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• Using HTML5 Today part 3&ndash; Using Polyfills

  - by Steve Albers

  Shims helps when adding semantic tags to older IE browsers, but there is a huge range of other new HTML5 features that having varying support on browsers.  Polyfills are JavaScript code and/or browser plug-ins that can provide older or less featured browsers with API support.  The best polyfills will detect the whether the current browser has native support, and only adds the functionality if necessary.  The Douglas Crockford JSON2.js library is an example of this approach: if the browser already supports the JSON object, nothing changes.  If JSON is not available, the library adds a JSON property in the global object. This approach provides some big benefits: It lets you add great new HTML5 features to your web sites sooner. It lets the developer focus on writing to the up-and-coming standard rather than proprietary APIs. Where most one-off legacy code fixes tends to break down over time, well done polyfills will stop executing over time (as customer browsers natively support the feature) meaning polyfill code may not need to be tested against new browsers since they will execute the native methods instead. Your should also remember that Polyfills represent an entirely separate code path (and sometimes plug-in) that requires testing for support.  Also Polyfills tend to run on older browsers, which often have slower JavaScript performance.  As a result you might find that performance on older browsers is not comparable. When looking for Polyfills you can start by checking the Modernizr GitHub wiki or the HTML5 Please site. For an example of a polyfill consider a page that writes a few geometric shapes on a <canvas> <script src="jquery-1.7.1.min.js"><script> <script> $(document).ready(function () { drawCanvas(); }); function drawCanvas() { var context = $("canvas")[0].getContext('2d'); //background context.fillStyle = "#8B0000"; context.fillRect(5, 5, 300, 100); // emptybox context.strokeStyle = "#B0C4DE"; context.lineWidth = 4; context.strokeRect(20, 15, 80, 80); // circle context.arc(160, 55, 40, 0, Math.PI * 2, false); context.fillStyle = "#4B0082"; context.fill(); </script>   The result is a simple static canvas with a box & a circle:   …to enable this functionality on a pre-canvas browser we can find a polyfill.  A check on html5please.com references  FlashCanvas.  Pull down the zip and extract the files (flashcanvas.js, flash10canvas.swf, etc) to a directory on your site.  Then based on the documentation you need to add a single line to your original HTML file: <!--[if lt IE 9]><script src="flashcanvas.js"></script><![endif]—> …and you have canvas functionality!  The IE conditional comments ensure that the library is only loaded in browsers where it is useful, improving page load & processing time. Like all Polyfills, you should test to verify the functionality matches your expectations across browsers you need to support.  For instance the Flash Canvas home page advertises 70% support of HTML5 Canvas spec tests.

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• Framework for Everything - Where to begin? [Longer post]

  - by SquaredSoft

  Back story of this question, feel free to skip down for the specific question Hello, I've been very interested in the idea of abstract programming the last few years. I've made about 30 attempts at creating a piece of software that is capable of almost anything you throw at it. I've undertook some attempts at this that have taken upwards of a year, while getting close, never releasing it beyond my compiler. This has been something I've always tried wrapping my head around, and something is always missing. With the title, I'm sure you're assuming, "Yes of course you noob! You can't account for everything!" To which I have to reply, "Why not?" To give you some background into what I'm talking about, this all started with doing maybe a shade of gray hat SEO software. I found myself constantly having to create similar, but slightly different sets of code. I've gone through as many iterations of way to communicate on http as the universe has particles. "How many times am I going to have to write this multi-threaded class?" is something I found myself asking a lot. Sure, I could create a class library, and just work with that, but I always felt I could optimize what I had, which often was a large undertaking and typically involved frequent use of the CRTL+A keyboard shortcut, mixed with the delete button. It dawned on me that it was time to invest in a plugin system. This would allow me to simply add snippets of code. as time went on, and I could subversion stuff out, and distribute small chunks of code, rather than something that encompasses only a specific function or design. This comes with its own complexity, of course, and by the time I had finished the software scope for this addition, it hit me that I would want to add to everything in the software, not just a new http method, or automation code for a specific website. Great, we're getting more abstract. However, the software that I have in my mind comes down to a quite a few questions regarding its execution. I have to have some parameters to what I am going to do. After writing what the perfect software would do in my mind, I came up with this as a list of requirements: Should be able to use networking A "Macro" or "Expression system" which would allow people to do something like : =First(=ParseToList(=GetUrl("http://www.google.com?q=helloworld!"), Template.Google)) Multithreaded Able to add UI elements through some type of XML -- People can make their own addons etc. Can use third party API through the plugins, such as Microsoft CRM, Exchange, etc. This would allow the software to essentially be used for everything. Really, any task you wish to automate, in a simple way. Making the UI was as also extremely hard. How do you do all of this? Its very difficult. So my question: With so many attempts at this, I'm out of ideas how to successfully complete this. I have a very specific idea in my mind, but I keep failing to execute it. I'm a self taught programmer. I've been doing it for years, and work professionally in it, but I've never encountered something that would be as complex and in-depth as a system which essentially does everything. Where would you start? What are the best practices for design? How can I avoid constantly having to go back and optimize my software. What can I do to generalize this and draw everything out to completion. These are things I struggle with. P.s., I'm using c# as my main language. I feel like in this example, I might be hitting the outer limit of the language, although, I don't know if that is the case, or if I'm just a bad programmer. Thanks for your time.

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• Free hosting solution for a very low-traffic website [duplicate]

  - by user966939

  This question already has an answer here: How to find web hosting that meets my requirements? 4 answers I run a very low-traffic website (about 40 users, basically all of which are daily active on the site). I don't see it changing anytime soon either, as there is no way to sign up on the site right now. Until now I have just been using a sub-directory on a friend's host (shared), to host the web site. But in only a few weeks from now, his subscription will end, and he has no plans on renewing it. So of course this means I'll have to move on to something else. But I don't think I'll find someone who'd be willing to share a... shared host with me again. And besides, the software used on that server is ancient (PHP 4.4.9 + MySQL 4.1.22). There's one obvious solution that comes to mind, I guess: choose a better host and pay for it myself. The problem here is that I have no real fixed income, as I'm only a student. So even if the pricing is dirt cheap, I just can't be certain I will be able to afford it, every single month, for... at least 2 years maybe? So I've looked at free hosting solutions instead. The least requirement I had was that it was completely free of ads. But no matter where I look, I always find something in a corner or two ("what can you expect from a free host?" - yeah I know, but I guess it was worth a shot). For example, on Byethost (one of the free hosts I tried), if you trigger a PHP error while error reporting is set to E_ALL, you will spawn some hidden ad... Besides Byethost, I've tried 000Webhost, x10Hosting, 2Freehosting/1Freehosting, Wink.ws, and they are only worse. Okay, I'm running low on ideas. But! What if I just hosted the site myself, on my own computer? That could work. I actually do have my computer on practically 24/7. But not really. Sometimes I need to reboot it, and sometimes we even have power outages. And what if the hardware needs an upgrade? It's not such a big deal for me if the site went down, because I know what's going on; but what about the users? If I do decide to host it myself, is there some way to show users an alternate page instead of them just seeing a generic "server not found" page in the browser when the site is not accessible? Or is there something I have been missing out on? Is there a different kind of "web hosting" solution out there that I haven't heard of? Here is what I'm really looking for: Free (as in, no costs) NO ads Bandwidth enough for a low-traffic forum with roughly 40 users (Semi-)Up-to-date PHP and MySQL (at least not older than a year) No standard (non-extension) PHP functions turned off - such as sleep() The mbstring extension is enabled Disk space: at least 5 MB At least one MySQL database Some bonus points would be: Max execution time of PHP scripts can be set Remote access to MySQL database What would be the best solution for me? Is there one?

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• Cannot get ATI Drivers installed

  - by bittoast67

  I am trying to install the Catalyst driver. The best I can get is a strange resolution problem and firefox acts all wonkt. The worst I have gotten is low graphics mode in which I just reinstall Ubuntu. I have a HP Pavilion Dv7 laptop. With Radeon 3200 HD. I plan to try again with a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.4.3 as I have heard its the most compatible. This is what I have done: I have tried just the easy way of going to synaptic and installing the drivers that way. the fglrx package (not the fglrx update). And if memory serves I think that boots me into low graphics mode. So, fresh install of Ubuntu and tried again. I have done everything a couple times from this site (http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Precise_Installation_Guide) following every instruction to a T. That gets me something, such as a lowered fan speed and a much cooler computer, but I also lose most of my resolution. And displays says its the best resolution I can get. I also have a very screwy firefox. Using this method I can see AMD Catalyst Control Center in my dash (two of them really one administrator and one not) but when I try to open it it says no amd driver detected. So again, ubuntu reinstall. I have tried the GUI method from the Legacy driver I got from AMD's site. It runs through smoothly and at the very end after I exit the installer it gives me an error. I have also tried various other methods using terminal, as well as various different drivers (the one from the amd's site and the one suggested in the above link for my graphics card) both to no avail. When I try the method in the link on number 2, and I get the super low res and screwy fire fox. I type in, fglrxinfo ,and get a badrequest error. I have yet to type in fglrxinfo and get anything like what I am supposed to. UPDATE: I am now currently reinstalling Ubuntu 12.4. I tried the above mentioned link - thank you very much!- just to see on the previously failed driver attempt by following the purge commands. And to no avail when typing fglrxinfo I still get the badrequest thing. I will update again after a try with a true fresh install. Thanks again!! UPDATE: Alright everyone. Still no go. I have done everything word per word in the provided tutorial. I have rebooted my computer again to a fucked up resolution and this is what I get when typing fglrxinfo: $ fglrxinfo X Error of failed request: BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation) Major opcode of failed request: 153 (GLX) Minor opcode of failed request: 19 (X_GLXQueryServerString) Serial number of failed request: 12 Current serial number in output stream: 12 I would like to add that when installing this file: fglrx_8.970-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb I got this: Building initial module for 3.8.0-29-generic Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 3.8.0-29-generic (x86_64) Consult /var/lib/dkms/fglrx/8.970/build/make.log for more information. update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated) Processing triggers for ureadahead ... Processing triggers for bamfdaemon ... Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf.index... Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ... update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.8.0-29-generic Processing triggers for libc-bin ... ldconfig deferred processing now taking place Any ideas? Anyone? I cant for the life of me figure out what I am doing wrong.

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• Software Center seems to freeze system when installing, syslog has "blocked for more than 120 seconds" errors

  - by nbm

  12.04 (precise) 64-bit Kernel Linux 3.2.0-39 3.6GB memory Intel Core 2 Duo CPU @ 2.40GHz x2 WUBI-installed Ubuntu running on a MacBook Pro 7.1 with OSX running Vista via Boot Camp (hey, I like lots of OS's m'kay?) When installing from Ubuntu software center my system very frequently freezes. This has happened 4 of the last 5 installs. Most recently I was installing the Google Earth .deb from Google's website: clicking the .deb file automatically opens Software Center (otherwise I would have used Synaptic, as I've grown to expect Software Center to freeze my system and I'm rather tired of it.) By "freeze" I mean nothing works: no dash, no launcher, no mouse movement, no alt-tab, can't open terminal (keyboard does not work). Software center does show the "installing" icon but after that it greys out and I can't click anything. REISUB has no effect but a cold power-down and restart is possible. Occasionally, after 5-10 minutes, I'll be able to move the mouse / use the keyboard and run a launcher command or two, although other open apps (Chrome and Software Center) will still be greyed-out/frozen. (I've never waited longer than that - if still unresponsive after 15 minutes I just power down and restart.) Most recently, which is why I am finally posting a question, I waited about 15 minutes and was finally able to open System Monitor while this was going on. Processes tells me that System Monitor is using about 20% of CPU, and nothing else is using much (zeros mostly). In fact I didn't even see Software Center listed? However at this point the system finally partially unfroze, the installation completed, and while I wasn't about to close Software Center I was able to do a system shutdown and fresh restart and I went and took a look at the syslog. In /var/log/syslog I see a lot of ":blocked for more than 120 seconds" messages. Similar to ubuntu hang out with this message :blocked for more than 120 seconds Which has not been answered, and I'm not running a virtual machine. My full syslog with stack traces looks very, very similar to this: Why do tasks on Amazon Xen instance block for over 120 seconds causing server to hang? Note that that question was solved, but that's because the problem was being caused by Amazon and Amazon fixed the bug. I'm not running anything Amazon-related. My syslog does look very similar, however. My question is also similar to this: Troubleshooting server hang But the referenced "duplicate" in that question is about how to kill processes/restart when the system freezes. I know how to kill processes and restart. I want to figure out what is causing the problem so I can try to fix it. I realize that I could just use Synaptic instead of Ubuntu Software Center, but I'd like to try to solve the problem if possible. I'm thinking I should perhaps submit a bug report, but I wanted to first see if anyone else was having any similar problems, and if so what you all did to fix it. I see a number of questions about Software Center freezing and others, including those I linked, about the "blocked for more than 120 seconds" log error, but I didn't see any question that links the two. I did save a copy of the syslog report if anyone wants to see it, but as mentioned it's quite similar to the one posted in the Amazon-related question...and I didn't want to take up even more space unnecessarily as, my apologies - this question has already become extremely verbose!

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• Career-Defining Moments

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2013/06/25/career-defining-moments.aspx Fear holds us back from many things. A little fear is healthy, but don’t let it overwhelm you into missing opportunities. In every career there is a moment when you can either step forward and define yourself, or sit down and regret it later. Why do we hold back: is it fear, constraints, family concerns, or that we simply can't do it? I think in many cases it comes to the unknown, and we are good at fearing the unknown. Some people hold back because they are fearful of what they don’t know. Some hold back because they are fearful of learning new things. Some hold back simply because to take on a new challenge it means they have to give something else up. The phrase sometimes used is “It’s the devil you know versus the one you don’t.” That fear sometimes allows us to miss great opportunities. In many people’s case it is the opportunity to go into business for yourself, to start something that never existed. Most hold back hear for a fear of failing. We’ve all heard the phrase “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?”, which is intended to get people to think about the opportunities they might create. A better term I heard recently on the Ruby Rogues podcast was “What would be worth doing even if you knew you were going to fail?” I think that wording suits the intent better. If you knew (or thought) going in that you were going to fail and you didn’t care, it would open you up to the possibility of paying more attention to the journey and not the outcome. In my case it is a fear of acceptance. I am fearful that I may not learn what I need to learn or may not do a good enough job to be accepted. At the same time that fear drives me and makes me want to leap forward. Some folks would define this as “The Flinch”. I’m learning Ruby and Puppet right now. I have limited experience with both, limited to the degree it scares me some that I don’t know much about either. Okay, it scares me quite a bit! Some people’s defining moment might be going to work for Microsoft. All of you who know me know that I am in love with automation, from low-tech to high-tech automation. So for me, my “mecca” is a little different in that regard. Awhile back I sat down and defined where I wanted my career to go and it had to do more with DevOps, defined as applying developer practices to system administration operations (I could not find this definition when I searched). It’s an area that interests me and why I really want to expand chocolatey into something more awesome. I want to see Windows be as automatable and awesome as other operating systems that are out there. Back to the career-defining moment. Sometimes these moments only come once in a lifetime. The key is to recognize when you are in one of these moments and step back to evaluate it before choosing to dive in head first. So I am about to embark on what I define as one of these “moments.”  On July 1st I will be joining Puppet Labs and working to help make the Windows automation experience rock solid! I’m both scared and excited about the opportunity!

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• Appropriate design / technologies to handle dynamic string formatting?

  - by Mark W

  recently I was tasked with implementing a way of adding support for versioning of hardware packet specifications to one of our libraries. First a bit of information about the project. We have a hardware library which has classes for each of the various commands we support sending to our hardware. These hardware modules are essentially just lights with a few buttons, and a 2 or 4 digit display. The packets typically follow the format {SOH}AADD{ETX}, where AA is our sentinel action code, and DD is the device ID. These packet specs are different from one command to the next obviously, and the different firmware versions we have support different specifications. For example, on version 1 an action code of 14 may have a spec of {SOH}AADDTEXT{ETX} which would be AA = 14 literal, DD = device ID, TEXT = literal text to display on the device. Then we come out with a revision with adds an extended byte(s) onto the end of the packet like this {SOH}AADDTEXTE{ETX}. Assume the TEXT field is fixed width for this example. We have now added a new field onto the end which could be used to say specify the color or flash rate of the text/buttons. Currently this java library only supports one version of the commands, the latest. In our hardware library we would have a class for this command, say a DisplayTextArgs.java. That class would have fields for the device ID, the text, and the extended byte. The command class would expose a method which generates the string ("{SOH}AADDTEXTE{ETX}") using the value from the class. In practice we would create the Args class as needed, populate the fields, call the method to get our packet string, then ship that down across the CAN. Some of our other commands specification can vary for the same command, on the same version, depending on some runtime state. For example, another command for version 1 may be {SOH}AA{ETX}, where this action code clears all of the modules behind a specific controller device of their text. We may overload this packet to have option fields with multiple meanings like {SOH}AAOC{ETX} where OC is literal text, which tells the controller to only clear text on a specific module type, and to leave the others alone, or the spec could also have an option format of {SOH}AADD{ETX} to clear the text off a a specific device. Currently, in the method which generates the packet string, we would evaluate fields on the args class to determine which spec we will be using when formatting the packet. For this example, it would be along the lines of: if m_DeviceID != null then use {SOH}AADD{ETX} else if m_ClearOCs == true then use {SOH}AAOC{EXT} else use {SOH}AA{ETX} I had considered using XML, or a database to store String.format format strings, which were linked to firmware version numbers in some table. We would load them up at startup, and pass in the version number of the hardwares firmware we are currently using (I can query the devices for their firmware version, but the version is not included in all packets as part of the spec). This breaks down pretty quickly because of the dynamic nature of how we select which version of the command to use. I then considered using a rule engine to possibly build out expressions which could be interpreted at runtume, to evaluate the args class's state, and from that select the appropriate format string to use, but my brief look at rule engines for java scared me away with its complexity. While it seems like it might be a viable solution, it seems overly complex. So this is why I am here. I wouldn't say design is my strongest skill, and im having trouble figuring out the best way to approach this problem. I probably wont be able to radically change the args classes, but if the trade off was good enough, I may be able to convince my boss that the change is appropriate. What I would like from the community is some feedback on some best practices / design methodologies / API or other resources which I could use to accomplish: Logic to determine which set of commands to use for a given firmware version Of those command, which version of each command to use (based on the args classes state) Keep the rules logic decoupled from the application so as to avoid needing releases for every firmware version Be simple enough so I don't need weeks of study and trial and error to implement effectively.

