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• Book Review - Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan

  - by BuckWoody

  As part of my professional development, I’ve created a list of books to read throughout the year, starting in June of 2011. This a review of the first one, called Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan. You can find my entire list of books I’m reading for my career here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/06/07/head-in-the-clouds-eyes-on-the-books.aspx  Why I Chose This Book: As part of my learning style, I try to read multiple books about a single subject. I’ve found that at least 3 books are necessary to get the right amount of information to me. This is a “technical” work, meaning that it deals with technology and not business, writing or other facets of my career. I’ll have a mix of all of those as I read along. I chose this work in addition to others I’ve read since it covers everything from an introduction to more advanced topics in a single book. It also has some practical examples of actually working with the product, particularly on storage. Although it’s dated, many examples normally translate. I also saw that it had pretty good reviews. What I learned: I learned a great deal about storage, and many useful code snippets. I do think that there could have been more of a focus on the application fabric - but of course that wasn’t as mature a feature when this book was written. I learned some great architecture examples, and in one section I learned more about encryption. In that example, however, I would rather have seen the examples go the other way - the book focused on moving data from on-premise to Azure storage in an encrypted fashion. Using the Application Fabric I would rather see sensitive data left in a hybrid fashion on premise, and connect to for the Azure application. Even so, the examples were very useful. If you’re looking for a good “starter” Azure book, this is a good choice. I also recommend the last chapter as a quick read for a DBA, or Database Administrator. It’s not very long, but useful. Note that the limits described are incorrect - which is one of the dangers of reading a book about any cloud offering. The services offered are updated so quickly that the information is in constant danger of being “stale”. Even so, I found this a useful book, which I believe will help me work with Azure better. Raw Notes: I take notes as I read, calling that process “reading with a pencil”. I find that when I do that I pay attention better, and record some things that I need to know later. I’ll take these notes, categorize them into a OneNote notebook that I synchronize in my Live.com account, and that way I can search them from anywhere. I can even read them on the web, since the Live.com has a OneNote program built in. Note that these are the raw notes, so they might not make a lot of sense out of context - I include them here so you can watch my though process. Programming Windows Azure by Siriram Krishnan: Learning about how to select applications suitable for Distributed Technology. Application Fabric gets the least attention; probably because it was newer at the time. Very clear (Chapter One) Good foundation Background and history, but not too much I normally arrange my descriptions differently, starting with the use-cases and moving to physicality, but this difference helps me. Interesting that I am reading this using Safari Books Online, which uses many of these concepts. Taught me some new aspects of a Hypervisor – very low-level information about the Azure Fabric (not to be confused with the Application Fabric feature) (Chapter Two) Good detail of what is included in the SDK. Even more is available now. CS = Cloud Service (Chapter 3) Place Storage info in the configuration file, since it can be streamed in-line with a running app. Ditto for logging, and keep separated configs for staging and testing. Easy-switch in and switch out.  (Chapter 4) There are two Runtime API’s, one of external and one for internal. Realizing how powerful this paradigm really is. Some places seem light, and to drop off but perhaps that’s best. Managing API is not charged, which is nice. I don’t often think about the price, until it comes to an actual deployment (Chapter 5) Csmanage is something I want to dig into deeper. API requires package moves to Blob storage first, so it needs a URL. Csmanage equivalent can be written in Unix scripting using openssl. Upgrades are possible, and you use the upgradeDomainCount attribute in the Service-Definition.csdef file  Always use a low-privileged account to test on the dev fabric, since Windows Azure runs in partial trust. Full trust is available, but can be dangerous and must be well-thought out. (Chapter 6) Learned how to run full CMD commands in a web window – not that you would ever do that, but it was an interesting view into those links. This leads to a discussion on hosting other runtimes (such as Java or PHP) in Windows Azure. I got an expanded view on this process, although this is where the book shows its age a little. Books can be a problem for Cloud Computing for this reason – things just change too quickly. Windows Azure storage is not eventually consistent – it is instantly consistent with multi-phase commit. Plumbing for this is internal, not required to code that. (Chapter 7) REST API makes the service interoperable, hybrid, and consistent across code architectures. Nicely done. Use affinity groups to keep data and code together. Side note: e-book readers need a common “notes” feature. There’s a decent quick description of REST in this chapter. Learned about CloudDrive code – PowerShell sample that mounts Blob storage as a local provider. Works against Dev fabric by default, can be switched to Account. Good treatment in the storage chapters on the differences between using Dev storage and Azure storage. These can be mitigated. No, blobs are not of any size or number. Not a good statement (Chapter 8) Blob storage is probably Azure’s closest play to Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas). Blob change operations must be authenticated, even when public. Chapters on storage are pretty in-depth. Queue Messages are base-64 encoded (Chapter 9) The visibility timeout ensures processing of message in a disconnected system. Order is not guaranteed for a message, so if you need that set an increasing number in the queue mechanism. While Queues are accessible via REST, they are not public and are secured by default. Interesting – the header for a queue request includes an estimated count. This can be useful to create more worker roles in a dynamic system. Each Entity (row) in the Azure Table service is atomic – all or nothing. (Chapter 10) An entity can have up to 255 Properties  Use “ID” for the class to indicate the key value, or use the [DataServiceKey] Attribute.  LINQ makes working with the Azure Table Service much easier, although Interop is certainly possible. Good description on the process of selecting the Partition and Row Key.  When checking for continuation tokens for pagination, include logic that falls out of the check in case you are at the last page.  On deleting a storage object, it is instantly unavailable, however a background process is dispatched to perform the physical deletion. So if you want to re-create a storage object with the same name, add retry logic into the code. Interesting approach to deleting an index entity without having to read it first – create a local entity with the same keys and apply it to the Azure system regardless of change-state.  Although the “Indexes” description is a little vague, it’s interesting to see a Folding and Stemming discussion a-la the Porter Stemming Algorithm. (Chapter 11)  Presents a better discussion of indexes (at least inverted indexes) later in the chapter. Great treatment for DBA’s in Chapter 11. We need to work on getting secondary indexes in Table storage. There is a limited form of transactions called “Entity Group Transactions” that, although they have conditions, makes a transactional system more possible. Concurrency also becomes an issue, but is handled well if you’re using Data Services in .NET. It watches the Etag and allows you to take action appropriately. I do not recommend using Azure as a location for secure backups. In fact, I would rather have seen the examples in (Chapter 12) go the other way, showing how data could be brought back to a local store as a DR or HA strategy. Good information on cryptography and so on even so. Chapter seems out of place, and should be combined with the Blob chapter.  (Chapter 13) on SQL Azure is dated, although the base concepts are OK.  Nice example of simple ADO.NET access to a SQL Azure (or any SQL Server Really) database.  

