there being sold by companies. I’ve always laughed at how much money people spend on some of these motivational programs/seminars because I think that being productive isn’t that hard if you create a re-useable set of steps and processes to follow. That’s not to say that some of these programs/seminars aren’t worth the money of course because I know they’ve definitely benefited some people that have a hard time getting things done and staying focused. One of the best productivity techniques I’ve ever learned is called the “Pomodoro Technique” and it’s completely free. This technique is an extremely simple way to manage your time without having to remember a bunch of steps, color coding mechanisms, or other processes. The technique was originally developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 80s and can be implemented with a simple timer. In a nutshell here’s how the technique works: Pick a task to work on Set the timer to 25 minutes and work on the task Once the timer rings record your time Take a 5 minute break Repeat the process Here’s why the technique works well for me: It forces me to focus on a single task for 25 minutes. In the past I had no time goal in mind and just worked aimlessly on a task until I got interrupted or bored. 25 minutes is a small enough chunk of time for me to stay focused. Any distractions that may come up have to wait until after the timer goes off. If the distraction is really important then I stop the timer and record my time up to that point. When the timer is running I act as if I only have 25 minutes total for the task (like you’re down to the last 25 minutes before turning in your term paper….frantically working to get it done) which helps me stay focused and turns into a “beat the clock” type of game. It’s actually kind of fun if you treat it that way and really helps me focus on a the task at hand. I automatically know how much time I’m spending on a given task (more on this later) by using this technique. I know that I have 5 minutes after each pomodoro (the 25 minute sprint) to waste on anything I’d like including visiting a website, stepping away from the computer, etc. which also helps me stay focused when the 25 minute timer is counting down. I use this technique so much that I decided to build a program for Windows 8 called Pomodoro Focus (I plan to blog about how it was built in a later post). It’s a Windows Store application that allows people to track tasks, productive time spent on tasks, interruption time experienced while working on a given task, and the number of pomodoros completed. If a time estimate is given when the task is initially created, Pomodoro Focus will also show the task completion percentage. I like it because it allows me to track my tasks, time spent on tasks (very useful in the consulting world), and even how much time I wasted on tasks (pressing the pause button while working on a task starts the interruption timer). I recently added a new feature that charts productive and interruption time for tasks since I wanted to see how productive I was from week to week and month to month. A few screenshots from the Pomodoro Focus app are shown next, I had a lot of fun building it and use it myself to as I work on tasks.   There are certainly many other productivity techniques and processes out there (and a slew of books describing them), but the Pomodoro Technique has been the simplest and most effective technique I’ve ever come across for staying focused and getting things done.   Persistence is Key Getting things done is great but one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in life is that persistence is key especially when you’re trying to get something done that at times seems insurmountable. Small tasks ultimately lead to larger tasks getting accomplished, however, it’s not all roses along the way as some of the smaller tasks may come with their own share of bumps and bruises that lead to discouragement about the end goal and whether or not it is worth achieving at all. I’ve been on several long-term projects over my career as a software developer (I have one personal project going right now that fits well here) and found that repeating, “Persistence is the key!” over and over to myself really helps. Not every project turns out to be successful, but if you don’t show persistence through the hard times you’ll never know if you succeeded or not. Likewise, if you don’t persistently stick to the process of creating a daily list, follow a productivity process, etc. then the odds of consistently staying productive aren’t good.   Track Your Time How much time do you actually spend working on various tasks? If you don’t currently track time spent answering emails, on phone calls, and working on various tasks then you might be surprised to find out that a task that you thought was going to take you 30 minutes ultimately ended up taking 2 hours. If you don’t track the time you spend working on tasks how can you expect to learn from your mistakes, optimize your time better, and become more productive? That’s another reason why I like the Pomodoro Technique – it makes it easy to stay focused on tasks while also tracking how much time I’m working on a given task.   Eliminate Distractions I blogged about this final tip several years ago but wanted to bring it up again. If you want to be productive (and ultimately successful at whatever you’re doing) then you can’t waste a lot of time playing games or on Twitter, Facebook, or other time sucking websites. If you see an article you’re interested in that has no relation at all to the tasks you’re trying to accomplish then bookmark it and read it when you have some spare time (such as during a pomodoro break). Fighting the temptation to check your friends’ status updates on Facebook? Resist the urge and realize how much those types of activities are hurting your productivity and taking away from your focus. I’ll admit that eliminating distractions is still tough for me personally and something I have to constantly battle. But, I’ve made a conscious decision to cut back on my visits and updates to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other sites. Sure, my Klout score has suffered as a result lately, but does anyone actually care about those types of scores aside from your online “friends” (few of whom you’ve actually met in person)? :-) Ultimately it comes down to self-discipline and how badly you want to be productive and successful in your career, life goals, hobbies, or whatever you’re working on. Rather than having your homepage take you to a time wasting news site, game site, social site, picture site, or others, how about adding something like the following as your homepage? Every time your browser opens you’ll see a personal message which helps keep you on the right track. You can download my ubber-sophisticated homepage here if interested. Summary Is there a single set of steps that if followed can ultimately lead to productivity? I don’t think so since one size has never fit all. Every person is different, works in their own unique way, and has their own set of motivators, distractions, and more. While I certainly don’t consider myself to be an expert on the subject of productivity, I do think that if you learn what steps work best for you and gradually refine them over time that you can come up with a personal productivity process that can serve you well. Productivity is definitely an “art” that anyone can learn with a little practice and persistence. You’ve seen some of the steps that I personally like to follow and I hope you find some of them useful in boosting your productivity. If you have others you use please leave a comment. I’m always looking for ways to improve.

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• Windows Azure: General Availability of Web Sites + Mobile Services, New AutoScale + Alerts Support, No Credit Card Needed for MSDN

  - by ScottGu

  This morning we released a major set of updates to Windows Azure.  These updates included: Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites with SLA Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services with SLA Auto-Scale: New automatic scaling support for Web Sites, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines Alerts/Notifications: New email alerting support for all Compute Services (Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines) MSDN: No more credit card requirement for sign-up All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Web Sites. The Windows Azure Web Sites service is perfect for hosting a web presence, building customer engagement solutions, and delivering business web apps.  Today’s General Availability release means we are taking off the “preview” tag from the Free and Standard (formerly called reserved) tiers of Windows Azure Web Sites.  This means we are providing: A 99.9% monthly SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the Standard tier Microsoft Support available on a 24x7 basis (with plans that range from developer plans to enterprise Premier support) The Free tier runs in a shared compute environment and supports up to 10 web sites. While the Free tier does not come with an SLA, it works great for rapid development and testing and enables you to quickly spike out ideas at no cost. The Standard tier, which was called “Reserved” during the preview, runs using dedicated per-customer VM instances for great performance, isolation and scalability, and enables you to host up to 500 different Web sites within them.  You can easily scale your Standard instances on-demand using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can adjust VM instance sizes from a Small instance size (1 core, 1.75GB of RAM), up to a Medium instance size (2 core, 3.5GB of RAM), or Large instance (4 cores and 7 GB RAM).  You can choose to run between 1 and 10 Standard instances, enabling you to easily scale up your web backend to 40 cores of CPU and 70GB of RAM: Today’s release also includes general availability support for custom domain SSL certificate bindings for web sites running using the Standard tier. Customers will be able to utilize certificates they purchase for their custom domains and use either SNI or IP based SSL encryption. SNI encryption is available for all modern browsers and does not require an IP address.  SSL certificates can be used for individual sites or wild-card mapped across multiple sites (we charge extra for the use of a SSL cert – but the fee is per-cert and not per site which means you pay once for it regardless of how many sites you use it with).  Today’s release also includes the following new features: Auto-Scale support Today’s Windows Azure release adds preview support for Auto-Scaling web sites.  This enables you to setup automatic scale rules based on the activity of your instances – allowing you to automatically scale down (and save money) when they are below a CPU threshold you define, and automatically scale up quickly when traffic increases.  See below for more details. 64-bit and 32-bit mode support You can now choose to run your standard tier instances in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode (previously they only ran in 32-bit mode).  This enables you to address even more memory within individual web applications. Memory dumps Memory dumps can be very useful for diagnosing issues and debugging apps. Using a REST API, you can now get a memory dump of your sites, which you can then use for investigating issues in Visual Studio Debugger, WinDbg, and other tools. Scaling Sites Independently Prior to today’s release, all sites scaled up/down together whenever you scaled any site in a sub-region. So you may have had to keep your proof-of-concept or testing sites in a separate sub-region if you wanted to keep them in the Free tier. This will no longer be necessary.  Windows Azure Web Sites can now mix different tier levels in the same geographic sub-region. This allows you, for example, to selectively move some of your sites in the West US sub-region up to Standard tier when they require the features, scalability, and SLA of the Standard tier. Full pricing details on Windows Azure Web Sites can be found here.  Note that the “Shared Tier” of Windows Azure Web Sites remains in preview mode (and continues to have discounted preview pricing).  Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Mobile Services is perfect for building scalable cloud back-ends for Windows 8.x, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML/JavaScript applications.  Customers We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Windows Azure Mobile Services since we first previewed it last September, and more than 20,000 customers are now running mobile back-ends in production using it.  These customers range from startups like Yatterbox, to university students using Mobile Services to complete apps like Sly Fox in their spare time, to media giants like Verdens Gang finding new ways to deliver content, and telcos like TalkTalk Business delivering the up-to-the-minute information their customers require.  In today’s Build keynote, we demonstrated how TalkTalk Business is using Windows Azure Mobile Services to deliver service, outage and billing information to its customers, wherever they might be. Partners When we unveiled the source control and Custom API features I blogged about two weeks ago, we enabled a range of new scenarios, one of which is a more flexible way to work with third party services.  The following blogs, samples and tutorials from our partners cover great ways you can extend Mobile Services to help you build rich modern apps: New Relic allows developers to monitor and manage the end-to-end performance of iOS and Android applications connected to Mobile Services. SendGrid eliminates the complexity of sending email from Mobile Services, saving time and money, while providing reliable delivery to the inbox. Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud that you can use with Mobile Services to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into your mobile apps. Xamarin provides a Mobile Services add on to make it easy building cross-platform connected mobile aps. Pusher allows quickly and securely add scalable real-time messaging functionality to Mobile Services-based web and mobile apps. Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 This week during //build/ keynote, we demonstrated how Visual Studio 2013, Mobile Services and Windows 8.1 make building connected apps easier than ever. Developers building Windows 8 applications in Visual Studio can now connect them to Windows Azure Mobile Services by simply right clicking then choosing Add Connected Service. You can either create a new Mobile Service or choose existing Mobile Service in the Add Connected Service dialog. Once completed, Visual Studio adds a reference to Mobile Services SDK to your project and generates a Mobile Services client initialization snippet automatically. Add Push Notifications Push Notifications and Live Tiles are a key to building engaging experiences. Visual Studio 2013 and Mobile Services make it super easy to add push notifications to your Windows 8.1 app, by clicking Add a Push Notification item: The Add Push Notification wizard will then guide you through the registration with the Windows Store as well as connecting your app to a new or existing mobile service. Upon completion of the wizard, Visual Studio will configure your mobile service with the WNS credentials, as well as add sample logic to your client project and your mobile service that demonstrates how to send push notifications to your app. Server Explorer Integration In Visual Studio 2013 you can also now view your Mobile Services in the the Server Explorer. You can add tables, edit, and save server side scripts without ever leaving Visual Studio, as shown on the image below: Pricing With today’s general availability release we are announcing that we will be offering Mobile Services in three tiers – Free, Standard, and Premium.  Each tier is metered using a simple pricing model based on the # of API calls (bandwidth is included at no extra charge), and the Standard and Premium tiers are backed by 99.9% monthly SLAs.  You can elastically scale up or down the number of instances you have of each tier to increase the # of API requests your service can support – allowing you to efficiently scale as your business grows. The following table summarizes the new pricing model (full pricing details here):   You can find the full details of the new pricing model here. Build Conference Talks The //BUILD/ conference will be packed with sessions covering every aspect of developing connected applications with Mobile Services. The best part is that, even if you can’t be with us in San Francisco, every session is being streamed live. Be sure not to miss these talks: Mobile Services – Soup to Nuts — Josh Twist Building Cross-Platform Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner Connected Windows Phone Apps made Easy with Mobile Services — Yavor Georgiev Build Connected Windows 8.1 Apps with Mobile Services — Nick Harris Who’s that user? Identity in Mobile Apps — Dinesh Kulkarni Building REST Services with JavaScript — Nathan Totten Going Live and Beyond with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Kirill Gavrylyuk , Paul Batum Protips for Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner AutoScale: Dynamically scale up/down your app based on real-world usage One of the key benefits of Windows Azure is that you can dynamically scale your application in response to changing demand. In the past, though, you have had to either manually change the scale of your application, or use additional tooling (such as WASABi or MetricsHub) to automatically scale your application. Today, we’re announcing that AutoScale will be built-into Windows Azure directly.  With today’s release it is now enabled for Cloud Services, Virtual Machines and Web Sites (Mobile Services support will come soon). Auto-scale enables you to configure Windows Azure to automatically scale your application dynamically on your behalf (without any manual intervention) so you can achieve the ideal performance and cost balance. Once configured it will regularly adjust the number of instances running in response to the load in your application. Currently, we support two different load metrics: CPU percentage Storage queue depth (Cloud Services and Virtual Machines only) We’ll enable automatic scaling on even more scale metrics in future updates. When to use Auto-Scale The following are good criteria for services/apps that will benefit from the use of auto-scale: The service/app can scale horizontally (e.g. it can be duplicated to multiple instances) The service/app load changes over time If your app meets these criteria, then you should look to leverage auto-scale. How to Enable Auto-Scale To enable auto-scale, simply navigate to the Scale tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal for the app/service you wish to enable.  Within the scale tab turn the Auto-Scale setting on to either CPU or Queue (for Cloud Services and VMs) to enable Auto-Scale.  Then change the instance count and target CPU settings to configure the Auto-Scale ranges you want to maintain. The image below demonstrates how to enable Auto-Scale on a Windows Azure Web-Site.  I’ve configured the web-site so that it will run using between 1 and 5 VM instances.  The exact # used will depend on the aggregate CPU of the VMs using the 40-70% range I’ve configured below.  If the aggregate CPU goes above 70%, then Windows Azure will automatically add new VMs to the pool (up to the maximum of 5 instances I’ve configured it to use).  If the aggregate CPU drops below 40% then Windows Azure will automatically start shutting down VMs to save me money: Once you’ve turned auto-scale on, you can return to the Scale tab at any point and select Off to manually set the number of instances. Using the Auto-Scale Preview With today’s update you can now, in just a few minutes, have Windows Azure automatically adjust the number of instances you have running  in your apps to keep your service performant at an even better cost. Auto-scale is being released today as a preview feature, and will be free until General Availability. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 separate auto-scale rules across all of the resources they have (Web sites, Cloud services or Virtual Machines). If you hit the 10 limit, you can disable auto-scale for any resource to enable it for another. Alerts and Notifications Starting today we are now providing the ability to configure threshold based alerts on monitoring metrics. This feature is available for compute services (cloud services, VM, websites and mobiles services). Alerts provide you the ability to get proactively notified of active or impending issues within your application.  You can define alert rules for: Virtual machine monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (CPU percentage, network in/out, disk read bytes/sec and disk write bytes/sec) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Cloud service monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (same as VM), monitoring metrics from the guest VM (from performance counters within the VM) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. For Web Sites and Mobile Services, alerting rules can be configured on monitoring metrics from monitoring endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Creating Alert Rules You can add an alert rule for a monitoring metric by navigating to the Setting -> Alerts tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click on the Add Rule button to create an alert rule. Give the alert rule a name and optionally add a description. Then pick the service which you want to define the alert rule on: The next step in the alert creation wizard will then filter the monitoring metrics based on the service you selected:   Once created the rule will show up in your alerts list within the settings tab: The rule above is defined as “not activated” since it hasn’t tripped over the CPU threshold we set.  If the CPU on the above machine goes over the limit, though, I’ll get an email notifying me from an Windows Azure Alerts email address ([email protected]). And when I log into the portal and revisit the alerts tab I’ll see it highlighted in red.  Clicking it will then enable me to see what is causing it to fail, as well as view the history of when it has happened in the past. Alert Notifications With today’s initial preview you can now easily create alerting rules based on monitoring metrics and get notified on active or impending issues within your application that require attention. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 alert rules across all of the services that support alert rules. No More Credit Card Requirement for MSDN Subscribers Earlier this month (during TechEd 2013), Windows Azure announced that MSDN users will get Windows Azure Credits every month that they can use for any Windows Azure services they want. You can read details about this in my previous Dev/Test blog post. Today we are making further updates to enable an easier Windows Azure signup for MSDN users. MSDN users will now not be required to provide payment information (e.g. no credit card) during sign-up, so long as they use the service within the included monetary credit for the billing period. For usage beyond the monetary credit, they can enable overages by providing the payment information and remove the spending limit. This enables a super easy, one page sign-up experience for MSDN users.  Simply sign-up for your Windows Azure trial using the same Microsoft ID that you use to manage your MSDN account, then complete the one page sign-up form below and you will be able to spend your free monthly MSDN credits (up to $150 each month) on any Windows Azure resource for dev/test:   This makes it trivially easy for every MDSN customer to start using Windows Azure today.  If you haven’t signed up yet, I definitely recommend checking it out. Summary Today’s release includes a ton of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. 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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• top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – June 2012