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• High Resolution Timeouts

  - by user12607257

  The default resolution of application timers and timeouts is now 1 msec in Solaris 11.1, down from 10 msec in previous releases. This improves out-of-the-box performance of polling and event based applications, such as ticker applications, and even the Oracle rdbms log writer. More on that in a moment. As a simple example, the poll() system call takes a timeout argument in units of msec: System Calls poll(2) NAME poll - input/output multiplexing SYNOPSIS int poll(struct pollfd fds[], nfds_t nfds, int timeout); In Solaris 11, a call to poll(NULL,0,1) returns in 10 msec, because even though a 1 msec interval is requested, the implementation rounds to the system clock resolution of 10 msec. In Solaris 11.1, this call returns in 1 msec. In specification lawyer terms, the resolution of CLOCK_REALTIME, introduced by POSIX.1b real time extensions, is now 1 msec. The function clock_getres(CLOCK_REALTIME,&res) returns 1 msec, and any library calls whose man page explicitly mention CLOCK_REALTIME, such as nanosleep(), are subject to the new resolution. Additionally, many legacy functions that pre-date POSIX.1b and do not explicitly mention a clock domain, such as poll(), are subject to the new resolution. Here is a fairly comprehensive list: nanosleep pthread_mutex_timedlock pthread_mutex_reltimedlock_np pthread_rwlock_timedrdlock pthread_rwlock_reltimedrdlock_np pthread_rwlock_timedwrlock pthread_rwlock_reltimedwrlock_np mq_timedreceive mq_reltimedreceive_np mq_timedsend mq_reltimedsend_np sem_timedwait sem_reltimedwait_np poll select pselect _lwp_cond_timedwait _lwp_cond_reltimedwait semtimedop sigtimedwait aiowait aio_waitn aio_suspend port_get port_getn cond_timedwait cond_reltimedwait setitimer (ITIMER_REAL) misc rpc calls, misc ldap calls This change in resolution was made feasible because we made the implementation of timeouts more efficient a few years back when we re-architected the callout subsystem of Solaris. Previously, timeouts were tested and expired by the kernel's clock thread which ran 100 times per second, yielding a resolution of 10 msec. This did not scale, as timeouts could be posted by every CPU, but were expired by only a single thread. The resolution could be changed by setting hires_tick=1 in /etc/system, but this caused the clock thread to run at 1000 Hz, which made the potential scalability problem worse. Given enough CPUs posting enough timeouts, the clock thread could be a performance bottleneck. We fixed that by re-implementing the timeout as a per-CPU timer interrupt (using the cyclic subsystem, for those familiar with Solaris internals). This decoupled the clock thread frequency from timeout resolution, and allowed us to improve default timeout resolution without adding CPU overhead in the clock thread. Here are some exceptions for which the default resolution is still 10 msec. The thread scheduler's time quantum is 10 msec by default, because preemption is driven by the clock thread (plus helper threads for scalability). See for example dispadmin, priocntl, fx_dptbl, rt_dptbl, and ts_dptbl. This may be changed using hires_tick. The resolution of the clock_t data type, primarily used in DDI functions, is 10 msec. It may be changed using hires_tick. These functions are only used by developers writing kernel modules. A few functions that pre-date POSIX CLOCK_REALTIME mention _SC_CLK_TCK, CLK_TCK, "system clock", or no clock domain. These functions are still driven by the clock thread, and their resolution is 10 msec. They include alarm, pcsample, times, clock, and setitimer for ITIMER_VIRTUAL and ITIMER_PROF. Their resolution may be changed using hires_tick. Now back to the database. How does this help the Oracle log writer? Foreground processes post a redo record to the log writer, which releases them after the redo has committed. When a large number of foregrounds are waiting, the release step can slow down the log writer, so under heavy load, the foregrounds switch to a mode where they poll for completion. This scales better because every foreground can poll independently, but at the cost of waiting the minimum polling interval. That was 10 msec, but is now 1 msec in Solaris 11.1, so the foregrounds process transactions faster under load. Pretty cool.

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• Uninstalling Reporting Server 2008 on Windows Server 2008

  - by Piotr Rodak

  Ha. I had quite disputable pleasure of installing and reinstalling and reinstalling and reinstalling – I think about 5 times before it worked – Reporting Server 2008 on Windows Server with the same year number in name. During my struggle I came across an error which seems to be not quite unfamiliar to some more unfortunate developers and admins who happen to uninstall SSRS 2008 from the server. I had the SSRS 2008 installed as named instance, SQL2008. I wanted to uninstall the server and install it to default instance. And this is when it bit me – not the first time and not the last that day . The setup complained that it couldn’t access a DLL: Error message: TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Setup ------------------------------ The following error has occurred: Access to the path 'C:\Windows\SysWOW64\perf-ReportServer$SQL2008-rsctr.dll' is denied. For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?LinkID=20476&ProdName=Microsoft+SQL+Server&EvtSrc=setup.rll&EvtID=50000&ProdVer=10.0.1600.22&EvtType=0x60797DC7%25400x84E8D3C0 ------------------------------ BUTTONS: OK This is a screenshot that shows the above error: This issue seems to have a bit of literature dedicated to it and even seemingly a KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956173 and a similar Connect item: http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/363653/error-messages-when-upgrading-from-sql-2008-rc0-to-rtm The article describes issue as following: When you try to uninstall Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services from the server, you may receive the following error message: An error has occurred: Access to the path 'Drive_Letter:\WINDOWS\system32\perf-ReportServer-rsctr.dll' is denied. Note Drive_Letter refers to the disc drive into which the SQL Server installation media is inserted. In my case, the Note was not true; the error pointed to a dll that was located in Windows folder on C:\, not where the installation media were. Despite this difference I tried to identify any processes that might be keeping lock on the dll. I downloaded Sysinternals process explorer and ran it to find any processes I could stop. Unfortunately, there was no such process. I tried to rerun the installation, but it failed at the same step. Eventually I decided to remove the dll before the setup was executed. I changed name of the dll to be able to restore it in case of some issues. Interestingly, Windows let me do it, which means that indeed, it was not locked by any process. I ran the setup and this time it uninstalled the instance without any problems:   To summarize my experience I should say – be very careful, don’t leave any leftovers after uninstallation – remove/rename any folders that are left after setup has finished. For some reason, setup doesn’t remove folders and certain files. Installation on Windows Server 2008 requires more attention than on Windows 2003 because of the changed security model, some actions can be executed only by administrator in elevated execution mode. In general, you have to get used to UAC and a bit different experience than with Windows Server 2003. Technorati Tags: SQL Server 2008,Windows Server 2008,SRS,Reporting Services

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

  - by Rick Strahl

  A few months ago on a project the subject of load testing came up. We were having some serious issues with a Web application that would start spewing SQL lock errors under somewhat heavy load. These sort of errors can be tough to catch, precisely because they only occur under load and not during typical development testing. To replicate this error more reliably we needed to put a load on the application and run it for a while before these SQL errors would flare up. It’s been a while since I’d looked at load testing tools, so I spent a bit of time looking at different tools and frankly didn’t really find anything that was a good fit. A lot of tools were either a pain to use, didn’t have the basic features I needed, or are extravagantly expensive. In  the end I got frustrated enough to build an initially small custom load test solution that then morphed into a more generic library, then gained a console front end and eventually turned into a full blown Web load testing tool that is now called West Wind WebSurge. I got seriously frustrated looking for tools every time I needed some quick and dirty load testing for an application. If my aim is to just put an application under heavy enough load to find a scalability problem in code, or to simply try and push an application to its limits on the hardware it’s running I shouldn’t have to have to struggle to set up tests. It should be easy enough to get going in a few minutes, so that the testing can be set up quickly so that it can be done on a regular basis without a lot of hassle. And that was the goal when I started to build out my initial custom load tester into a more widely usable tool. If you’re in a hurry and you want to check it out, you can find more information and download links here: West Wind WebSurge Product Page Walk through Video Download link (zip) Install from Chocolatey Source on GitHub For a more detailed discussion of the why’s and how’s and some background continue reading. How did I get here? When I started out on this path, I wasn’t planning on building a tool like this myself – but I got frustrated enough looking at what’s out there to think that I can do better than what’s available for the most common simple load testing scenarios. When we ran into the SQL lock problems I mentioned, I started looking around what’s available for Web load testing solutions that would work for our whole team which consisted of a few developers and a couple of IT guys both of which needed to be able to run the tests. It had been a while since I looked at tools and I figured that by now there should be some good solutions out there, but as it turns out I didn’t really find anything that fit our relatively simple needs without costing an arm and a leg… I spent the better part of a day installing and trying various load testing tools and to be frank most of them were either terrible at what they do, incredibly unfriendly to use, used some terminology I couldn’t even parse, or were extremely expensive (and I mean in the ‘sell your liver’ range of expensive). Pick your poison. There are also a number of online solutions for load testing and they actually looked more promising, but those wouldn’t work well for our scenario as the application is running inside of a private VPN with no outside access into the VPN. Most of those online solutions also ended up being very pricey as well – presumably because of the bandwidth required to test over the open Web can be enormous. When I asked around on Twitter what people were using– I got mostly… crickets. Several people mentioned Visual Studio Load Test, and most other suggestions pointed to online solutions. I did get a bunch of responses though with people asking to let them know what I found – apparently I’m not alone when it comes to finding load testing tools that are effective and easy to use. As to Visual Studio, the higher end skus of Visual Studio and the test edition include a Web load testing tool, which is quite powerful, but there are a number of issues with that: First it’s tied to Visual Studio so it’s not very portable – you need a VS install. I also find the test setup and terminology used by the VS test runner extremely confusing. Heck, it’s complicated enough that there’s even a Pluralsight course on using the Visual Studio Web test from Steve Smith. And of course you need to have one of the high end Visual Studio Skus, and those are mucho Dinero ($$$) – just for the load testing that’s rarely an option. Some of the tools are ultra extensive and let you run analysis tools on the target serves which is useful, but in most cases – just plain overkill and only distracts from what I tend to be ultimately interested in: Reproducing problems that occur at high load, and finding the upper limits and ‘what if’ scenarios as load is ramped up increasingly against a site. Yes it’s useful to have Web app instrumentation, but often that’s not what you’re interested in. I still fondly remember early days of Web testing when Microsoft had the WAST (Web Application Stress Tool) tool, which was rather simple – and also somewhat limited – but easily allowed you to create stress tests very quickly. It had some serious limitations (mainly that it didn’t work with SSL),  but the idea behind it was excellent: Create tests quickly and easily and provide a decent engine to run it locally with minimal setup. You could get set up and run tests within a few minutes. Unfortunately, that tool died a quiet death as so many of Microsoft’s tools that probably were built by an intern and then abandoned, even though there was a lot of potential and it was actually fairly widely used. Eventually the tools was no longer downloadable and now it simply doesn’t work anymore on higher end hardware. West Wind Web Surge – Making Load Testing Quick and Easy So I ended up creating West Wind WebSurge out of rebellious frustration… The goal of WebSurge is to make it drop dead simple to create load tests. It’s super easy to capture sessions either using the built in capture tool (big props to Eric Lawrence, Telerik and FiddlerCore which made that piece a snap), using the full version of Fiddler and exporting sessions, or by manually or programmatically creating text files based on plain HTTP headers to create requests. I’ve been using this tool for 4 months now on a regular basis on various projects as a reality check for performance and scalability and it’s worked extremely well for finding small performance issues. I also use it regularly as a simple URL tester, as it allows me to quickly enter a URL plus headers and content and test that URL and its results along with the ability to easily save one or more of those URLs. A few weeks back I made a walk through video that goes over most of the features of WebSurge in some detail: Note that the UI has slightly changed since then, so there are some UI improvements. Most notably the test results screen has been updated recently to a different layout and to provide more information about each URL in a session at a glance. The video and the main WebSurge site has a lot of info of basic operations. For the rest of this post I’ll talk about a few deeper aspects that may be of interest while also giving a glance at how WebSurge works. Session Capturing As you would expect, WebSurge works with Sessions of Urls that are played back under load. Here’s what the main Session View looks like: You can create session entries manually by individually adding URLs to test (on the Request tab on the right) and saving them, or you can capture output from Web Browsers, Windows Desktop applications that call services, your own applications using the built in Capture tool. With this tool you can capture anything HTTP -SSL requests and content from Web pages, AJAX calls, SOAP or REST services – again anything that uses Windows or .NET HTTP APIs. Behind the scenes the capture tool uses FiddlerCore so basically anything you can capture with Fiddler you can also capture with Web Surge Session capture tool. Alternately you can actually use Fiddler as well, and then export the captured Fiddler trace to a file, which can then be imported into WebSurge. This is a nice way to let somebody capture session without having to actually install WebSurge or for your customers to provide an exact playback scenario for a given set of URLs that cause a problem perhaps. Note that not all applications work with Fiddler’s proxy unless you configure a proxy. For example, .NET Web applications that make HTTP calls usually don’t show up in Fiddler by default. For those .NET applications you can explicitly override proxy settings to capture those requests to service calls. The capture tool also has handy optional filters that allow you to filter by domain, to help block out noise that you typically don’t want to include in your requests. For example, if your pages include links to CDNs, or Google Analytics or social links you typically don’t want to include those in your load test, so by capturing just from a specific domain you are guaranteed content from only that one domain. Additionally you can provide url filters in the configuration file – filters allow to provide filter strings that if contained in a url will cause requests to be ignored. Again this is useful if you don’t filter by domain but you want to filter out things like static image, css and script files etc. Often you’re not interested in the load characteristics of these static and usually cached resources as they just add noise to tests and often skew the overall url performance results. In my testing I tend to care only about my dynamic requests. SSL Captures require Fiddler Note, that in order to capture SSL requests you’ll have to install the Fiddler’s SSL certificate. The easiest way to do this is to install Fiddler and use its SSL configuration options to get the certificate into the local certificate store. There’s a document on the Telerik site that provides the exact steps to get SSL captures to work with Fiddler and therefore with WebSurge. Session Storage A group of URLs entered or captured make up a Session. Sessions can be saved and restored easily as they use a very simple text format that simply stored on disk. The format is slightly customized HTTP header traces separated by a separator line. The headers are standard HTTP headers except that the full URL instead of just the domain relative path is stored as part of the 1st HTTP header line for easier parsing. Because it’s just text and uses the same format that Fiddler uses for exports, it’s super easy to create Sessions by hand manually or under program control writing out to a simple text file. You can see what this format looks like in the Capture window figure above – the raw captured format is also what’s stored to disk and what WebSurge parses from. The only ‘custom’ part of these headers is that 1st line contains the full URL instead of the domain relative path and Host: header. The rest of each header are just plain standard HTTP headers with each individual URL isolated by a separator line. The format used here also uses what Fiddler produces for exports, so it’s easy to exchange or view data either in Fiddler or WebSurge. Urls can also be edited interactively so you can modify the headers easily as well: Again – it’s just plain HTTP headers so anything you can do with HTTP can be added here. Use it for single URL Testing Incidentally I’ve also found this form as an excellent way to test and replay individual URLs for simple non-load testing purposes. Because you can capture a single or many URLs and store them on disk, this also provides a nice HTTP playground where you can record URLs with their headers, and fire them one at a time or as a session and see results immediately. It’s actually an easy way for REST presentations and I find the simple UI flow actually easier than using Fiddler natively. Finally you can save one or more URLs as a session for later retrieval. I’m using this more and more for simple URL checks. Overriding Cookies and Domains Speaking of HTTP headers – you can also overwrite cookies used as part of the options. One thing that happens with modern Web applications is that you have session cookies in use for authorization. These cookies tend to expire at some point which would invalidate a test. Using the Options dialog you can actually override the cookie: which replaces the cookie for all requests with the cookie value specified here. You can capture a valid cookie from a manual HTTP request in your browser and then paste into the cookie field, to replace the existing Cookie with the new one that is now valid. Likewise you can easily replace the domain so if you captured urls on west-wind.com and now you want to test on localhost you can do that easily easily as well. You could even do something like capture on store.west-wind.com and then test on localhost/store which would also work. Running Load Tests Once you’ve created a Session you can specify the length of the test in seconds, and specify the number of simultaneous threads to run each session on. Sessions run through each of the URLs in the session sequentially by default. One option in the options list above is that you can also randomize the URLs so each thread runs requests in a different order. This avoids bunching up URLs initially when tests start as all threads run the same requests simultaneously which can sometimes skew the results of the first few minutes of a test. While sessions run some progress information is displayed: By default there’s a live view of requests displayed in a Console-like window. On the bottom of the window there’s a running total summary that displays where you’re at in the test, how many requests have been processed and what the requests per second count is currently for all requests. Note that for tests that run over a thousand requests a second it’s a good idea to turn off the console display. While the console display is nice to see that something is happening and also gives you slight idea what’s happening with actual requests, once a lot of requests are processed, this UI updating actually adds a lot of CPU overhead to the application which may cause the actual load generated to be reduced. If you are running a 1000 requests a second there’s not much to see anyway as requests roll by way too fast to see individual lines anyway. If you look on the options panel, there is a NoProgressEvents option that disables the console display. Note that the summary display is still updated approximately once a second so you can always tell that the test is still running. Test Results When the test is done you get a simple Results display: On the right you get an overall summary as well as breakdown by each URL in the session. Both success and failures are highlighted so it’s easy to see what’s breaking in your load test. The report can be printed or you can also open the HTML document in your default Web Browser for printing to PDF or saving the HTML document to disk. The list on the right shows you a partial list of the URLs that were fired so you can look in detail at the request and response data. The list can be filtered by success and failure requests. Each list is partial only (at the moment) and limited to a max of 1000 items in order to render reasonably quickly. Each item in the list can be clicked to see the full request and response data: This particularly useful for errors so you can quickly see and copy what request data was used and in the case of a GET request you can also just click the link to quickly jump to the page. For non-GET requests you can find the URL in the Session list, and use the context menu to Test the URL as configured including any HTTP content data to send. You get to see the full HTTP request and response as well as a link in the Request header to go visit the actual page. Not so useful for a POST as above, but definitely useful for GET requests. Finally you can also get a few charts. The most useful one is probably the Request per Second chart which can be accessed from the Charts menu or shortcut. Here’s what it looks like:   Results can also be exported to JSON, XML and HTML. Keep in mind that these files can get very large rather quickly though, so exports can end up taking a while to complete. Command Line Interface WebSurge runs with a small core load engine and this engine is plugged into the front end application I’ve shown so far. There’s also a command line interface available to run WebSurge from the Windows command prompt. Using the command line you can run tests for either an individual URL (similar to AB.exe for example) or a full Session file. By default when it runs WebSurgeCli shows progress every second showing total request count, failures and the requests per second for the entire test. A silent option can turn off this progress display and display only the results. The command line interface can be useful for build integration which allows checking for failures perhaps or hitting a specific requests per second count etc. It’s also nice to use this as quick and dirty URL test facility similar to the way you’d use Apache Bench (ab.exe). Unlike ab.exe though, WebSurgeCli supports SSL and makes it much easier to create multi-URL tests using either manual editing or the WebSurge UI. Current Status Currently West Wind WebSurge is still in Beta status. I’m still adding small new features and tweaking the UI in an attempt to make it as easy and self-explanatory as possible to run. Documentation for the UI and specialty features is also still a work in progress. I plan on open-sourcing this product, but it won’t be free. There’s a free version available that provides a limited number of threads and request URLs to run. A relatively low cost license  removes the thread and request limitations. Pricing info can be found on the Web site – there’s an introductory price which is $99 at the moment which I think is reasonable compared to most other for pay solutions out there that are exorbitant by comparison… The reason code is not available yet is – well, the UI portion of the app is a bit embarrassing in its current monolithic state. The UI started as a very simple interface originally that later got a lot more complex – yeah, that never happens, right? Unless there’s a lot of interest I don’t foresee re-writing the UI entirely (which would be ideal), but in the meantime at least some cleanup is required before I dare to publish it :-). The code will likely be released with version 1.0. I’m very interested in feedback. Do you think this could be useful to you and provide value over other tools you may or may not have used before? I hope so – it already has provided a ton of value for me and the work I do that made the development worthwhile at this point. You can leave a comment below, or for more extensive discussions you can post a message on the West Wind Message Board in the WebSurge section Microsoft MVPs and Insiders get a free License If you’re a Microsoft MVP or a Microsoft Insider you can get a full license for free. Send me a link to your current, official Microsoft profile and I’ll send you a not-for resale license. Send any messages to [email protected]. Resources For more info on WebSurge and to download it to try it out, use the following links. West Wind WebSurge Home Download West Wind WebSurge Getting Started with West Wind WebSurge Video© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in ASP.NET   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Another "Windows 7 entry missing from Grub2" Question