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• That Escalated Quickly

  - by Jesse Taber

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2014/05/17/that-escalated-quickly.aspxI have been working remotely out of my home for over 4 years now. All of my coworkers during that time have also worked remotely. Lots of folks have written about the challenges inherent in facilitating communication on remote teams and strategies for overcoming them. A popular theme around this topic is the notion of “escalating communication”. In this context “escalating” means taking a conversation from one mode of communication to a different, higher fidelity mode of communication. Here are the five modes of communication I use at work in order of increasing fidelity: Email – This is the “lowest fidelity” mode of communication that I use. I usually only check it a few times a day (and I’m trying to check it even less frequently than that) and I only keep items in my inbox if they represent an item I need to take action on that I haven’t tracked anywhere else. Forums / Message boards – Being a developer, I’ve gotten into the habit of having other people look over my code before it becomes part of the product I’m working on. These code reviews often happen in “real time” via screen sharing, but I also always have someone else give all of the changes another look using pull requests. A pull request takes my code and lets someone else see the changes I’ve made side-by-side with the existing code so they can see if I did anything dumb. Pull requests can facilitate a conversation about the code changes in an online-forum like style. Some teams I’ve worked on also liked using tools like Trello or Google Groups to have on-going conversations about a topic or task that was being worked on. Chat & Instant Messaging  - Chat and instant messaging are the real workhorses for communication on the remote teams I’ve been a part of. I know some teams that are co-located that also use it pretty extensively for quick messages that don’t warrant walking across the office to talk with someone but reqire more immediacy than an e-mail. For the purposes of this post I think it’s important to note that the terms “chat” and “instant messaging” might insinuate that the conversation is happening in real time, but that’s not always true. Modern chat and IM applications maintain a searchable history so people can easily see what might have been discussed while they were away from their computers. Voice, Video and Screen sharing – Everyone’s got a camera and microphone on their computers now, and there are an abundance of services that will let you use them to talk to other people who have cameras and microphones on their computers. I’m including screen sharing here as well because, in my experience, these discussions typically involve one or more people showing the other participants something that’s happening on their screen. Obviously, this mode of communication is much higher-fidelity than any of the ones listed above. Scheduled meetings are typically conducted using this mode of communication. In Person – No matter how great communication tools become, there’s no substitute for meeting with someone face-to-face. However, opportunities for this kind of communcation are few and far between when you work on a remote team. When a conversation gets escalated that usually means it moves up one or more positions on this list. A lot of people advocate jumping to #4 sooner than later. Like them, I used to believe that, if it was possible, organizing a call with voice and video was automatically better than any kind of text-based communication could be. Lately, however, I’m becoming less convinced that escalating is always the right move. Working Asynchronously Last year I attended a talk at our local code camp given by Drew Miller. Drew works at GitHub and was talking about how they use GitHub internally. Many of the folks at GitHub work remotely, so communication was one of the main themes in Drew’s talk. During the talk Drew used the phrase, “asynchronous communication” to describe their use of chat and pull request comments. That phrase stuck in my head because I hadn’t heard it before but I think it perfectly describes the way in which remote teams often need to communicate. You don’t always know when your co-workers are at their computers or what hours (if any) they are working that day. In order to work this way you need to assume that the person you’re talking to might not respond right away. You can’t always afford to wait until everyone required is online and available to join a voice call, so you need to use text-based, persistent forms of communication so that people can receive and respond to messages when they are available. Going back to my list from the beginning of this post for a second, I characterize items #1-3 as being “asynchronous” modes of communication while we could call items #4 and #5 “synchronous”. When communication gets escalated it’s almost always moving from an asynchronous mode of communication to a synchronous one. Now, to the point of this post: I’ve become increasingly reluctant to escalate from asynchronous to synchronous communication for two primary reasons: 1 – You can often find a higher fidelity way to convey your message without holding a synchronous conversation 2 - Asynchronous modes of communication are (usually) persistent and searchable. You Don’t Have to Broadcast Live Let’s start with the first reason I’ve listed. A lot of times you feel like you need to escalate to synchronous communication because you’re having difficulty describing something that you’re seeing in words. You want to provide the people you’re conversing with some audio-visual aids to help them understand the point that you’re trying to make and you think that getting on Skype and sharing your screen with them is the best way to do that. Firing up a screen sharing session does work well, but you can usually accomplish the same thing in an asynchronous manner. For example, you could take a screenshot and annotate it with some text and drawings to illustrate what it is you’re seeing. If a screenshot won’t work, taking a short screen recording while your narrate over it and posting the video to your forum or chat system along with a text-based description of what’s in the recording that can be searched for later can be a great way to effectively communicate with your team asynchronously. I Said What?!? Now for the second reason I listed: most asynchronous modes of communication provide a transcript of what was said and what decisions might have been made during the conversation. There have been many occasions where I’ve used the search feature of my team’s chat application to find a conversation that happened several weeks or months ago to remember what was decided. Unfortunately, I think the benefits associated with the persistence of communicating asynchronously often get overlooked when people decide to escalate to a in-person meeting or voice/video call. I’m becoming much more reluctant to suggest a voice or video call if I suspect that it might lead to codifying some kind of design decision because everyone involved is going to hang up the call and immediately forget what was decided. I recognize that you can record and archive these types of interactions, but without being able to search them the recordings aren’t terribly useful. When and How To Escalate I don’t mean to imply that communicating via voice/video or in person is never a good idea. I probably jump on a Skype call with a co-worker at least once a day to quickly hash something out or show them a bit of code that I’m working on. Also, meeting in person periodically is really important for remote teams. There’s no way around the fact that sometimes it’s easier to jump on a call and show someone my screen so they can see what I’m seeing. So when is it right to escalate? I think the simplest way to answer that is when the communication starts to feel painful. Everyone’s tolerance for that pain is different, but I think you need to let it hurt a little bit before jumping to synchronous communication. When you do escalate from asynchronous to synchronous communication, there are a couple of things you can do to maximize the effectiveness of the communication: Takes notes – This is huge and yet I’ve found that a lot of teams don’t do this. If you’re holding a meeting with  > 2 people you should have someone taking notes. Taking notes while participating in a meeting can be difficult but there are a few strategies to deal with this challenge that probably deserve a short post of their own. After the meeting, make sure the notes are posted to a place where all concerned parties (including those that might not have attended the meeting) can review and search them. Persist decisions made ASAP – If any decisions were made during the meeting, persist those decisions to a searchable medium as soon as possible following the conversation. All the teams I’ve worked on used a web-based system for tracking the on-going work and a backlog of work to be done in the future. I always try to make sure that all of the cards/stories/tasks/whatever in these systems always reflect the latest decisions that were made as the work was being planned and executed. If held a quick call with your team lead and decided that it wasn’t worth the effort to build real-time validation into that new UI you were working on, go and codify that decision in the story associated with that work immediately after you hang up. Even better, write it up in the story while you are both still on the phone. That way when the folks from your QA team pick up the story to test a few days later they’ll know why the real-time validation isn’t there without having to invoke yet another conversation about the work. Communicating Well is Hard At this point you might be thinking that communicating asynchronously is more difficult than having a live conversation. You’re right: it is more difficult. In order to communicate effectively this way you need to very carefully think about the message that you’re trying to convey and craft it in a way that’s easy for your audience to understand. This is almost always harder than just talking through a problem in real time with someone; this is why escalating communication is such a popular idea. Why wouldn’t we want to do the thing that’s easier? Easier isn’t always better. If you and your team can get in the habit of communicating effectively in an asynchronous manner you’ll find that, over time, all of your communications get less painful because you don’t need to re-iterate previously made points over and over again. If you communicate right the first time, you often don’t need to rehash old conversations because you can go back and find the decisions that were made laid out in plain language. You’ll also find that you get better at doing things like writing useful comments in your code, creating written documentation about how the feature that you just built works, or persuading your team to do things in a certain way.