  - by JuergenKress

  Send your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/wlscommunity OTNArchBeat? Free Virtual Developer Day: Oracle ADF and Oracle Fusion Middleware Development http://bit.ly/MxuNAg AMIS, Oracle & Java? Checklist veearts nu ook op iPad. @amis_services Mobile integratie met Oracle Fusion Middleware http://dld.bz/buwsM #OSB #SOA WhitehorsesWhiteblog: Troubleshoot JVM crashes of Weblogic: CompilerThread (http://bit.ly/KcGzZK) Jon petter hjulstad E-vita is now Apps Grid Specialized! ODTUG Fusion Middleware Sessions RT @OTNArchBeat: ODTUG Kscope12 - June 24-28 - San Antonio, TX http://bit.ly/LlWkNV OTNArchBeat? Free Event: Modern #Java Development, in/outside the Enterprise - May 30 - Redwood Shores, CA http://bit.ly/LfB79a ADF Community DE? Oracle Advanced ADF 11g Partner Workshop Düsseldorf /Germany (english) June 26-29, click here to see Nicolas Lorain? Best Practices for #JavaFX 2 Enterprise Applications (Part Two) http://buff.ly/Lk1DBn by Jim Weaver shay shmeltzer? #Oracle Developers in #Israel - don't miss the free #ADF workshop July 2nd - get hands-on with Oracle ADF -here OTNArchBeat? Java at JAXconf | Tori Wieldt http://bit.ly/LdoLS2 Anand Akela? #Oracle Customers and Partners – Get your free pass to @CloudExpo in New York, June 11 to 14, http://goo.gl/RpYFT <- Stop by booth #511 OracleSupport_WLS? Did you know that since 3/15/12 #WebLogic Server 12.1.1.0 is certified for production with JDK 7? http://bit.ly/IYJE0L Sharat? Highly useful #JavaFX best practices blog by @JavaFXpert More details here ADF EMG How to set up a productive ADF Dev Env - discussion started by @baigsorcl. Click here to Read and comment. OracleSupport_WLS Upcoming #webcast: Diagnosing #weblogic performance issues through #java thread dumps http://bit.ly/M4O9qF My Oracle Support? New to Oracle Support? - Webcast on Support Basics webcast May 22 10:30 Central Europe. Register @ http://bit.ly/J8o0WG Mohamad Afshar? Cloud Expo – Oracle Customers and Partners – get your free pass to Cloud Expo in New York, June 11 to 14, http://goo.gl/RpYFT OTNArchBeat Oracle VM 3.1 is here | @Ronenkofman http://bit.ly/JriWTq Oracle Exalogic? RT @D0uglasPhillips: ExalogicTV New Video Introducing Oracle Secure Global Desktop for #Exalogic!! http://bit.ly/nwkrCu OracleBlogs? Java EE6 and WebLogic YouTube video channels http://ow.ly/1jVcYJ Oracle WebLogic RT @aleftik: Excited to spend some time today playing around with the WebSockets SDK http://bit.ly/NoTtri WebLogic Community Java EE6 and WebLogic YouTube video channels http://wp.me/p1LMIb-h0 OracleSupport_WLS New tutorial! How to use the #JMS #API to create a message producer with #GlassFish and #NetBeans http://bit.ly/Juqjn JDeveloper & ADF? Tip when installing JDeveloper 11.1.2.2.0 version http://dlvr.it/1b48s1 WebLogic Community Middleware Oracle Excellence Awards 2012 – HAPPY NEW YEAR! Click here to read WebLogicCommunity #opn #oracle#Specialization #opnaward Steven Davelaar? Improve performance of your ADF app using lazy, on-demand querying of detail view objects: Click here OracleBlogs? Middleware Oracle Excellence Awards 2012 & HAPPY NEW YEAR! http://ow.ly/1kahzZ OracleSupport_WLS Upgrading from #weblogic 9.2.x to 10.3.x? http://bit.ly/Kqzl9N AMIS, Oracle & Java “@JDeveloper: Logout from an ADF application http://dlvr.it/1fQBnm” WebLogic Community UK OUG call for papers–your middleware success! Click here #UKOUG #soacommunity #OPN Whitehorses Whiteblog: Enterprise Manager: Manage your Fusion Middleware logfiles (http://bit.ly/KQlZkR) WebLogic Community? @Jphjulstad HI Jon, should we send Pizza when you go in production with your WebLogic 12c project? Whish you success! #WebLogicCommunity Sabine Leitner ADF Einsteigerworkshops je 2 Tage im Juni in HAM, BLN, HANN #Oracle #WLS http://bit.ly/LcOIzB @OracleWebLogic @OracleAppGrid@soacommunity Andreas Koop new post Java Heap Monitor in JDeveloper http://bit.ly/LgSk85 Sabine Leitner? #Oracle Kundentag mit Vorträgen von Sparkasse, Schufa, LBBW, Allianz über FMW & Exa Lösungen! 21.06. FRA http://bit.ly/JtwE3v @wlscommunity NetBeans Team RT @chadlung: Installing and configuring #NetBeans 7.1.2 and the #Java JDK 1.7 on OS X: http://www.giantflyingsaucer.com/blog/p=3760 #osx WebLogic Community Happy New Year #WeblogicCommunity thanks for the business! Time for a drink http://pic.twitter.com/K34KFbvH WebLogic Community UK OUG call for papers&ndash;your middleware success! http://wp.me/p1LMIb-gU WebLogic Community? Middleware Oracle Excellence Awards 2012 - HAPPY NEW YEAR! http://wp.me/p1LMIb-h6 Oracle WebLogic? RT @wlscommunity: WebLogic World Record Two Processor Result with SPECjEnterprise2010 Benchmark Click here to read #weblogic #sunfire #li Marc? Relocate wlst script for all the logfiles in your domain @wlscommunity, http://tinyurl.com/btbjcco WebLogic Community WebLogic World Record Two Processor Result with SPECjEnterprise2010 Benchmark Click here #WebLogicCommunity #weblogic #sunfire Oracle WebLogic MIss a WebLogic Devcast webinar? Catch any of the replays in the series on-demand! #WebLogic #JavaEE #coherence http://bit.ly/LNGa4p JDeveloper & ADF? Bean DataControl - Edit table records http://dlvr.it/1ZWqCx Justin Kestelyn? Contents of "Virtual Developer Day: Java SE 7 and JavaFX 2.0" are now avail on demand; no reg http://tinyurl.com/78nxnyo Frank Nimphius? Preparing 12c new features for DOAG 2012 Development - June 14th in Bonn (http://development.doag.org) WebLogic Community? Middleware Oracle Excellence Awards 2012&ndash;HAPPY NEW YEAR! http://wp.me/p1LMIb-he JDeveloper & ADF Placeholder Watermarks with ADF 11.1.2 http://dlvr.it/1ZWDc9 Oracle ACE Program? May edition #ACE newsletter now available online. http://bit.ly/LKA2de chriscmuir New blog post: Which JDeveloper is right for me? http://bit.ly/J8sj9e GlassFish? Transactional Interceptors in Java EE 7 - Request for feedback: Linda described how EJB's container-managed tr http://bit.ly/KKuGNJ OracleEnterpriseMgr Oracle Application Testing Suite 12.1 Debuts at StarEast 2012 http://ow.ly/aXcv8 #em12c JAX London First set of speaker session announced for #JAXLondon see: http://bit.ly/L0HSME OTNArchBeat? Oracle Cloud Conference: dates and locations worldwide http://bit.ly/JgNeID NetBeans Team? Video: Create and debug a TestNG test class in #NetBeans IDE: http://ow.ly/b7NEW NetBeans Team #NetBeans tip: Code Template for #Kohana #PHP Framework: http://ow.ly/aWIvY Robin? Started to use the #Oracle #WebLogic Server #Maven Plugin. Really awesome to install a complete #WLS with "mvn wls:install" !@wlscommunity OTNArchBeat? Free Event: Modern #Java Development, in/outside the Enterprise - May 30 - Redwood Shores, CA http://bit.ly/JIN9tf OracleBlogs WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter May 2012 http://ow.ly/1k5TeG Java Certification? Java SE 7 Fundamentals course now available On Demand. Watch a preview now: http://ow.ly/aWYgD Whitehorses Whiteblog: Native IO in WebLogic on Solaris 11 X64 (http://bit.ly/KGM4mp) NetBeans Team? Quick video of FindBugs Integration in #NetBeans IDE 7.2: http://ow.ly/aNece NetBeans Team #JavaFX Scene Builder Docs Updated for 2.2 and #NetBeans 7.2 dev builds: http://ow.ly/b7Nie Duncan Mills? New blog posting on implementing input field watermarks with ADF Faces 11.1.2 Click here #adf WebLogic Community? WebLogic Partner Community Newsletter May 2012 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-h4 OracleBlogs? UK OUG call for papersyour middleware success! http://ow.ly/1jNs49 Nicolas Lorain? Java tip: Deploying #JavaFX apps to multiple environments - JavaWorld http://buff.ly/KDADvu Adam Bien? Java EE and How to Specify The Unconventional With Convention Over Configuration [Free Article]: The free http://bit.ly/JEUkUf Owen Hughes and team?#Oracle #Exalogic #Performance: What? How? Why? Click here GlassFish? SecuritEE in the Cloud: Java EE 7 and the Cloud theme continue to move full steam ahead. In a PaaS environment http://bit.ly/K2RPte JDeveloper & ADF? How to Align Managed Bean Scope and Bean Data Control in Oracle ADF http://dlvr.it/1dngxQ Andrejus Baranovskis Missing New Feature in JDev (11.1.2.2.0) - ADF Methods Security http://fb.me/1jQM1enls OracleSupport_WLS? Tutorial on managing #HTTP Sessions in a #Weblogic #Cluster http://bit.ly/JshESe Oracle WebLogic? ZeroTurnaround developer report: #Spring keeps getting heavier, and #Java EE keeps getting lighter http://bit.ly/JDmKy2 JDeveloper & ADF? How to Search in Views - Part 4 || Oracle ADF http://dlvr.it/1dpDjZ WebLogic Community Java Message Service with Java and Spring Framework on Oracle WebLogic; Webcast May 15th 2012 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-gS Andreas Koop? new post ADF Bug or Feature? Non-Breaking Space outside required icon style http://bit.ly/KDZnUo Oracle WebLogic? Don't miss this month's WebLogic DevCast: WebLogic JMS and Spring JMS http://bit.ly/J6g2ST Tuesday May 15th 10:00am PT JDeveloper & ADF How To Disable SELECT COUNT Execution for ADF Table Rendering http://dlvr.it/1dqKH6 OracleSupport_WLS? #SSL and security has its own Information Center, http://bit.ly/LP8Vil for troubleshooting, install, config and more NetBeans Team? Featured #NetBeans plugin is @Codename_One for creating native apps for major mobile platforms: http://plugins.netbeans.org/ JDeveloper & ADF? Using JDeveloper HTTP Analyser to intercept/forward requests http://dlvr.it/1Yzl4J Nicolas Lorain? Create native looks for JavaFX applications: JavaFX-CSS-Themes · http://buff.ly/M0jel0 by Gregg Setzer Devoxx? Want to make the world a better place? Then get involved in Random Hacks of Kindness on June 2 - 3 in Belgium @ http://www.rhok.be #RHoK WebLogic Community top tweets WebLogic Partner Community – May 2012 Click here #WebLogicCommunity Michel Schildmeijer Oracle Traffic Director 11g http://lnkd.in/-mm3Vy Andrejus Baranovskis? Proactively Monitoring JDeveloper 11g IDE Heap Memory http://fb.me/16YZErPrx Arun Gupta? 80+ attendees building a #javaee6 application using NetBeans/WebLogic at Java Day, Istanbul fun times! http://pic.twitter.com/odY19daW A. Chatziantoniou? Just registered for the Oracle FMW Summer Camp in Lisbon. Looking forward to learn, meet friends and try to buy ice cream on the beach OTNArchBeat Another Myth Debunked: 200 Continuous Redeployments with WebLogic|@munz http://bit.ly/JiPyM7 Oracle WebLogic? Need to learn more on #WebLogic Server #JVM performance tuning? http://bit.ly/MN UxHx GlassFish? Dukes Choice Awards 2012 Nominations Are Open: 2012 Duke's Choice Award are open for nominations. These awards http://bit.ly/Ksk4U3 Justin Kestelyn? Major cloud-related announcements from Larry Ellison and Mark Hurd on June 6 http://bit.ly/KTJiII Nicolas Lorain Transparent Windows (Stage) with #JavaFX 2 : Adam Bien's Weblog http://j.mp/INgq8K WebLogic Community Web Services with JAX and Spring on WebLogic–Webcast May 30th 2012 #WebLogicCommunity #weblogic #opn JDeveloper & ADF Oracle ADF - How to work with Dates http://dlvr.it/1Y70zw OracleBlogs Web Services with JAX and Spring on WebLogicWebcast May 30th 2012 http://ow.ly/1k2WtO Adam Bien? Summer Java EE Workshops: 23.05, Amsterdam Airport Java EE Hacking, Without Airport. The dutch version of Airport http://bit.ly/JeP6hV JDeveloper & ADF ADF 11g: BC4J or EJB3. http://bit.ly/JVVFZF ADF EMG? Great discussion with JSF guru Andy Schwartz on the forum - 38 posts! Check it out: here Devoxx? Oracle (http://www.oracle.com ) joins Devoxx 2012 as the first Premium partner, welcome aboard! Nicolas Lorain Developing a Simple Todo Application using #JavaFX, #Java and #MongoDB- Part-1JavaBeat http://j.mp/IDGxLA Nicolas Lorain Preview of JavaFX 2.2 canvas feature > Harmonic Code: Death bitmaps could be beautiful... Part I http://buff.ly/KyAXg5 #JavaFX OTNArchBeat?? New York Coherence Special Interest Group (NYCSIG) - May 24 - NYC http://bit.ly/JzJcbT WebLogic Community iAS upgrade to WebLogic watch #C2B2 online seminar http://youtu.be/5m2CNUjBIGQ #WebLogicCommunity Ruth Collett? Join Oracle in #Joburg on May 21 for OTN Developer Day - sessions on #Java #JavaEE 6/7 and much more! http://bit.ly/IENwnD WebLogic Community? Sending out invitations to our advanced Fusion Middleware Summer Camps! Want to learn more register for the community Ruth Collett? Join @ArunGupta in Istanbul this Monday to hear the latest on #JavaEE 6/7 http://bit.ly/Je63cc GlassFish? NetBeans 7.2 Beta - Built for Speed, Deploy Apps to Oracle Cloud: NetBeans 7.2 Beta is now available. The http://bit.ly/LxMMTK Lucas Jellema My latest SlideShare upload : Java ain't scary - introducing Java to PL/SQ. here via @slideshare JDeveloper & ADF? #Developer #free#ADF training in #Scotland - June 13. More information: http://bit.ly/LbPLlf AMIS, Oracle & Java? AMIS behaalt als eerste in Nedeland de Oracle ADF specialisatie - Channelworld nieuwsChannelconnect: http://bit.ly/JzAcB4 WebLogic Community Web Services with JAX and Spring on WebLogic&ndash;Webcast May 30th 2012 http://wp.me/p1LMIb-gX Nicolas Lorain?@ JavaFX-based SimpleDateFormat Demonstrator http://j.mp/KFCVOi #JavaFX via Dustin Marx Oracle Exalogic? Are you an Oracle partner? There's news on the Oracle Partner Network about #Exalogic specializations - http://bit.ly/Mt3ANY JDeveloper & ADF Shorter URL for your ADF application http://dlvr.it/1XqNLY OTNArchBeat? Bay Area Coherence Special Interest Group (BACSIG) Meeting June 7 http://bit.ly/JAa0Lx OTNArchBeat? Java EE 6 Sample Application on WebLogic 12c: Conference Planner | @arungupta http://bit.ly/LPvof4 JDeveloper & ADF? Excellent example of Oracle ADF - Google Maps/Earth integration http://dlvr.it/1cbc80 JDeveloper & ADF Setting Up JDeveloper's Embedded WLS for MySQL http://dlvr.it/1c4b8P JDeveloper & ADF? Solution for Sharing Global User Data in ADF BC http://dlvr.it/1cc7SJ Java? Java Magazine May/June #javaee #javafx #javame #openJDK #hotspot #wicket #lotsmore http://ow.ly/aX07v Oracle WebLogic? http://bit.ly/JxQsnS if you have trouble finding the right #patchset when doing an upgrade to your #weblogic server OracleEnterpriseMgr 15 minutes to go before we start our Application Testing Suite 12.1 webcast. http://bit.ly/JHyTEe Learn from the lead PM what's new. #em12c Sten Vesterli Eating your own dog food - Oracle support site finally in ADF: http://lnkd.in/s6hg_p Adam Bien Project: "Jenever" (=poison) checked-in with GIT:here CU at http://workshops.adam-bien.com. Thanks for attending! OTNArchBeat Web Service Development with NetBeans and Testing with WebLogic Admin Console | @munz http://bit.ly/JcWk34 Please feel free to send us your news! And add your blog to our SOA blog wiki