  - by 4x10

  Like many before me had the following problem that after installing Ubuntu (with windows 7 already installed), the grub boot loader wouldnt show windows 7 as a boot option, though i can boot fine if I use the "Choose Boot Device" options on the x220. The difference is that I try using UEFI only so many answers didn't really fit my problem, though i tried several stuffs: after running boot repair it destroyed the ubuntu boot loader custom entry in /etc/grub.d/40_custom for windows which doesnt show up many update-grub and reboots trying windows repair recovery thing while being there i also did bootrec.exe /FixBoot and update-grub and reboot again and finaly because it was so much fun, i installed linux all over again, while formatting and deleting everything linux related before that. Now that i think of it, Ubuntu also didn't notice Windows being there during the Setup and it still doesnt according to the Boot Info from Boot Repair. Boot Info Script 0.61-git-patched [23 April 2012] ============================= Boot Info Summary: =============================== => No boot loader is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda. sda1: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: vfat Boot sector type: Windows 7: FAT32 Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files: /efi/Boot/bootx64.efi /efi/ubuntu/grubx64.efi sda2: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: Mounting failed: mount: unknown filesystem type '' sda3: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Windows 7 Boot files: /Windows/System32/winload.exe sda4: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ext4 Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: Operating System: Ubuntu precise (development branch) Boot files: /boot/grub/grub.cfg /etc/fstab sda5: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ext4 Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: Operating System: Boot files: sda6: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: swap Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: ============================ Drive/Partition Info: ============================= Drive: sda _____________________________________________________________________ Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System /dev/sda1 1 625,142,447 625,142,447 ee GPT GUID Partition Table detected. Partition Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors System /dev/sda1 2,048 206,847 204,800 EFI System partition /dev/sda2 206,848 468,991 262,144 Microsoft Reserved Partition (Windows) /dev/sda3 468,992 170,338,303 169,869,312 Data partition (Windows/Linux) /dev/sda4 170,338,304 330,338,304 160,000,001 Data partition (Windows/Linux) /dev/sda5 330,338,305 617,141,039 286,802,735 Data partition (Windows/Linux) /dev/sda6 617,141,040 625,141,040 8,000,001 Swap partition (Linux) "blkid" output: ________________________________________________________________ Device UUID TYPE LABEL /dev/sda1 885C-ED1B vfat /dev/sda3 EE06CC0506CBCCB1 ntfs /dev/sda4 604dd3b2-64ca-4200-b8fb-820e8d0ca899 ext4 /dev/sda5 d62515fd-8120-4a74-b17b-0bdf244124a3 ext4 /dev/sda6 7078b649-fb2a-4c59-bd03-fd31ef440d37 swap ================================ Mount points: ================================= Device Mount_Point Type Options /dev/sda1 /boot/efi vfat (rw) /dev/sda4 / ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro) /dev/sda5 /home ext4 (rw) =========================== sda4/boot/grub/grub.cfg: =========================== -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE # # It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates # from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub # ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/00_header ### if [ -s $prefix/grubenv ]; then set have_grubenv=true load_env fi set default="0" if [ "${prev_saved_entry}" ]; then set saved_entry="${prev_saved_entry}" save_env saved_entry set prev_saved_entry= save_env prev_saved_entry set boot_once=true fi function savedefault { if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then saved_entry="${chosen}" save_env saved_entry fi } function recordfail { set recordfail=1 if [ -n "${have_grubenv}" ]; then if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then save_env recordfail; fi; fi } function load_video { insmod efi_gop insmod efi_uga insmod video_bochs insmod video_cirrus } insmod part_gpt insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,gpt4)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 604dd3b2-64ca-4200-b8fb-820e8d0ca899 if loadfont /usr/share/grub/unicode.pf2 ; then set gfxmode=auto load_video insmod gfxterm insmod part_gpt insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,gpt4)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 604dd3b2-64ca-4200-b8fb-820e8d0ca899 set locale_dir=($root)/boot/grub/locale set lang=en_US insmod gettext fi terminal_output gfxterm if [ "${recordfail}" = 1 ]; then set timeout=-1 else set timeout=10 fi ### END /etc/grub.d/00_header ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### set menu_color_normal=white/black set menu_color_highlight=black/light-gray if background_color 44,0,30; then clear fi ### END /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### function gfxmode { set gfxpayload="$1" if [ "$1" = "keep" ]; then set vt_handoff=vt.handoff=7 else set vt_handoff= fi } if [ ${recordfail} != 1 ]; then if [ -e ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt ]; then if hwmatch ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt 3; then if [ ${match} = 0 ]; then set linux_gfx_mode=keep else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=keep fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi export linux_gfx_mode if [ "$linux_gfx_mode" != "text" ]; then load_video; fi menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-20-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode insmod gzio insmod part_gpt insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,gpt4)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 604dd3b2-64ca-4200-b8fb-820e8d0ca899 linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-20-generic root=UUID=604dd3b2-64ca-4200-b8fb-820e8d0ca899 ro quiet splash $vt_handoff initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-20-generic } menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-20-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod gzio insmod part_gpt insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,gpt4)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 604dd3b2-64ca-4200-b8fb-820e8d0ca899 echo 'Loading Linux 3.2.0-20-generic ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-20-generic root=UUID=604dd3b2-64ca-4200-b8fb-820e8d0ca899 ro recovery nomodeset echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-20-generic } ### END /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### END /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+)" { insmod part_gpt insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,gpt4)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 604dd3b2-64ca-4200-b8fb-820e8d0ca899 linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin } menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)" { insmod part_gpt insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,gpt4)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 604dd3b2-64ca-4200-b8fb-820e8d0ca899 linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin console=ttyS0,115200n8 } ### END /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### ### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### # This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the # menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change # the 'exec tail' line above. ### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### if [ -f $prefix/custom.cfg ]; then source $prefix/custom.cfg; fi ### END /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- =============================== sda4/etc/fstab: ================================ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a # device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices # that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5). # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 # / was on /dev/sda4 during installation UUID=604dd3b2-64ca-4200-b8fb-820e8d0ca899 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 # /boot/efi was on /dev/sda1 during installation UUID=885C-ED1B /boot/efi vfat defaults 0 1 # /home was on /dev/sda5 during installation UUID=d62515fd-8120-4a74-b17b-0bdf244124a3 /home ext4 defaults 0 2 # swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation UUID=7078b649-fb2a-4c59-bd03-fd31ef440d37 none swap sw 0 0 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- =================== sda4: Location of files loaded by Grub: ==================== GiB - GB File Fragment(s) 129.422874451 = 138.966753280 boot/grub/grub.cfg 1 83.059570312 = 89.184534528 boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-20-generic 2 101.393131256 = 108.870045696 boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-20-generic 1 83.059570312 = 89.184534528 initrd.img 2 101.393131256 = 108.870045696 vmlinuz 1 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION : =================== log of boot-repair 2012-04-25__23h40 =================== boot-repair version : 3.18-0ppa3~precise boot-sav version : 3.18-0ppa4~precise glade2script version : 0.3.2.1-0ppa7~precise internet: connected python-software-properties version : 0.82.7 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 591 not upgraded. dpkg-preconfigure: unable to re-open stdin: No such file or directory boot-repair is executed in installed-session (Ubuntu precise (development branch) , precise , Ubuntu , x86_64) WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sda'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted. =================== OSPROBER: /dev/sda4:The OS now in use - Ubuntu precise (development branch) CurrentSession:linux =================== BLKID: /dev/sda3: UUID="EE06CC0506CBCCB1" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda1: UUID="885C-ED1B" TYPE="vfat" /dev/sda4: UUID="604dd3b2-64ca-4200-b8fb-820e8d0ca899" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sda5: UUID="d62515fd-8120-4a74-b17b-0bdf244124a3" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sda6: UUID="7078b649-fb2a-4c59-bd03-fd31ef440d37" TYPE="swap" 1 disks with OS, 1 OS : 1 Linux, 0 MacOS, 0 Windows, 0 unknown type OS. WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sda'! The util sfdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted. =================== /etc/default/grub : # If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update # /boot/grub/grub.cfg. # For full documentation of the options in this file, see: # info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration' GRUB_DEFAULT=0 #GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 #GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true GRUB_TIMEOUT=10 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian` GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" # Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs # This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains # the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...) #GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef" # Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only) #GRUB_TERMINAL=console # The resolution used on graphical terminal # note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE # you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo' #GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480 # Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux #GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true # Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries #GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true" # Uncomment to get a beep at grub start #GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1" EFI_OF_PART[1] (, ) =================== dmesg | grep EFI : [ 0.000000] EFI v2.00 by Lenovo [ 0.000000] Kernel-defined memdesc doesn't match the one from EFI! [ 0.000000] EFI: mem00: type=3, attr=0xf, range=[0x0000000000000000-0x0000000000001000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem01: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x0000000000001000-0x000000000004e000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem02: type=3, attr=0xf, range=[0x000000000004e000-0x0000000000058000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem03: type=10, attr=0xf, range=[0x0000000000058000-0x0000000000059000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem04: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x0000000000059000-0x000000000005e000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem05: type=4, attr=0xf, range=[0x000000000005e000-0x000000000005f000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem06: type=3, attr=0xf, range=[0x000000000005f000-0x00000000000a0000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem07: type=2, attr=0xf, range=[0x0000000000100000-0x00000000005b9000) (4MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem08: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000005b9000-0x0000000020000000) (506MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem09: type=0, attr=0xf, range=[0x0000000020000000-0x0000000020200000) (2MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem10: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x0000000020200000-0x00000000364e4000) (354MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem11: type=2, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000364e4000-0x000000003726a000) (13MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem12: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x000000003726a000-0x0000000040000000) (141MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem13: type=0, attr=0xf, range=[0x0000000040000000-0x0000000040200000) (2MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem14: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x0000000040200000-0x000000009df35000) (1501MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem15: type=2, attr=0xf, range=[0x000000009df35000-0x00000000d39a0000) (858MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem16: type=4, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d39a0000-0x00000000d39c0000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem17: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d39c0000-0x00000000d5df5000) (36MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem18: type=4, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d5df5000-0x00000000d6990000) (11MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem19: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d6990000-0x00000000d6b82000) (1MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem20: type=1, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d6b82000-0x00000000d6b9f000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem21: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d6b9f000-0x00000000d77b0000) (12MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem22: type=4, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d77b0000-0x00000000d780a000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem23: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d780a000-0x00000000d7826000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem24: type=4, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d7826000-0x00000000d7868000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem25: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d7868000-0x00000000d7869000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem26: type=4, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d7869000-0x00000000d786a000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem27: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d786a000-0x00000000d786b000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem28: type=4, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d786b000-0x00000000d786c000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem29: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d786c000-0x00000000d786d000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem30: type=4, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d786d000-0x00000000d825f000) (9MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem31: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d825f000-0x00000000d8261000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem32: type=4, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d8261000-0x00000000d82f7000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem33: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d82f7000-0x00000000d82f8000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem34: type=4, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d82f8000-0x00000000d8705000) (4MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem35: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d8705000-0x00000000d8706000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem36: type=4, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d8706000-0x00000000d8761000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem37: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d8761000-0x00000000d8768000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem38: type=4, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d8768000-0x00000000d9b9f000) (20MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem39: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d9b9f000-0x00000000d9e4c000) (2MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem40: type=2, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d9e4c000-0x00000000d9e52000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem41: type=3, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000d9e52000-0x00000000da59f000) (7MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem42: type=5, attr=0x800000000000000f, range=[0x00000000da59f000-0x00000000da6c3000) (1MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem43: type=5, attr=0x800000000000000f, range=[0x00000000da6c3000-0x00000000da79f000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem44: type=6, attr=0x800000000000000f, range=[0x00000000da79f000-0x00000000da8b1000) (1MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem45: type=6, attr=0x800000000000000f, range=[0x00000000da8b1000-0x00000000da99f000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem46: type=0, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000da99f000-0x00000000daa22000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem47: type=0, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000daa22000-0x00000000daa9b000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem48: type=0, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000daa9b000-0x00000000daa9c000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem49: type=0, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000daa9c000-0x00000000daa9f000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem50: type=10, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000daa9f000-0x00000000daadd000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem51: type=10, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000daadd000-0x00000000dab9f000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem52: type=9, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000dab9f000-0x00000000dabdc000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem53: type=9, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000dabdc000-0x00000000dabff000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem54: type=4, attr=0xf, range=[0x00000000dabff000-0x00000000dac00000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem55: type=7, attr=0xf, range=[0x0000000100000000-0x000000021e600000) (4582MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem56: type=11, attr=0x8000000000000001, range=[0x00000000f80f8000-0x00000000f80f9000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] EFI: mem57: type=11, attr=0x8000000000000001, range=[0x00000000fed1c000-0x00000000fed20000) (0MB) [ 0.000000] ACPI: UEFI 00000000dabde000 0003E (v01 LENOVO TP-8D 00001280 PTL 00000002) [ 0.000000] ACPI: UEFI 00000000dabdd000 00042 (v01 PTL COMBUF 00000001 PTL 00000001) [ 0.000000] ACPI: UEFI 00000000dabdc000 00292 (v01 LENOVO TP-8D 00001280 PTL 00000002) [ 0.795807] fb0: EFI VGA frame buffer device [ 1.057243] EFI Variables Facility v0.08 2004-May-17 [ 9.122104] fb: conflicting fb hw usage inteldrmfb vs EFI VGA - removing generic driver ReadEFI: /dev/sda , N 128 , 0 , , PRStart 1024 , PRSize 128 WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sda'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted. =================== PARTITIONS & DISKS: sda4 : sda, not-sepboot, grubenv-ok grub2, grub-efi, update-grub, 64, with-boot, is-os, gpt-but-not-EFI, fstab-has-bad-efi, no-nt, no-winload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, no-grldr, no-b-bcd, apt-get, grub-install, . sda3 : sda, maybesepboot, no-grubenv nogrub, no-docgrub, no-update-grub, 32, no-boot, no-os, gpt-but-not-EFI, part-has-no-fstab, no-nt, haswinload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, no-grldr, no-b-bcd, nopakmgr, nogrubinstall, /mnt/boot-sav/sda3. sda1 : sda, maybesepboot, no-grubenv nogrub, no-docgrub, no-update-grub, 32, no-boot, no-os, is-correct-EFI, part-has-no-fstab, no-nt, no-winload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, no-grldr, no-b-bcd, nopakmgr, nogrubinstall, /boot/efi. sda5 : sda, maybesepboot, no-grubenv nogrub, no-docgrub, no-update-grub, 32, no-boot, no-os, gpt-but-not-EFI, part-has-no-fstab, no-nt, no-winload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, no-grldr, no-b-bcd, nopakmgr, nogrubinstall, /home. sda : GPT-BIS, GPT, no-BIOS_boot, has-correctEFI, 2048 sectors * 512 bytes =================== PARTED: Model: ATA HITACHI HTS72323 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 320GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: gpt Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 1049kB 106MB 105MB fat32 EFI system partition boot 2 106MB 240MB 134MB Microsoft reserved partition msftres 3 240MB 87.2GB 87.0GB ntfs Basic data partition 4 87.2GB 169GB 81.9GB ext4 5 169GB 316GB 147GB ext4 6 316GB 320GB 4096MB linux-swap(v1) =================== MOUNT: /dev/sda4 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro) proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw) none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw) none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw) udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620) tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755) none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880) none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) /dev/sda1 on /boot/efi type vfat (rw) /dev/sda5 on /home type ext4 (rw) gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/vierlex/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=vierlex) /dev/sda3 on /mnt/boot-sav/sda3 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) /sys/block/sda: alignment_offset bdi capability dev device discard_alignment events events_async events_poll_msecs ext_range holders inflight power queue range removable ro sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sda5 sda6 size slaves stat subsystem trace uevent /dev: agpgart autofs block bsg btrfs-control bus char console core cpu cpu_dma_latency disk dri ecryptfs fb0 fd full fuse hpet input kmsg log mapper mcelog mei mem net network_latency network_throughput null oldmem port ppp psaux ptmx pts random rfkill rtc rtc0 sda sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sda5 sda6 sg0 shm snapshot snd stderr stdin stdout tpm0 uinput urandom usbmon0 usbmon1 usbmon2 v4l vga_arbiter video0 watchdog zero /dev/mapper: control /boot/efi: EFI /boot/efi/EFI: Boot Microsoft ubuntu /boot/efi/efi: Boot Microsoft ubuntu /boot/efi/efi/Boot: bootx64.efi /boot/efi/efi/ubuntu: grubx64.efi WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sda'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted. =================== DF: Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda4 ext4 77G 4.1G 69G 6% / udev devtmpfs 3.9G 12K 3.9G 1% /dev tmpfs tmpfs 1.6G 864K 1.6G 1% /run none tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock none tmpfs 3.9G 152K 3.9G 1% /run/shm /dev/sda1 vfat 96M 18M 79M 19% /boot/efi /dev/sda5 ext4 137G 2.2G 128G 2% /home /dev/sda3 fuseblk 81G 30G 52G 37% /mnt/boot-sav/sda3 =================== FDISK: Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xf34fe538 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 625142447 312571223+ ee GPT =================== Before mainwindow FSCK no PASTEBIN yes WUBI no WINBOOT yes recommendedrepair, purge, QTY_OF_PART_FOR_REINSTAL 1 no-kernel-purge UNHIDEBOOT_ACTION yes (10s), noflag () PART_TO_REINSTALL_GRUB sda4, FORCE_GRUB no (sda) REMOVABLEDISK no USE_SEPARATEBOOTPART no (sda3) grub2 () UNCOMMENT_GFXMODE no ATA ADD_KERNEL_OPTION no (acpi=off) MBR_TO_RESTORE ( ) EFI detected. Please check the options. =================== Actions FSCK no PASTEBIN yes WUBI no WINBOOT no bootinfo, nombraction, QTY_OF_PART_FOR_REINSTAL 1 no-kernel-purge UNHIDEBOOT_ACTION no (10s), noflag () PART_TO_REINSTALL_GRUB sda4, FORCE_GRUB no (sda) REMOVABLEDISK no USE_SEPARATEBOOTPART no (sda3) grub2 () UNCOMMENT_GFXMODE no ATA ADD_KERNEL_OPTION no (acpi=off) MBR_TO_RESTORE ( ) No change has been performed on your computer. See you soon! internet: connected Thanks for your time and attention. EDIT: additional Info Request =No boot loader is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda. But maybe this is how it is supposed to work? yea this is ok. boot stuff seems to be on a seperate partition, in my case sda1. I'm very new to this UEFI thing too. missing files like bootmgr i don't really have a clue :D but yea, maybe thats how it suppose to be? Instead and whats not shown in the log for some reason: There is additional microsoft bootfiles on sda1 under /efi/microsoft/ [much stuff] I remember also doing some kind of hack to make a UEFI windows 7 usb stick. http://jake.io/b/2011/installing-windows-7-with-uefi-boot-on-an-x220-from-usb/ In short: creating and placing bootx64.efi on the stick so it can be booted in UEFI mode. boot order i decide that in my BIOS. i read somwhere that the thinkpad x220 (essential part of the serial number: 4921 http://www.lenovo.com/shop/americas/content/user_guides/x220_x220i_x220tablet_x220itablet_ug_en.pdf) doesnt really have UEFI interface or something, still, these 2 options are listed with all the other usual devices you can give a boot priority to. Right now it looks like this: Boot Priority Order 1. ubuntu 2. Windows Boot Manager 3. USB FDD 4. USB HDD 5. ATA HDD0 HITACHI [random string]