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• Anti-Forgery Request Helpers for ASP.NET MVC and jQuery AJAX

  - by Dixin

  Background To secure websites from cross-site request forgery (CSRF, or XSRF) attack, ASP.NET MVC provides an excellent mechanism: The server prints tokens to cookie and inside the form; When the form is submitted to server, token in cookie and token inside the form are sent in the HTTP request; Server validates the tokens. To print tokens to browser, just invoke HtmlHelper.AntiForgeryToken():<% using (Html.BeginForm()) { %> <%: this.Html.AntiForgeryToken(Constants.AntiForgeryTokenSalt)%> <%-- Other fields. --%> <input type="submit" value="Submit" /> <% } %> This invocation generates a token then writes inside the form:<form action="..." method="post"> <input name="__RequestVerificationToken" type="hidden" value="J56khgCvbE3bVcsCSZkNVuH9Cclm9SSIT/ywruFsXEgmV8CL2eW5C/gGsQUf/YuP" /> <!-- Other fields. --> <input type="submit" value="Submit" /> </form> and also writes into the cookie: __RequestVerificationToken_Lw__= J56khgCvbE3bVcsCSZkNVuH9Cclm9SSIT/ywruFsXEgmV8CL2eW5C/gGsQUf/YuP When the above form is submitted, they are both sent to server. In the server side, [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] attribute is used to specify the controllers or actions to validate them:[HttpPost] [ValidateAntiForgeryToken(Salt = Constants.AntiForgeryTokenSalt)] public ActionResult Action(/* ... */) { // ... } This is very productive for form scenarios. But recently, when resolving security vulnerabilities for Web products, some problems are encountered. Specify validation on controller (not on each action) The server side problem is, It is expected to declare [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] on controller, but actually it has be to declared on each POST actions. Because POST actions are usually much more then controllers, this is a little crazy Problem Usually a controller contains actions for HTTP GET and actions for HTTP POST requests, and usually validations are expected for HTTP POST requests. So, if the [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] is declared on the controller, the HTTP GET requests become invalid:[ValidateAntiForgeryToken(Salt = Constants.AntiForgeryTokenSalt)] public class SomeController : Controller // One [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] attribute. { [HttpGet] public ActionResult Index() // Index() cannot work. { // ... } [HttpPost] public ActionResult PostAction1(/* ... */) { // ... } [HttpPost] public ActionResult PostAction2(/* ... */) { // ... } // ... } If browser sends an HTTP GET request by clicking a link: http://Site/Some/Index, validation definitely fails, because no token is provided. So the result is, [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] attribute must be distributed to each POST action:public class SomeController : Controller // Many [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] attributes. { [HttpGet] public ActionResult Index() // Works. { // ... } [HttpPost] [ValidateAntiForgeryToken(Salt = Constants.AntiForgeryTokenSalt)] public ActionResult PostAction1(/* ... */) { // ... } [HttpPost] [ValidateAntiForgeryToken(Salt = Constants.AntiForgeryTokenSalt)] public ActionResult PostAction2(/* ... */) { // ... } // ... } This is a little bit crazy, because one application can have a lot of POST actions. Solution To avoid a large number of [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] attributes (one for each POST action), the following ValidateAntiForgeryTokenAttribute wrapper class can be helpful, where HTTP verbs can be specified:[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class | AttributeTargets.Method, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)] public class ValidateAntiForgeryTokenWrapperAttribute : FilterAttribute, IAuthorizationFilter { private readonly ValidateAntiForgeryTokenAttribute _validator; private readonly AcceptVerbsAttribute _verbs; public ValidateAntiForgeryTokenWrapperAttribute(HttpVerbs verbs) : this(verbs, null) { } public ValidateAntiForgeryTokenWrapperAttribute(HttpVerbs verbs, string salt) { this._verbs = new AcceptVerbsAttribute(verbs); this._validator = new ValidateAntiForgeryTokenAttribute() { Salt = salt }; } public void OnAuthorization(AuthorizationContext filterContext) { string httpMethodOverride = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.GetHttpMethodOverride(); if (this._verbs.Verbs.Contains(httpMethodOverride, StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) { this._validator.OnAuthorization(filterContext); } } } When this attribute is declared on controller, only HTTP requests with the specified verbs are validated:[ValidateAntiForgeryTokenWrapper(HttpVerbs.Post, Constants.AntiForgeryTokenSalt)] public class SomeController : Controller { // GET actions are not affected. // Only HTTP POST requests are validated. } Now one single attribute on controller turns on validation for all POST actions. Maybe it would be nice if HTTP verbs can be specified on the built-in [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] attribute, which is easy to implemented. Submit token via AJAX The browser side problem is, if server side turns on anti-forgery validation for POST, then AJAX POST requests will fail be default. Problem For AJAX scenarios, when request is sent by jQuery instead of form:$.post(url, { productName: "Tofu", categoryId: 1 // Token is not posted. }, callback); This kind of AJAX POST requests will always be invalid, because server side code cannot see the token in the posted data. Solution The tokens are printed to browser then sent back to server. So first of all, HtmlHelper.AntiForgeryToken() must be called somewhere. Now the browser has token in HTML and cookie. Then jQuery must find the printed token in the HTML, and append token to the data before sending:$.post(url, { productName: "Tofu", categoryId: 1, __RequestVerificationToken: getToken() // Token is posted. }, callback); To be reusable, this can be encapsulated into a tiny jQuery plugin:/// <reference path="jquery-1.4.2.js" /> (function ($) { $.getAntiForgeryToken = function (tokenWindow, appPath) { // HtmlHelper.AntiForgeryToken() must be invoked to print the token. tokenWindow = tokenWindow && typeof tokenWindow === typeof window ? tokenWindow : window; appPath = appPath && typeof appPath === "string" ? "_" + appPath.toString() : ""; // The name attribute is either __RequestVerificationToken, // or __RequestVerificationToken_{appPath}. tokenName = "__RequestVerificationToken" + appPath; // Finds the <input type="hidden" name={tokenName} value="..." /> from the specified. // var inputElements = $("input[type='hidden'][name='__RequestVerificationToken" + appPath + "']"); var inputElements = tokenWindow.document.getElementsByTagName("input"); for (var i = 0; i < inputElements.length; i++) { var inputElement = inputElements[i]; if (inputElement.type === "hidden" && inputElement.name === tokenName) { return { name: tokenName, value: inputElement.value }; } } return null; }; $.appendAntiForgeryToken = function (data, token) { // Converts data if not already a string. if (data && typeof data !== "string") { data = $.param(data); } // Gets token from current window by default. token = token ? token : $.getAntiForgeryToken(); // $.getAntiForgeryToken(window). data = data ? data + "&" : ""; // If token exists, appends {token.name}={token.value} to data. return token ? data + encodeURIComponent(token.name) + "=" + encodeURIComponent(token.value) : data; }; // Wraps $.post(url, data, callback, type). $.postAntiForgery = function (url, data, callback, type) { return $.post(url, $.appendAntiForgeryToken(data), callback, type); }; // Wraps $.ajax(settings). $.ajaxAntiForgery = function (settings) { settings.data = $.appendAntiForgeryToken(settings.data); return $.ajax(settings); }; })(jQuery); In most of the scenarios, it is Ok to just replace $.post() invocation with $.postAntiForgery(), and replace $.ajax() with $.ajaxAntiForgery():$.postAntiForgery(url, { productName: "Tofu", categoryId: 1 }, callback); // Token is posted. There might be some scenarios of custom token. Here $.appendAntiForgeryToken() is provided:data = $.appendAntiForgeryToken(data, token); // Token is already in data. No need to invoke $.postAntiForgery(). $.post(url, data, callback); And there are scenarios that the token is not in the current window. For example, an HTTP POST request can be sent by iframe, while the token is in the parent window. Here window can be specified for $.getAntiForgeryToken():data = $.appendAntiForgeryToken(data, $.getAntiForgeryToken(window.parent)); // Token is already in data. No need to invoke $.postAntiForgery(). $.post(url, data, callback); If you have better solution, please do tell me.