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, February 08, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, February 08, 2011Popular ReleasesyoutubeFisher: youtubeFisher 3.0 [beta]: What's new: Supports YouTube's new layout Complete internal refactoringNearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v5.0: Version 5.0 of the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing the following improvements: .NET 4.0 as target framework using ASP.NET MVC 3. All views migrated to Razor for cleaner markup. Alternate template (Layout file) for mobile devices 4 Bug Fixes since Version 4.1 Visit the project Roadmap for more details.fuv: 1.0 release, codename Chopper Joe: features: search/replace :o to open file :s to save file :q to quitASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager html generation optimized new features for the lookup (add additional search data ) live demo went aeroEnhSim: EnhSim 2.3.6 BETA: 2.3.6 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.06 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 Changes since 2.3.0 ...TestApi - a library of Test APIs: TestApi v0.6: TestApi v0.6 comes with the following changes: TestApi code development has been moved to Codeplex: Moved TestApi soluton to VS 2010; Moved all source code to Codeplex. All development work is done there now. Fault Injection API: Integrated the unmanaged FaultInjectionEngine.dll COM component in the build; Cleaned up FaultInjectionEngine.dll to build at warning level 4; Implemented “FaultScope” which allows for in-process fault injection; Added automation scripts & sample program; ...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.5: AutoChat now allows up to 6 items. Items with nr. 7-0 will be removed! News page url's are now opened in the default browser Added a context menu to the system tray icon (thanks to Alex Banagos) AutoChat now allows configuring the Chat Keys and the Modifier Key The recent files list now supports compact and full mode Fix: Swapped mouse buttons are now properly detected Fix: Sometimes the Play button was pressed while still greyed out Champion: Karma Note: You can also run the u...mojoPortal: 2.3.6.2: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2362-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Rawr: Rawr 4.0.19 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...IronRuby: 1.1.2: IronRuby 1.1.2 is a servicing release that keeps on improving compatibility with Ruby 1.9.2 and includes IronRuby integration to Visual Studio 2010. We decided to drop 1.8.6 compatibility mode in all post-1.0 releases. We recommend using IronRuby 1.0 if you need 1.8.6 compatibility. In this release we fixed several major issues: - problems that blocked Gem installation in certain cases - regex syntax: the parser was replaced with a new one that is much more compatible with Ruby 1.9.2 - cras...Pyxis 2: Production Release: Pyxis 2.0.0.13 - Full Production Release This release of Pyxis 2 offers you a wide range of features: Launch Applications in their own threads & domains Render alpha-blended icons on the desktop Support for SD & USB drives Online App Store Dynamic & Static IP support Menus & Modals Over a dozen GUI controls File selection dialogs Folder selection dialog Application, Bootloader, and Firmware Updating Update Release Notes Much More!Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Sample Browser v2 (CTP Release): Sample Browser v2 (CTP Release) http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=205917MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 (4): There was a small issue with the previous release that caused errors when installing the templates in VS10 Express. This release corrects the error. Only use this if you encountered issues when installing the previous release. No changes in the binaries.Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.0: Finally the version 1.0 release! Sorry for the long delay since the last release, but I think that you'll find this release to be really smooth, really stable, and a really great enhancement to Windows. New features include: Windows 7 taskbar integration Major performance and usability improvements Redesigned look and feel New name: Finestra Better automatic updating Much faster full-screen switcher Fixes Windows 7 hotkey collisions by default Updated installerFacebook C# SDK: 5.0.2 (BETA): PLEASE TAKE A FEW MINUTES TO GIVE US SOME FEEDBACK: Facebook C# SDK Survey This is third BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. This release contains some breaking changes. Particularly with authentication. After spending time reviewing the trouble areas that people are having using th...ASP.NET MVC SiteMap provider: MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 for MVC3: Using NuGet?MvcSiteMapProvider is also listed in the NuGet feed. Learn more... Like the project? Consider a donation!Donate via PayPal via PayPal. ChangelogTargeting ASP.NET MVC 3 and .NET 4.0 Additional UpdatePriority options for generating XML sitemaps Allow to specify target on SiteMapTitleAttribute One action with multiple routes and breadcrumbs Medium Trust optimizations Create SiteMapTitleAttribute for setting parent title IntelliSense for your sitemap with MvcSiteMapSchem...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab consists of six labs: one for logging, one for service location, and four for application setting manager. Each lab takes about 20 minutes to walk through. Each lab consists of a PDF document. You can go through the steps in the doc to create solution and then build/deploy the solution and run the lab. For those of you who wants to save the time, we included the final solution so you can just build/deploy the solution and run the lab.Value Injecter - object(s) to -> object mapper: 2.3: it lets you define your own convention-based matching algorithms (ValueInjections) in order to match up (inject) source values to destination values. inject from multiple sources in one InjectFrom added ConventionInjectionMobile Device Detection and Redirection: 0.1.11.11: Improvements to Beta Release The following changes have been made in version 0.1.11.11: BlackBerry Version 6 devices (such as the 9800 Torch) are now correctly identified with a dedicated handler. Android powered devices are now correctly identified. Minor change to Provider.cs to improve performance and optimise data sent to 51Degrees.mobi if the option is enabled. GC.collect is no longer called at any point. All garbage collection now happens automatically IMPORTANT CHANGES This rele...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 10: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 9 ChangesAdded support for trends Added support for Silverlight 4 Elevated WP7 fixes Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.1.7: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: http://json.codeplex.comNew Projectsbisolu_sendus: bisolu smsBlack & Scholes: Black & Scholes OptionsCosLabs: CosLabs makes it easy to see the full capabilities of the Cosmos operating system toolkit. CosLabs has a number of experiments to find new and unique uses for Cosmos. It's developed in C#.DeployToAzure: DeployToAzure allows automating deployment of Windows Azure project and making it a part of TFS 2010 build process without using PowerShell and Azure Management CmdLets. Digital: Educational purposesDiscogsNet: DiscogsNet is a .NET library to query the Discogs.com API and parse the Discogs XML data dump files. It's developed in C# and usable from any .NET language. The API of the library is focused on ease of use and intuitiveness.DJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC: DJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC is a lightweight framework which helps you build rich user interfaces for ASP.NET MVC while enjoying great developer productivity. DokuDB: Visio AddIn to document different versions of a databaseDtsConfig Explorer: This project is a windows froms application that helps explore a SSIS dtsconfig file with an easy wayEveryDNS Service: Windows service to automatically send your current IP address to everydns.net for dynamic domains. Automatically monitors and sends IP address changes without having to be logged in. The project is built in C# targeting the .NET 4.0 framework.EvoSim - Evolution Simulation: EvoSim is a pet project to learn aspects of MVVM, WPF/Silverlight, and Parallel Processing features of .NET 4. The goal is to simulate a world filled with creatures that move, eat, reproduce, and die according to Darwinian evolutionary principles. It is tile and turn based.EZStorage: A storage library for XNA based on EasyStorage but abstracting in an XML based file list for each folder, allowing file listings on all folders and details like file creation dates which are no longer possible in XNA 4.0ForeverBell's Snake: A snake game written in VB.NET.Glauca Browser: This is a browser with a webkit core inside.Grauers SharePoint 2010 Custom MasterPage Feature: This is a SharePoint 2010 Custom MastePage feature. Custom Master and custom CSS Blog post about the project: http://www.grauers.net/archive/2011/02/07/build-a-sharepoint-2010-custom-mastepage-with-visual-studio-2010.aspxHamming Code Sample: HamCode demonstrate how the hamming code work, result of coded and decoded data. Shows the benefits of hamming method/codeHydroDesktop Mercurial Test: This is a trial version of the HydroDesktop project (hydrodesktop.codeplex.com) running on Mercurial source code repository. We first want to test whether the data update/download is happening fine before switching the official HydroDesktop website to the new system.LateBindingApi: Creates .Net Proxy Components from COM Type Libraries.Middlesex County College Library Wireless Auto Login: The Middlesex County College Library Wireless Auto Login automatically logs a computer in to the Middlesex County College (Edison, NJ) Library's WifiMobility: Mobility is a small program that reads from a text file. The text file includes everything about the program, right down to that cute little bunny on your desktop! Try Mobility today!OpenMFC: OpenMFC is opensource version of MFC for using with C/C++ compiler without MFC.Orchard Content Sharing: This Orchard module adds content sharing functionality via integration with AddThis.com sharing service.Orchard Wunder Weather Widget: This project is used to maintain the source code for the Wunder Weather widget in the Orchard gallery.Professional Audio Recorder: Professional Audio Recorder is a Audio Recorder for Windows Phone 7Python Node Info for Umbraco: Designed to assist Umbraco macro authors who are writing their macros in Python. Provides a helper macro that, when inserted into a page, will enable the display of an info panel showing the page node properties as represented in Python.Softina.Graphs: Softina.Graphs is a graph managment and algorithm utility. It includes a set of libraries to work with graph processing. It is written using .net framework with c# language and MS Visual Studio 2008. Client applications is created using devexpress components.spangesharp: Application to help people learn c#Visual Studio Private Extension Gallery: Add a new tab in the Visual Studio extension manager to manage private extensions.WCF Home Framework: Home Framework is a service-oriented framework able to facilitate deploy and management of wcf services in a mid-size scenario project.Windows Phone 7 Video Player: This project contains all the source of an application for Windows Phone 7 to consume an RSS Media exposed by our Smooth Streaming Video Player plugin for WordPress (http://smooth.codeplex.com).WOL Shopping List: This is a shoppingList version of WOL's NearMeWP7RSSReader: Updated RSSReader project for Windows Phone 7 using the RTM tools with the October 2010 update.Xen (XNA Extended) Framework: The Xen Framework is a set of libraries that provides and extends XNA 4.0 functionality to make game development easier and faster while producing clean, maintainable code. Xen frees you up to spend more time building your game.

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• Cold Start

  - by antony.reynolds

  Well we had snow drifts 3ft deep on Saturday so it must be spring time.  In preparation for Spring we decided to move the lawn tractor.  Of course after sitting in the garage all winter it refused to start.  I then come into the office and need to start my 11g SOA Suite installation.  I thought about this and decided my tractor might be cranky but at least I can script the startup of my SOA Suite 11g installation. So with this in mind I created 6 scripts.  I created them for Linux but they should translate to Windows without too many problems.  This is left as an exercise to the reader, note you will have to hardcode more than I did in the Linux scripts and create separate script files for the sqlplus and WLST sections. Order to start things I believe there should be order in all things, especially starting the SOA Suite.  So here is my preferred order. Start Database This is need by EM and the rest of SOA Suite so best to start it before the Admin Server and managed servers. Start Node Manager on all machines This is needed if you want the scripts to work across machines. Start Admin Server Once this is done in theory you can manually stat the managed servers using WebLogic console.  But then you have to wait for console to be available.  Scripting it all is quicker and easier way of starting. Start Managed Servers & Clusters Best to start them one per physical machine at a time to avoid undue load on the machines.  Non-clustered install will have just soa_server1 and bam_serv1 by default.  Clusters will have at least SOA and BAM clusters that can be started as a group or individually.  I have provided scripts for standalone servers, but easy to change them to work with clusters. Starting Database I have provided a very primitive script (available here) to start the database, the listener and the DB console.  The section highlighted in red needs to match your database name. #!/bin/sh echo "##############################" echo "# Setting Oracle Environment #" echo "##############################" . oraenv <<-EOF orcl EOF echo "#####################" echo "# Starting Database #" echo "#####################" sqlplus / as sysdba <<-EOF startup exit EOF echo "#####################" echo "# Starting Listener #" echo "#####################" lsnrctl start echo "######################" echo "# Starting dbConsole #" echo "######################" emctl start dbconsole read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Starting SOA Suite My script for starting the SOA Suite (available here) breaks the task down into five sections. Setting the Environment First set up the environment variables.  The variables highlighted in red probably need changing for your environment. #!/bin/sh echo "###########################" echo "# Setting SOA Environment #" echo "###########################" export MW_HOME=~oracle/Middleware11gPS1 export WL_HOME=$MW_HOME/wlserver_10.3 export ORACLE_HOME=$MW_HOME/Oracle_SOA export DOMAIN_NAME=soa_std_domain export DOMAIN_HOME=$MW_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME Starting the Node Manager I start node manager with a nohup to stop it exiting when the script terminates and I redirect the standard output and standard error to a file in a logs directory. cd $DOMAIN_HOME echo "#########################" echo "# Starting Node Manager #" echo "#########################" nohup $WL_HOME/server/bin/startNodeManager.sh >logs/NodeManager.out 2>&1 & Starting the Admin Server I had problems starting the Admin Server from Node Manager so I decided to start it using the command line script.  I again use nohup and redirect output. echo "#########################" echo "# Starting Admin Server #" echo "#########################" nohup ./startWebLogic.sh >logs/AdminServer.out 2>&1 & Starting the Managed Servers I then used WLST (WebLogic Scripting Tool) to start the managed servers.  First I waited for the Admin Server to come up by putting a connect command in a loop.  I could have put the WLST commands into a separate script file but I wanted to reduce the number of files I was using and so used redirected input (here syntax). $ORACLE_HOME/common/bin/wlst.sh <<-EOF import time sleep=time.sleep print "#####################################" print "# Waiting for Admin Server to Start #" print "#####################################" while True:   try:     connect(adminServerName="AdminServer")     break   except:     sleep(10) I then start the SOA server and tell WLST to wait until it is started before returning.  If starting a cluster then the start command would be modified accordingly to start the SOA cluster. print "#######################" print "# Starting SOA Server #" print "#######################" start(name="soa_server1", block="true") I then start the BAM server in the same way as the SOA server. print "#######################" print "# Starting BAM Server #" print "#######################" start(name="bam_server1", block="true") EOF Finally I let people know the servers are up and wait for input in case I am running in a separate window, in which case the result would be lost without the read command. echo "#####################" echo "# SOA Suite Started #" echo "#####################" read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Stopping the SOA Suite My script for shutting down the SOA Suite (available here)  is basically the reverse of my startup script.  After setting the environment I connect to the Admin Server using WLST and shut down the managed servers and the admin server.  Again the script would need modifying for a cluster. Stopping the Servers If I cannot connect to the Admin Server I try to connect to the node manager, in case the Admin Server is down but the managed servers are up. #!/bin/sh echo "###########################" echo "# Setting SOA Environment #" echo "###########################" export MW_HOME=~oracle/Middleware11gPS1 export WL_HOME=$MW_HOME/wlserver_10.3 export ORACLE_HOME=$MW_HOME/Oracle_SOA export DOMAIN_NAME=soa_std_domain export DOMAIN_HOME=$MW_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME cd $DOMAIN_HOME $MW_HOME/Oracle_SOA/common/bin/wlst.sh <<-EOF try:   print("#############################")   print("# Connecting to AdminServer #")   print("#############################")   connect(username='weblogic',password='welcome1',url='t3://localhost:7001') except:   print "#########################################"   print "#   Unable to connect to Admin Server   #"   print "# Attempting to connect to Node Manager #"   print "#########################################"   nmConnect(domainName=os.getenv("DOMAIN_NAME")) print "#######################" print "# Stopping BAM Server #" print "#######################" shutdown('bam_server1') print "#######################" print "# Stopping SOA Server #" print "#######################" shutdown('soa_server1') print "#########################" print "# Stopping Admin Server #" print "#########################" shutdown('AdminServer') disconnect() nmDisconnect() EOF Stopping the Node Manager I stopped the node manager by searching for the java node manager process using the ps command and then killing that process. echo "#########################" echo "# Stopping Node Manager #" echo "#########################" kill -9 `ps -ef | grep java | grep NodeManager |  awk '{print $2;}'` echo "#####################" echo "# SOA Suite Stopped #" echo "#####################" read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Stopping the Database Again my script for shutting down the database is the reverse of my start script.  It is available here.  The only change needed might be to the database name. #!/bin/sh echo "##############################" echo "# Setting Oracle Environment #" echo "##############################" . oraenv <<-EOF orcl EOF echo "######################" echo "# Stopping dbConsole #" echo "######################" emctl stop dbconsole echo "#####################" echo "# Stopping Listener #" echo "#####################" lsnrctl stop echo "#####################" echo "# Stopping Database #" echo "#####################" sqlplus / as sysdba <<-EOF shutdown immediate exit EOF read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Cleaning Up Cleaning SOA Suite I often run tests and want to clean up all the log files.  The following script (available here) does this for the WebLogic servers in a given domain on a machine.  After setting the domain I just remove all files under the servers logs directories.  It also cleans up the log files I created with my startup scripts.  These scripts could be enhanced to copy off the log files if you needed them but in my test environments I don’t need them and would prefer to reclaim the disk space. #!/bin/sh echo "###########################" echo "# Setting SOA Environment #" echo "###########################" export MW_HOME=~oracle/Middleware11gPS1 export WL_HOME=$MW_HOME/wlserver_10.3 export ORACLE_HOME=$MW_HOME/Oracle_SOA export DOMAIN_NAME=soa_std_domain export DOMAIN_HOME=$MW_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME echo "##########################" echo "# Cleaning SOA Log Files #" echo "##########################" cd $DOMAIN_HOME rm -Rf logs/* servers/*/logs/* read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Cleaning Database I also created a script to clean up the dump files of an Oracle database instance and also the EM log files (available here).  This relies on the machine name being correct as the EM log files are stored in a directory that is based on the hostname and the Oracle SID. #!/bin/sh echo "##############################" echo "# Setting Oracle Environment #" echo "##############################" . oraenv <<-EOF orcl EOF echo "#############################" echo "# Cleaning Oracle Log Files #" echo "#############################" rm -Rf $ORACLE_BASE/admin/$ORACLE_SID/*dump/* rm -Rf $ORACLE_HOME/`hostname`_$ORACLE_SID/sysman/log/* read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Summary Hope you find the above scripts useful.  They certainly stop me hanging around waiting for things to happen on my test machine and make it easy to run a test, change parameters, bounce the SOA Suite and clean the logs between runs so I can see exactly what is happening. Now I need to get that mower started…

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• Building The Right SharePoint Team For Your Organization