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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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• OIM 11g notification framework

  - by Rajesh G Kumar

  OIM 11g has introduced an improved and template based Notifications framework. New release has removed the limitation of sending text based emails (out-of-the-box emails) and enhanced to support html features. New release provides in-built out-of-the-box templates for events like 'Reset Password', 'Create User Self Service' , ‘User Deleted' etc. Also provides new APIs to support custom templates to send notifications out of OIM. OIM notification framework supports notification mechanism based on events, notification templates and template resolver. They are defined as follows: Ø Events are defined as XML file and imported as part of MDS database in order to make notification event available for use. Ø Notification templates are created using OIM advance administration console. The template contains the text and the substitution 'variables' which will be replaced with the data provided by the template resolver. Templates support internationalization and can be defined as HTML or in form of simple text. Ø Template resolver is a Java class that is responsible to provide attributes and data to be used at runtime and design time. It must be deployed following the OIM plug-in framework. Resolver data provided at design time is to be used by end user to design notification template with available entity variables and it also provides data at runtime to replace the designed variable with value to be displayed to recipients. Steps to define custom notifications in OIM 11g are: Steps# Steps 1. Define the Notification Event 2. Create the Custom Template Resolver class 3. Create Template with notification contents to be sent to recipients 4. Create Event triggering spots in OIM 1. Notification Event metadata The Notification Event is defined as XML file which need to be imported into MDS database. An event file must be compliant with the schema defined by the notification engine, which is NotificationEvent.xsd. The event file contains basic information about the event.XSD location in MDS database: “/metadata/iam-features-notification/NotificationEvent.xsd”Schema file can be viewed by exporting file from MDS using weblogicExportMetadata.sh script.Sample Notification event metadata definition: 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 2: <Events xmlns:xsi=http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="../../../metadata/NotificationEvent.xsd"> 3: <EventType name="Sample Notification"> 4: <StaticData> 5: <Attribute DataType="X2-Entity" EntityName="User" Name="Granted User"/> 6: </StaticData> 7: <Resolver class="com.iam.oim.demo.notification.DemoNotificationResolver"> 8: <Param DataType="91-Entity" EntityName="Resource" Name="ResourceInfo"/> 9: </Resolver> 10: </EventType> 11: </Events> Line# Description 1. XML file notation tag 2. Events is root tag 3. EventType tag is to declare a unique event name which will be available for template designing 4. The StaticData element lists a set of parameters which allow user to add parameters that are not data dependent. In other words, this element defines the static data to be displayed when notification is to be configured. An example of static data is the User entity, which is not dependent on any other data and has the same set of attributes for all event instances and notification templates. Available attributes are used to be defined as substitution tokens in the template. 5. Attribute tag is child tag for StaticData to declare the entity and its data type with unique reference name. User entity is most commonly used Entity as StaticData. 6. StaticData closing tag 7. Resolver tag defines the resolver class. The Resolver class must be defined for each notification. It defines what parameters are available in the notification creation screen and how those parameters are replaced when the notification is to be sent. Resolver class resolves the data dynamically at run time and displays the attributes in the UI. 8. The Param DataType element lists a set of parameters which allow user to add parameters that are data dependent. An example of the data dependent or a dynamic entity is a resource object which user can select at run time. A notification template is to be configured for the resource object. Corresponding to the resource object field, a lookup is displayed on the UI. When a user selects the event the call goes to the Resolver class provided to fetch the fields that are displayed in the Available Data list, from which user can select the attribute to be used on the template. Param tag is child tag to declare the entity and its data type with unique reference name. 9. Resolver closing tag 10 EventType closing tag 11. Events closing tag Note: - DataType needs to be declared as “X2-Entity” for User entity and “91-Entity” for Resource or Organization entities. The dynamic entities supported for lookup are user, resource, and organization. Once notification event metadata is defined, need to be imported into MDS database. Fully qualified resolver class name need to be define for XML but do not need to load the class in OIM yet (it can be loaded later). 2. Coding the notification resolver All event owners have to provide a resolver class which would resolve the data dynamically at run time. Custom resolver class must implement the interface oracle.iam.notification.impl.NotificationEventResolver and override the implemented methods with actual implementation. It has 2 methods: S# Methods Descriptions 1. public List<NotificationAttribute> getAvailableData(String eventType, Map<String, Object> params); This API will return the list of available data variables. These variables will be available on the UI while creating/modifying the Templates and would let user select the variables so that they can be embedded as a token as part of the Messages on the template. These tokens are replaced by the value passed by the resolver class at run time. Available data is displayed in a list. The parameter "eventType" specifies the event Name for which template is to be read.The parameter "params" is the map which has the entity name and the corresponding value for which available data is to be fetched. Sample code snippet: List<NotificationAttribute> list = new ArrayList<NotificationAttribute>(); long objKey = (Long) params.get("resource"); //Form Field details based on Resource object key HashMap<String, Object> formFieldDetail = getObjectFormName(objKey); for (Iterator<?> itrd = formFieldDetail.entrySet().iterator(); itrd.hasNext(); ) { NotificationAttribute availableData = new NotificationAttribute(); Map.Entry formDetailEntrySet = (Entry<?, ?>)itrd.next(); String fieldLabel = (String)formDetailEntrySet.getValue(); availableData.setName(fieldLabel); list.add(availableData); } return list; 2. Public HashMap<String, Object> getReplacedData(String eventType, Map<String, Object> params); This API would return the resolved value of the variables present on the template at the runtime when notification is being sent. The parameter "eventType" specifies the event Name for which template is to be read.The parameter "params" is the map which has the base values such as usr_key, obj_key etc required by the resolver implementation to resolve the rest of the variables in the template. Sample code snippet: HashMap<String, Object> resolvedData = new HashMap<String, Object>();String firstName = getUserFirstname(params.get("usr_key"));resolvedData.put("fname", firstName); String lastName = getUserLastName(params.get("usr_key"));resolvedData.put("lname", lastname);resolvedData.put("count", "1 million");return resolvedData; This code must be deployed as per OIM 11g plug-in framework. The XML file defining the plug-in is as below: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <oimplugins xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <plugins pluginpoint="oracle.iam.notification.impl.NotificationEventResolver"> <plugin pluginclass= " com.iam.oim.demo.notification.DemoNotificationResolver" version="1.0" name="Sample Notification Resolver"/> </plugins> </oimplugins> 3. Defining the template To create a notification template: Log in to the Oracle Identity Administration Click the System Management tab and then click the Notification tab From the Actions list on the left pane, select Create On the Create page, enter values for the following fields under the Template Information section: Template Name: Demo template Description Text: Demo template Under the Event Details section, perform the following: From the Available Event list, select the event for which the notification template is to be created from a list of available events. Depending on your selection, other fields are displayed in the Event Details section. Note that the template Sample Notification Event created in the previous step being used as the notification event. The contents of the Available Data drop down are based on the event XML StaticData tag, the drop down basically lists all the attributes of the entities defined in that tag. Once you select an element in the drop down, it will show up in the Selected Data text field and then you can just copy it and paste it into either the message subject or the message body fields prefixing $ symbol. Example if list has attribute like First_Name then message body will contains this as $First_Name which resolver will parse and replace it with actual value at runtime. In the Resource field, select a resource from the lookup. This is the dynamic data defined by the Param DataType element in the XML definition. Based on selected resource getAvailableData method of resolver will be called to fetch the resource object attribute detail, if method is overridden with required implementation. For current scenario, Map<String, Object> params will get populated with object key as value and key as “resource” in the map. This is the only input will be provided to resolver at design time. You need to implement the further logic to fetch the object attributes detail to populate the available Data list. List string should not have space in between, if object attributes has space for attribute name then implement logic to replace the space with ‘_’ before populating the list. Example if attribute name is “First Name” then make it “First_Name” and populate the list. Space is not supported while you try to parse and replace the token at run time with real value. Make a note that the Available Data and Selected Data are used in the substitution tokens definition only, they do not define the final data that will be sent in the notification. OIM will invoke the resolver class to get the data and make the substitutions. Under the Locale Information section, enter values in the following fields: To specify a form of encoding, select either UTF-8 or ASCII. In the Message Subject field, enter a subject for the notification. From the Type options, select the data type in which you want to send the message. You can choose between HTML and Text/Plain. In the Short Message field, enter a gist of the message in very few words. In the Long Message field, enter the message that will be sent as the notification with Available data token which need to be replaced by resolver at runtime. After you have entered the required values in all the fields, click Save. A message is displayed confirming the creation of the notification template. Click OK 4. Triggering the event A notification event can be triggered from different places in OIM. The logic behind the triggering must be coded and plugged into OIM. Examples of triggering points for notifications: Event handlers: post process notifications for specific data updates in OIM users Process tasks: to notify the users that a provisioning task was executed by OIM Scheduled tasks: to notify something related to the task The scheduled job has two parameters: Template Name: defines the notification template to be sent User Login: defines the user record that will provide the data to be sent in the notification Sample Code Snippet: public void execute(String templateName , String userId) { try { NotificationService notService = Platform.getService(NotificationService.class); NotificationEvent eventToSend=this.createNotificationEvent(templateName,userId); notService.notify(eventToSend); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } private NotificationEvent createNotificationEvent(String poTemplateName, String poUserId) { NotificationEvent event = new NotificationEvent(); String[] receiverUserIds= { poUserId }; event.setUserIds(receiverUserIds); event.setTemplateName(poTemplateName); event.setSender(null); HashMap<String, Object> templateParams = new HashMap<String, Object>(); templateParams.put("USER_LOGIN",poUserId); event.setParams(templateParams); return event; } public HashMap getAttributes() { return null; } public void setAttributes() {} }

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• An easy way to create Side by Side registrationless COM Manifests with Visual Studio

  - by Rick Strahl

  Here's something I didn't find out until today: You can use Visual Studio to easily create registrationless COM manifest files for you with just a couple of small steps. Registrationless COM lets you use COM component without them being registered in the registry. This means it's possible to deploy COM components along with another application using plain xcopy semantics. To be sure it's rarely quite that easy - you need to watch out for dependencies - but if you know you have COM components that are light weight and have no or known dependencies it's easy to get everything into a single folder and off you go. Registrationless COM works via manifest files which carry the same name as the executable plus a .manifest extension (ie. yourapp.exe.manifest) I'm going to use a Visual FoxPro COM object as an example and create a simple Windows Forms app that calls the component - without that component being registered. Let's take a walk down memory lane… Create a COM Component I start by creating a FoxPro COM component because that's what I know and am working with here in my legacy environment. You can use VB classic or C++ ATL object if that's more to your liking. Here's a real simple Fox one: DEFINE CLASS SimpleServer as Session OLEPUBLIC FUNCTION HelloWorld(lcName) RETURN "Hello " + lcName ENDDEFINE Compile it into a DLL COM component with: BUILD MTDLL simpleserver FROM simpleserver RECOMPILE And to make sure it works test it quickly from Visual FoxPro: server = CREATEOBJECT("simpleServer.simpleserver") MESSAGEBOX( server.HelloWorld("Rick") ) Using Visual Studio to create a Manifest File for a COM Component Next open Visual Studio and create a new executable project - a Console App or WinForms or WPF application will all do. Go to the References Node Select Add Reference Use the Browse tab and find your compiled DLL to import  Next you'll see your assembly in the project. Right click on the reference and select Properties Click on the Isolated DropDown and select True Compile and that's all there's to it. Visual Studio will create a App.exe.manifest file right alongside your application's EXE. The manifest file created looks like this: xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? assembly xsi:schemaLocation="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1 assembly.adaptive.xsd" manifestVersion="1.0" xmlns:asmv1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" xmlns:asmv2="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2" xmlns:asmv3="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:co.v1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:clickonce.v1" xmlns:co.v2="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:clickonce.v2" xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" assemblyIdentity name="App.exe" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="x86" type="win32" / file name="simpleserver.DLL" asmv2:size="27293" hash xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2" dsig:Transforms dsig:Transform Algorithm="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:HashTransforms.Identity" / dsig:Transforms dsig:DigestMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1" / dsig:DigestValuepuq+ua20bbidGOWhPOxfquztBCU=dsig:DigestValue hash typelib tlbid="{f10346e2-c9d9-47f7-81d1-74059cc15c3c}" version="1.0" helpdir="" resourceid="0" flags="HASDISKIMAGE" / comClass clsid="{af2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff}" threadingModel="Apartment" tlbid="{f10346e2-c9d9-47f7-81d1-74059cc15c3c}" progid="simpleserver.SimpleServer" description="simpleserver.SimpleServer" / file assembly Now let's finish our super complex console app to test with: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; namespace ConsoleApplication1 {     class Program     {         static voidMain(string[] args)         { Type type = Type.GetTypeFromProgID("simpleserver.simpleserver",true); dynamic server = Activator.CreateInstance(type); Console.WriteLine(server.HelloWorld("rick")); Console.ReadLine(); } } } Now run the Console Application… As expected that should work. And why not? The COM component is still registered, right? :-) Nothing tricky about that. Let's unregister the COM component and then re-run and see what happens. Go to the Command Prompt Change to the folder where the DLL is installed Unregister with: RegSvr32 -u simpleserver.dll      To be sure that the COM component no longer works, check it out with the same test you used earlier (ie. o = CREATEOBJECT("SimpleServer.SimpleServer") in your development environment or VBScript etc.). Make sure you run the EXE and you don't re-compile the application or else Visual Studio will complain that it can't find the COM component in the registry while compiling. In fact now that we have our .manifest file you can remove the COM object from the project. When you run run the EXE from Windows Explorer or a command prompt to avoid the recompile. Watch out for embedded Manifest Files Now recompile your .NET project and run it… and it will most likely fail! The problem is that .NET applications by default embeds a manifest file into the compiled EXE application which results in the externally created manifest file being completely ignored. Only one manifest can be applied at a time and the compiled manifest takes precedency. Uh, thanks Visual Studio - not very helpful… Note that if you use another development tool like Visual FoxPro to create your EXE this won't be an issue as long as the tool doesn't automatically add a manifest file. Creating a Visual FoxPro EXE for example will work immediately with the generated manifest file as is. If you are using .NET and Visual Studio you have a couple of options of getting around this: Remove the embedded manifest file Copy the contents of the generated manifest file into a project manifest file and compile that in To remove an embedded manifest in a Visual Studio project: Open the Project Properties (Alt-Enter on project node) Go down to Resources | Manifest and select | Create Application without a Manifest   You can now add use the external manifest file and it will actually be respected when the app runs. The other option is to let Visual Studio create the manifest file on disk and then explicitly add the manifest file into the project. Notice on the dialog above I did this for app.exe.manifest and the manifest actually shows up in the list. If I select this file it will be compiled into the EXE and be used in lieu of any external files and that works as well. Remove the simpleserver.dll reference so you can compile your code and run the application. Now it should work without COM registration of the component. Personally I prefer external manifests because they can be modified after the fact - compiled manifests are evil in my mind because they are immutable - once they are there they can't be overriden or changed. So I prefer an external manifest. However, if you are absolutely sure nothing needs to change and you don't want anybody messing with your manifest, you can also embed it. The option to either is there. Watch for Manifest Caching While working trying to get this to work I ran into some problems at first. Specifically when it wasn't working at first (due to the embedded schema) I played with various different manifest layouts in different files etc.. There are a number of different ways to actually represent manifest files including offloading to separate folder (more on that later). A few times I made deliberate errors in the schema file and I found that regardless of what I did once the app failed or worked no amount of changing of the manifest file would make it behave differently. It appears that Windows is caching the manifest data for a given EXE or DLL. It takes a restart or a recompile of either the EXE or the DLL to clear the caching. Recompile your servers in order to see manifest changes unless there's an outright failure of an invalid manifest file. If the app starts the manifest is being read and caches immediately. This can be very confusing especially if you don't know that it's happening. I found myself always recompiling the exe after each run and before making any changes to the manifest file. Don't forget about Runtimes of COM Objects In the example I used above I used a Visual FoxPro COM component. Visual FoxPro is a runtime based environment so if I'm going to distribute an application that uses a FoxPro COM object the runtimes need to be distributed as well. The same is true of classic Visual Basic applications. Assuming that you don't know whether the runtimes are installed on the target machines make sure to install all the additional files in the EXE's directory alongside the COM DLL. In the case of Visual FoxPro the target folder should contain: The EXE  App.exe The Manifest file (unless it's compiled in) App.exe.manifest The COM object DLL (simpleserver.dll) Visual FoxPro Runtimes: VFP9t.dll (or VFP9r.dll for non-multithreaded dlls), vfp9rENU.dll, msvcr71.dll All these files should be in the same folder. Debugging Manifest load Errors If you for some reason get your manifest loading wrong there are a couple of useful tools available - SxSTrace and SxSParse. These two tools can be a huge help in debugging manifest loading errors. Put the following into a batch file (SxS_Trace.bat for example): sxstrace Trace -logfile:sxs.bin sxstrace Parse -logfile:sxs.bin -outfile:sxs.txt Then start the batch file before running your EXE. Make sure there's no caching happening as described in the previous section. For example, if I go into the manifest file and explicitly break the CLSID and/or ProgID I get a detailed report on where the EXE is looking for the manifest and what it's reading. Eventually the trace gives me an error like this: INFO: Parsing Manifest File C:\wwapps\Conf\SideBySide\Code\app.EXE.     INFO: Manifest Definition Identity is App.exe,processorArchitecture="x86",type="win32",version="1.0.0.0".     ERROR: Line 13: The value {AAaf2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff} of attribute clsid in element comClass is invalid. ERROR: Activation Context generation failed. End Activation Context Generation. pinpointing nicely where the error lies. Pay special attention to the various attributes - they have to match exactly in the different sections of the manifest file(s). Multiple COM Objects The manifest file that Visual Studio creates is actually quite more complex than is required for basic registrationless COM object invokation. The manifest file can be simplified a lot actually by stripping off various namespaces and removing the type library references altogether. Here's an example of a simplified manifest file that actually includes references to 2 COM servers: xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" assemblyIdentity name="App.exe" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="x86" type="win32" / file name="simpleserver.DLL" comClass clsid="{af2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="simpleserver.SimpleServer" description="simpleserver.SimpleServer" / file file name = "sidebysidedeploy.dll" comClass clsid="{EF82B819-7963-4C36-9443-3978CD94F57C}" progid="sidebysidedeploy.SidebysidedeployServer" description="SidebySideDeploy Server" threadingModel="apartment" / file assembly Simple enough right? Routing to separate Manifest Files and Folders In the examples above all files ended up in the application's root folder - all the DLLs, support files and runtimes. Sometimes that's not so desirable and you can actually create separate manifest files. The easiest way to do this is to create a manifest file that 'routes' to another manifest file in a separate folder. Basically you create a new 'assembly identity' via a named id. You can then create a folder and another manifest with the id plus .manifest that points at the actual file. In this example I create: App.exe.manifest A folder called App.deploy A manifest file in App.deploy All DLLs and runtimes in App.deploy Let's start with that master manifest file. This file only holds a reference to another manifest file: App.exe.manifest xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"? assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" assemblyIdentity name="App.exe" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="x86" type="win32" / dependency dependentAssembly assemblyIdentity name="App.deploy" version="1.0.0.0" type="win32" / dependentAssembly dependency assembly   Note this file only contains a dependency to App.deploy which is another manifest id. I can then create App.deploy.manifest in the current folder or in an App.deploy folder. In this case I'll create App.deploy and in it copy the DLLs and support runtimes. I then create App.deploy.manifest. App.deploy.manifest xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"? assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" assemblyIdentity name="App.deploy" type="win32" version="1.0.0.0" / file name="simpleserver.DLL" comClass clsid="{af2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="simpleserver.SimpleServer" description="simpleserver.SimpleServer" / file file name="sidebysidedeploy.dll" comClass clsid="{EF82B819-7963-4C36-9443-3978CD94F57C}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="sidebysidedeploy.SidebysidedeployServer" description="SidebySideDeploy Server" / file assembly   In this manifest file I then host my COM DLLs and any support runtimes. This is quite useful if you have lots of DLLs you are referencing or if you need to have separate configuration and application files that are associated with the COM object. This way the operation of your main application and the COM objects it interacts with is somewhat separated. You can see the two folders here:   Routing Manifests to different Folders In theory registrationless COM should be pretty easy in painless - you've seen the configuration manifest files and it certainly doesn't look very complicated, right? But the devil's in the details. The ActivationContext API (SxS - side by side activation) is very intolerant of small errors in the XML or formatting of the keys, so be really careful when setting up components, especially if you are manually editing these files. If you do run into trouble SxsTrace/SxsParse are a huge help to track down the problems. And remember that if you do have problems that you'll need to recompile your EXEs or DLLs for the SxS APIs to refresh themselves properly. All of this gets even more fun if you want to do registrationless COM inside of IIS :-) But I'll leave that for another blog post…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in COM  .NET  FoxPro   Tweet (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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• Unable to boot Windows 7 after installing Ubuntu