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 10, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, June 10, 2013Popular ReleasesNexusCamera: NexusCamera: Nexus Camera is a control for Windows Phone 7 & 8, which can be used as a menu on the Camera. The idea in making this control when we use a camera nexus. Thanks for Nexus. Need Windows Phone Toolkit https://phone.codeplex.com/ View Sample Camera http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/nexus4-camera.jpgVR Player: VR Player 0.3 ALPHA: New plugin system with individual folders TrackIR support Maya and 3ds max formats support Dual screen support Mono layouts (left and right) Cylinder height parameter Barel effect factor parameter Razer hydra filter parameter VRPN bug fixes UI improvements Performances improvements Stabilization and logging with Log4Net New default values base on users feedback CTRL key to open menuZXMAK2: Version 2.7.5.4: - add hayes modem device (thanks to Eltaron) - add host joystick selection - fix joystick bits (swapped in previous version)SimCityPak: SimCityPak 0.1.0.8: SimCityPak 0.1.0.8 New features: Import BMP color palettes for vehicles Import RASTER file (uncompressed 8.8.8.8 DDS files) View different channels of RASTER files or preview of all layers combined Find text in javascripts TGA viewer Ground textures added to lot editor Many additional identified instances and propertiesWsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1306.09: Add more verifications on certificate validation. WPP will not let user to try publishing an update until the certificate is valid. Add certificate expiration date on the 'About' form. Filter Approbation to avoid a user to try to approve an update for uninstallation when the update do not support uninstallation. Add the server and console version on the 'About' form. WPP will not let user to publish an update until the server and console are not at the same level. WPP do not let user ...AJAX Control Toolkit: June 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - June 2013 Release Version 7.0607June 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - Instructions for using the AJAX Control Toolkit with ASP.NET 4.5 can be found at...Rawr: Rawr 5.2.1: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.13: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImageJumbo.com" links FIXED: Ripping of Threads with multiple pagesXomega Framework: Xomega.Framework 1.4: Adding support for Visual Studio 2012 and .Net framework 4.5. Minor bug fixes and enhancements.sb0t v.5: sb0t 5.14: Stability fix in script engine. Avatar.exists property fixed in scripting. cb0t custom font protocol re-added and updated to support new Ares.ASP.NET MVC Forum: MVCForum v1.3.5: This is a bug release version, with a couple of small usability features and UI changes. All the small amount of bugs reported in v1.3 have been fixed, no upgrade needed just overwrite the files and everything should just work.Json.NET: Json.NET 5.0 Release 6: New feature - Added serialized/deserialized JSON to verbose tracing New feature - Added support for using type name handling with ISerializable content Fix - Fixed not using default serializer settings with primitive values and JToken.ToObject Fix - Fixed error writing BigIntegers with JsonWriter.WriteToken Fix - Fixed serializing and deserializing flag enums with EnumMember attribute Fix - Fixed error deserializing interfaces with a valid type converter Fix - Fixed error deser...Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: DotNetNuke 7 Project Templates V2.3 for VS2012: V2.3 - Release Date 6/5/2013 Items addressed in this 2.3 release Fixed bad namespace for BusinessController in one of the C# templates. Updated documentation in all templates. Setting up your DotNetNuke Module Development Environment Installing Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Templates Customizing the latest DotNetNuke Module Development Project TemplatesPulse: Pulse 0.6.7.0: A number of small bug fixes to stabilize the previous Beta. Sorry about the never ending "New Version" bug!QlikView Extension - Animated Scatter Chart: Animated Scatter Chart - v1.0: Version 1.0 including Source Code qar File Example QlikView application Tested With: Browser Firefox 20 (x64) Google Chrome 27 (x64) Internet Explorer 9 QlikView QlikView Desktop 11 - SR2 (x64) QlikView Desktop 11.2 - SR1 (x64) QlikView Ajax Client 11.2 - SR2 (based on x64)BarbaTunnel: BarbaTunnel 7.2: Warning: HTTP Tunnel is not compatible with version 6.x and prior, HTTP packet format has been changed. Check Version History for more information about this release.SuperWebSocket, a .NET WebSocket Server: SuperWebSocket 0.8: This release includes these changes below: Upgrade SuperSocket to 1.5.3 which is much more stable Added handshake request validating api (WebSocketServer.ValidateHandshake(TWebSocketSession session, string origin)) Fixed a bug that the m_Filters in the SubCommandBase can be null if the command's method LoadSubCommandFilters(IEnumerable<SubCommandFilterAttribute> globalFilters) is not invoked Fixed the compatibility issue on Origin getting in the different version protocols Marked ISub...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.0: 2013.06.04 Ver5.9.0 (1) ?????????????????????????????????($Remote.ini Tmp.ini) (2) ThreadBaseTest?? (3) ????POP3??????SMTP???????????????? (4) Web???????、?????????URL??????????????? (5) Ftp???????、LIST?????????????? (6) ?????????????????????Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.569b: New* Movies - Autoscrape/Batch Rescrape extra fanart and or extra thumbs. * Movies - Alternative editor can add manually actors. * TV - Batch Rescraper, AutoScrape extrafanart, if option enabled. Fixed* Movies - Slow performance switching to movie tab by adding option 'Disable "Not Matching Rename Pattern"' to Movie Preferences - General. * Movies - Fixed only actors with images were scraped and added to nfo * Movies - Fixed filter reset if selected tab was above Home Movies. * Updated Medi...Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v9.0: Version 9.0 of Nearforums with great new features for users and developers: SQL Azure support Admin UI for Forum Categories Avoid html validation for certain roles Improve profile picture moderation and support Warn, suspend, and ban users Web administration of site settings Extensions support Visit the Roadmap for more details. Webdeploy package sha1 checksum: 9.0.0.0: e687ee0438cd2b1df1d3e95ecb9d66e7c538293b New ProjectsASP.NET MVC 4 and RequireJS: ASP.NET MVC 4 application with Areas and RequireJSBaseX - Base converter and calculator: Dealing with numbers of any base in .NET.C# Exercises: C# ExercisesClassfinder: ClassfinderCreative OS ALPHA: This is a OS!!!!CSS Exercises: CSS ExercisesCustom Workflow Action: Project showing how to create and use Custom Workflow Action for SharePoint Designer 2013.Devshed Tools: Provides easy to use and compile-time-support solution for various type of projects on the .NET framework. Currently Devshed.Web is in development.Envar Editor: Edit environment variables easily on windowsExcel To Sql: A simplified tool for importing Excel data into SQL.HTML Exercises: HTML ExercisesKnockout.js with ASP.NET MVC: This project implements a system which maps .NET ViewModels to javascript ViewModels for use with knockout.js, using Razor markup syntax.LogoBids: LOGO??????,ORM??OpenAccess ORMManagistics: Management Logistics Application (including: Warehouse, Sale, Purchase, ...)Matrix Switch Preset Utility: A small utility for managing the inputs and outputs from a matrix switch via RS-232. Developed in WPF (VB9) and running on the .Net3.5SP1 framework.MvcSystemsCommander: An ASP.NET C# MVC4 webapp to help systems administrators consolidate common systems administration tasksNewspaperAgent: My small projectOutlook Recovery Software - Efficiently Repair Damaged PST File: This project tells you the easiest way to recover PST file of Outlook. Complete information has been given here to help users.Pattern: Testprocedure: a new procedural programming framework based on .net, by using lambda expression, it can handle async io friendly and provide a full lock-free solutionSharePoint 2013 custom field samples: SharePoint 2013 custom field samples is a research project aims to provide samples for developing custom fields in SharePoint 2013.SharePoint 2013 List Forms: This small framework allows you to manage custom list forms using rendering templates and controls stored in a SharePoint library.The Coconut Cranium Decision Engine: The Coconut Cranium Decision Engine is a boolean decision engine using the most mind-bendingly worse way of working.TxtToSeq: Command line utility to convert Commodore SEQ files to TXT files and vice-versa.ultgw: ult gw