  - by Mark Rackley

  I see the question posted fairly often asking what kind SharePoint team an organization should have. How many people do I need? What roles do I need to fill? What is best for my organization? Well, just like every other answer in SharePoint, the correct answer is “it depends”. Do you ever get sick of hearing that??? I know I do… So, let me give you my thoughts and opinions based upon my experience and what I’ve seen and let you come to your own conclusions. What are the possible SharePoint roles? I guess the first thing you need to understand are the different roles that exist in SharePoint (and their are LOTS). Remember, SharePoint is a massive beast and you will NOT find one person who can do it all. If you are hoping to find that person you will be sorely disappointed. For the most part this is true in SharePoint 2007 and 2010. However, generally things are improved in 2010 and easier for junior individuals to grasp. SharePoint Administrator The absolutely positively only role that you should not be without no matter the size of your organization or SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint administrator. These guys are essential to keeping things running and figuring out what’s wrong when things aren’t running well. These unsung heroes do more before 10 am than I do all day. The bad thing is, when these guys are awesome, you don’t even know they exist because everything is running so smoothly. You should definitely invest some time and money here to make sure you have some competent if not rockstar help. You need an admin who truly loves SharePoint and will go that extra mile when necessary. Let me give you a real world example of what I’m talking about: We have a rockstar admin… and I’m sure she’s sick of my throwing her name around so she’ll just have to live with remaining anonymous in this post… sorry Lori… Anyway! A couple of weeks ago our Server teams came to us and said Hi Lori, I’m finalizing the MOSS servers and doing updates that require a restart; can I restart them? Seems like a harmless request from your server team does it not? Sure, go ahead and apply the patches and reboot during our scheduled maintenance window. No problem? right? Sounded fair to me… but no…. not to our fearless SharePoint admin… I need a complete list of patches that will be applied. There is an update that is out there that will break SharePoint… KB973917 is the patch that has been shown to cause issues. What? You mean Microsoft released a patch that would actually adversely affect SharePoint? If we did NOT have a rockstar admin, our server team would have applied these patches and then when some problem occurred in SharePoint we’d have to go through the fun task of tracking down exactly what caused the issue and resolve it. How much time would that have taken? If you have a junior SharePoint admin or an admin who’s not out there staying on top of what’s going on you could have spent days tracking down something so simple as applying a patch you should not have applied. I will even go as far to say the only SharePoint rockstar you NEED in your organization is a SharePoint admin. You can always outsource really complicated development projects or bring in a rockstar contractor every now and then to make sure you aren’t way off track in other areas. For your day-to-day sanity and to keep SharePoint running smoothly, you need an awesome Admin. Some rockstars in this category are: Ben Curry, Mike Watson, Joel Oleson, Todd Klindt, Shane Young, John Ferringer, Sean McDonough, and of course Lori Gowin. SharePoint Developer Another essential role for your SharePoint deployment is a SharePoint developer. Things do start to get a little hazy here and there are many flavors of “developers”. Are you writing custom code? using SharePoint Designer? What about SharePoint Branding?  Are all of these considered developers? I would say yes. Are they interchangeable? I’d say no. Development in SharePoint is such a large beast in itself. I would say that it’s not so large that you can’t know it all well, but it is so large that there are many people who specialize in one particular category. If you are lucky enough to have someone on staff who knows it all well, you better make sure they are well taken care of because those guys are ready-made to move over to a consulting role and charge you 3 times what you are probably paying them. :) Some of the all-around rockstars are Eric Shupps, Andrew Connell (go Razorbacks), Rob Foster, Paul Schaeflein, and Todd Bleeker SharePoint Power User/No-Code Solutions Developer These SharePoint Swiss Army Knives are essential for quick wins in your organization. These people can twist the out-of-the-box functionality to make it do things you would not even imagine. Give these guys SharePoint Designer, jQuery, InfoPath, and a little time and they will create views, dashboards, and KPI’s that will blow your mind away and give your execs the “wow” they are looking for. Not only can they deliver that wow factor, but they can mashup, merge, and really help make your SharePoint application usable and deliver an overall better user experience. Before you hand off a project to your SharePoint Custom Code developer, let one of these rockstars look at it and show you what they can do (in probably less time). I would say the second most important role you can fill in your organization is one of these guys. Rockstars in this category are Christina Wheeler, Laura Rogers, Jennifer Mason, and Mark Miller SharePoint Developer – Custom Code If you want to really integrate SharePoint into your legacy systems, or really twist it and make it bend to your will, you are going to have to open up Visual Studio and write some custom code.  Remember, SharePoint is essentially just a big, huge, ginormous .NET application, so you CAN write code to make it do ANYTHING, but do you really want to spend the time and effort to do so? At some point with every other form of SharePoint development you are going to run into SOME limitation (SPD Workflows is the big one that comes to mind). If you truly want to knock down all the walls then custom development is the way to go. PLEASE keep in mind when you are looking for a custom code developer that a .NET developer does NOT equal a SharePoint developer. Just SOME of the things these guys write are: Custom Workflows Custom Web Parts Web Service functionality Import data from legacy systems Export data to legacy systems Custom Actions Event Receivers Service Applications (2010) These guys are also the ones generally responsible for packaging everything up into solution packages (you are doing that, right?). Rockstars in this category are Phil Wicklund, Christina Wheeler, Geoff Varosky, and Brian Jackett. SharePoint Branding “But it LOOKS like SharePoint!” Somebody call the WAAAAAAAAAAAAHMbulance…   Themes, Master Pages, Page Layouts, Zones, and over 2000 styles in CSS.. these guys not only have to be comfortable with all of SharePoint’s quirks and pain points when branding, but they have to know it TWICE for publishing and non-publishing sites.  Not only that, but these guys really need to have an eye for graphic design and be able to translate the ramblings of business into something visually stunning. They also have to be comfortable with XSLT, XML, and be able to hand off what they do to your custom developers for them to package as solutions (which you are doing, right?). These rockstars include Heater Waterman, Cathy Dew, and Marcy Kellar SharePoint Architect SharePoint Architects are generally SharePoint Admins or Developers who have moved into more of a BA role? Is that fair to say? These guys really have a grasp and understanding for what SharePoint IS and what it can do. These guys help you structure your farms to meet your needs and help you design your applications the correct way. It’s always a good idea to bring in a rockstar SharePoint Architect to do a sanity check and make sure you aren’t doing anything stupid.  Most organizations probably do not have a rockstar architect on staff. These guys are generally brought in at the deployment of a farm, upgrade of a farm, or for large development projects. I personally also find architects very useful for sitting down with the business to translate their needs into what SharePoint can do. A good architect will be able to pick out what can be done out-of-the-box and what has to be custom built and hand those requirements to the development Staff. Architects can generally fill in as an admin or a developer when needed. Some rockstar architects are Rick Taylor, Dan Usher, Bill English, Spence Harbar, Neil Hodgkins, Eric Harlan, and Bjørn Furuknap. Other Roles / Specialties On top of all these other roles you also get these people who specialize in things like Reporting, BDC (BCS in 2010), Search, Performance, Security, Project Management, etc... etc... etc... Again, most organizations will not have one of these gurus on staff, they’ll just pay out the nose for them when they need them. :) SharePoint End User Everyone else in your organization that touches SharePoint falls into this category. What they actually DO in SharePoint is determined by your governance and what permissions you give these guys. Hopefully you have these guys on a fairly short leash and are NOT giving them access to tools like SharePoint Designer. Sadly end users are the ones who truly make your deployment a success by using it, but are also your biggest enemy in breaking it.  :)  We love you guys… really!!! Okay, all that’s fine and dandy, but what should MY SharePoint team look like? It depends! Okay… Are you just doing out of the box team sites with no custom development? Then you are probably fine with a great Admin team and a great No-Code Solution Development team. How many people do you need? Depends on how busy you can keep them. Sorry, can’t answer the question about numbers without knowing your specific needs. I can just tell you who you MIGHT need and what they will do for you. I’ll leave you with what my ideal SharePoint Team would look like for a particular scenario: Farm / Organization Structure Dev, QA, and 2 Production Farms. 5000 – 10000 Users Custom Development and Integration with legacy systems Team Sites, My Sites, Intranet, Document libraries and overall company collaboration Team Rockstar SharePoint Administrator 2-3 junior SharePoint Administrators SharePoint Architect / Lead Developer 2 Power User / No-Code Solution Developers 2-3 Custom Code developers Branding expert With a team of that size and skill set, they should be able to keep a substantial SharePoint deployment running smoothly and meet your business needs. This does NOT mean that you would not need to bring in contract help from time to time when you need an uber specialist in one area. Also, this team assumes there will be ongoing development for the life of your SharePoint farm. If you are just going to be doing sporadic custom development, it might make sense to partner with an awesome firm that specializes in that sort of work (I can give you the name of a couple if you are interested).  Again though, the size of your team depends on the number of requests you are receiving and how much active deployment you are doing. So, don’t bring in a team that looks like this and then yell at me because they are sitting around with nothing to do or are so overwhelmed that nothing is getting done. I do URGE you to take the proper time to asses your needs and determine what team is BEST for your organization. Also, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not skimp on the talent. When it comes to SharePoint you really do get what you pay for when it comes to employees, contractors, and software.  SharePoint can become absolutely critical to your business and because you skimped on hiring a developer he created a web part that brings down the farm because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or you hire an admin who thinks it’s fine to stick everything in the same Content Database and then can’t figure out why people are complaining. SharePoint can be an enormous blessing to an organization or it’s biggest curse. Spend the time and money to do it right, or be prepared to spending even more time and money later to fix it.

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• Insert Record by Drag & Drop from ADF Tree to ADF Tree Table

  - by arul.wilson(at)oracle.com

  If you want to create record based on the values Dragged from ADF Tree and Dropped on a ADF Tree Table, then here you go.UseCase DescriptionUser Drags a tree node from ADF Tree and Drops it on a ADF Tree Table node. A new row gets added in the Tree Table based on the source tree node, subsequently a record gets added to the database table on which Tree table in based on.Following description helps to achieve this using ADF BC.Run the DragDropSchema.sql to create required tables.Create Business Components from tables (PRODUCTS, COMPONENTS, SUB_COMPONENTS, USERS, USER_COMPONENTS) created above.Add custom method to App Module Impl, this method will be used to insert record from view layer.   public String createUserComponents(String p_bugdbId, String p_productId, String p_componentId, String p_subComponentId){    Row newUserComponentsRow = this.getUserComponentsView1().createRow();    try {      newUserComponentsRow.setAttribute("Bugdbid", p_bugdbId);      newUserComponentsRow.setAttribute("ProductId", new oracle.jbo.domain.Number(p_productId));      newUserComponentsRow.setAttribute("Component1", p_componentId);      newUserComponentsRow.setAttribute("SubComponent", p_subComponentId);    } catch (Exception e) {        e.printStackTrace();        return "Failure";    }        return "Success";  }Expose this method to client interface.To display the root node we need a custom VO which can be achieved using below query. SELECT Users.ACTIVE, Users.BUGDB_ID, Users.EMAIL, Users.FIRSTNAME, Users.GLOBAL_ID, Users.LASTNAME, Users.MANAGER_ID, Users.MANAGER_PRIVILEGEFROM USERS UsersWHERE Users.MANAGER_ID is NULLCreate VL between UsersView and UsersRootNodeView VOs.Drop ProductsView from DC as ADF Tree to jspx page.Add Tree Level Rule based on ComponentsView and SubComponentsView.Drop UsersRootNodeView as ADF Tree TableAdd Tree Level Rules based on UserComponentsView and UsersView.Add DragSource to ADF Tree and CollectionDropTarget to ADF Tree Table respectively.Bind CollectionDropTarget's DropTarget to backing bean and implement method of signature DnDAction (DropEvent), this method gets invoked when Tree Table encounters a drop action, here details required for creating new record are captured from the drag source and passed to 'createUserComponents' method. public DnDAction onTreeDrop(DropEvent dropEvent) {      String newBugdbId = "";      String msgtxt="";            try {          // Getting the target node bugdb id          Object serverRowKey = dropEvent.getDropSite();          if (serverRowKey != null) {                  //Code for Tree Table as target              String dropcomponent = dropEvent.getDropComponent().toString();              dropcomponent = (String)dropcomponent.subSequence(0, dropcomponent.indexOf("["));              if (dropcomponent.equals("RichTreeTable")){                RichTreeTable richTreeTable = (RichTreeTable)dropEvent.getDropComponent();                richTreeTable.setRowKey(serverRowKey);                int rowIndexTreeTable = richTreeTable.getRowIndex();                //Drop Target Logic                if (((JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)richTreeTable.getRowData(rowIndexTreeTable)).getAttributeValue()==null) {                  //Get Parent                  newBugdbId = (String)((JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)richTreeTable.getRowData(rowIndexTreeTable)).getParent().getAttributeValue();                } else {                  if (isNum(((JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)richTreeTable.getRowData(rowIndexTreeTable)).getAttributeValue().toString())) {                    //Get Parent's parent                              newBugdbId = (String)((JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)richTreeTable.getRowData(rowIndexTreeTable)).getParent().getParent().getAttributeValue();                  } else{                      //Dropped on USER                                          newBugdbId = (String)((JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)richTreeTable.getRowData(rowIndexTreeTable)).getAttributeValue();                  }                  }              }           }                     DataFlavor<RowKeySet> df = DataFlavor.getDataFlavor(RowKeySet.class);          RowKeySet droppedValue = dropEvent.getTransferable().getData(df);            Object[] keys = droppedValue.toArray();          Key componentKey = null;          Key subComponentKey = null;           // binding for createUserComponents method defined in AppModuleImpl class  to insert record in database.                      operationBinding = bindings.getOperationBinding("createUserComponents");            // get the Product, Component, Subcomponent details and insert to UserComponents table.          // loop through the keys if more than one comp/subcomponent is select.                   for (int i = 0; i < keys.length; i++) {                  System.out.println("in for :"+i);              List list = (List)keys[i];                  System.out.println("list "+i+" : "+list);              System.out.println("list size "+list.size());              if (list.size() == 1) {                                // we cannot drag and drop  the highest node !                                msgtxt="You cannot drop Products, please drop Component or SubComponent from the Tree.";                  System.out.println(msgtxt);                                this.showInfoMessage(msgtxt);              } else {                  if (list.size() == 2) {                    // were doing the first branch, in this case all components.                    componentKey = (Key)list.get(1);                    Object[] droppedProdCompValues = componentKey.getAttributeValues();                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_bugdbId",newBugdbId);                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_productId",droppedProdCompValues[0]);                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_componentId",droppedProdCompValues[1]);                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_subComponentId","ALL");                    Object result = operationBinding.execute();              } else {                    subComponentKey = (Key)list.get(2);                    Object[] droppedProdCompSubCompValues = subComponentKey.getAttributeValues();                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_bugdbId",newBugdbId);                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_productId",droppedProdCompSubCompValues[0]);                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_componentId",droppedProdCompSubCompValues[1]);                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_subComponentId",droppedProdCompSubCompValues[2]);                    Object result = operationBinding.execute();                  }                   }            }                        /* this.getCil1().setDisabled(false);            this.getCil1().setPartialSubmit(true); */                      return DnDAction.MOVE;        } catch (Exception ex) {          System.out.println("drop failed with : " + ex.getMessage());          ex.printStackTrace();                  /* this.getCil1().setDisabled(true); */          return DnDAction.NONE;          }    } Run jspx page and drop a Component or Subcomponent from Products Tree to UserComponents Tree Table.