  - by Devendra

  I have Windows 7 on my machine and then installed Ubuntu 12.04 using a live CD. I can see both Windows 7 and Ubuntu in the grub menu, but when I select Windows 7 it shows a black screen for about 2 seconds and the returns to the Grub menu. But if I select Ubuntu it's working fine. This is the contents of the boot-repair log: Boot Info Script 0.61.full + Boot-Repair extra info [Boot-Info November 20th 2012] ============================= Boot Info Summary: =============================== => Grub2 (v2.00) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks at sector 1 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks in partition 1 for (,msdos6)/boot/grub. sda1: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Grub2 (v1.99-2.00) Boot sector info: Grub2 (v2.00) is installed in the boot sector of sda1 and looks at sector 388911128 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks in partition 1 for (,msdos6)/boot/grub. No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Windows 7 Boot files: /bootmgr /Boot/BCD /Windows/System32/winload.exe sda2: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files: sda3: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files: sda4: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: Extended Partition Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: sda5: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS Boot sector info: According to the info in the boot sector, sda5 starts at sector 2048. Operating System: Boot files: sda6: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ext4 Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: Operating System: Ubuntu 12.10 Boot files: /boot/grub/grub.cfg /etc/fstab /boot/grub/i386-pc/core.img sda7: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: swap Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: ============================ Drive/Partition Info: ============================= Drive: sda _____________________________________________________________________ Disk /dev/sda: 750.2 GB, 750156374016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders, total 1465149168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System /dev/sda1 * 206,848 146,802,687 146,595,840 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda2 147,007,488 293,623,807 146,616,320 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda3 293,623,808 332,820,613 39,196,806 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda4 332,822,526 1,465,145,343 1,132,322,818 f W95 Extended (LBA) /dev/sda5 461,342,720 1,465,145,343 1,003,802,624 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda6 332,822,528 453,171,199 120,348,672 83 Linux /dev/sda7 453,173,248 461,338,623 8,165,376 82 Linux swap / Solaris "blkid" output: ________________________________________________________________ Device UUID TYPE LABEL /dev/sda1 F6AE2C13AE2BCB47 ntfs /dev/sda2 DC2273012272DFC6 ntfs /dev/sda3 1E76E43376E40D79 ntfs New Volume /dev/sda5 5ED60ACDD60AA57D ntfs /dev/sda6 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 ext4 /dev/sda7 52f3dd94-6be7-4a7b-a3ae-f43eb8810483 swap ================================ Mount points: ================================= Device Mount_Point Type Options /dev/sda6 / ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro) =========================== sda6/boot/grub/grub.cfg: =========================== -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE # # It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates # from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub # ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/00_header ### if [ -s $prefix/grubenv ]; then set have_grubenv=true load_env fi set default="0" if [ x"${feature_menuentry_id}" = xy ]; then menuentry_id_option="--id" else menuentry_id_option="" fi export menuentry_id_option if [ "${prev_saved_entry}" ]; then set saved_entry="${prev_saved_entry}" save_env saved_entry set prev_saved_entry= save_env prev_saved_entry set boot_once=true fi function savedefault { if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then saved_entry="${chosen}" save_env saved_entry fi } function recordfail { set recordfail=1 if [ -n "${have_grubenv}" ]; then if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then save_env recordfail; fi; fi } function load_video { if [ x$feature_all_video_module = xy ]; then insmod all_video else insmod efi_gop insmod efi_uga insmod ieee1275_fb insmod vbe insmod vga insmod video_bochs insmod video_cirrus fi } if [ x$feature_default_font_path = xy ] ; then font=unicode else insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='hd0,msdos6' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos6 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos6 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos6 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 fi font="/usr/share/grub/unicode.pf2" fi if loadfont $font ; then set gfxmode=auto load_video insmod gfxterm set locale_dir=$prefix/locale set lang=en_IN insmod gettext fi terminal_output gfxterm if [ "${recordfail}" = 1 ]; then set timeout=10 else set timeout=10 fi ### END /etc/grub.d/00_header ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### set menu_color_normal=white/black set menu_color_highlight=black/light-gray if background_color 44,0,30; then clear fi ### END /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### function gfxmode { set gfxpayload="${1}" if [ "${1}" = "keep" ]; then set vt_handoff=vt.handoff=7 else set vt_handoff= fi } if [ "${recordfail}" != 1 ]; then if [ -e ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt ]; then if hwmatch ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt 3; then if [ ${match} = 0 ]; then set linux_gfx_mode=keep else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=keep fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi export linux_gfx_mode if [ "${linux_gfx_mode}" != "text" ]; then load_video; fi menuentry 'Ubuntu' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-simple-9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124' { recordfail gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='hd0,msdos6' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos6 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos6 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos6 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 fi linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-17-generic root=UUID=9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 ro quiet splash $vt_handoff initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-17-generic } submenu 'Advanced options for Ubuntu' $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-advanced-9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124' { menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.5.0-17-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-3.5.0-17-generic-advanced-9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124' { recordfail gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='hd0,msdos6' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos6 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos6 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos6 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 fi echo 'Loading Linux 3.5.0-17-generic ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-17-generic root=UUID=9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 ro quiet splash $vt_handoff echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-17-generic } menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.5.0-17-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-3.5.0-17-generic-recovery-9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124' { recordfail insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='hd0,msdos6' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos6 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos6 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos6 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 fi echo 'Loading Linux 3.5.0-17-generic ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-17-generic root=UUID=9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 ro recovery nomodeset echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-17-generic } } ### END /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### END /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='hd0,msdos6' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos6 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos6 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos6 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 fi linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin } menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='hd0,msdos6' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos6 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos6 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos6 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 fi linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin console=ttyS0,115200n8 } ### END /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### menuentry 'Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)' --class windows --class os $menuentry_id_option 'osprober-chain-F6AE2C13AE2BCB47' { insmod part_msdos insmod ntfs set root='hd0,msdos1' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos1 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos1 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos1 F6AE2C13AE2BCB47 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root F6AE2C13AE2BCB47 fi chainloader +1 } ### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_uefi-firmware ### ### END /etc/grub.d/30_uefi-firmware ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### # This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the # menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change # the 'exec tail' line above. ### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### if [ -f ${config_directory}/custom.cfg ]; then source ${config_directory}/custom.cfg elif [ -z "${config_directory}" -a -f $prefix/custom.cfg ]; then source $prefix/custom.cfg; fi ### END /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- =============================== sda6/etc/fstab: ================================ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a # device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices # that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5). # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> # / was on /dev/sda6 during installation UUID=9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 # swap was on /dev/sda7 during installation UUID=52f3dd94-6be7-4a7b-a3ae-f43eb8810483 none swap sw 0 0 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- =================== sda6: Location of files loaded by Grub: ==================== GiB - GB File Fragment(s) 162.831275940 = 174.838751232 boot/grub/grub.cfg 1 163.036647797 = 175.059267584 boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-17-generic 1 206.871749878 = 222.126850048 boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-17-generic 1 163.036647797 = 175.059267584 initrd.img 1 163.036647797 = 175.059267584 initrd.img.old 1 206.871749878 = 222.126850048 vmlinuz 1 =============================== StdErr Messages: =============================== cat: write error: Broken pipe cat: write error: Broken pipe ADDITIONAL INFORMATION : =================== log of boot-repair 2012-12-11__00h59 =================== boot-repair version : 3.195~ppa28~quantal boot-sav version : 3.195~ppa28~quantal glade2script version : 3.2.2~ppa45~quantal boot-sav-extra version : 3.195~ppa28~quantal boot-repair is executed in installed-session (Ubuntu 12.10, quantal, Ubuntu, x86_64) CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-17-generic root=UUID=9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 ro quiet splash vt.handoff=7 =================== os-prober: /dev/sda6:The OS now in use - Ubuntu 12.10 CurrentSession:linux /dev/sda1:Windows 7 (loader):Windows:chain =================== blkid: /dev/sda1: UUID="F6AE2C13AE2BCB47" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda2: UUID="DC2273012272DFC6" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda3: LABEL="New Volume" UUID="1E76E43376E40D79" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda5: UUID="5ED60ACDD60AA57D" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda6: UUID="9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sda7: UUID="52f3dd94-6be7-4a7b-a3ae-f43eb8810483" TYPE="swap" 1 disks with OS, 2 OS : 1 Linux, 0 MacOS, 1 Windows, 0 unknown type OS. Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary. DOS and Linux will interpret the contents differently. =================== /etc/default/grub : # If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update # /boot/grub/grub.cfg. # For full documentation of the options in this file, see: # info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration' GRUB_DEFAULT=0 #GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true GRUB_TIMEOUT=10 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian` GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" # Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs # This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains # the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...) #GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef" # Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only) #GRUB_TERMINAL=console # The resolution used on graphical terminal # note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE # you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo' #GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480 # Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux #GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true # Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries #GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true" # Uncomment to get a beep at grub start #GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1" =================== /etc/grub.d/ : drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Oct 17 20:29 grub.d total 72 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 7541 Oct 14 23:06 00_header -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5488 Oct 4 15:00 05_debian_theme -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10891 Oct 14 23:06 10_linux -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10258 Oct 14 23:06 20_linux_xen -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1688 Oct 11 19:40 20_memtest86+ -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10976 Oct 14 23:06 30_os-prober -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1426 Oct 14 23:06 30_uefi-firmware -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 214 Oct 14 23:06 40_custom -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 216 Oct 14 23:06 41_custom -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 483 Oct 14 23:06 README =================== UEFI/Legacy mode: This installed-session is not in EFI-mode. EFI in dmesg. Please report this message to [email protected] [ 0.000000] ACPI: UEFI 00000000bafe7000 0003E (v01 DELL QA09 00000002 PTL 00000002) [ 0.000000] ACPI: UEFI 00000000bafe6000 00042 (v01 PTL COMBUF 00000001 PTL 00000001) [ 0.000000] ACPI: UEFI 00000000bafe3000 00256 (v01 DELL QA09 00000002 PTL 00000002) SecureBoot disabled. =================== PARTITIONS & DISKS: sda6 : sda, not-sepboot, grubenv-ok grub2, grub-pc , update-grub, 64, with-boot, is-os, not--efi--part, fstab-without-boot, fstab-without-efi, no-nt, no-winload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, notwinboot, apt-get, grub-install, with--usr, fstab-without-usr, not-sep-usr, standard, farbios, . sda1 : sda, not-sepboot, no-grubenv nogrub, no-docgrub, no-update-grub, 32, no-boot, is-os, not--efi--part, part-has-no-fstab, part-has-no-fstab, no-nt, haswinload, no-recov-nor-hid, bootmgr, is-winboot, nopakmgr, nogrubinstall, no---usr, part-has-no-fstab, not-sep-usr, standard, not-far, /mnt/boot-sav/sda1. sda2 : sda, not-sepboot, no-grubenv nogrub, no-docgrub, no-update-grub, 32, no-boot, no-os, not--efi--part, part-has-no-fstab, part-has-no-fstab, no-nt, no-winload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, notwinboot, nopakmgr, nogrubinstall, no---usr, part-has-no-fstab, not-sep-usr, standard, farbios, /mnt/boot-sav/sda2. sda3 : sda, not-sepboot, no-grubenv nogrub, no-docgrub, no-update-grub, 32, no-boot, no-os, not--efi--part, part-has-no-fstab, part-has-no-fstab, no-nt, no-winload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, notwinboot, nopakmgr, nogrubinstall, no---usr, part-has-no-fstab, not-sep-usr, standard, farbios, /mnt/boot-sav/sda3. sda5 : sda, not-sepboot, no-grubenv nogrub, no-docgrub, no-update-grub, 32, no-boot, no-os, not--efi--part, part-has-no-fstab, part-has-no-fstab, no-nt, no-winload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, notwinboot, nopakmgr, nogrubinstall, no---usr, part-has-no-fstab, not-sep-usr, standard, farbios, /mnt/boot-sav/sda5. sda : not-GPT, BIOSboot-not-needed, has-no-EFIpart, not-usb, has-os, 2048 sectors * 512 bytes =================== parted -l: Model: ATA WDC WD7500BPKT-7 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 750GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 106MB 75.2GB 75.1GB primary ntfs boot 2 75.3GB 150GB 75.1GB primary ntfs 3 150GB 170GB 20.1GB primary ntfs 4 170GB 750GB 580GB extended lba 6 170GB 232GB 61.6GB logical ext4 7 232GB 236GB 4181MB logical linux-swap(v1) 5 236GB 750GB 514GB logical ntfs =================== parted -lm: BYT; /dev/sda:750GB:scsi:512:4096:msdos:ATA WDC WD7500BPKT-7; 1:106MB:75.2GB:75.1GB:ntfs::boot; 2:75.3GB:150GB:75.1GB:ntfs::; 3:150GB:170GB:20.1GB:ntfs::; 4:170GB:750GB:580GB:::lba; 6:170GB:232GB:61.6GB:ext4::; 7:232GB:236GB:4181MB:linux-swap(v1)::; 5:236GB:750GB:514GB:ntfs::; =================== mount: /dev/sda6 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro) proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw) none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw) none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw) udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620) tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755) none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880) none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) none on /run/user type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=104857600,mode=0755) gvfsd-fuse on /run/user/dev/gvfs type fuse.gvfsd-fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=dev) /dev/sda1 on /mnt/boot-sav/sda1 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) /dev/sda2 on /mnt/boot-sav/sda2 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) /dev/sda3 on /mnt/boot-sav/sda3 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) /dev/sda5 on /mnt/boot-sav/sda5 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) =================== ls: /sys/block/sda (filtered): alignment_offset bdi capability dev device discard_alignment events events_async events_poll_msecs ext_range holders inflight power queue range removable ro sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sda5 sda6 sda7 size slaves stat subsystem trace uevent /sys/block/sr0 (filtered): alignment_offset bdi capability dev device discard_alignment events events_async events_poll_msecs ext_range holders inflight power queue range removable ro size slaves stat subsystem trace uevent /dev (filtered): alarm ashmem autofs binder block bsg btrfs-control bus cdrom cdrw char console core cpu cpu_dma_latency disk dri dvd dvdrw ecryptfs fb0 fb1 fd full fuse hpet input kmsg kvm log mapper mcelog mei mem net network_latency network_throughput null oldmem port ppp psaux ptmx pts random rfkill rtc rtc0 sda sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sda5 sda6 sda7 sg0 sg1 shm snapshot snd sr0 stderr stdin stdout uinput urandom v4l vga_arbiter vhost-net video0 zero ls /dev/mapper: control =================== df -Th: Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda6 ext4 57G 2.7G 51G 6% / udev devtmpfs 1.9G 12K 1.9G 1% /dev tmpfs tmpfs 770M 892K 769M 1% /run none tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock none tmpfs 1.9G 260K 1.9G 1% /run/shm none tmpfs 100M 44K 100M 1% /run/user /dev/sda1 fuseblk 70G 36G 35G 51% /mnt/boot-sav/sda1 /dev/sda2 fuseblk 70G 66G 4.8G 94% /mnt/boot-sav/sda2 /dev/sda3 fuseblk 19G 87M 19G 1% /mnt/boot-sav/sda3 /dev/sda5 fuseblk 479G 436G 44G 92% /mnt/boot-sav/sda5 =================== fdisk -l: Disk /dev/sda: 750.2 GB, 750156374016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders, total 1465149168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disk identifier: 0x1dc69d0b Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 206848 146802687 73297920 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda2 147007488 293623807 73308160 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda3 293623808 332820613 19598403 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda4 332822526 1465145343 566161409 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) Partition 4 does not start on physical sector boundary. /dev/sda5 461342720 1465145343 501901312 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda6 332822528 453171199 60174336 83 Linux /dev/sda7 453173248 461338623 4082688 82 Linux swap / Solaris Partition table entries are not in disk order =================== Recommended repair Recommended-Repair This setting will reinstall the grub2 of sda6 into the MBR of sda. Additional repair will be performed: unhide-bootmenu-10s grub-install (GRUB) 2.00-7ubuntu11,grub-install (GRUB) 2. Reinstall the GRUB of sda6 into the MBR of sda Installation finished. No error reported. grub-install /dev/sda: exit code of grub-install /dev/sda:0 update-grub Generating grub.cfg ... Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-17-generic Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-17-generic Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin Found Windows 7 (loader) on /dev/sda1 Unhide GRUB boot menu in sda6/boot/grub/grub.cfg Boot successfully repaired. You can now reboot your computer. The boot files of [The OS now in use - Ubuntu 12.10] are far from the start of the disk. Your BIOS may not detect them. You may want to retry after creating a /boot partition (EXT4, >200MB, start of the disk). This can be performed via tools such as gParted. Then select this partition via the [Separate /boot partition:] option of [Boot Repair]. (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootPartition)