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• Looking into Entity Framework Code First Migrations

  - by nikolaosk

  In this post I will introduce you to Code First Migrations, an Entity Framework feature introduced in version 4.3 back in February of 2012.I have extensively covered Entity Framework in this blog. Please find my other Entity Framework posts here .   Before the addition of Code First Migrations (4.1,4.2 versions), Code First database initialisation meant that Code First would create the database if it does not exist (the default behaviour - CreateDatabaseIfNotExists). The other pattern we could use is DropCreateDatabaseIfModelChanges which means that Entity Framework, will drop the database if it realises that model has changes since the last time it created the database.The final pattern is DropCreateDatabaseAlways which means that Code First will recreate the database every time one runs the application.That is of course fine for the development database but totally unacceptable and catastrophic when you have a production database. We cannot lose our data because of the work that Code First works.Migrations solve this problem.With migrations we can modify the database without completely dropping it.We can modify the database schema to reflect the changes to the model without losing data.In version EF 5.0 migrations are fully included and supported. I will demonstrate migrations with a hands-on example.Let me say a few words first about Entity Framework first. The .Net framework provides support for Object Relational Mappingthrough EF. So EF is a an ORM tool and it is now the main data access technology that microsoft works on. I use it quite extensively in my projects. Through EF we have many things out of the box provided for us. We have the automatic generation of SQL code.It maps relational data to strongly types objects.All the changes made to the objects in the memory are persisted in a transactional way back to the data store. You can find in this post an example on how to use the Entity Framework to retrieve data from an SQL Server Database using the "Database/Schema First" approach.In this approach we make all the changes at the database level and then we update the model with those changes. In this post you can see an example on how to use the "Model First" approach when working with ASP.Net and the Entity Framework.This model was firstly introduced in EF version 4.0 and we could start with a blank model and then create a database from that model.When we made changes to the model , we could recreate the database from the new model. The Code First approach is the more code-centric than the other two. Basically we write POCO classes and then we persist to a database using something called DBContext.Code First relies on DbContext. We create 2,3 classes (e.g Person,Product) with properties and then these classes interact with the DbContext class we can create a new database based upon our POCOS classes and have tables generated from those classes.We do not have an .edmx file in this approach.By using this approach we can write much easier unit tests.DbContext is a new context class and is smaller,lightweight wrapper for the main context class which is ObjectContext (Schema First and Model First).Let's move on to our hands-on example.I have installed VS 2012 Ultimate edition in my Windows 8 machine. 1)  Create an empty asp.net web application. Give your application a suitable name. Choose C# as the development language2) Add a new web form item in your application. Leave the default name.3) Create a new folder. Name it CodeFirst .4) Add a new item in your application, a class file. Name it Footballer.cs. This is going to be a simple POCO class.Place this class file in the CodeFirst folder.The code follows    public class Footballer     {         public int FootballerID { get; set; }         public string FirstName { get; set; }         public string LastName { get; set; }         public double Weight { get; set; }         public double Height { get; set; }              }5) We will have to add EF 5.0 to our project. Right-click on the project in the Solution Explorer and select Manage NuGet Packages... for it.In the window that will pop up search for Entity Framework and install it.Have a look at the picture below   If you want to find out if indeed EF version is 5.0 version is installed have a look at the References. Have a look at the picture below to see what you will see if you have installed everything correctly.Have a look at the picture below 6) Then we need to create a context class that inherits from DbContext.Add a new class to the CodeFirst folder.Name it FootballerDBContext.Now that we have the entity classes created, we must let the model know.I will have to use the DbSet<T> property.The code for this class follows     public class FootballerDBContext:DbContext     {         public DbSet<Footballer> Footballers { get; set; }             }    Do not forget to add  (using System.Data.Entity;) in the beginning of the class file 7) We must take care of the connection string. It is very easy to create one in the web.config.It does not matter that we do not have a database yet.When we run the DbContext and query against it , it will use a connection string in the web.config and will create the database based on the classes.I will use the name "FootballTraining" for the database.In my case the connection string inside the web.config, looks like this    <connectionStrings>    <add name="CodeFirstDBContext" connectionString="server=.;integrated security=true; database=FootballTraining" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/>                       </connectionStrings>8) Now it is time to create Linq to Entities queries to retrieve data from the database . Add a new class to your application in the CodeFirst folder.Name the file DALfootballer.csWe will create a simple public method to retrieve the footballers. The code for the class followspublic class DALfootballer     {         FootballerDBContext ctx = new FootballerDBContext();         public List<Footballer> GetFootballers()         {             var query = from player in ctx.Footballers select player;             return query.ToList();         }     } 9) Place a GridView control on the Default.aspx page and leave the default name.Add an ObjectDataSource control on the Default.aspx page and leave the default name. Set the DatasourceID property of the GridView control to the ID of the ObjectDataSource control.(DataSourceID="ObjectDataSource1" ). Let's configure the ObjectDataSource control. Click on the smart tag item of the ObjectDataSource control and select Configure Data Source. In the Wizzard that pops up select the DALFootballer class and then in the next step choose the GetFootballers() method.Click Finish to complete the steps of the wizzard.Build and Run your application.  10) Obviously you will not see any records coming back from your database, because we have not inserted anything. The database is created, though.Have a look at the picture below.  11) Now let's change the POCO class. Let's add a new property to the Footballer.cs class.        public int Age { get; set; } Build and run your application again. You will receive an error. Have a look at the picture below 12) That was to be expected.EF Code First Migrations is not activated by default. We have to activate them manually and configure them according to your needs. We will open the Package Manager Console from the Tools menu within Visual Studio 2012.Then we will activate the EF Code First Migration Features by writing the command “Enable-Migrations”.  Have a look at the picture below. This adds a new folder Migrations in our project. A new auto-generated class Configuration.cs is created.Another class is also created [CURRENTDATE]_InitialCreate.cs and added to our project.The Configuration.cs  is shown in the picture below. The [CURRENTDATE]_InitialCreate.cs is shown in the picture below  13) ??w we are ready to migrate the changes in the database. We need to run the Add-Migration Age command in Package Manager ConsoleAdd-Migration will scaffold the next migration based on changes you have made to your model since the last migration was created.In the Migrations folder, the file 201211201231066_Age.cs is created.Have a look at the picture below to see the newly generated file and its contents. Now we can run the Update-Database command in Package Manager Console .See the picture above.Code First Migrations will compare the migrations in our Migrations folder with the ones that have been applied to the database. It will see that the Age migration needs to be applied, and run it.The EFMigrations.CodeFirst.FootballeDBContext database is now updated to include the Age column in the Footballers table.Build and run your application.Everything will work fine now.Have a look at the picture below to see the migrations applied to our table. 14) We may want it to automatically upgrade the database (by applying any pending migrations) when the application launches.Let's add another property to our Poco class.          public string TShirtNo { get; set; }We want this change to migrate automatically to the database.We go to the Configuration.cs we enable automatic migrations.     public Configuration()        {            AutomaticMigrationsEnabled = true;        } In the Page_Load event handling routine we have to register the MigrateDatabaseToLatestVersion database initializer. A database initializer simply contains some logic that is used to make sure the database is setup correctly.   protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)        {            Database.SetInitializer(new MigrateDatabaseToLatestVersion<FootballerDBContext, Configuration>());        } Build and run your application. It will work fine. Have a look at the picture below to see the migrations applied to our table in the database. Hope it helps!!!  