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• Using VLOOKUP in Excel

  - by Mark Virtue

  VLOOKUP is one of Excel’s most useful functions, and it’s also one of the least understood.  In this article, we demystify VLOOKUP by way of a real-life example.  We’ll create a usable Invoice Template for a fictitious company. So what is VLOOKUP?  Well, of course it’s an Excel function.  This article will assume that the reader already has a passing understanding of Excel functions, and can use basic functions such as SUM, AVERAGE, and TODAY.  In its most common usage, VLOOKUP is a database function, meaning that it works with database tables – or more simply, lists of things in an Excel worksheet.  What sort of things?   Well, any sort of thing.  You may have a worksheet that contains a list of employees, or products, or customers, or CDs in your CD collection, or stars in the night sky.  It doesn’t really matter. Here’s an example of a list, or database.  In this case it’s a list of products that our fictitious company sells: Usually lists like this have some sort of unique identifier for each item in the list.  In this case, the unique identifier is in the “Item Code” column.  Note:  For the VLOOKUP function to work with a database/list, that list must have a column containing the unique identifier (or “key”, or “ID”), and that column must be the first column in the table.  Our sample database above satisfies this criterion. The hardest part of using VLOOKUP is understanding exactly what it’s for.  So let’s see if we can get that clear first: VLOOKUP retrieves information from a database/list based on a supplied instance of the unique identifier. Put another way, if you put the VLOOKUP function into a cell and pass it one of the unique identifiers from your database, it will return you one of the pieces of information associated with that unique identifier.  In the example above, you would pass VLOOKUP an item code, and it would return to you either the corresponding item’s description, its price, or its availability (its “In stock” quantity).  Which of these pieces of information will it pass you back?  Well, you get to decide this when you’re creating the formula. If all you need is one piece of information from the database, it would be a lot of trouble to go to to construct a formula with a VLOOKUP function in it.  Typically you would use this sort of functionality in a reusable spreadsheet, such as a template.  Each time someone enters a valid item code, the system would retrieve all the necessary information about the corresponding item. Let’s create an example of this:  An Invoice Template that we can reuse over and over in our fictitious company. First we start Excel… …and we create ourselves a blank invoice: This is how it’s going to work:  The person using the invoice template will fill in a series of item codes in column “A”, and the system will retrieve each item’s description and price, which will be used to calculate the line total for each item (assuming we enter a valid quantity). For the purposes of keeping this example simple, we will locate the product database on a separate sheet in the same workbook: In reality, it’s more likely that the product database would be located in a separate workbook.  It makes little difference to the VLOOKUP function, which doesn’t really care if the database is located on the same sheet, a different sheet, or a completely different workbook. In order to test the VLOOKUP formula we’re about to write, we first enter a valid item code into cell A11: Next, we move the active cell to the cell in which we want information retrieved from the database by VLOOKUP to be stored.  Interestingly, this is the step that most people get wrong.  To explain further:  We are about to create a VLOOKUP formula that will retrieve the description that corresponds to the item code in cell A11.  Where do we want this description put when we get it?  In cell B11, of course.  So that’s where we write the VLOOKUP formula – in cell B11. Select cell B11: We need to locate the list of all available functions that Excel has to offer, so that we can choose VLOOKUP and get some assistance in completing the formula.  This is found by first clicking the Formulas tab, and then clicking Insert Function:   A box appears that allows us to select any of the functions available in Excel.  To find the one we’re looking for, we could type a search term like “lookup” (because the function we’re interested in is a lookup function).  The system would return us a list of all lookup-related functions in Excel.  VLOOKUP is the second one in the list.  Select it an click OK… The Function Arguments box appears, prompting us for all the arguments (or parameters) needed in order to complete the VLOOKUP function.  You can think of this box as the function is asking us the following questions: What unique identifier are you looking up in the database? Where is the database? Which piece of information from the database, associated with the unique identifier, do you wish to have retrieved for you? The first three arguments are shown in bold, indicating that they are mandatory arguments (the VLOOKUP function is incomplete without them and will not return a valid value).  The fourth argument is not bold, meaning that it’s optional:   We will complete the arguments in order, top to bottom. The first argument we need to complete is the Lookup_value argument.  The function needs us to tell it where to find the unique identifier (the item code in this case) that it should be retuning the description of.  We must select the item code we entered earlier (in A11). Click on the selector icon to the right of the first argument: Then click once on the cell containing the item code (A11), and press Enter: The value of “A11” is inserted into the first argument. Now we need to enter a value for the Table_array argument.  In other words, we need to tell VLOOKUP where to find the database/list.  Click on the selector icon next to the second argument: Now locate the database/list and select the entire list – not including the header line.  The database is located on a separate worksheet, so we first click on that worksheet tab: Next we select the entire database, not including the header line: …and press Enter.  The range of cells that represents the database (in this case “’Product Database’!A2:D7”) is entered automatically for us into the second argument. Now we need to enter the third argument, Col_index_num.  We use this argument to specify to VLOOKUP which piece of information from the database, associate with our item code in A11, we wish to have returned to us.  In this particular example, we wish to have the item’s description returned to us.  If you look on the database worksheet, you’ll notice that the “Description” column is the second column in the database.  This means that we must enter a value of “2” into the Col_index_num box: It is important to note that that we are not entering a “2” here because the “Description” column is in the B column on that worksheet.  If the database happened to start in column K of the worksheet, we would still enter a “2” in this field. Finally, we need to decide whether to enter a value into the final VLOOKUP argument, Range_lookup.  This argument requires either a true or false value, or it should be left blank.  When using VLOOKUP with databases (as is true 90% of the time), then the way to decide what to put in this argument can be thought of as follows: If the first column of the database (the column that contains the unique identifiers) is sorted alphabetically/numerically in ascending order, then it’s possible to enter a value of true into this argument, or leave it blank. If the first column of the database is not sorted, or it’s sorted in descending order, then you must enter a value of false into this argument As the first column of our database is not sorted, we enter false into this argument: That’s it!  We’ve entered all the information required for VLOOKUP to return the value we need.  Click the OK button and notice that the description corresponding to item code “R99245” has been correctly entered into cell B11: The formula that was created for us looks like this: If we enter a different item code into cell A11, we will begin to see the power of the VLOOKUP function:  The description cell changes to match the new item code: We can perform a similar set of steps to get the item’s price returned into cell E11.  Note that the new formula must be created in cell E11.  The result will look like this: …and the formula will look like this: Note that the only difference between the two formulae is the third argument (Col_index_num) has changed from a “2” to a “3” (because we want data retrieved from the 3rd column in the database). If we decided to buy 2 of these items, we would enter a “2” into cell D11.  We would then enter a simple formula into cell F11 to get the line total: =D11*E11 …which looks like this… Completing the Invoice Template We’ve learned a lot about VLOOKUP so far.  In fact, we’ve learned all we’re going to learn in this article.  It’s important to note that VLOOKUP can be used in other circumstances besides databases.  This is less common, and may be covered in future How-To Geek articles. Our invoice template is not yet complete.  In order to complete it, we would do the following: We would remove the sample item code from cell A11 and the “2” from cell D11.  This will cause our newly created VLOOKUP formulae to display error messages: We can remedy this by judicious use of Excel’s IF() and ISBLANK() functions.  We change our formula from this…       =VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE) …to this…       =IF(ISBLANK(A11),”",VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE)) We would copy the formulas in cells B11, E11 and F11 down to the remainder of the item rows of the invoice.  Note that if we do this, the resulting formulas will no longer correctly refer to the database table.  We could fix this by changing the cell references for the database to absolute cell references.  Alternatively – and even better – we could create a range name for the entire product database (such as “Products”), and use this range name instead of the cell references.  The formula would change from this…       =IF(ISBLANK(A11),”",VLOOKUP(A11,’Product Database’!A2:D7,2,FALSE)) …to this…       =IF(ISBLANK(A11),”",VLOOKUP(A11,Products,2,FALSE)) …and then copy the formulas down to the rest of the invoice item rows. We would probably “lock” the cells that contain our formulae (or rather unlock the other cells), and then protect the worksheet, in order to ensure that our carefully constructed formulae are not accidentally overwritten when someone comes to fill in the invoice. We would save the file as a template, so that it could be reused by everyone in our company If we were feeling really clever, we would create a database of all our customers in another worksheet, and then use the customer ID entered in cell F5 to automatically fill in the customer’s name and address in cells B6, B7 and B8. If you would like to practice with VLOOKUP, or simply see our resulting Invoice Template, it can be downloaded from here. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make Excel 2007 Print Gridlines In Workbook FileMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 FormatImport Microsoft Access Data Into ExcelChange the Default Font in Excel 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Classic Cinema Online offers 100’s of OnDemand Movies OutSync will Sync Photos of your Friends on Facebook and Outlook Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver Optimize your computer the Microsoft way Stormpulse provides slick, real time weather data

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• How to find and fix performance problems in ORM powered applications

  - by FransBouma

  Once in a while we get requests about how to fix performance problems with our framework. As it comes down to following the same steps and looking into the same things every single time, I decided to write a blogpost about it instead, so more people can learn from this and solve performance problems in their O/R mapper powered applications. In some parts it's focused on LLBLGen Pro but it's also usable for other O/R mapping frameworks, as the vast majority of performance problems in O/R mapper powered applications are not specific for a certain O/R mapper framework. Too often, the developer looks at the wrong part of the application, trying to fix what isn't a problem in that part, and getting frustrated that 'things are so slow with <insert your favorite framework X here>'. I'm in the O/R mapper business for a long time now (almost 10 years, full time) and as it's a small world, we O/R mapper developers know almost all tricks to pull off by now: we all know what to do to make task ABC faster and what compromises (because there are almost always compromises) to deal with if we decide to make ABC faster that way. Some O/R mapper frameworks are faster in X, others in Y, but you can be sure the difference is mainly a result of a compromise some developers are willing to deal with and others aren't. That's why the O/R mapper frameworks on the market today are different in many ways, even though they all fetch and save entities from and to a database. I'm not suggesting there's no room for improvement in today's O/R mapper frameworks, there always is, but it's not a matter of 'the slowness of the application is caused by the O/R mapper' anymore. Perhaps query generation can be optimized a bit here, row materialization can be optimized a bit there, but it's mainly coming down to milliseconds. Still worth it if you're a framework developer, but it's not much compared to the time spend inside databases and in user code: if a complete fetch takes 40ms or 50ms (from call to entity object collection), it won't make a difference for your application as that 10ms difference won't be noticed. That's why it's very important to find the real locations of the problems so developers can fix them properly and don't get frustrated because their quest to get a fast, performing application failed. Performance tuning basics and rules Finding and fixing performance problems in any application is a strict procedure with four prescribed steps: isolate, analyze, interpret and fix, in that order. It's key that you don't skip a step nor make assumptions: these steps help you find the reason of a problem which seems to be there, and how to fix it or leave it as-is. Skipping a step, or when you assume things will be bad/slow without doing analysis will lead to the path of premature optimization and won't actually solve your problems, only create new ones. The most important rule of finding and fixing performance problems in software is that you have to understand what 'performance problem' actually means. Most developers will say "when a piece of software / code is slow, you have a performance problem". But is that actually the case? If I write a Linq query which will aggregate, group and sort 5 million rows from several tables to produce a resultset of 10 rows, it might take more than a couple of milliseconds before that resultset is ready to be consumed by other logic. If I solely look at the Linq query, the code consuming the resultset of the 10 rows and then look at the time it takes to complete the whole procedure, it will appear to me to be slow: all that time taken to produce and consume 10 rows? But if you look closer, if you analyze and interpret the situation, you'll see it does a tremendous amount of work, and in that light it might even be extremely fast. With every performance problem you encounter, always do realize that what you're trying to solve is perhaps not a technical problem at all, but a perception problem. The second most important rule you have to understand is based on the old saying "Penny wise, Pound Foolish": the part which takes e.g. 5% of the total time T for a given task isn't worth optimizing if you have another part which takes a much larger part of the total time T for that same given task. Optimizing parts which are relatively insignificant for the total time taken is not going to bring you better results overall, even if you totally optimize that part away. This is the core reason why analysis of the complete set of application parts which participate in a given task is key to being successful in solving performance problems: No analysis -> no problem -> no solution. One warning up front: hunting for performance will always include making compromises. Fast software can be made maintainable, but if you want to squeeze as much performance out of your software, you will inevitably be faced with the dilemma of compromising one or more from the group {readability, maintainability, features} for the extra performance you think you'll gain. It's then up to you to decide whether it's worth it. In almost all cases it's not. The reason for this is simple: the vast majority of performance problems can be solved by implementing the proper algorithms, the ones with proven Big O-characteristics so you know the performance you'll get plus you know the algorithm will work. The time taken by the algorithm implementing code is inevitable: you already implemented the best algorithm. You might find some optimizations on the technical level but in general these are minor. Let's look at the four steps to see how they guide us through the quest to find and fix performance problems. Isolate The first thing you need to do is to isolate the areas in your application which are assumed to be slow. For example, if your application is a web application and a given page is taking several seconds or even minutes to load, it's a good candidate to check out. It's important to start with the isolate step because it allows you to focus on a single code path per area with a clear begin and end and ignore the rest. The rest of the steps are taken per identified problematic area. Keep in mind that isolation focuses on tasks in an application, not code snippets. A task is something that's started in your application by either another task or the user, or another program, and has a beginning and an end. You can see a task as a piece of functionality offered by your application.  Analyze Once you've determined the problem areas, you have to perform analysis on the code paths of each area, to see where the performance problems occur and which areas are not the problem. This is a multi-layered effort: an application which uses an O/R mapper typically consists of multiple parts: there's likely some kind of interface (web, webservice, windows etc.), a part which controls the interface and business logic, the O/R mapper part and the RDBMS, all connected with either a network or inter-process connections provided by the OS or other means. Each of these parts, including the connectivity plumbing, eat up a part of the total time it takes to complete a task, e.g. load a webpage with all orders of a given customer X. To understand which parts participate in the task / area we're investigating and how much they contribute to the total time taken to complete the task, analysis of each participating task is essential. Start with the code you wrote which starts the task, analyze the code and track the path it follows through your application. What does the code do along the way, verify whether it's correct or not. Analyze whether you have implemented the right algorithms in your code for this particular area. Remember we're looking at one area at a time, which means we're ignoring all other code paths, just the code path of the current problematic area, from begin to end and back. Don't dig in and start optimizing at the code level just yet. We're just analyzing. If your analysis reveals big architectural stupidity, it's perhaps a good idea to rethink the architecture at this point. For the rest, we're analyzing which means we collect data about what could be wrong, for each participating part of the complete application. Reviewing the code you wrote is a good tool to get deeper understanding of what is going on for a given task but ultimately it lacks precision and overview what really happens: humans aren't good code interpreters, computers are. We therefore need to utilize tools to get deeper understanding about which parts contribute how much time to the total task, triggered by which other parts and for example how many times are they called. There are two different kind of tools which are necessary: .NET profilers and O/R mapper / RDBMS profilers. .NET profiling .NET profilers (e.g. dotTrace by JetBrains or Ants by Red Gate software) show exactly which pieces of code are called, how many times they're called, and the time it took to run that piece of code, at the method level and sometimes even at the line level. The .NET profilers are essential tools for understanding whether the time taken to complete a given task / area in your application is consumed by .NET code, where exactly in your code, the path to that code, how many times that code was called by other code and thus reveals where hotspots are located: the areas where a solution can be found. Importantly, they also reveal which areas can be left alone: remember our penny wise pound foolish saying: if a profiler reveals that a group of methods are fast, or don't contribute much to the total time taken for a given task, ignore them. Even if the code in them is perhaps complex and looks like a candidate for optimization: you can work all day on that, it won't matter.  As we're focusing on a single area of the application, it's best to start profiling right before you actually activate the task/area. Most .NET profilers support this by starting the application without starting the profiling procedure just yet. You navigate to the particular part which is slow, start profiling in the profiler, in your application you perform the actions which are considered slow, and afterwards you get a snapshot in the profiler. The snapshot contains the data collected by the profiler during the slow action, so most data is produced by code in the area to investigate. This is important, because it allows you to stay focused on a single area. O/R mapper and RDBMS profiling .NET profilers give you a good insight in the .NET side of things, but not in the RDBMS side of the application. As this article is about O/R mapper powered applications, we're also looking at databases, and the software making it possible to consume the database in your application: the O/R mapper. To understand which parts of the O/R mapper and database participate how much to the total time taken for task T, we need different tools. There are two kind of tools focusing on O/R mappers and database performance profiling: O/R mapper profilers and RDBMS profilers. For O/R mapper profilers, you can look at LLBLGen Prof by hibernating rhinos or the Linq to Sql/LLBLGen Pro profiler by Huagati. Hibernating rhinos also have profilers for other O/R mappers like NHibernate (NHProf) and Entity Framework (EFProf) and work the same as LLBLGen Prof. For RDBMS profilers, you have to look whether the RDBMS vendor has a profiler. For example for SQL Server, the profiler is shipped with SQL Server, for Oracle it's build into the RDBMS, however there are also 3rd party tools. Which tool you're using isn't really important, what's important is that you get insight in which queries are executed during the task / area we're currently focused on and how long they took. Here, the O/R mapper profilers have an advantage as they collect the time it took to execute the query from the application's perspective so they also collect the time it took to transport data across the network. This is important because a query which returns a massive resultset or a resultset with large blob/clob/ntext/image fields takes more time to get transported across the network than a small resultset and a database profiler doesn't take this into account most of the time. Another tool to use in this case, which is more low level and not all O/R mappers support it (though LLBLGen Pro and NHibernate as well do) is tracing: most O/R mappers offer some form of tracing or logging system which you can use to collect the SQL generated and executed and often also other activity behind the scenes. While tracing can produce a tremendous amount of data in some cases, it also gives insight in what's going on. Interpret After we've completed the analysis step it's time to look at the data we've collected. We've done code reviews to see whether we've done anything stupid and which parts actually take place and if the proper algorithms have been implemented. We've done .NET profiling to see which parts are choke points and how much time they contribute to the total time taken to complete the task we're investigating. We've performed O/R mapper profiling and RDBMS profiling to see which queries were executed during the task, how many queries were generated and executed and how long they took to complete, including network transportation. All this data reveals two things: which parts are big contributors to the total time taken and which parts are irrelevant. Both aspects are very important. The parts which are irrelevant (i.e. don't contribute significantly to the total time taken) can be ignored from now on, we won't look at them. The parts which contribute a lot to the total time taken are important to look at. We now have to first look at the .NET profiler results, to see whether the time taken is consumed in our own code, in .NET framework code, in the O/R mapper itself or somewhere else. For example if most of the time is consumed by DbCommand.ExecuteReader, the time it took to complete the task is depending on the time the data is fetched from the database. If there was just 1 query executed, according to tracing or O/R mapper profilers / RDBMS profilers, check whether that query is optimal, uses indexes or has to deal with a lot of data. Interpret means that you follow the path from begin to end through the data collected and determine where, along the path, the most time is contributed. It also means that you have to check whether this was expected or is totally unexpected. My previous example of the 10 row resultset of a query which groups millions of rows will likely reveal that a long time is spend inside the database and almost no time is spend in the .NET code, meaning the RDBMS part contributes the most to the total time taken, the rest is compared to that time, irrelevant. Considering the vastness of the source data set, it's expected this will take some time. However, does it need tweaking? Perhaps all possible tweaks are already in place. In the interpret step you then have to decide that further action in this area is necessary or not, based on what the analysis results show: if the analysis results were unexpected and in the area where the most time is contributed to the total time taken is room for improvement, action should be taken. If not, you can only accept the situation and move on. In all cases, document your decision together with the analysis you've done. If you decide that the perceived performance problem is actually expected due to the nature of the task performed, it's essential that in the future when someone else looks at the application and starts asking questions you can answer them properly and new analysis is only necessary if situations changed. Fix After interpreting the analysis results you've concluded that some areas need adjustment. This is the fix step: you're actively correcting the performance problem with proper action targeted at the real cause. In many cases related to O/R mapper powered applications it means you'll use different features of the O/R mapper to achieve the same goal, or apply optimizations at the RDBMS level. It could also mean you apply caching inside your application (compromise memory consumption over performance) to avoid unnecessary re-querying data and re-consuming the results. After applying a change, it's key you re-do the analysis and interpretation steps: compare the results and expectations with what you had before, to see whether your actions had any effect or whether it moved the problem to a different part of the application. Don't fall into the trap to do partly analysis: do the full analysis again: .NET profiling and O/R mapper / RDBMS profiling. It might very well be that the changes you've made make one part faster but another part significantly slower, in such a way that the overall problem hasn't changed at all. Performance tuning is dealing with compromises and making choices: to use one feature over the other, to accept a higher memory footprint, to go away from the strict-OO path and execute queries directly onto the RDBMS, these are choices and compromises which will cross your path if you want to fix performance problems with respect to O/R mappers or data-access and databases in general. In most cases it's not a big issue: alternatives are often good choices too and the compromises aren't that hard to deal with. What is important is that you document why you made a choice, a compromise: which analysis data, which interpretation led you to the choice made. This is key for good maintainability in the years to come. Most common performance problems with O/R mappers Below is an incomplete list of common performance problems related to data-access / O/R mappers / RDBMS code. It will help you with fixing the hotspots you found in the interpretation step. SELECT N+1: (Lazy-loading specific). Lazy loading triggered performance bottlenecks. Consider a list of Orders bound to a grid. You have a Field mapped onto a related field in Order, Customer.CompanyName. Showing this column in the grid will make the grid fetch (indirectly) for each row the Customer row. This means you'll get for the single list not 1 query (for the orders) but 1+(the number of orders shown) queries. To solve this: use eager loading using a prefetch path to fetch the customers with the orders. SELECT N+1 is easy to spot with an O/R mapper profiler or RDBMS profiler: if you see a lot of identical queries executed at once, you have this problem. Prefetch paths using many path nodes or sorting, or limiting. Eager loading problem. Prefetch paths can help with performance, but as 1 query is fetched per node, it can be the number of data fetched in a child node is bigger than you think. Also consider that data in every node is merged on the client within the parent. This is fast, but it also can take some time if you fetch massive amounts of entities. If you keep fetches small, you can use tuning parameters like the ParameterizedPrefetchPathThreshold setting to get more optimal queries. Deep inheritance hierarchies of type Target Per Entity/Type. If you use inheritance of type Target per Entity / Type (each type in the inheritance hierarchy is mapped onto its own table/view), fetches will join subtype- and supertype tables in many cases, which can lead to a lot of performance problems if the hierarchy has many types. With this problem, keep inheritance to a minimum if possible, or switch to a hierarchy of type Target Per Hierarchy, which means all entities in the inheritance hierarchy are mapped onto the same table/view. Of course this has its own set of drawbacks, but it's a compromise you might want to take. Fetching massive amounts of data by fetching large lists of entities. LLBLGen Pro supports paging (and limiting the # of rows returned), which is often key to process through large sets of data. Use paging on the RDBMS if possible (so a query is executed which returns only the rows in the page requested). When using paging in a web application, be sure that you switch server-side paging on on the datasourcecontrol used. In this case, paging on the grid alone is not enough: this can lead to fetching a lot of data which is then loaded into the grid and paged there. Keep note that analyzing queries for paging could lead to the false assumption that paging doesn't occur, e.g. when the query contains a field of type ntext/image/clob/blob and DISTINCT can't be applied while it should have (e.g. due to a join): the datareader will do DISTINCT filtering on the client. this is a little slower but it does perform paging functionality on the data-reader so it won't fetch all rows even if the query suggests it does. Fetch massive amounts of data because blob/clob/ntext/image fields aren't excluded. LLBLGen Pro supports field exclusion for queries. You can exclude fields (also in prefetch paths) per query to avoid fetching all fields of an entity, e.g. when you don't need them for the logic consuming the resultset. Excluding fields can greatly reduce the amount of time spend on data-transport across the network. Use this optimization if you see that there's a big difference between query execution time on the RDBMS and the time reported by the .NET profiler for the ExecuteReader method call. Doing client-side aggregates/scalar calculations by consuming a lot of data. If possible, try to formulate a scalar query or group by query using the projection system or GetScalar functionality of LLBLGen Pro to do data consumption on the RDBMS server. It's far more efficient to process data on the RDBMS server than to first load it all in memory, then traverse the data in-memory to calculate a value. Using .ToList() constructs inside linq queries. It might be you use .ToList() somewhere in a Linq query which makes the query be run partially in-memory. Example: var q = from c in metaData.Customers.ToList() where c.Country=="Norway" select c; This will actually fetch all customers in-memory and do an in-memory filtering, as the linq query is defined on an IEnumerable<T>, and not on the IQueryable<T>. Linq is nice, but it can often be a bit unclear where some parts of a Linq query might run. Fetching all entities to delete into memory first. To delete a set of entities it's rather inefficient to first fetch them all into memory and then delete them one by one. It's more efficient to execute a DELETE FROM ... WHERE query on the database directly to delete the entities in one go. LLBLGen Pro supports this feature, and so do some other O/R mappers. It's not always possible to do this operation in the context of an O/R mapper however: if an O/R mapper relies on a cache, these kind of operations are likely not supported because they make it impossible to track whether an entity is actually removed from the DB and thus can be removed from the cache. Fetching all entities to update with an expression into memory first. Similar to the previous point: it is more efficient to update a set of entities directly with a single UPDATE query using an expression instead of fetching the entities into memory first and then updating the entities in a loop, and afterwards saving them. It might however be a compromise you don't want to take as it is working around the idea of having an object graph in memory which is manipulated and instead makes the code fully aware there's a RDBMS somewhere. Conclusion Performance tuning is almost always about compromises and making choices. It's also about knowing where to look and how the systems in play behave and should behave. The four steps I provided should help you stay focused on the real problem and lead you towards the solution. Knowing how to optimally use the systems participating in your own code (.NET framework, O/R mapper, RDBMS, network/services) is key for success as well as knowing what's going on inside the application you built. I hope you'll find this guide useful in tracking down performance problems and dealing with them in a useful way.  