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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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• Announcing the release of the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 for .NET

  - by ScottGu

  Today we released the v2.1 update of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET.  This is a major refresh of the Windows Azure SDK and it includes some great new features and enhancements. These new capabilities include: Visual Studio 2013 Preview Support: The Windows Azure SDK now supports using the new VS 2013 Preview Visual Studio 2013 VM Image: Windows Azure now has a built-in VM image that you can use to host and develop with VS 2013 in the cloud Visual Studio Server Explorer Enhancements: Redesigned with improved filtering and auto-loading of subscription resources Virtual Machines: Start and Stop VM’s w/suspend billing directly from within Visual Studio Cloud Services: New Emulator Express option with reduced footprint and Run as Normal User support Service Bus: New high availability options, Notification Hub support, Improved VS tooling PowerShell Automation: Lots of new PowerShell commands for automating Web Sites, Cloud Services, VMs and more All of these SDK enhancements are now available to start using immediately and you can download the SDK from the Windows Azure .NET Developer Center.  Visual Studio’s Team Foundation Service (http://tfs.visualstudio.com/) has also been updated to support today’s SDK 2.1 release, and the SDK 2.1 features can now be used with it (including with automated builds + tests). Below are more details on the new features and capabilities released today: Visual Studio 2013 Preview Support Today’s Window Azure SDK 2.1 release adds support for the recent Visual Studio 2013 Preview. The 2.1 SDK also works with Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012, and works side by side with the previous Windows Azure SDK 1.8 and 2.0 releases. To install the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 on your local computer, choose the “install the sdk” link from the Windows Azure .NET Developer Center. Then, chose which version of Visual Studio you want to use it with.  Clicking the third link will install the SDK with the latest VS 2013 Preview: If you don’t already have the Visual Studio 2013 Preview installed on your machine, this will also install Visual Studio Express 2013 Preview for Web. Visual Studio 2013 VM Image Hosted in the Cloud One of the requests we’ve heard from several customers has been to have the ability to host Visual Studio within the cloud (avoiding the need to install anything locally on your computer). With today’s SDK update we’ve added a new VM image to the Windows Azure VM Gallery that has Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Preview, SharePoint 2013, SQL Server 2012 Express and the Windows Azure 2.1 SDK already installed on it.  This provides a really easy way to create a development environment in the cloud with the latest tools. With the recent shutdown and suspend billing feature we shipped on Windows Azure last month, you can spin up the image only when you want to do active development, and then shut down the virtual machine and not have to worry about usage charges while the virtual machine is not in use. You can create your own VS image in the cloud by using the New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery menu within the Windows Azure Management Portal, and then by selecting the “Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Preview” template: Visual Studio Server Explorer: Improved Filtering/Management of Subscription Resources With the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 release you’ll notice significant improvements in the Visual Studio Server Explorer. The explorer has been redesigned so that all Windows Azure services are now contained under a single Windows Azure node.  From the top level node you can now manage your Windows Azure credentials, import a subscription file or filter Server Explorer to only show services from particular subscriptions or regions. Note: The Web Sites and Mobile Services nodes will appear outside the Windows Azure Node until the final release of VS 2013. If you have installed the ASP.NET and Web Tools Preview Refresh, though, the Web Sites node will appear inside the Windows Azure node even with the VS 2013 Preview. Once your subscription information is added, Windows Azure services from all your subscriptions are automatically enumerated in the Server Explorer. You no longer need to manually add services to Server Explorer individually. This provides a convenient way of viewing all of your cloud services, storage accounts, service bus namespaces, virtual machines, and web sites from one location: Subscription and Region Filtering Support Using the Windows Azure node in Server Explorer, you can also now filter your Windows Azure services in the Server Explorer by the subscription or region they are in.  If you have multiple subscriptions but need to focus your attention to just a few subscription for some period of time, this a handy way to hide the services from other subscriptions view until they become relevant. You can do the same sort of filtering by region. To enable this, just select “Filter Services” from the context menu on the Windows Azure node: Then choose the subscriptions and/or regions you want to filter by. In the below example, I’ve decided to show services from my pay-as-you-go subscription within the East US region: Visual Studio will then automatically filter the items that show up in the Server Explorer appropriately: With storage accounts and service bus namespaces, you sometimes need to work with services outside your subscription. To accommodate that scenario, those services allow you to attach an external account (from the context menu). You’ll notice that external accounts have a slightly different icon in server explorer to indicate they are from outside your subscription. Other Improvements We’ve also improved the Server Explorer by adding additional properties and actions to the service exposed. You now have access to most of the properties on a cloud service, deployment slot, role or role instance as well as the properties on storage accounts, virtual machines and web sites. Just select the object of interest in Server Explorer and view the properties in the property pane. We also now have full support for creating/deleting/update storage tables, blobs and queues from directly within Server Explorer.  Simply right-click on the appropriate storage account node and you can create them directly within Visual Studio: Virtual Machines: Start/Stop within Visual Studio Virtual Machines now have context menu actions that allow you start, shutdown, restart and delete a Virtual Machine directly within the Visual Studio Server Explorer. The shutdown action enables you to shut down the virtual machine and suspend billing when the VM is not is use, and easily restart it when you need it: This is especially useful in Dev/Test scenarios where you can start a VM – such as a SQL Server – during your development session and then shut it down / suspend billing when you are not developing (and no longer be billed for it). You can also now directly remote desktop into VMs using the “Connect using Remote Desktop” context menu command in VS Server Explorer.  Cloud Services: Emulator Express with Run as Normal User Support You can now launch Visual Studio and run your cloud services locally as a Normal User (without having to elevate to an administrator account) using a new Emulator Express option included as a preview feature with this SDK release.  Emulator Express is a version of the Windows Azure Compute Emulator that runs a restricted mode – one instance per role – and it doesn’t require administrative permissions and uses 40% less resources than the full Windows Azure Emulator. Emulator Express supports both web and worker roles. To run your application locally using the Emulator Express option, simply change the following settings in the Windows Azure project. On the shortcut menu for the Windows Azure project, choose Properties, and then choose the Web tab. Check the setting for IIS (Internet Information Services). Make sure that the option is set to IIS Express, not the full version of IIS. Emulator Express is not compatible with full IIS. On the Web tab, choose the option for Emulator Express. Service Bus: Notification Hubs With the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 release we are adding support for Windows Azure Notification Hubs as part of our official Windows Azure SDK, inside of Microsoft.ServiceBus.dll (previously the Notification Hub functionality was in a preview assembly). You are now able to create, update and delete Notification Hubs programmatically, manage your device registrations, and send push notifications to all your mobile clients across all platforms (Windows Store, Windows Phone 8, iOS, and Android). Learn more about Notification Hubs on MSDN here, or watch the Notification Hubs //BUILD/ presentation here. Service Bus: Paired Namespaces One of the new features included with today’s Windows Azure SDK 2.1 release is support for Service Bus “Paired Namespaces”.  Paired Namespaces enable you to better handle situations where a Service Bus service namespace becomes unavailable (for example: due to connectivity issues or an outage) and you are unable to send or receive messages to the namespace hosting the queue, topic, or subscription. Previously,to handle this scenario you had to manually setup separate namespaces that can act as a backup, then implement manual failover and retry logic which was sometimes tricky to get right. Service Bus now supports Paired Namespaces, which enables you to connect two namespaces together. When you activate the secondary namespace, messages are stored in the secondary queue for delivery to the primary queue at a later time. If the primary container (namespace) becomes unavailable for some reason, automatic failover enables the messages in the secondary queue. For detailed information about paired namespaces and high availability, see the new topic Asynchronous Messaging Patterns and High Availability. Service Bus: Tooling Improvements In this release, the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio contain several enhancements and changes to the management of Service Bus messaging entities using Visual Studio’s Server Explorer. The most noticeable change is that the Service Bus node is now integrated into the Windows Azure node, and supports integrated subscription management. Additionally, there has been a change to the code generated by the Windows Azure Worker Role with Service Bus Queue project template. This code now uses an event-driven “message pump” programming model using the QueueClient.OnMessage method. PowerShell: Tons of New Automation Commands Since my last blog post on the previous Windows Azure SDK 2.0 release, we’ve updated Windows Azure PowerShell (which is a separate download) five times. You can find the full change log here. We’ve added new cmdlets in the following areas: China instance and Windows Azure Pack support Environment Configuration VMs Cloud Services Web Sites Storage SQL Azure Service Bus China Instance and Windows Azure Pack We now support the following cmdlets for the China instance and Windows Azure Pack, respectively: China Instance: Web Sites, Service Bus, Storage, Cloud Service, VMs, Network Windows Azure Pack: Web Sites, Service Bus We will have full cmdlet support for these two Windows Azure environments in PowerShell in the near future. Virtual Machines: Stop/Start Virtual Machines Similar to the Start/Stop VM capability in VS Server Explorer, you can now stop your VM and suspend billing: If you want to keep the original behavior of keeping your stopped VM provisioned, you can pass in the -StayProvisioned switch parameter. Virtual Machines: VM endpoint ACLs We’ve added and updated a bunch of cmdlets for you to configure fine-grained network ACL on your VM endpoints. You can use the following cmdlets to create ACL config and apply them to a VM endpoint: New-AzureAclConfig Get-AzureAclConfig Set-AzureAclConfig Remove-AzureAclConfig Add-AzureEndpoint -ACL Set-AzureEndpoint –ACL The following example shows how to add an ACL rule to an existing endpoint of a VM. Other improvements for Virtual Machine management includes Added -NoWinRMEndpoint parameter to New-AzureQuickVM and Add-AzureProvisioningConfig to disable Windows Remote Management Added -DirectServerReturn parameter to Add-AzureEndpoint and Set-AzureEndpoint to enable/disable direct server return Added Set-AzureLoadBalancedEndpoint cmdlet to modify load balanced endpoints Cloud Services: Remote Desktop and Diagnostics Remote Desktop and Diagnostics are popular debugging options for Cloud Services. We’ve introduced cmdlets to help you configure these two Cloud Service extensions from Windows Azure PowerShell. Windows Azure Cloud Services Remote Desktop extension: New-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtensionConfig Get-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtension Set-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtension Remove-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtension Windows Azure Cloud Services Diagnostics extension New-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtensionConfig Get-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtension Set-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtension Remove-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtension The following example shows how to enable Remote Desktop for a Cloud Service. Web Sites: Diagnostics With our last SDK update, we introduced the Get-AzureWebsiteLog –Tail cmdlet to get the log streaming of your Web Sites. Recently, we’ve also added cmdlets to configure Web Site application diagnostics: Enable-AzureWebsiteApplicationDiagnostic Disable-AzureWebsiteApplicationDiagnostic The following 2 examples show how to enable application diagnostics to the file system and a Windows Azure Storage Table: SQL Database Previously, you had to know the SQL Database server admin username and password if you want to manage the database in that SQL Database server. Recently, we’ve made the experience much easier by not requiring the admin credential if the database server is in your subscription. So you can simply specify the -ServerName parameter to tell Windows Azure PowerShell which server you want to use for the following cmdlets. Get-AzureSqlDatabase New-AzureSqlDatabase Remove-AzureSqlDatabase Set-AzureSqlDatabase We’ve also added a -AllowAllAzureServices parameter to New-AzureSqlDatabaseServerFirewallRule so that you can easily add a firewall rule to whitelist all Windows Azure IP addresses. Besides the above experience improvements, we’ve also added cmdlets get the database server quota and set the database service objective. Check out the following cmdlets for details. Get-AzureSqlDatabaseServerQuota Get-AzureSqlDatabaseServiceObjective Set-AzureSqlDatabase –ServiceObjective Storage and Service Bus Other new cmdlets include Storage: CRUD cmdlets for Azure Tables and Queues Service Bus: Cmdlets for managing authorization rules on your Service Bus Namespace, Queue, Topic, Relay and NotificationHub Summary Today’s release includes a bunch of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  All the above features/enhancements are shipped and available to use immediately as part of the 2.1 release of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET. 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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• 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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• 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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• Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate 2010-Part 3