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• Time Tracking on an Agile Team

  - by Stephen.Walther

  What’s the best way to handle time-tracking on an Agile team? Your gut reaction to this question might be to resist any type of time-tracking at all. After all, one of the principles of the Agile Manifesto is “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.  Forcing the developers on your team to track the amount of time that they devote to completing stories or tasks might seem like useless bureaucratic red tape: an impediment to getting real work done. I completely understand this reaction. I’ve been required to use time-tracking software in the past to account for each hour of my workday. It made me feel like Fred Flintstone punching in at the quarry mine and not like a professional. Why You Really Do Need Time-Tracking There are, however, legitimate reasons to track time spent on stories even when you are a member of an Agile team.  First, if you are working with an outside client, you might need to track the number of hours spent on different stories for the purposes of billing. There might be no way to avoid time-tracking if you want to get paid. Second, the Product Owner needs to know when the work on a story has gone over the original time estimated for the story. The Product Owner is concerned with Return On Investment. If the team has gone massively overtime on a story, then the Product Owner has a legitimate reason to halt work on the story and reconsider the story’s business value. Finally, you might want to track how much time your team spends on different types of stories or tasks. For example, if your team is spending 75% of their time doing testing then you might need to bring in more testers. Or, if 10% of your team’s time is expended performing a software build at the end of each iteration then it is time to consider better ways of automating the build process. Time-Tracking in SonicAgile For these reasons, we added time-tracking as a feature to SonicAgile which is our free Agile Project Management tool. We were heavily influenced by Jeff Sutherland (one of the founders of Scrum) in the way that we implemented time-tracking (see his article http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2007/03/time-tracking-is-anti-scrum-what-do-you.html). In SonicAgile, time-tracking is disabled by default. If you want to use this feature then the project owner must enable time-tracking in Project Settings. You can choose to estimate using either days or hours. If you are estimating at the level of stories then it makes more sense to choose days. Otherwise, if you are estimating at the level of tasks then it makes more sense to use hours. After you enable time-tracking then you can assign three estimates to a story: Original Estimate – This is the estimate that you enter when you first create a story. You don’t change this estimate. Time Spent – This is the amount of time that you have already devoted to the story. You update the time spent on each story during your daily standup meeting. Time Left – This is the amount of time remaining to complete the story. Again, you update the time left during your daily standup meeting. So when you first create a story, you enter an original estimate that becomes the time left. During each daily standup meeting, you update the time spent and time left for each story on the Kanban. If you had perfect predicative power, then the original estimate would always be the same as the sum of the time spent and the time left. For example, if you predict that a story will take 5 days to complete then on day 3, the story should have 3 days spent and 2 days left. Unfortunately, never in the history of mankind has anyone accurately predicted the exact amount of time that it takes to complete a story. For this reason, SonicAgile does not update the time spent and time left automatically. Each day, during the daily standup, your team should update the time spent and time left for each story. For example, the following table shows the history of the time estimates for a story that was originally estimated to take 3 days but, eventually, takes 5 days to complete: Day Original Estimate Time Spent Time Left Day 1 3 days 0 days 3 days Day 2 3 days 1 day 2 days Day 3 3 days 2 days 2 days Day 4 3 days 3 days 2 days Day 5 3 days 4 days 0 days In the table above, everything goes as predicted until you reach day 3. On day 3, the team realizes that the work will require an additional two days. The situation does not improve on day 4. All of the sudden, on day 5, all of the remaining work gets done. Real work often follows this pattern. There are long periods when nothing gets done punctuated by occasional and unpredictable bursts of progress. We designed SonicAgile to make it as easy as possible to track the time spent and time left on a story. Detecting when a Story Goes Over the Original Estimate Sometimes, stories take much longer than originally estimated. There’s a surprise. For example, you discover that a new software component is incompatible with existing software components. Or, you discover that you have to go through a month-long certification process to finish a story. In those cases, the Product Owner has a legitimate reason to halt work on a story and re-evaluate the business value of the story. For example, the Product Owner discovers that a story will require weeks to implement instead of days, then the story might not be worth the expense. SonicAgile displays a warning on both the Backlog and the Kanban when the time spent on a story goes over the original estimate. An icon of a clock is displayed. Time-Tracking and Tasks Another optional feature of SonicAgile is tasks. If you enable Tasks in Project Settings then you can break stories into one or more tasks. You can perform time-tracking at the level of a story or at the level of a task. If you don’t break a story into tasks then you can enter the time left and time spent for the story. As soon as you break a story into tasks, then you can no longer enter the time left and time spent at the level of the story. Instead, the time left and time spent for a story is rolled up from its tasks. On the Kanban, you can see how the time left and time spent for each task gets rolled up into each story. The progress bar for the story is rolled up from the progress bars for each task. The original estimate is never rolled up – even when you break a story into tasks. A story’s original estimate is entered separately from the original estimates of each of the story’s tasks. Summary Not every Agile team can avoid time-tracking. You might be forced to track time to get paid, to detect when you are spending too much time on a particular story, or to track the amount of time that you are devoting to different types of tasks. We designed time-tracking in SonicAgile to require the least amount of work to track the information that you need. Time-tracking is an optional feature. If you enable time-tracking then you can track the original estimate, time left, and time spent for each story and task. You can use time-tracking with SonicAgile for free. Register at http://SonicAgile.com.