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• lxc containers hangs after upgrade to 13.10

  - by doug123

  I have 3 lxc containers. They were all working fine on 12.10 and I upgraded the containers with do-release-upgrade on the containers to 13.04 and 13.10 and that worked great. Then I upgraded the host to 13.04 and then 13.10 and now the 3 containers hang with this: >lxc-start -n as1 -l DEBUG -o $(tty) lxc-start 1383145786.513 INFO lxc_start_ui - using rcfile /var/lib/lxc/as1/config lxc-start 1383145786.513 WARN lxc_log - lxc_log_init called with log already initialized lxc-start 1383145786.513 INFO lxc_apparmor - aa_enabled set to 1 lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/2' (5/6) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/13' (7/8) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/14' (9/10) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/15' (11/12) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/17' (13/14) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/18' (15/16) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/19' (17/18) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/20' (19/20) lxc-start 1383145786.514 INFO lxc_conf - tty's configured lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_start - sigchild handler set lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_console - opening /dev/tty for console peer lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_console - using '/dev/tty' as console lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_console - 6242 got SIGWINCH fd 25 lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_console - set winsz dstfd:22 cols:177 rows:53 lxc-start 1383145786.514 INFO lxc_start - 'as1' is initialized lxc-start 1383145786.522 DEBUG lxc_start - Not dropping cap_sys_boot or watching utmp lxc-start 1383145786.524 DEBUG lxc_conf - mac address of host interface 'vethB4L35W' changed to private fe:7c:96:a0:ae:29 lxc-start 1383145786.525 DEBUG lxc_conf - instanciated veth 'vethB4L35W/vethVC61K2', index is '26' lxc-start 1383145786.529 DEBUG lxc_cgroup - cgroup 'memory.limit_in_bytes' set to '20G' lxc-start 1383145786.529 DEBUG lxc_cgroup - cgroup 'cpuset.cpus' set to '12-23' lxc-start 1383145786.529 INFO lxc_cgroup - cgroup has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.555 DEBUG lxc_conf - move 'eth0' to '6249' lxc-start 1383145786.555 INFO lxc_conf - 'as1' hostname has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.575 DEBUG lxc_conf - 'eth0' has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - network has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .44 42 252:0 / / rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/mapper/limitorderbook1-root rw,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .52 44 0:5 / /dev rw,relatime - devtmpfs udev rw,size=32961632k,nr_inodes=8240408,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /dev. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .61 52 0:11 / /dev/pts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime - devpts devpts rw,mode=600,ptmxmode=000 . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /dev/pts. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .68 44 0:15 / /run rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime - tmpfs tmpfs rw,size=6594456k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .69 68 0:18 / /run/lock rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=5120k . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/lock. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .72 68 0:19 / /run/shm rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime - tmpfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/shm. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .73 68 0:21 / /run/user rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=102400k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/user. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .76 44 0:14 / /sys rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - sysfs sysfs rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .77 76 0:16 / /sys/fs/cgroup rw,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=4k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .78 77 0:20 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuset,clone_children . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .79 77 0:23 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpu . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .80 77 0:24 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuacct . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .81 77 0:25 / /sys/fs/cgroup/memory rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,memory . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/memory. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .82 77 0:26 / /sys/fs/cgroup/devices rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,devices . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/devices. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .83 77 0:27 / /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,freezer . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .84 77 0:28 / /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,blkio . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .85 77 0:29 / /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,perf_event . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .94 77 0:30 / /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,hugetlb . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .95 77 0:31 / /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - cgroup systemd rw,name=systemd . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .96 76 0:17 / /sys/fs/fuse/connections rw,relatime - fusectl none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/fuse/connections. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .98 76 0:6 / /sys/kernel/debug rw,relatime - debugfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/kernel/debug. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .101 76 0:10 / /sys/kernel/security rw,relatime - securityfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/kernel/security. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .102 76 0:22 / /sys/fs/pstore rw,relatime - pstore none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/pstore. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .103 44 0:3 / /proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - proc proc rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /proc. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .104 44 9:2 / /data rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/md2 rw,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /data. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .105 44 8:1 / /boot rw,relatime - ext2 /dev/sda1 rw,errors=continue . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /boot. lxc-start 1383145786.576 DEBUG lxc_conf - mounted '/data/srv/lxc/as1' on '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc' lxc-start 1383145786.576 DEBUG lxc_conf - mounted 'none' on '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc//dev/pts', type 'devpts' lxc-start 1383145786.576 DEBUG lxc_conf - mounted 'none' on '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc//proc', type 'proc' lxc-start 1383145786.576 DEBUG lxc_conf - mounted 'none' on '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc//sys', type 'sysfs' lxc-start 1383145786.576 DEBUG lxc_conf - mounted 'none' on '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc//run', type 'tmpfs' lxc-start 1383145786.576 INFO lxc_conf - mount points have been setup lxc-start 1383145786.577 INFO lxc_conf - console has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.577 INFO lxc_conf - 8 tty(s) has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.577 INFO lxc_conf - rootfs path is ./data/srv/lxc/as1., mount is ./usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc. lxc-start 1383145786.577 INFO lxc_apparmor - I am 1, /proc/self points to 1 lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - created '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc/lxc_putold' directory lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - mountpoint for old rootfs is '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc/lxc_putold' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - pivot_root syscall to '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc' successful lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/dev/pts' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/run/lock' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/run/shm' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/run/user' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/cpu' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/memory' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/devices' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/freezer' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/blkio' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/systemd' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/fuse/connections' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/kernel/debug' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/kernel/security' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/pstore' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/proc' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/data' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/boot' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/dev' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/run' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold' lxc-start 1383145786.577 INFO lxc_conf - created new pts instance lxc-start 1383145786.578 DEBUG lxc_conf - drop capability 'sys_boot' (22) lxc-start 1383145786.578 DEBUG lxc_conf - capabilities have been setup lxc-start 1383145786.578 NOTICE lxc_conf - 'as1' is setup. lxc-start 1383145786.578 DEBUG lxc_cgroup - cgroup 'memory.limit_in_bytes' set to '20G' lxc-start 1383145786.578 DEBUG lxc_cgroup - cgroup 'cpuset.cpus' set to '12-23' lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_cgroup - cgroup has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_apparmor - setting up apparmor lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_apparmor - changed apparmor profile to lxc-container-default lxc-start 1383145786.578 NOTICE lxc_start - exec'ing '/sbin/init' lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .15 20 0:14 / /sys rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - sysfs sysfs rw . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .16 20 0:3 / /proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - proc proc rw . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /proc. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .17 20 0:5 / /dev rw,relatime - devtmpfs udev rw,size=32961632k,nr_inodes=8240408,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /dev. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .18 17 0:11 / /dev/pts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime - devpts devpts rw,mode=600,ptmxmode=000 . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /dev/pts. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .19 20 0:15 / /run rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime - tmpfs tmpfs rw,size=6594456k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .20 1 252:0 / / rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/mapper/limitorderbook1-root rw,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .22 15 0:16 / /sys/fs/cgroup rw,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=4k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .23 15 0:17 / /sys/fs/fuse/connections rw,relatime - fusectl none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/fuse/connections. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .24 15 0:6 / /sys/kernel/debug rw,relatime - debugfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/kernel/debug. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .25 15 0:10 / /sys/kernel/security rw,relatime - securityfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/kernel/security. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .26 19 0:18 / /run/lock rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=5120k . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/lock. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .27 19 0:19 / /run/shm rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime - tmpfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/shm. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .28 22 0:20 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuset,clone_children . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .29 19 0:21 / /run/user rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=102400k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/user. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .30 15 0:22 / /sys/fs/pstore rw,relatime - pstore none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/pstore. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .31 22 0:23 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpu . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .32 22 0:24 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuacct . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .33 22 0:25 / /sys/fs/cgroup/memory rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,memory . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/memory. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .34 22 0:26 / /sys/fs/cgroup/devices rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,devices . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/devices. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .35 22 0:27 / /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,freezer . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .36 22 0:28 / /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,blkio . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .37 22 0:29 / /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,perf_event . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .38 22 0:30 / /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,hugetlb . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .39 20 9:2 / /data rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/md2 rw,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /data. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .40 20 8:1 / /boot rw,relatime - ext2 /dev/sda1 rw,errors=continue . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /boot. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .41 22 0:31 / /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - cgroup systemd rw,name=systemd . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd. lxc-start 1383145786.579 NOTICE lxc_start - '/sbin/init' started with pid '6249' lxc-start 1383145786.579 WARN lxc_start - invalid pid for SIGCHLD <4>init: ureadahead main process (7) terminated with status 5 <4>init: console-font main process (94) terminated with status 1 And it will just sit there like that for hours at least. The container becomes pingable but I can't ssh and if I try lxc-console -n as1 I get a blank screen. If I do lxc-stop -n as1 or ^C in the window where it has hung I get: ^CTERM environment variable not set. <4>init: plymouth-upstart-bridge main process (192) terminated with status 1 <4>init: hwclock-save main process (187) terminated with status 70 * Asking all remaining processes to terminate... ...done. * All processes ended within 1 seconds... ...done. * Deactivating swap... ...fail! mount: cannot mount block device /dev/md2 read-only * Will now restart But after 20 minutes it hasn't restarted. Any ideas why these containers are hanging?