  - by Tarun Arora

  Welcome back once again, in Part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies, in Part 2 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I discussed the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. In part 3 I’ll be discussing Test Result Analysis, Test Result Drill through, Test Report Generation, Test Run Comparison, Asp.net Profiler and some closing thoughts. Test Results – I see some creepy worms! In Part 2 we put together a web performance test and a load test, lets run the test to see load test to see how the Web site responds to the load simulation. While the load test is running you will be able to see close to real time analysis in the Load Test Analyser window. You can use the Load Test Analyser to conduct load test analysis in three ways: Monitor a running load test - A condensed set of the performance counter data is maintained in memory. To prevent the results memory requirements from growing unbounded, up to 200 samples for each performance counter are maintained. This includes 100 evenly spaced samples that span the current elapsed time of the run and the most recent 100 samples.         After the load test run is completed - The test controller spools all collected performance counter data to a database while the test is running. Additional data, such as timing details and error details, is loaded into the database when the test completes. The performance data for a completed test is loaded from the database and analysed by the Load Test Analyser. Below you can see a screen shot of the summary view, this provides key results in a format that is compact and easy to read. You can also print the load test summary, this is generated after the test has completed or been stopped.         Analyse the load test results of a previously run load test – We’ll see this in the section where i discuss comparison between two test runs. The performance counters can be plotted on the graphs. You also have the option to highlight a selected part of the test and view details, drill down to the user activity chart where you can hover over to see more details of the test run.   Generate Report => Test Run Comparisons The level of reports you can generate using the Load Test Analyser is astonishing. You have the option to create excel reports and conduct side by side analysis of two test results or to track trend analysis. The tools also allows you to export the graph data either to MS Excel or to a CSV file. You can view the ASP.NET profiler report to conduct further analysis as well. View Data and Diagnostic Attachments opens the Choose Diagnostic Data Adapter Attachment dialog box to select an adapter to analyse the result type. For example, you can select an IntelliTrace adapter, click OK and open the IntelliTrace summary for the test agent that was used in the load test.   Compare results This creates a set of reports that compares the data from two load test results using tables and bar charts. I have taken these screen shots from the MSDN documentation, I would highly recommend exploring the wealth of knowledge available on MSDN. Leaving Thoughts While load testing the application with an excessive load for a longer duration of time, i managed to bring the IIS to its knees by piling up a huge queue of requests waiting to be processed. This clearly means that the IIS had run out of threads as all the threads were busy processing existing request, one easy way of fixing this is by increasing the default number of allocated threads, but this might escalate the problem. The better suggestion is to try and drill down to the actual root cause of the problem. When ever the garbage collection runs it stops processing any pages so all requests that come in during that period are queued up, but realistically the garbage collection completes in fraction of a a second. To understand this better lets look at the .net heap, it is divided into large heap and small heap, anything greater than 85kB in size will be allocated to the Large object heap, the Large object heap is non compacting and remember large objects are expensive to move around, so if you are allocating something in the large object heap, make sure that you really need it! The small object heap on the other hand is divided into generations, so all objects that are supposed to be short-lived are suppose to live in Gen-0 and the long living objects eventually move to Gen-2 as garbage collection goes through.  As you can see in the picture below all < 85 KB size objects are first assigned to Gen-0, when Gen-0 fills up and a new object comes in and finds Gen-0 full, the garbage collection process is started, the process checks for all the dead objects and assigns them as the valid candidate for deletion to free up memory and promotes all the remaining objects in Gen-0 to Gen-1. So in the future when ever you clean up Gen-1 you have to clean up Gen-0 as well. When you fill up Gen – 0 again, all of Gen – 1 dead objects are drenched and rest are moved to Gen-2 and Gen-0 objects are moved to Gen-1 to free up Gen-0, but by this time your Garbage collection process has started to take much more time than it usually takes. Now as I mentioned earlier when garbage collection is being run all page requests that come in during that period are queued up. Does this explain why possibly page requests are getting queued up, apart from this it could also be the case that you are waiting for a long running database process to complete.      Lets explore the heap a bit more… What is really a case of crisis is when the objects are living long enough to make it to Gen-2 and then dying, this is definitely a high cost operation. But sometimes you need objects in memory, for example when you cache data you hold on to the objects because you need to use them right across the user session, which is acceptable. But if you wanted to see what extreme caching can do to your server then write a simple application that chucks in a lot of data in cache, run a load test over it for about 10-15 minutes, forcing a lot of data in memory causing the heap to run out of memory. If you get to such a state where you start running out of memory the IIS as a mode of recovery restarts the worker process. It is great way to free up all your memory in the heap but this would clear the cache. The problem with this is if the customer had 10 items in their shopping basket and that data was stored in the application cache, the user basket will now be empty forcing them either to get frustrated and go to a competitor website or if the customer is really patient, give it another try! How can you address this, well two ways of addressing this; 1. Workaround – A x86 bit processor only allows a maximum of 4GB of RAM, this means the machine effectively has around 3.4 GB of RAM available, the OS needs about 1.5 GB of RAM to run efficiently, the IIS and .net framework also need their share of memory, leaving you a heap of around 800 MB to play with. Because Team builds by default build your application in ‘Compile as any mode’ it means the application is build such that it will run in x86 bit mode if run on a x86 bit processor and run in a x64 bit mode if run on a x64 but processor. The problem with this is not all applications are really x64 bit compatible specially if you are using com objects or external libraries. So, as a quick win if you compiled your application in x86 bit mode by changing the compile as any selection to compile as x86 in the team build, you will be able to run your application on a x64 bit machine in x86 bit mode (WOW – By running Windows on Windows) and what that means is, you could use 8GB+ worth of RAM, if you take away everything else your application will roughly get a heap size of at least 4 GB to play with, which is immense. If you need a heap size of more than 4 GB you have either build a software for NASA or there is something fundamentally wrong in your application. 2. Solution – Now that you have put a workaround in place the IIS will not restart the worker process that regularly, which means you can take a breather and start working to get to the root cause of this memory leak. But this begs a question “How do I Identify possible memory leaks in my application?” Well i won’t say that there is one single tool that can tell you where the memory leak is, but trust me, ‘Performance Profiling’ is a great start point, it definitely gets you started in the right direction, let’s have a look at how. Performance Wizard - Start the Performance Wizard and select Instrumentation, this lets you measure function call counts and timings. Before running the performance session right click the performance session settings and chose properties from the context menu to bring up the Performance session properties page and as shown in the screen shot below, check the check boxes in the group ‘.NET memory profiling collection’ namely ‘Collect .NET object allocation information’ and ‘Also collect the .NET Object lifetime information’.    Now if you fire off the profiling session on your pages you will notice that the results allows you to view ‘Object Lifetime’ which shows you the number of objects that made it to Gen-0, Gen-1, Gen-2, Large heap, etc. Another great feature about the profile is that if your application has > 5% cases where objects die right after making to the Gen-2 storage a threshold alert is generated to alert you. Since you have the option to also view the most expensive methods and by capturing the IntelliTrace data you can drill in to narrow down to the line of code that is the root cause of the problem. Well now that we have seen how crucial memory management is and how easy Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 makes it for us to identify and reproduce the problem with the best of breed tools in the product. Caching One of the main ways to improve performance is Caching. Which basically means you tell the web server that instead of going to the database for each request you keep the data in the webserver and when the user asks for it you serve it from the webserver itself. BUT that can have consequences! Let’s look at some code, trust me caching code is not very intuitive, I define a cache key for almost all searches made through the common search page and cache the results. The approach works fine, first time i get the data from the database and second time data is served from the cache, significant performance improvement, EXCEPT when two users try to do the same operation and run into each other. But it is easy to handle this by adding the lock as you can see in the snippet below. So, as long as a user comes in and finds that the cache is empty, the user locks and starts to get the cache no more concurrency issues. But lets say you are processing 10 requests per second, by the time i have locked the operation to get the results from the database, 9 other users came in and found that the cache key is null so after i have come out and populated the cache they will still go in to get the results again. The application will still be faster because the next set of 10 users and so on would continue to get data from the cache. BUT if we added another null check after locking to build the cache and before actual call to the db then the 9 users who follow me would not make the extra trip to the database at all and that would really increase the performance, but didn’t i say that the code won’t be very intuitive, may be you should leave a comment you don’t want another developer to come in and think what a fresher why is he checking for the cache key null twice !!! The downside of caching is, you are storing the data outside of the database and the data could be wrong because the updates applied to the database would make the data cached at the web server out of sync. So, how do you invalidate the cache? Well if you only had one way of updating the data lets say only one entry point to the data update you can write some logic to say that every time new data is entered set the cache object to null. But this approach will not work as soon as you have several ways of feeding data to the system or your system is scaled out across a farm of web servers. The perfect solution to this is Micro Caching which means you cache the query for a set time duration and invalidate the cache after that set duration. The advantage is every time the user queries for that data with in the time span for which you have cached the results there are no calls made to the database and the data is served right from the server which makes the response immensely quick. Now figuring out the appropriate time span for which you micro cache the query results really depends on the application. Lets say your website gets 10 requests per second, if you retain the cache results for even 1 minute you will have immense performance gains. You would reduce 90% hits to the database for searching. Ever wondered why when you go to e-bookers.com or xpedia.com or yatra.com to book a flight and you click on the book button because the fare seems too exciting and you get an error message telling you that the fare is not valid any more. Yes, exactly => That is a cache failure! These travel sites or price compare engines are not going to hit the database every time you hit the compare button instead the results will be served from the cache, because the query results are micro cached, its a perfect trade-off, by micro caching the results the site gains 100% performance benefits but every once in a while annoys a customer because the fare has expired. But the trade off works in the favour of these sites as they are still able to process up to 30+ page requests per second which means cater to the site traffic by may be losing 1 customer every once in a while to a competitor who is also using a similar caching technique what are the odds that the user will not come back to their site sooner or later? Recap   Resources Below are some Key resource you might like to review. I would highly recommend the documentation, walkthroughs and videos available on MSDN. You can always make use of Fiddler to debug Web Performance Tests. Some community test extensions and plug ins available on Codeplex might also be of interest to you. The Road Ahead Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post, you may also want to read Part I and Part II if you haven’t so far. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. Next ‘Load Testing in the cloud’, I’ll be working on exploring the possibilities of running Test controller/Agents in the Cloud. See you on the other side! Thank You!   Share this post : CodeProject

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• When is a SQL function not a function?

  - by Rob Farley

  Should SQL Server even have functions? (Oh yeah – this is a T-SQL Tuesday post, hosted this month by Brad Schulz) Functions serve an important part of programming, in almost any language. A function is a piece of code that is designed to return something, as opposed to a piece of code which isn’t designed to return anything (which is known as a procedure). SQL Server is no different. You can call stored procedures, even from within other stored procedures, and you can call functions and use these in other queries. Stored procedures might query something, and therefore ‘return data’, but a function in SQL is considered to have the type of the thing returned, and can be used accordingly in queries. Consider the internal GETDATE() function. SELECT GETDATE(), SomeDatetimeColumn FROM dbo.SomeTable; There’s no logical difference between the field that is being returned by the function and the field that’s being returned by the table column. Both are the datetime field – if you didn’t have inside knowledge, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which was which. And so as developers, we find ourselves wanting to create functions that return all kinds of things – functions which look up values based on codes, functions which do string manipulation, and so on. But it’s rubbish. Ok, it’s not all rubbish, but it mostly is. And this isn’t even considering the SARGability impact. It’s far more significant than that. (When I say the SARGability aspect, I mean “because you’re unlikely to have an index on the result of some function that’s applied to a column, so try to invert the function and query the column in an unchanged manner”) I’m going to consider the three main types of user-defined functions in SQL Server: Scalar Inline Table-Valued Multi-statement Table-Valued I could also look at user-defined CLR functions, including aggregate functions, but not today. I figure that most people don’t tend to get around to doing CLR functions, and I’m going to focus on the T-SQL-based user-defined functions. Most people split these types of function up into two types. So do I. Except that most people pick them based on ‘scalar or table-valued’. I’d rather go with ‘inline or not’. If it’s not inline, it’s rubbish. It really is. Let’s start by considering the two kinds of table-valued function, and compare them. These functions are going to return the sales for a particular salesperson in a particular year, from the AdventureWorks database. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_inline(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS TABLE AS  RETURN (     SELECT e.LoginID as EmployeeLogin, o.OrderDate, o.SalesOrderID     FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o     LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e     ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID     WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid     AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101')     AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101') ) ; GO CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_multi(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS @results TABLE (     EmployeeLogin nvarchar(512),     OrderDate datetime,     SalesOrderID int     ) AS BEGIN     INSERT @results (EmployeeLogin, OrderDate, SalesOrderID)     SELECT e.LoginID, o.OrderDate, o.SalesOrderID     FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o     LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e     ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID     WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid     AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101')     AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101')     ;     RETURN END ; GO You’ll notice that I’m being nice and responsible with the use of the DATEADD function, so that I have SARGability on the OrderDate filter. Regular readers will be hoping I’ll show what’s going on in the execution plans here. Here I’ve run two SELECT * queries with the “Show Actual Execution Plan” option turned on. Notice that the ‘Query cost’ of the multi-statement version is just 2% of the ‘Batch cost’. But also notice there’s trickery going on. And it’s nothing to do with that extra index that I have on the OrderDate column. Trickery. Look at it – clearly, the first plan is showing us what’s going on inside the function, but the second one isn’t. The second one is blindly running the function, and then scanning the results. There’s a Sequence operator which is calling the TVF operator, and then calling a Table Scan to get the results of that function for the SELECT operator. But surely it still has to do all the work that the first one is doing... To see what’s actually going on, let’s look at the Estimated plan. Now, we see the same plans (almost) that we saw in the Actuals, but we have an extra one – the one that was used for the TVF. Here’s where we see the inner workings of it. You’ll probably recognise the right-hand side of the TVF’s plan as looking very similar to the first plan – but it’s now being called by a stack of other operators, including an INSERT statement to be able to populate the table variable that the multi-statement TVF requires. And the cost of the TVF is 57% of the batch! But it gets worse. Let’s consider what happens if we don’t need all the columns. We’ll leave out the EmployeeLogin column. Here, we see that the inline function call has been simplified down. It doesn’t need the Employee table. The join is redundant and has been eliminated from the plan, making it even cheaper. But the multi-statement plan runs the whole thing as before, only removing the extra column when the Table Scan is performed. A multi-statement function is a lot more powerful than an inline one. An inline function can only be the result of a single sub-query. It’s essentially the same as a parameterised view, because views demonstrate this same behaviour of extracting the definition of the view and using it in the outer query. A multi-statement function is clearly more powerful because it can contain far more complex logic. But a multi-statement function isn’t really a function at all. It’s a stored procedure. It’s wrapped up like a function, but behaves like a stored procedure. It would be completely unreasonable to expect that a stored procedure could be simplified down to recognise that not all the columns might be needed, but yet this is part of the pain associated with this procedural function situation. The biggest clue that a multi-statement function is more like a stored procedure than a function is the “BEGIN” and “END” statements that surround the code. If you try to create a multi-statement function without these statements, you’ll get an error – they are very much required. When I used to present on this kind of thing, I even used to call it “The Dangers of BEGIN and END”, and yes, I’ve written about this type of thing before in a similarly-named post over at my old blog. Now how about scalar functions... Suppose we wanted a scalar function to return the count of these. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_scalar(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS int AS BEGIN     RETURN (         SELECT COUNT(*)         FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o         LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e         ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID         WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid         AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101')         AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101')     ); END ; GO Notice the evil words? They’re required. Try to remove them, you just get an error. That’s right – any scalar function is procedural, despite the fact that you wrap up a sub-query inside that RETURN statement. It’s as ugly as anything. Hopefully this will change in future versions. Let’s have a look at how this is reflected in an execution plan. Here’s a query, its Actual plan, and its Estimated plan: SELECT e.LoginID, y.year, dbo.FetchSales_scalar(p.SalesPersonID, y.year) AS NumSales FROM (VALUES (2001),(2002),(2003),(2004)) AS y (year) CROSS JOIN Sales.SalesPerson AS p LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = p.SalesPersonID; We see here that the cost of the scalar function is about twice that of the outer query. Nicely, the query optimizer has worked out that it doesn’t need the Employee table, but that’s a bit of a red herring here. There’s actually something way more significant going on. If I look at the properties of that UDF operator, it tells me that the Estimated Subtree Cost is 0.337999. If I just run the query SELECT dbo.FetchSales_scalar(281,2003); we see that the UDF cost is still unchanged. You see, this 0.0337999 is the cost of running the scalar function ONCE. But when we ran that query with the CROSS JOIN in it, we returned quite a few rows. 68 in fact. Could’ve been a lot more, if we’d had more salespeople or more years. And so we come to the biggest problem. This procedure (I don’t want to call it a function) is getting called 68 times – each one between twice as expensive as the outer query. And because it’s calling it in a separate context, there is even more overhead that I haven’t considered here. The cheek of it, to say that the Compute Scalar operator here costs 0%! I know a number of IT projects that could’ve used that kind of costing method, but that’s another story that I’m not going to go into here. Let’s look at a better way. Suppose our scalar function had been implemented as an inline one. Then it could have been expanded out like a sub-query. It could’ve run something like this: SELECT e.LoginID, y.year, (SELECT COUNT(*)     FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o     LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e     ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID     WHERE o.SalesPersonID = p.SalesPersonID     AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,y.year-2000,'20000101')     AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,y.year-2000+1,'20000101')     ) AS NumSales FROM (VALUES (2001),(2002),(2003),(2004)) AS y (year) CROSS JOIN Sales.SalesPerson AS p LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = p.SalesPersonID; Don’t worry too much about the Scan of the SalesOrderHeader underneath a Nested Loop. If you remember from plenty of other posts on the matter, execution plans don’t push the data through. That Scan only runs once. The Index Spool sucks the data out of it and populates a structure that is used to feed the Stream Aggregate. The Index Spool operator gets called 68 times, but the Scan only once (the Number of Executions property demonstrates this). Here, the Query Optimizer has a full picture of what’s being asked, and can make the appropriate decision about how it accesses the data. It can simplify it down properly. To get this kind of behaviour from a function, we need it to be inline. But without inline scalar functions, we need to make our function be table-valued. Luckily, that’s ok. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_inline2(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS table AS RETURN (SELECT COUNT(*) as NumSales     FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o     LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e     ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID     WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid     AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101')     AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101') ); GO But we can’t use this as a scalar. Instead, we need to use it with the APPLY operator. SELECT e.LoginID, y.year, n.NumSales FROM (VALUES (2001),(2002),(2003),(2004)) AS y (year) CROSS JOIN Sales.SalesPerson AS p LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = p.SalesPersonID OUTER APPLY dbo.FetchSales_inline2(p.SalesPersonID, y.year) AS n; And now, we get the plan that we want for this query. All we’ve done is tell the function that it’s returning a table instead of a single value, and removed the BEGIN and END statements. We’ve had to name the column being returned, but what we’ve gained is an actual inline simplifiable function. And if we wanted it to return multiple columns, it could do that too. I really consider this function to be superior to the scalar function in every way. It does need to be handled differently in the outer query, but in many ways it’s a more elegant method there too. The function calls can be put amongst the FROM clause, where they can then be used in the WHERE or GROUP BY clauses without fear of calling the function multiple times (another horrible side effect of functions). So please. If you see BEGIN and END in a function, remember it’s not really a function, it’s a procedure. And then fix it. @rob_farley

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• E: mkinitramfs failure cpio 141 gzip 1

  - by Nagaraj Shindagi

  I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with Dell power-edge R720 server, facing the problem when I apt-get -f install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. 2 not fully installed or removed. After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. Setting up linux-image-3.2.0-37-generic-pae (3.2.0-37.58) ... Running depmod. update-initramfs: deferring update (hook will be called later) The link /initrd.img is a dangling linkto /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-37-generic-pae Examining /etc/kernel/postinst.d. run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/initramfs-tools 3.2.0-37-generic-pae /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-37-generic-pae update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-37-generic-pae gzip: stdout: No space left on device E: mkinitramfs failure cpio 141 gzip 1 update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-37-generic-pae with 1. run-parts: /etc/kernel/postinst.d/initramfs-tools exited with return code 1 Failed to process /etc/kernel/postinst.d at /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-image-3.2.0 -37-generic-pae.postinst line 1010. dpkg: error processing linux-image-3.2.0-37-generic-pae (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-image-generic-pae: linux-image-generic-pae depends on linux-image-3.2.0-37-generic-pae; however: Package linux-image-3.2.0-37-generic-pae is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing linux-image-generic-pae (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup erro r from a previous failure. Errors were encountered while processing: linux-image-3.2.0-37-generic-pae linux-image-generic-pae E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) ------------ even i tried with apt-get clean apt-get remove apt-get autoremove apt-get purge there is no difference it will show the same error message as above, even i checked the disk space ----------- Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda6 24030076 612456 22196964 3% / udev 16536644 4 16536640 1% /dev tmpfs 6618884 1164 6617720 1% /run none 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock none 16547208 72 16547136 1% /run/shm cgroup 16547208 0 16547208 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/sda1 93207 75034 13361 85% /boot /dev/sda10 9611492 1096076 8027176 13% /tmp /dev/sda12 9611492 226340 8896912 3% /opt /dev/sda13 9611492 152516 8970736 2% /srv /dev/sda7 9611492 592208 8531044 7% /home /dev/sda8 9611492 2656736 6466516 30% /usr /dev/sda9 9611492 696468 8426784 8% /var /dev/sda14 961237336 134563516 777845764 15% /usr/data /dev/sda15 618991384 84498388 503050052 15% /usr/data1 /dev/sda11 9611492 152616 8970636 2% /usr/local --------------- is there any problem on allotting the space to the partiations please let me know the solution its on urgent please help me on this issue regards

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• My Ubuntu Touch seems to be broken no matter how many different files I try