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• MSCC: Scripting - Administrator's­ toolbox of magic...

  Finally, we made it to have our April meetup - in May. The most obvious explanation is the increased amount of open source and IT activities that either the MSCC, the Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM), or the University of Mauritius Student's Computer Club is organising. It's absolutely incredible to see the recent hype of events here on the island. And I'm loving it! Unfortunately, we also had to deal with arranging for a location this time. It was kind of an odyssey as my requests (and phone calls) haven't been answered, even though I tried it several times - well, kind of disappointing and I have to look into that for future gatherings. In my opinion, it is essential that two parameters of a community meeting are fixed as early as possible: Location, and Date and time You can't just change one or both on the very last minute. Well, this time we had to do it due to unforeseen reasons, and I apologise to any MSCC member which couldn't make it to our April meetup. Okay, lesson learned but now back to the actual meetup report ... Shortly after the meeting I placed the following statement as my first impression: "Spontaneous and improvised :) No, seriously, Ish and Dan had well prepared presentations on shell scripting, mainly focused towards Bourne Again Shell (bash), and the pros and cons of scripting versus actually writing something in a decent programming language. I thought that I could cut myself out of the equation but the demand for information about PowerShell was higher than expected..." Well, it turned out that the interest in Windows PowerShell was high, as I even got a couple of questions on it via social media networks during the evening. I also like to mention that the number of attendees went back to what I would call a "standard" number of participation. This time there were 12 craftsmen, but again a good number of First Timers. Reactions of other attendees Here are some impressions and feedback from our participants: "Enjoyed the bash and powershell (linux / windows) presentations ..." -- Nadim on event comments "He [Daniel] also showed us some syntax loopholes in Bash that could leave someone with bad code." -- Ish on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting   Glad to see a couple of first time attendees, especially students from the university itself. Some details on the presentations MSCC: First time visit at the University of Mauritius - Phase II Engineering Tower, room 2.9 Gimme some love ... bash and other shells Ish gave a great introduction into shell scripting as he spoke about existing shell environments and a little bit about their history. Furthermore, he talked about various built-in commands, the use of coreutils, the ability to daisy-chain multiple commands using pipes, the importance of the standard I/O streams and their file descriptors in advanced scripting techniques. Combined with a couple of sample statements in the Linux terminal on Ubuntu 14.04 machine it was a solid presentation. Have a closer look at his slides - published on his blog on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting. Oddities of scripting After the brief introduction into bash it was Daniel's turn to highlight a good number of oddities when working with shell scripts. First of all, it should be clear that scripting is not supposed for any kind of implementations in terms of software but simply to automate administrative procedures and to simplify routine jobs on a system. One of the cool oddities that he mentioned is that everything (!) in a shell is represented by strings; there are no other types like integer, float, date-time, etc. that you'd like to use in a full-fledged programming language. Let's have a look at his sample:  more to come... What's the output? As a conclusion, Daniel suggests that shell scripting should be limited but not restricted to automatic repetitive command stacks and batch jobs, startup wrapper for applications in order to set up the execution environment, and other not too sophisticated jobs. But as soon as it might involve a little bit more logic or you might rely on performance it's better to write an application in Ruby, Python, or Perl (among others of course). This is also enables the possibility to test your code properly. MSCC: Ish talking about Bourne Again Shell (bash) and shell scripting to automate regular tasks MSCC: Daniel gives an overview about the pros and cons of shell scripting versus programming MSCC: PowerShell as your scripting solution on Windows operating systems The path of the Enlightened is long ... and tough. Honestly, even though PowerShell was mentioned without any further details on the meetup's agenda, I didn't expect that there would be demand to give a presentation on Microsoft PowerShell after all. I already took this topic out of the announcement but the audience wanted to have some information. Okay, then let's see what I could do - improvised style. While my machine booted and got hooked up to the projector, I started to talk about the beginnings of PowerShell from back in 2006, and its predecessors MS DOS and Command Prompt. A throwback in history... always good for young people. As usual, Microsoft didn't get it at that time. Instead of listening to their client's needs and demands they ignored the feasibility to administrate Windows server farms without any UI tools. PowerShell is actually a result of this, and seeing that shell scripting is a common, reliable and fast way in an administrator's toolbox for decades, Microsoft had to adapt from their Microsoft Management Console (MMC) to a broader approach. It's not like shell scripting was something new; it is in daily use by alternative operating systems like AIX, HP UX, Solaris, and last but not least Linux. Most interestingly, Microsoft is very good at renovating existing architectures, and over the years PowerShell not only replaced their own combination of Command Prompt and Scripting Hosts (VBScript and CScript) but really turned into a challenging competitor on the market. The shell is easy to extend with cmdlets, and open to other Microsoft products like SQL Server, SharePoint, as well as Third-party software applications. Similar to MMC PowerShell also offers the ability to administer other machine remotely - only without a graphical user interface and therefore it's easier to automate and schedule regular tasks. Following is a sample of a PowerShell script file (extension .ps1): $strComputer = "." $colItems = get-wmiobject -class Win32_BIOS -namespace root\CIMV2 -comp $strComputer foreach ($objItem in $colItems) {write-host "BIOS Characteristics: " $objItem.BiosCharacteristicswrite-host "BIOS Version: " $objItem.BIOSVersionwrite-host "Build Number: " $objItem.BuildNumberwrite-host "Caption: " $objItem.Captionwrite-host "Code Set: " $objItem.CodeSetwrite-host "Current Language: " $objItem.CurrentLanguagewrite-host "Description: " $objItem.Descriptionwrite-host "Identification Code: " $objItem.IdentificationCodewrite-host "Installable Languages: " $objItem.InstallableLanguageswrite-host "Installation Date: " $objItem.InstallDatewrite-host "Language Edition: " $objItem.LanguageEditionwrite-host "List Of Languages: " $objItem.ListOfLanguageswrite-host "Manufacturer: " $objItem.Manufacturerwrite-host "Name: " $objItem.Namewrite-host "Other Target Operating System: " $objItem.OtherTargetOSwrite-host "Primary BIOS: " $objItem.PrimaryBIOSwrite-host "Release Date: " $objItem.ReleaseDatewrite-host "Serial Number: " $objItem.SerialNumberwrite-host "SMBIOS BIOS Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSBIOSVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Major Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMajorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Minor Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMinorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Present: " $objItem.SMBIOSPresentwrite-host "Software Element ID: " $objItem.SoftwareElementIDwrite-host "Software Element State: " $objItem.SoftwareElementStatewrite-host "Status: " $objItem.Statuswrite-host "Target Operating System: " $objItem.TargetOperatingSystemwrite-host "Version: " $objItem.Versionwrite-host} Which gives you information about your BIOS and Windows OS. Then change the computer name to another one on your network (NetBIOS based) and run the script again. There lots of samples and tutorials at the Microsoft Script Center, and I would advise you to pay a visit over there if you are more interested in PowerShell. The Script Center provides the download links, too. Upcoming Events What are the upcoming events here in Mauritius? So far, we have the following ones (incomplete list as usual) in chronological order: Hacking Defence (14. May 2014) WebCup Maurice (7. & 8. June 2014) Developers Conference (TBA ~ July 2014) Linuxfest 2014 (TBA ~ November 2014) Hopefully, there will be more announcements during the next couple of weeks and months. If you know about any other event, like a bootcamp, a code challenge or hackathon here in Mauritius, please drop me a note in the comment section below this article. Thanks! My resume of the day Spontaneous and improvised :) The new location at the University of Mauritius turned out very well, there is plenty of space, and it could be a good choice for future meetings. Especially, having the ability to get more and more students into our IT community sounds like a great opportunity. Later during the day, I got some promising mails from Nadim regarding future sessions at the local branch of the Middlesex University. Well, we will see in the future... But for now this will be on hold until approximately October when students resume their regular studies. Anyway, it was a good experience at the university, and thanks again to the UoM Student's Computer Club that made the necessary arrangements for the MSCC!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 15, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 15, 2010New ProjectsBizTalk EDI Guidance: BizTalk EDI Guidance is intended to simplify the delivery of EDI solutions by leveraging the ESB Toolkit. This project is currently Alpha and sh...Continues Integration Sample: I'm providing a series of blog post to show a complete CI process using CruiseControl.Net and msbuild. The source code for this series is hosted here.DioM2D: My Dragons in our Midst RPG. Runs on my custom Starlight Engine.Ethical Hacking ASP.NET: Security tools and guidelines for white-hat hacking and protecting ASP.NET web applications.Farseer Engine with XNATouch: Farseer is great engine for game physics. This implementation uses XNATouch framework.Feature Builder Guidance Extensions: Feature Builder Guidance Extensions are Feature Extensions which extend the guidance for the Feature Building experience. Each FBGX will be suppli...Microsoft Office Document Security: MODS is a plugin for office 2007 thats includes Hash Encryption, Hex Convertion and more. Plugins: MODS For Word still working on (MODS for Excel ...Minimize Engine (XNA): The Minimize Engine is a basic 3D Games Engine created using XNA, with its primary focus around Grid Based games.MSForge TownCrier: This project is meant to build a notification and calling system for MSForge.net User Groups.NatureProtector: Silverlight 4 project.OutSync: OutSync is a free Windows desktop application that syncs photos of your Facebook friends with matching contacts in Microsoft Outlook. It allows you...Quick Save Images, Clipboard save to file, Quick save, bmp, png, jpeg, Image: ClipSa is a very small tool for very quick picture saving. You put some picture into the clipboard (PrintScrn/Alt-PrintScrn/Ctrl-C), ClipSa saves ...ResHelper Manager: Resource strings management tool that creates localization files for any type of localization target (asp.net, wpf and so on...)SecureCookieHttpModule: Secure your session cookie (and other session-based) cookies for replay attacks using this easy to use ASP.NET HttpModule.simpleChMS: A Church Management System (ChMS) designed for churches or ministries like youth groups that want to facilitate better care or theie membership. Fo...sMAPtool: -SPDomainObject: mapping strong type objects to sp listsSQL Trim: This project aims at developing a universal trim function for Microsoft SQL Server. It trims: 1) pre spaces 2) post spaces 3) double spaces 3) subs...TurretGunner: mt-experienceNew ReleasesBeanProxy: BeanProxy 3.0: BeanProxy is a C# (.NET 3.5) library housing classes that facilitates unit testing. 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It supports SQL 2005 and SQL 2008, although you have to download the correct install pa...StreamInsight Yahoo Finance input adapter example: StockTicker_v1_0_RTM: Updated for StreamInsight RTM.Update Controls .NET: 2.1.0.0: Automatic dependency management for WPF and Silverlight data binding. This release combines both the WPF and Silverlight assemblies into one insta...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30514.0: Automatic drop of latest buildMost Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMirror Testing SystemRawrPHPExcelBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology FoundationCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRMWindows Azure Command-line Tools for PHP DevelopersShake - C# MakeStyleCop