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• Building a jQuery Plug-in to make an HTML Table scrollable

  - by Rick Strahl

  Today I got a call from a customer and we were looking over an older application that uses a lot of tables to display financial and other assorted data. The application is mostly meta-data driven with lots of layout formatting automatically driven through meta data rather than through explicit hand coded HTML layouts. One of the problems in this apps are tables that display a non-fixed amount of data. The users of this app don't want to use paging to see more data, but instead want to display overflow data using a scrollbar. Many of the forms are very densely populated, often with multiple data tables that display a few rows of data in the UI at the most. This sort of layout does not lend itself well to paging, but works much better with scrollable data. Unfortunately scrollable tables are not easily created. HTML Tables are mangy beasts as anybody who's done any sort of Web development knows. Tables are finicky when it comes to styling and layout, and they have many funky quirks, especially when it comes to scrolling both of the table rows themselves or even the child columns. There's no built-in way to make tables scroll and to lock headers while you do, and while you can embed a table (or anything really) into a scrolling div with something like this: <div style="position:relative; overflow: hidden; overflow-y: scroll; height: 200px; width: 400px;"> <table id="table" style="width: 100%" class="blackborder" > <thead> <tr class="gridheader"> <th>Column 1</th> <th>Column 2</th> <th>Column 3</th> <th >Column 4</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Column 1 Content</td> <td>Column 2 Content</td> <td>Column 3 Content</td> <td>Column 4 Content</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Column 1 Content</td> <td>Column 2 Content</td> <td>Column 3 Content</td> <td>Column 4 Content</td> </tr> … </tbody> </table> </div> </div> that won't give a very satisfying visual experience: Both the header and body scroll which looks odd. You lose context as soon as the header scrolls off the top and when you reach the bottom of the list the bottom outline of the table shows which also looks off. The the side bar shows all the way down the length of the table yet another visual miscue. In a pinch this will work, but it's ugly. What's out there? Before we go further here you should know that there are a few capable grid plug-ins out there already. Among them: Flexigrid (can work of any table as well as with AJAX data) jQuery Scrollable Table Plug-in (feature similar to what I need but not quite) jqGrid (mostly an Ajax Grid which is very powerful and works very well) But in the end none of them fit the bill of what I needed in this situation. All of these require custom CSS and some of them are fairly complex to restyle. Others are AJAX only or work better with AJAX loaded data. However, I need to actually try (as much as possible) to maintain the original styling of the tables without requiring extensive re-styling. Building the makeTableScrollable() Plug-in To make a table scrollable requires rearranging the table a bit. In the plug-in I built I create two <div> tags and split the table into two: one for the table header and one for the table body. The bottom <div> tag then contains only the table's row data and can be scrolled while the header stays fixed. Using jQuery the basic idea is pretty simple: You create the divs, copy the original table into the bottom, then clone the table, clear all content append the <thead> section, into new table and then copy that table into the second header <div>. Easy as pie, right? Unfortunately it's a bit more complicated than that as it's tricky to get the width of the table right to account for the scrollbar (by adding a small column) and making sure the borders properly line up for the two tables. A lot of style settings have to be made to ensure the table is a fixed size, to remove and reattach borders, to add extra space to allow for the scrollbar and so forth. The end result of my plug-in is a table with a scrollbar. Using the same table I used earlier the result looks like this: To create it, I use the following jQuery plug-in logic to select my table and run the makeTableScrollable() plug-in against the selector: $("#table").makeTableScrollable( { cssClass:"blackborder"} ); Without much further ado, here's the short code for the plug-in: (function ($) { $.fn.makeTableScrollable = function (options) { return this.each(function () { var $table = $(this); var opt = { // height of the table height: "250px", // right padding added to support the scrollbar rightPadding: "10px", // cssclass used for the wrapper div cssClass: "" } $.extend(opt, options); var $thead = $table.find("thead"); var $ths = $thead.find("th"); var id = $table.attr("id"); var cssClass = $table.attr("class"); if (!id) id = "_table_" + new Date().getMilliseconds().ToString(); $table.width("+=" + opt.rightPadding); $table.css("border-width", 0); // add a column to all rows of the table var first = true; $table.find("tr").each(function () { var row = $(this); if (first) { row.append($("<th>").width(opt.rightPadding)); first = false; } else row.append($("<td>").width(opt.rightPadding)); }); // force full sizing on each of the th elemnts $ths.each(function () { var $th = $(this); $th.css("width", $th.width()); }); // Create the table wrapper div var $tblDiv = $("<div>").css({ position: "relative", overflow: "hidden", overflowY: "scroll" }) .addClass(opt.cssClass); var width = $table.width(); $tblDiv.width(width).height(opt.height) .attr("id", id + "_wrapper") .css("border-top", "none"); // Insert before $tblDiv $tblDiv.insertBefore($table); // then move the table into it $table.appendTo($tblDiv); // Clone the div for header var $hdDiv = $tblDiv.clone(); $hdDiv.empty(); var width = $table.width(); $hdDiv.attr("style", "") .css("border-bottom", "none") .width(width) .attr("id", id + "_wrapper_header"); // create a copy of the table and remove all children var $newTable = $($table).clone(); $newTable.empty() .attr("id", $table.attr("id") + "_header"); $thead.appendTo($newTable); $hdDiv.insertBefore($tblDiv); $newTable.appendTo($hdDiv); $table.css("border-width", 0); }); } })(jQuery); Oh sweet spaghetti code :-) The code starts out by dealing the parameters that can be passed in the options object map: height The height of the full table/structure. The height of the outside wrapper container. Defaults to 200px. rightPadding The padding that is added to the right of the table to account for the scrollbar. Creates a column of this width and injects it into the table. If too small the rightmost column might get truncated. if too large the empty column might show. cssClass The CSS class of the wrapping container that appears to wrap the table. If you want a border around your table this class should probably provide it since the plug-in removes the table border. The rest of the code is obtuse, but pretty straight forward. It starts by creating a new column in the table to accommodate the width of the scrollbar and avoid clipping of text in the rightmost column. The width of the columns is explicitly set in the header elements to force the size of the table to be fixed and to provide the same sizing when the THEAD section is moved to a new copied table later. The table wrapper div is created, formatted and the table is moved into it. The new wrapper div is cloned for the header wrapper and configured. Finally the actual table is cloned and cleared of all elements. The original table's THEAD section is then moved into the new table. At last the new table is added to the header <div>, and the header <div> is inserted before the table wrapper <div>. I'm always amazed how easy jQuery makes it to do this sort of re-arranging, and given of what's happening the amount of code is rather small. Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary A word of warning: I make no guarantees about the code above. It's a first cut and I provided this here mainly to demonstrate the concepts of decomposing and reassembling an HTML layout :-) which jQuery makes so nice and easy. I tested this component against the typical scenarios we plan on using it for which are tables that use a few well known styles (or no styling at all). I suspect if you have complex styling on your <table> tag that things might not go so well. If you plan on using this plug-in you might want to minimize your styling of the table tag and defer any border formatting using the class passed in via the cssClass parameter, which ends up on the two wrapper div's that wrap the header and body rows. There's also no explicit support for footers. I rarely if ever use footers (when not using paging that is), so I didn't feel the need to add footer support. However, if you need that it's not difficult to add - the logic is the same as adding the header. The plug-in relies on a well-formatted table that has THEAD and TBODY sections along with TH tags in the header. Note that ASP.NET WebForm DataGrids and GridViews by default do not generate well-formatted table HTML. You can look at my Adding proper THEAD sections to a GridView post for more info on how to get a GridView to render properly. The plug-in has no dependencies other than jQuery. Even with the limitations in mind I hope this might be useful to some of you. I know I've already identified a number of places in my own existing applications where I will be plugging this in almost immediately. Resources Download Sample and Plug-in code Latest version in the West Wind Web & AJAX Toolkit Repository © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in jQuery  HTML  ASP.NET  

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• Ancillary Objects: Separate Debug ELF Files For Solaris

  - by Ali Bahrami

  We introduced a new object ELF object type in Solaris 11 Update 1 called the Ancillary Object. This posting describes them, using material originally written during their development, the PSARC arc case, and the Solaris Linker and Libraries Manual. ELF objects contain allocable sections, which are mapped into memory at runtime, and non-allocable sections, which are present in the file for use by debuggers and observability tools, but which are not mapped or used at runtime. Typically, all of these sections exist within a single object file. Ancillary objects allow them to instead go into a separate file. There are different reasons given for wanting such a feature. One can debate whether the added complexity is worth the benefit, and in most cases it is not. However, one important case stands out — customers with very large 32-bit objects who are not ready or able to make the transition to 64-bits. We have customers who build extremely large 32-bit objects. Historically, the debug sections in these objects have used the stabs format, which is limited, but relatively compact. In recent years, the industry has transitioned to the powerful but verbose DWARF standard. In some cases, the size of these debug sections is large enough to push the total object file size past the fundamental 4GB limit for 32-bit ELF object files. The best, and ultimately only, solution to overly large objects is to transition to 64-bits. However, consider environments where: Hundreds of users may be executing the code on large shared systems. (32-bits use less memory and bus bandwidth, and on sparc runs just as fast as 64-bit code otherwise). Complex finely tuned code, where the original authors may no longer be available. Critical production code, that was expensive to qualify and bring online, and which is otherwise serving its intended purpose without issue. Users in these risk adverse and/or high scale categories have good reasons to push 32-bits objects to the limit before moving on. Ancillary objects offer these users a longer runway. Design The design of ancillary objects is intended to be simple, both to help human understanding when examining elfdump output, and to lower the bar for debuggers such as dbx to support them. The primary and ancillary objects have the same set of section headers, with the same names, in the same order (i.e. each section has the same index in both files). A single added section of type SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY is added to both objects, containing information that allows a debugger to identify and validate both files relative to each other. Given one of these files, the ancillary section allows you to identify the other. Allocable sections go in the primary object, and non-allocable ones go into the ancillary object. A small set of non-allocable objects, notably the symbol table, are copied into both objects. As noted above, most sections are only written to one of the two objects, but both objects have the same section header array. The section header in the file that does not contain the section data is tagged with the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section header flag to indicate its placeholder status. Compiler writers and others who produce objects can set the SUNW_SHF_PRIMARY section header flag to mark non-allocable sections that should go to the primary object rather than the ancillary. If you don't request an ancillary object, the Solaris ELF format is unchanged. Users who don't use ancillary objects do not pay for the feature. This is important, because they exist to serve a small subset of our users, and must not complicate the common case. If you do request an ancillary object, the runtime behavior of the primary object will be the same as that of a normal object. There is no added runtime cost. The primary and ancillary object together represent a logical single object. This is facilitated by the use of a single set of section headers. One can easily imagine a tool that can merge a primary and ancillary object into a single file, or the reverse. (Note that although this is an interesting intellectual exercise, we don't actually supply such a tool because there's little practical benefit above and beyond using ld to create the files). Among the benefits of this approach are: There is no need for per-file symbol tables to reflect the contents of each file. The same symbol table that would be produced for a standard object can be used. The section contents are identical in either case — there is no need to alter data to accommodate multiple files. It is very easy for a debugger to adapt to these new files, and the processing involved can be encapsulated in input/output routines. Most of the existing debugger implementation applies without modification. The limit of a 4GB 32-bit output object is now raised to 4GB of code, and 4GB of debug data. There is also the future possibility (not currently supported) to support multiple ancillary objects, each of which could contain up to 4GB of additional debug data. It must be noted however that the 32-bit DWARF debug format is itself inherently 32-bit limited, as it uses 32-bit offsets between debug sections, so the ability to employ multiple ancillary object files may not turn out to be useful. Using Ancillary Objects (From the Solaris Linker and Libraries Guide) By default, objects contain both allocable and non-allocable sections. Allocable sections are the sections that contain executable code and the data needed by that code at runtime. Non-allocable sections contain supplemental information that is not required to execute an object at runtime. These sections support the operation of debuggers and other observability tools. The non-allocable sections in an object are not loaded into memory at runtime by the operating system, and so, they have no impact on memory use or other aspects of runtime performance no matter their size. For convenience, both allocable and non-allocable sections are normally maintained in the same file. However, there are situations in which it can be useful to separate these sections. To reduce the size of objects in order to improve the speed at which they can be copied across wide area networks. To support fine grained debugging of highly optimized code requires considerable debug data. In modern systems, the debugging data can easily be larger than the code it describes. The size of a 32-bit object is limited to 4 Gbytes. In very large 32-bit objects, the debug data can cause this limit to be exceeded and prevent the creation of the object. To limit the exposure of internal implementation details. Traditionally, objects have been stripped of non-allocable sections in order to address these issues. Stripping is effective, but destroys data that might be needed later. The Solaris link-editor can instead write non-allocable sections to an ancillary object. This feature is enabled with the -z ancillary command line option. $ ld ... -z ancillary[=outfile] ...By default, the ancillary file is given the same name as the primary output object, with a .anc file extension. However, a different name can be provided by providing an outfile value to the -z ancillary option. When -z ancillary is specified, the link-editor performs the following actions. All allocable sections are written to the primary object. In addition, all non-allocable sections containing one or more input sections that have the SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY section header flag set are written to the primary object. All remaining non-allocable sections are written to the ancillary object. The following non-allocable sections are written to both the primary object and ancillary object. .shstrtab The section name string table. .symtab The full non-dynamic symbol table. .symtab_shndx The symbol table extended index section associated with .symtab. .strtab The non-dynamic string table associated with .symtab. .SUNW_ancillary Contains the information required to identify the primary and ancillary objects, and to identify the object being examined. The primary object and all ancillary objects contain the same array of sections headers. Each section has the same section index in every file. Although the primary and ancillary objects all define the same section headers, the data for most sections will be written to a single file as described above. If the data for a section is not present in a given file, the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section header flag is set, and the sh_size field is 0. This organization makes it possible to acquire a full list of section headers, a complete symbol table, and a complete list of the primary and ancillary objects from either of the primary or ancillary objects. The following example illustrates the underlying implementation of ancillary objects. An ancillary object is created by adding the -z ancillary command line option to an otherwise normal compilation. The file utility shows that the result is an executable named a.out, and an associated ancillary object named a.out.anc. $ cat hello.c #include <stdio.h> int main(int argc, char **argv) { (void) printf("hello, world\n"); return (0); } $ cc -g -zancillary hello.c $ file a.out a.out.anc a.out: ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386 Version 1 [FPU], dynamically linked, not stripped, ancillary object a.out.anc a.out.anc: ELF 32-bit LSB ancillary 80386 Version 1, primary object a.out $ ./a.out hello worldThe resulting primary object is an ordinary executable that can be executed in the usual manner. It is no different at runtime than an executable built without the use of ancillary objects, and then stripped of non-allocable content using the strip or mcs commands. As previously described, the primary object and ancillary objects contain the same section headers. To see how this works, it is helpful to use the elfdump utility to display these section headers and compare them. The following table shows the section header information for a selection of headers from the previous link-edit example. Index Section Name Type Primary Flags Ancillary Flags Primary Size Ancillary Size 13 .text PROGBITS ALLOC EXECINSTR ALLOC EXECINSTR SUNW_ABSENT 0x131 0 20 .data PROGBITS WRITE ALLOC WRITE ALLOC SUNW_ABSENT 0x4c 0 21 .symtab SYMTAB 0 0 0x450 0x450 22 .strtab STRTAB STRINGS STRINGS 0x1ad 0x1ad 24 .debug_info PROGBITS SUNW_ABSENT 0 0 0x1a7 28 .shstrtab STRTAB STRINGS STRINGS 0x118 0x118 29 .SUNW_ancillary SUNW_ancillary 0 0 0x30 0x30 The data for most sections is only present in one of the two files, and absent from the other file. The SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section header flag is set when the data is absent. The data for allocable sections needed at runtime are found in the primary object. The data for non-allocable sections used for debugging but not needed at runtime are placed in the ancillary file. A small set of non-allocable sections are fully present in both files. These are the .SUNW_ancillary section used to relate the primary and ancillary objects together, the section name string table .shstrtab, as well as the symbol table.symtab, and its associated string table .strtab. It is possible to strip the symbol table from the primary object. A debugger that encounters an object without a symbol table can use the .SUNW_ancillary section to locate the ancillary object, and access the symbol contained within. The primary object, and all associated ancillary objects, contain a .SUNW_ancillary section that allows all the objects to be identified and related together. $ elfdump -T SUNW_ancillary a.out a.out.anc a.out: Ancillary Section: .SUNW_ancillary index tag value [0] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0x8724 [1] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1 a.out [2] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0x8724 [3] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1a3 a.out.anc [4] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0xfbe2 [5] ANC_SUNW_NULL 0 a.out.anc: Ancillary Section: .SUNW_ancillary index tag value [0] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0xfbe2 [1] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1 a.out [2] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0x8724 [3] ANC_SUNW_MEMBER 0x1a3 a.out.anc [4] ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM 0xfbe2 [5] ANC_SUNW_NULL 0 The ancillary sections for both objects contain the same number of elements, and are identical except for the first element. Each object, starting with the primary object, is introduced with a MEMBER element that gives the file name, followed by a CHECKSUM that identifies the object. In this example, the primary object is a.out, and has a checksum of 0x8724. The ancillary object is a.out.anc, and has a checksum of 0xfbe2. The first element in a .SUNW_ancillary section, preceding the MEMBER element for the primary object, is always a CHECKSUM element, containing the checksum for the file being examined. The presence of a .SUNW_ancillary section in an object indicates that the object has associated ancillary objects. The names of the primary and all associated ancillary objects can be obtained from the ancillary section from any one of the files. It is possible to determine which file is being examined from the larger set of files by comparing the first checksum value to the checksum of each member that follows. Debugger Access and Use of Ancillary Objects Debuggers and other observability tools must merge the information found in the primary and ancillary object files in order to build a complete view of the object. This is equivalent to processing the information from a single file. This merging is simplified by the primary object and ancillary objects containing the same section headers, and a single symbol table. The following steps can be used by a debugger to assemble the information contained in these files. Starting with the primary object, or any of the ancillary objects, locate the .SUNW_ancillary section. The presence of this section identifies the object as part of an ancillary group, contains information that can be used to obtain a complete list of the files and determine which of those files is the one currently being examined. Create a section header array in memory, using the section header array from the object being examined as an initial template. Open and read each file identified by the .SUNW_ancillary section in turn. For each file, fill in the in-memory section header array with the information for each section that does not have the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT flag set. The result will be a complete in-memory copy of the section headers with pointers to the data for all sections. Once this information has been acquired, the debugger can proceed as it would in the single file case, to access and control the running program. Note - The ELF definition of ancillary objects provides for a single primary object, and an arbitrary number of ancillary objects. At this time, the Oracle Solaris link-editor only produces a single ancillary object containing all non-allocable sections. This may change in the future. Debuggers and other observability tools should be written to handle the general case of multiple ancillary objects. ELF Implementation Details (From the Solaris Linker and Libraries Guide) To implement ancillary objects, it was necessary to extend the ELF format to add a new object type (ET_SUNW_ANCILLARY), a new section type (SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY), and 2 new section header flags (SHF_SUNW_ABSENT, SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY). In this section, I will detail these changes, in the form of diffs to the Solaris Linker and Libraries manual. Part IV ELF Application Binary Interface Chapter 13: Object File Format Object File Format Edit Note: This existing section at the beginning of the chapter describes the ELF header. There's a table of object file types, which now includes the new ET_SUNW_ANCILLARY type. e_type Identifies the object file type, as listed in the following table. NameValueMeaning ET_NONE0No file type ET_REL1Relocatable file ET_EXEC2Executable file ET_DYN3Shared object file ET_CORE4Core file ET_LOSUNW0xfefeStart operating system specific range ET_SUNW_ANCILLARY0xfefeAncillary object file ET_HISUNW0xfefdEnd operating system specific range ET_LOPROC0xff00Start processor-specific range ET_HIPROC0xffffEnd processor-specific range Sections Edit Note: This overview section defines the section header structure, and provides a high level description of known sections. It was updated to define the new SHF_SUNW_ABSENT and SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY flags and the new SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY section. ... sh_type Categorizes the section's contents and semantics. Section types and their descriptions are listed in Table 13-5. sh_flags Sections support 1-bit flags that describe miscellaneous attributes. Flag definitions are listed in Table 13-8. ... Table 13-5 ELF Section Types, sh_type NameValue . . . SHT_LOSUNW0x6fffffee SHT_SUNW_ancillary0x6fffffee . . . ... SHT_LOSUNW - SHT_HISUNW Values in this inclusive range are reserved for Oracle Solaris OS semantics. SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY Present when a given object is part of a group of ancillary objects. Contains information required to identify all the files that make up the group. See Ancillary Section. ... Table 13-8 ELF Section Attribute Flags NameValue . . . SHF_MASKOS0x0ff00000 SHF_SUNW_NODISCARD0x00100000 SHF_SUNW_ABSENT0x00200000 SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY0x00400000 SHF_MASKPROC0xf0000000 . . . ... SHF_SUNW_ABSENT Indicates that the data for this section is not present in this file. When ancillary objects are created, the primary object and any ancillary objects, will all have the same section header array, to facilitate merging them to form a complete view of the object, and to allow them to use the same symbol tables. Each file contains a subset of the section data. The data for allocable sections is written to the primary object while the data for non-allocable sections is written to an ancillary file. The SHF_SUNW_ABSENT flag is used to indicate that the data for the section is not present in the object being examined. When the SHF_SUNW_ABSENT flag is set, the sh_size field of the section header must be 0. An application encountering an SHF_SUNW_ABSENT section can choose to ignore the section, or to search for the section data within one of the related ancillary files. SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY The default behavior when ancillary objects are created is to write all allocable sections to the primary object and all non-allocable sections to the ancillary objects. The SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY flag overrides this behavior. Any output section containing one more input section with the SHF_SUNW_PRIMARY flag set is written to the primary object without regard for its allocable status. ... Two members in the section header, sh_link, and sh_info, hold special information, depending on section type. Table 13-9 ELF sh_link and sh_info Interpretation sh_typesh_linksh_info . . . SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY The section header index of the associated string table. 0 . . . Special Sections Edit Note: This section describes the sections used in Solaris ELF objects, using the types defined in the previous description of section types. It was updated to define the new .SUNW_ancillary (SHT_SUNW_ANCILLARY) section. Various sections hold program and control information. Sections in the following table are used by the system and have the indicated types and attributes. Table 13-10 ELF Special Sections NameTypeAttribute . . . .SUNW_ancillarySHT_SUNW_ancillaryNone . . . ... .SUNW_ancillary Present when a given object is part of a group of ancillary objects. Contains information required to identify all the files that make up the group. See Ancillary Section for details. ... Ancillary Section Edit Note: This new section provides the format reference describing the layout of a .SUNW_ancillary section and the meaning of the various tags. Note that these sections use the same tag/value concept used for dynamic and capabilities sections, and will be familiar to anyone used to working with ELF. In addition to the primary output object, the Solaris link-editor can produce one or more ancillary objects. Ancillary objects contain non-allocable sections that would normally be written to the primary object. When ancillary objects are produced, the primary object and all of the associated ancillary objects contain a SHT_SUNW_ancillary section, containing information that identifies these related objects. Given any one object from such a group, the ancillary section provides the information needed to identify and interpret the others. This section contains an array of the following structures. See sys/elf.h. typedef struct { Elf32_Word a_tag; union { Elf32_Word a_val; Elf32_Addr a_ptr; } a_un; } Elf32_Ancillary; typedef struct { Elf64_Xword a_tag; union { Elf64_Xword a_val; Elf64_Addr a_ptr; } a_un; } Elf64_Ancillary; For each object with this type, a_tag controls the interpretation of a_un. a_val These objects represent integer values with various interpretations. a_ptr These objects represent file offsets or addresses. The following ancillary tags exist. Table 13-NEW1 ELF Ancillary Array Tags NameValuea_un ANC_SUNW_NULL0Ignored ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM1a_val ANC_SUNW_MEMBER2a_ptr ANC_SUNW_NULL Marks the end of the ancillary section. ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM Provides the checksum for a file in the c_val element. When ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM precedes the first instance of ANC_SUNW_MEMBER, it provides the checksum for the object from which the ancillary section is being read. When it follows an ANC_SUNW_MEMBER tag, it provides the checksum for that member. ANC_SUNW_MEMBER Specifies an object name. The a_ptr element contains the string table offset of a null-terminated string, that provides the file name. An ancillary section must always contain an ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM before the first instance of ANC_SUNW_MEMBER, identifying the current object. Following that, there should be an ANC_SUNW_MEMBER for each object that makes up the complete set of objects. Each ANC_SUNW_MEMBER should be followed by an ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM for that object. A typical ancillary section will therefore be structured as: TagMeaning ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUMChecksum of this object ANC_SUNW_MEMBERName of object #1 ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUMChecksum for object #1 . . . ANC_SUNW_MEMBERName of object N ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUMChecksum for object N ANC_SUNW_NULL An object can therefore identify itself by comparing the initial ANC_SUNW_CHECKSUM to each of the ones that follow, until it finds a match. Related Other Work The GNU developers have also encountered the need/desire to support separate debug information files, and use the solution detailed at http://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Separate-Debug-Files.html. At the current time, the separate debug file is constructed by building the standard object first, and then copying the debug data out of it in a separate post processing step, Hence, it is limited to a total of 4GB of code and debug data, just as a single object file would be. They are aware of this, and I have seen online comments indicating that they may add direct support for generating these separate files to their link-editor. It is worth noting that the GNU objcopy utility is available on Solaris, and that the Studio dbx debugger is able to use these GNU style separate debug files even on Solaris. Although this is interesting in terms giving Linux users a familiar environment on Solaris, the 4GB limit means it is not an answer to the problem of very large 32-bit objects. We have also encountered issues with objcopy not understanding Solaris-specific ELF sections, when using this approach. The GNU community also has a current effort to adapt their DWARF debug sections in order to move them to separate files before passing the relocatable objects to the linker. The details of Project Fission can be found at http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/DebugFission. The goal of this project appears to be to reduce the amount of data seen by the link-editor. The primary effort revolves around moving DWARF data to separate .dwo files so that the link-editor never encounters them. The details of modifying the DWARF data to be usable in this form are involved — please see the above URL for details.