  - by zeokila

  So I'm planning on testing out Ubuntu Touch, and developing some applications for it so I thought I would flash it to my Nexus 4 that was already unlocked, and running Paranoid Android and the kernel associated. I headed to Ubuntu's website, browsed around and came across this page: Touch/Install - Ubuntu Wiki I followed Step 1 perfectly, word by word. Its seems to me that everything on that part is fine. I skipped Step 2 having already done that for Paranoid Android, and then I follow 3 and 4 word to word also. Using the command phablet-flash -b everything seemed to be fine. So it booted up and all seemed normal, but it wasn't. Here are some major bugs that only seem to happen to me. So I was greeted with a normal lock screen: But one of the first noticable things on the home screen is that I only have 4 tabs, not 5: Some of the applications that are supposed to work do not (I know some are dummies) like here with the calculator, this is what I get: On the homescreen it is a black box, it will crash a couple of seconds later: Another annoying problem is that when I want to close apps, I have from right to left, if I close an app on the left first it will close it, but it will open the app to it's right, weird: Yet another bug, this one is in the pull down drawer, when you just click on it, you can see that not all the icons are there: Pretty much everything else works as it should, but my main problem is that there is no telephony, I'm not sure how it works exactly, but I'm never asked a SIM code (I'm guessing you need that?), I can't compose SMS's and can't dial numbers, it won't let me select the 'Send' or 'Call' button. I've after tried manual installs all over the place with these files: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-touch-preview/daily-preinstalled/current/saucy-preinstalled-armel+mako.zip (Says 44MB on site - 46.6MB on my laptop) http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-touch-preview/daily-preinstalled/current/saucy-preinstalled-phablet-armhf.zip (Says 366MB on site - 383.2MB on my laptop) There are some weird size differences between what the site told me and what I downloaded, but I've tried re-downloading just to end up with the same file. And it just alway ends up with the same problems. No telephony and those weird bugs. So my question is, how the hell can I get the same version as everyone else, with the ability to send texts and call and open the calculator and more? Also, definitely running saucy: And maybe useful? This is what's in the device info:

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• You should NOT be writing jQuery in SharePoint if&hellip;

  - by Mark Rackley

  Yes… another one of these posts. What can I say? I’m a pot stirrer.. a rabble rouser *rabble rabble* jQuery in SharePoint seems to be a fairly polarizing issue with one side thinking it is the most awesome thing since Princess Leia as the slave girl in Return of the Jedi and the other half thinking it is the worst idea since Mannequin 2: On the Move. The correct answer is OF COURSE “it depends”. But what are those deciding factors that make jQuery an awesome fit or leave a bad taste in your mouth? Let’s see if I can drive the discussion here with some polarizing comments of my own… I know some of you are getting ready to leave your comments even now before reading the rest of the blog, which is great! Iron sharpens iron… These discussions hopefully open us up to understanding the entire process better and think about things in a different way. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are not a developer… Let’s start off with my most polarizing and rant filled portion of the blog post. If you don’t know what you are doing or you don’t have a background that helps you understand the implications of what you are writing then you should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint! I truly believe that one of the biggest reasons for the jQuery haters is because of all the bad jQuery out there. If you don’t know what you are doing you can do some NASTY things! One of the best stories I’ve heard about this is from my good friend John Ferringer (@ferringer). John tells this story during our Mythbusters session we do together. One of his clients was undergoing a Denial of Service attack and they couldn’t figure out what was going on! After much searching they found that some genius jQuery developer wrote some code for an image rotator, but did not take into account what happens when there are no images to load! The code just kept hitting the servers over and over and over again which prevented anything else from getting done! Now, I’m NOT saying that I have not done the same sort of thing in the past or am immune from such mistakes. My point is that if you don’t know what you are doing, there are very REAL consequences that can have a major impact on your organization AND they will be hard to track down.  Think how happy your boss will be after you copy and pasted some jQuery from a blog without understanding what it does, it brings down the farm, AND it takes them 3 days to track it back to you.  :/ Good times will not be had. Like it or not JavaScript/jQuery is a programming language. While you .NET people sit on your high horses because your code is compiled and “runs faster” (also debatable), the rest of us will be actually getting work done and delivering solutions while you are trying to figure out why your widget won’t deploy. I can pick at that scab because I write .NET code too and speak from experience. I can do both, and do both well. So, I am not speaking from ignorance here. In JavaScript/jQuery you have variables, loops, conditionals, functions, arrays, events, and built in methods. If you are not a developer you just aren’t going to take advantage of all of that and use it correctly. Ahhh.. but there is hope! There is a lot of jQuery resources out there to help you learn and learn well! There are many experts on the subject that will gladly tell you when you are smoking crack. I just this minute saw a tweet from @cquick with a link to: “jQuery Fundamentals”. I just glanced through it and this may be a great primer for you aspiring jQuery devs. Take advantage of all the resources and become a developer! Hey, it will look awesome on your resume right? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if it depends too much on client resources for a good user experience I’ve said it once and I’ll say it over and over until you understand. jQuery is executed on the client’s computer. Got it? If you are looping through hundreds of rows of data, searching through an enormous DOM, or performing many calculations it is going to take some time! AND if your user happens to be sitting on some old PC somewhere that they picked up at a garage sale their experience will be that much worse! If you can’t give the user a good experience they will not use the site. So, if jQuery is causing the user to have a bad experience, don’t use it. I sometimes go as far to say that you should NOT go to jQuery as a first option for external facing web sites because you have ZERO control over what the end user’s computer will be. You just can’t guarantee an awesome user experience all of the time. Ahhh… but you have no choice? (where have I heard that before?). Well… if you really have no choice, here are some tips to help improve the experience: Avoid screen scraping This is not 1999 and SharePoint is not an old green screen from a mainframe… so why are you treating it like it is? Screen scraping is time consuming and client intensive. Take advantage of tools like SPServices to do your data retrieval when possible. Fine tune your DOM searches A lot of time can be eaten up just searching the DOM and ignoring table rows that you don’t need. Write better jQuery to only loop through tables rows that you need, or only access specific elements you need. Take advantage of Element ID’s to return the one element you are looking for instead of looping through all the DOM over and over again. Write better jQuery Remember this is development. Think about how you can write cleaner, faster jQuery. This directly relates to the previous point of improving your DOM searches, but also when using arrays, variables and loops. Do you REALLY need to loop through that array 3 times? How can you knock it down to 2 times or even 1? When you have lots of calculations and data that you are manipulating every operation adds up. Think about how you can streamline it. Back in the old days before RAM was abundant, Cores were plentiful and dinosaurs roamed the earth, us developers had to take performance into account in everything we did. It’s a lost art that really needs to be used here. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are sending a lot of data over the wire… Developer:  “Awesome… you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” Administrator: “Crap! you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” SPServices may indeed be the best thing that happened to SharePoint since the invention of SharePoint Saturdays by Godfather Lotter… BUT you HAVE to use it wisely! (I REFUSE to make the Spiderman reference). If you do not know what you are doing your code will bring back EVERY field and EVERY row from a list and push that over the internet with all that lovely XML wrapped around it. That can be a HUGE amount of data and will GREATLY impact performance! Calling several web service methods at the same time can cause the same problem and can negatively impact your SharePoint servers. These problems, thankfully, are not difficult to rectify if you are careful: Limit list data retrieved Use CAML to reduce the number of rows returned and limit the fields returned using ViewFields.  You should definitely be doing this regardless. If you aren’t I hope your admin thumps you upside the head. Batch large list updates You may or may not have noticed that if you try to do large updates (hundreds of rows) that the performance is either completely abysmal or it fails over half the time. You can greatly improve performance and avoid timeouts by breaking up your updates into several smaller updates. I don’t know if there is a magic number for best performance, it really depends on how much data you are sending back more than the number of rows. However, I have found that 200 rows generally works well.  Play around and find the right number for your situation. Delay Web Service calls when possible One of the cool things about jQuery and SPServices is that you can delay queries to the server until they are actually needed instead of doing them all at once. This can lead to performance improvements over DataViewWebParts and even .NET code in the right situations. So, don’t load the data until it’s needed. In some instances you may not need to retrieve the data at all, so why retrieve it ALL the time? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if there is a better solution… jQuery is NOT the silver bullet in SharePoint, it is not the answer to every question, it is just another tool in the developers toolkit. I urge all developers to know what options exist out there and choose the right one! Sometimes it will be jQuery, sometimes it will be .NET,  sometimes it will be XSL, and sometimes it will be some other choice… So, when is there a better solution to jQuery? When you can’t get away from performance problems Sometimes jQuery will just give you horrible performance regardless of what you do because of unavoidable obstacles. In these situations you are going to have to figure out an alternative. Can I do it with a DVWP or do I have to crack open Visual Studio? When you need to do something that jQuery can’t do There are lots of things you can’t do in jQuery like elevate privileges, event handlers, workflows, or interact with back end systems that have no web service interface. It just can’t do everything. When it can be done faster and more efficiently another way Why are you spending time to write jQuery to do a DataViewWebPart that would take 5 minutes? Or why are you trying to implement complicated logic that would be simple to do in .NET? If your answer is that you don’t have the option, okay. BUT if you do have the option don’t reinvent the wheel! Take advantage of the other tools. The answer is not always jQuery… sorry… the kool-aid tastes good, but sweet tea is pretty awesome too. You should not be using jQuery in SharePoint if you are a moron… Let’s finish up the blog on a high note… Yes.. it’s true, I sometimes type things just to get a reaction… guess this section title might be a good example, but it feels good sometimes just to type the words that a lot of us think… So.. don’t be that guy! Another good buddy of mine that works for Microsoft told me. “I loved jQuery in SharePoint…. until I had to support it.”. He went on to explain that some user was making several web service calls on a page using jQuery and then was calling Microsoft and COMPLAINING because the page took so long to load… DUH! What do you expect to happen when you are pushing that much data over the wire and are making that many web service calls at once!! It’s one thing to write that kind of code and accept it’s just going to take a while, it’s COMPLETELY another issue to do that and then complain when it’s not lightning fast!  Someone’s gene pool needs some chlorine. So, I think this is a nice summary of the blog… DON’T be that guy… don’t be a moron. How can you stop yourself from being a moron? Ah.. glad you asked, here are some tips: Think Is jQuery the right solution to my problem? Is there a better approach? What are the implications and pitfalls of using jQuery in this situation? Search What are others doing? Does someone have a better solution? Is there a third party library that does the same thing I need? Plan Write good jQuery. Limit calculations and data sent over the wire and don’t reinvent the wheel when possible. Test Okay, it works well on your machine. Try it on others ESPECIALLY if this is for an external site. Test with empty data. Test with hundreds of rows of data. Test as many scenarios as possible. Monitor those server resources to see the impact there as well. Ask the experts As smart as you are, there are people smarter than you. Even the experts talk to each other to make sure they aren't doing something stupid. And for the MOST part they are pretty nice guys. Marc Anderson and Christophe Humbert are two guys who regularly keep me in line. Make sure you aren’t doing something stupid. Repeat So, when you think you have the best solution possible, repeat the steps above just to be safe.  Conclusion jQuery is an awesome tool and has come in handy on many occasions. I’m even teaching a 1/2 day SharePoint & jQuery workshop at the upcoming SPTechCon in Boston if you want to berate me in person. However, it’s only as awesome as the developer behind the keyboard. It IS development and has its pitfalls. Knowledge and experience are invaluable to giving the user the best experience possible.  Let’s face it, in the end, no matter our opinions, prejudices, or ego providing our clients, customers, and users with the best solution possible is what counts. Period… end of sentence…

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• Stored Procedures with SSRS? Hmm… not so much

  - by Rob Farley

  Little Bobby Tables’ mother says you should always sanitise your data input. Except that I think she’s wrong. The SQL Injection aspect is for another post, where I’ll show you why I think SQL Injection is the same kind of attack as many other attacks, such as the old buffer overflow, but here I want to have a bit of a whinge about the way that some people sanitise data input, and even have a whinge about people who insist on using stored procedures for SSRS reports. Let me say that again, in case you missed it the first time: I want to have a whinge about people who insist on using stored procedures for SSRS reports. Let’s look at the data input sanitisation aspect – except that I’m going to call it ‘parameter validation’. I’m talking about code that looks like this: create procedure dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) as begin     /* First check that @eomdate is a valid date */     if isdate(@eomdate) != 1     begin         select 'Please enter a valid date' as ErrorMessage;         return;     end     /* Then check that time has passed since @eomdate */     if datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) < 5     begin         select 'Sorry - EOM is not complete yet' as ErrorMessage;         return;     end         /* If those checks have succeeded, return the data */     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)         and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     order by SalesPersonID; end Notice that the code checks that a date has been entered. Seriously??!! This must only be to check for NULL values being passed in, because anything else would have to be a valid datetime to avoid an error. The other check is maybe fair enough, but I still don’t like it. The two problems I have with this stored procedure are the result sets and the small fact that the stored procedure even exists in the first place. But let’s consider the first one of these problems for starters. I’ll get to the second one in a moment. If you read Jes Borland (@grrl_geek)’s recent post about returning multiple result sets in Reporting Services, you’ll be aware that Reporting Services doesn’t support multiple results sets from a single query. And when it says ‘single query’, it includes ‘stored procedure call’. It’ll only handle the first result set that comes back. But that’s okay – we have RETURN statements, so our stored procedure will only ever return a single result set.  Sometimes that result set might contain a single field called ErrorMessage, but it’s still only one result set. Except that it’s not okay, because Reporting Services needs to know what fields to expect. Your report needs to hook into your fields, so SSRS needs to have a way to get that information. For stored procs, it uses an option called FMTONLY. When Reporting Services tries to figure out what fields are going to be returned by a query (or stored procedure call), it doesn’t want to have to run the whole thing. That could take ages. (Maybe it’s seen some of the stored procedures I’ve had to deal with over the years!) So it turns on FMTONLY before it makes the call (and turns it off again afterwards). FMTONLY is designed to be able to figure out the shape of the output, without actually running the contents. It’s very useful, you might think. set fmtonly on exec dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson '20030401'; set fmtonly off Without the FMTONLY lines, this stored procedure returns a result set that has three columns and fourteen rows. But with FMTONLY turned on, those rows don’t come back. But what I do get back hurts Reporting Services. It doesn’t run the stored procedure at all. It just looks for anything that could be returned and pushes out a result set in that shape. Despite the fact that I’ve made sure that the logic will only ever return a single result set, the FMTONLY option kills me by returning three of them. It would have been much better to push these checks down into the query itself. alter procedure dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) as begin     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where     /* Make sure that @eomdate is valid */         isdate(@eomdate) = 1     /* And that it's sufficiently past */     and datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) >= 5     /* And now use it in the filter as appropriate */     and OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)     and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     order by SalesPersonID; end Now if we run it with FMTONLY turned on, we get the single result set back. But let’s consider the execution plan when we pass in an invalid date. First let’s look at one that returns data. I’ve got a semi-useful index in place on OrderDate, which includes the SalesPersonID and TotalDue fields. It does the job, despite a hefty Sort operation. …compared to one that uses a future date: You might notice that the estimated costs are similar – the Index Seek is still 28%, the Sort is still 71%. But the size of that arrow coming out of the Index Seek is a whole bunch smaller. The coolest thing here is what’s going on with that Index Seek. Let’s look at some of the properties of it. Glance down it with me… Estimated CPU cost of 0.0005728, 387 estimated rows, estimated subtree cost of 0.0044385, ForceSeek false, Number of Executions 0. That’s right – it doesn’t run. So much for reading plans right-to-left... The key is the Filter on the left of it. It has a Startup Expression Predicate in it, which means that it doesn’t call anything further down the plan (to the right) if the predicate evaluates to false. Using this method, we can make sure that our stored procedure contains a single query, and therefore avoid any problems with multiple result sets. If we wanted, we could always use UNION ALL to make sure that we can return an appropriate error message. alter procedure dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) as begin     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales, /*Placeholder: */ '' as ErrorMessage     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where     /* Make sure that @eomdate is valid */         isdate(@eomdate) = 1     /* And that it's sufficiently past */     and datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) >= 5     /* And now use it in the filter as appropriate */     and OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)     and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     /* Now include the error messages */     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Please enter a valid date' as ErrorMessage     where isdate(@eomdate) != 1     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Sorry - EOM is not complete yet' as ErrorMessage     where datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) < 5     order by SalesPersonID; end But still I don’t like it, because it’s now a stored procedure with a single query. And I don’t like stored procedures that should be functions. That’s right – I think this should be a function, and SSRS should call the function. And I apologise to those of you who are now planning a bonfire for me. Guy Fawkes’ night has already passed this year, so I think you miss out. (And I’m not going to remind you about when the PASS Summit is in 2012.) create function dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomdate datetime) returns table as return (     select SalesPersonID, count(*) as NumSales, sum(TotalDue) as TotalSales, '' as ErrorMessage     from Sales.SalesOrderHeader     where     /* Make sure that @eomdate is valid */         isdate(@eomdate) = 1     /* And that it's sufficiently past */     and datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) >= 5     /* And now use it in the filter as appropriate */     and OrderDate >= dateadd(month,-1,@eomdate)     and OrderDate < @eomdate     group by SalesPersonID     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Please enter a valid date' as ErrorMessage     where isdate(@eomdate) != 1     union all     select 0, 0, 0, 'Sorry - EOM is not complete yet' as ErrorMessage     where datediff(day,@eomdate,sysdatetime()) < 5 ); We’ve had to lose the ORDER BY – but that’s fine, as that’s a client thing anyway. We can have our reports leverage this stored query still, but we’re recognising that it’s a query, not a procedure. A procedure is designed to DO stuff, not just return data. We even get entries in sys.columns that confirm what the shape of the result set actually is, which makes sense, because a table-valued function is the right mechanism to return data. And we get so much more flexibility with this. If you haven’t seen the simplification stuff that I’ve preached on before, jump over to http://bit.ly/SimpleRob and watch the video of when I broke a microphone and nearly fell off the stage in Wales. You’ll see the impact of being able to have a simplifiable query. You can also read the procedural functions post I wrote recently, if you didn’t follow the link from a few paragraphs ago. So if we want the list of SalesPeople that made any kind of sales in a given month, we can do something like: select SalesPersonID from dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomonth) order by SalesPersonID; This doesn’t need to look up the TotalDue field, which makes a simpler plan. select * from dbo.GetMonthSummaryPerSalesPerson(@eomonth) where SalesPersonID is not null order by SalesPersonID; This one can avoid having to do the work on the rows that don’t have a SalesPersonID value, pushing the predicate into the Index Seek rather than filtering the results that come back to the report. If we had joins involved, we might see some of those being simplified out. We also get the ability to include query hints in individual reports. We shift from having a single-use stored procedure to having a reusable stored query – and isn’t that one of the main points of modularisation? Stored procedures in Reporting Services are just a bit limited for my liking. They’re useful in plenty of ways, but if you insist on using stored procedures all the time rather that queries that use functions – that’s rubbish. @rob_farley

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