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• The Product Owner

  - by Robert May

  In a previous post, I outlined the rules of Scrum.  This post details one of those rules. Picking a most important part of Scrum is difficult.  All of the rules are required, but if there were one rule that is “more” required that every other rule, its having a good Product Owner.  Simply put, the Product Owner can make or break the project. Duties of the Product Owner A Product Owner has many duties and responsibilities.  I’ll talk about each of these duties in detail below. A Product Owner: Discovers and records stories for the backlog. Prioritizes stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog. Determines Release dates and Iteration Dates. Develops story details and helps the team understand those details. Helps QA to develop acceptance tests. Interact with the Customer to make sure that the product is meeting the customer’s needs. Discovers and Records Stories for the Backlog When I do Scrum, I always use User Stories as the means for capturing functionality that’s required in the system.  Some people will use Use Cases, but the same rule applies.  The Product Owner has the ultimate responsibility for figuring out what functionality will be in the system.  Many different mechanisms for capturing this input can be used.  User interviews are great, but all sources should be considered, including talking with Customer Support types.  Often, they hear what users are struggling with the most and are a great source for stories that can make the application easier to use. Care should be taken when soliciting user stories from technical types such as programmers and the people that manage them.  They will almost always give stories that are very technical in nature and may not have a direct benefit for the end user.  Stories are about adding value to the company.  If the stories don’t have direct benefit to the end user, the Product Owner should question whether or not the story should be implemented.  In general, technical stories should be included as tasks in User Stories.  Technical stories are often needed, but the ultimate value to the user is in user based functionality, so technical stories should be considered nothing more than overhead in providing that user functionality. Until the iteration prior to development, stories should be nothing more than short, one line placeholders. An exercise called Story Planning can be used to brainstorm and come up with stories.  I’ll save the description of this activity for another blog post. For more information on User Stories, please read the book User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn. Prioritizes Stories in the Product Backlog, Release Backlog and Iteration Backlog Prioritization of stories is one of the most difficult tasks that a Product Owner must do.  A key concept of Scrum done right is the need to have the team working from a single set of prioritized stories.  If the team does not have a single set of prioritized stories, Scrum will likely fail at your organization.  The Product Owner is the ONLY person who has the responsibility to prioritize that list.  The Product Owner must be very diplomatic and sincerely listen to the people around him so that he can get the priorities correct. Just listening will still not yield the proper priorities.  Care must also be taken to ensure that Return on Investment is also considered.  Ultimately, determining which stories give the most value to the company for the least cost is the most important factor in determining priorities.  Product Owners should be willing to look at cold, hard numbers to determine the order for stories.  Even when many people want a feature, if that features is costly to develop, it may not have as high of a return on investment as features that are cheaper, but not as popular. The act of prioritization often causes conflict in an environment.  Customer Service thinks that feature X is the most important, because it will stop people from calling.  Operations thinks that feature Y is the most important, because it will stop servers from crashing.  Developers think that feature Z is most important because it will make writing software much easier for them.  All of these are useful goals, but the team can have only one list of items, and each item must have a priority that is different from all other stories.  The Product Owner will determine which feature gives the best return on investment and the other features will have to wait their turn, which means that someone will not have their top priority feature implemented first. A weak Product Owner will refuse to do prioritization.  I’ve heard from multiple Product Owners the following phrase, “Well, it’s all got to be done, so what does it matter what order we do it in?”  If your product owner is using this phrase, you need a new Product Owner.  Order is VERY important.  In Scrum, every release is potentially shippable.  If the wrong priority items are developed, then the value added in each release isn’t what it should be.  Additionally, the Product Owner with this mindset doesn’t understand Agile.  A product is NEVER finished, until the company has decided that it is no longer a going concern and they are no longer going to sell the product.  Therefore, prioritization isn’t an event, its something that continues every day.  The logical extension of the phrase “It’s all got to be done” is that you will never ship your product, since a product is never “done.”  Once stories have been prioritized, assigning them to the Release Backlog and the Iteration Backlog becomes relatively simple.  The top priority items are copied into the respective backlogs in order and the task is complete.  The team does have the right to shuffle things around a little in the iteration backlog.  For example, they may determine that working on story C with story A is appropriate because they’re related, even though story B is technically a higher priority than story C.  Or they may decide that story B is too big to complete in the time available after Story A has tasks created, so they’ll work on Story C since it’s smaller.  They can’t, however, go deep into the backlog to pick stories to implement.  The team and the Product Owner should work together to determine what’s best for the company. Prioritization is time consuming, but its one of the most important things a Product Owner does. Determines Release Dates and Iteration Dates Product owners are responsible for determining release dates for a product.  A common misconception that Product Owners have is that every “release” needs to correspond with an actual release to customers.  This is not the case.  In general, releases should be no more than 3 months long.  You  may decide to release the product to the customers, and many companies do release the product to customers, but it may also be an internal release. If a release date is too far away, developers will fall into the trap of not feeling a sense of urgency.  The date is far enough away that they don’t need to give the release their full attention.  Additionally, important tasks, such as performance tuning, regression testing, user documentation, and release preparation, will not happen regularly, making them much more difficult and time consuming to do.  The more frequently you do these tasks, the easier they are to accomplish. The Product Owner will be a key participant in determining whether or not a release should be sent out to the customers.  The determination should be made on whether or not the features contained in the release are valuable enough  and complete enough that the customers will see real value in the release.  Often, some features will take more than three months to get them to a state where they qualify for a release or need additional supporting features to be released.  The product owner has the right to make this determination. In addition to release dates, the Product Owner also will help determine iteration dates.  In general, an iteration length should be chosen and the team should follow that iteration length for an extended period of time.  If the iteration length is changed every iteration, you’re not doing Scrum.  Iteration lengths help the team and company get into a rhythm of developing quality software.  Iterations should be somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks in length.  Any shorter, and significant software will likely not be developed.  Any longer, and the team won’t feel urgency and planning will become very difficult. Iterations may not be extended during the iteration.  Companies where Scrum isn’t really followed will often use this as a strategy to complete all stories.  They don’t want to face the harsh reality of what their true performance is, and looking good is more important than seeking visibility and improving the process and team.  Companies like this typically don’t allow failure.  This is unhealthy.  Failure is part of life and unless we learn from it, we can’t improve.  I would much rather see a team push out stories to the next iteration and then have healthy discussions about why they failed rather than extend the iteration and not deal with the core problems. If iteration length varies, retrospectives become more difficult.  For example, evaluating the performance of the team’s estimation efforts becomes much more difficult if the iteration length varies.  Also, the team must have a velocity measurement.  If the iteration length varies, measuring velocity becomes impossible and upper management no longer will have the ability to evaluate the teams performance.  People external to the team will no longer have the ability to determine when key features are likely to be developed.  Variable iterations cause the entire company to fail and likely cause Scrum to fail at an organization. Develops Story Details and Helps the Team Understand Those Details A key concept in Scrum is that the stories are nothing more than a placeholder for a conversation.  Stories should be nothing more than short, one line statements about the functionality.  The team will then converse with the Product Owner about the details about that story.  The product owner needs to have a very good idea about what the details of the story are and needs to be able to help the team understand those details. Too often, we see this requirement as being translated into the need for comprehensive documentation about the story, including old fashioned requirements documentation.  The team should only develop the documentation that is required and should not develop documentation that is only created because their is a process to do so. In general, what we see that works best is the iteration before a team starts development work on a story, the Product Owner, with other appropriate business analysts, will develop the details of that story.  They’ll figure out what business rules are required, potentially make paper prototypes or other light weight mock-ups, and they seek to understand the story and what is implied.  Note that the time allowed for this task is deliberately short.  The Product Owner only has a single iteration to develop all of the stories for the next iteration. If more than one iteration is used, I’ve found that teams will end up with Big Design Up Front and traditional requirements documents.  This is a waste of time, since the team will need to then have discussions with the Product Owner to figure out what the requirements document says.  Instead of this, skip making the pretty pictures and detailing the nuances of the requirements and build only what is minimally needed by the team to do development.  If something comes up during development, you can address it at that time and figure out what you want to do.  The goal is to keep things as light weight as possible so that everyone can move as quickly as possible. Helps QA to Develop Acceptance Tests In Scrum, no story can be counted until it is accepted by QA.  Because of this, acceptance tests are very important to the team.  In general, acceptance tests need to be developed prior to the iteration or at the very beginning of the iteration so that the team can make sure that the tasks that they develop will fulfill the acceptance criteria. The Product Owner will help the team, including QA, understand what will make the story acceptable.  Note that the Product Owner needs to be careful about specifying that the feature will work “Perfectly” at the end of the iteration.  In general, features are developed a little bit at a time, so only the bit that is being developed should be considered as necessary for acceptance. A weak Product Owner will make statements like “Do it right the first time.”  Not only are these statements damaging to the team (like they would try to do it WRONG the first time . . .), they’re also ignoring the iterative nature of Scrum.  Additionally, a weak product owner will seek to add scope in the acceptance testing.  For example, they will refuse to determine acceptance at the beginning of the iteration, and then, after the team has planned and committed to the iteration, they will expand scope by defining acceptance.  This often causes the team to miss the iteration because scope that wasn’t planned on is included.  There are ways that the team can mitigate this problem.  For example, include extra “Product Owner” time to deal with the uncertainty that you know will be introduced by the Product Owner.  This will slow the perceived velocity of the team and is not ideal, since they’ll be doing more work than they get credit for. Interact with the Customer to Make Sure that the Product is Meeting the Customer’s Needs Once development is complete, what the team has worked on should be put in front of real live people to see if it meets the needs of the customer.  One of the great things about Agile is that if something doesn’t work, we can revisit it in a future iteration!  This frees up the team to make the best decision now and know that if that decision proves to be incorrect, the team can revisit it and change that decision. Features are about adding value to the customer, so if the customer doesn’t find them useful, then having the team make tweaks is valuable.  In general, most software will be 80 to 90 percent “right” after the initial round and only minor tweaks are required.  If proper coding standards are followed, these tweaks are usually minor and easy to accomplish.  Product Owners that are doing a good job will encourage real users to see and use the software, since they know that they are trying to add value to the customer. Poor product owners will think that they know the answers already, that their customers are silly and do stupid things and that they don’t need customer input.  If you have a product owner that is afraid to show the team’s work to real customers, you probably need a different product owner. Up Next, “Who Makes a Good Product Owner.” Followed by, “Messing with the Team.” Technorati Tags: Scrum,Product Owner

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• CLSF & CLK 2013 Trip Report by Jeff Liu

  - by jamesmorris

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

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