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• Using ExcelPacke to create Excel sheets on server

  - by DigiMortal

  In one of my community projects I needed to output some listings as Excel file. As installing Excel to server is non-sense that I was easily able to avoid I found simple solution for Excel 2007 files – open-source project called ExcelPackage. In this posting I will show you hot to create simple event attendees report in Excel 2007 format using ExcelPackage. Cautions Although ExcelPackage works well for me here are some things you should be aware of. ExcelPackage needs file system access because compression library it uses is designed so. There is only very old source code available and it is published under GPL. So if you are writing application to your customers then you cannot use this library unless you make your whole application open-source. ExcelPackage has also some technical problems and it is not very easy to use in simple cases. Authors have not provided any new releases since the beginning of 2007 so I have good reason to consider this project as abandoned. You may find the extensive package EPPlus also useful as there are new versions coming over time. EPPlus is also published under GPL (because ExcelPackage is under GPL), so you can use it only on very limited manner. If you don’t afraid some s*itfight with technology and GPL is okay for your system then let’s go on. Exporting event attendees list to Excel Suppose we have list with event attendees and we want to export it to Excel. We are behaving normally and we don’t install Excel desktop software to our web server. Here is the code. void ExportToExcel(Event evt) {     var fileInfo = new FileInfo(Path.GetTempPath() + "\\" +                                  DateTime.Now.Ticks + ".xlsx");       using (var xls = new ExcelPackage(fileInfo))     {         var sheet = xls.Workbook.Worksheets.Add(evt.Title);           sheet.Cell(1, 1).Value = "First name";         sheet.Cell(1, 2).Value = "Last name";         sheet.Cell(1, 3).Value = "E-mail";         sheet.Cell(1, 4).Value = "Phone";         sheet.Cell(1, 5).Value = "Registered";         sheet.Cell(1, 6).Value = "Live Meeting";           var i = 1;         foreach(var attendee in evt.Attendees)         {             i++;               var profile = attendee.Profile;             sheet.Cell(i, 1).Value = profile.FirstName;             sheet.Cell(i, 2).Value = profile.LastName;             sheet.Cell(i, 3).Value = profile.Email;             sheet.Cell(i, 4).Value = profile.Phone;             sheet.Cell(i, 5).Value = att.Created.ToString();             sheet.Cell(i, 6).Value = att.LiveMeeting.ToString();         }           xls.Save();      }       Response.Clear();     Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.openxmlformats";     Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition",                        "attachment; filename=" + fileInfo.Name);     Response.WriteFile(fileInfo.FullName);     Response.Flush();       if (fileInfo.Exists)         fileInfo.Delete(); } And here is the result. Although it is possible to make this list more effective and nice it works and users can start using it until all the nice bells and whistles are coming. Conclusion After some fighting with technology it was not very hard to get nice Excel 2007 sheets coming out from our server. We used ExcelPackage library to create list of event attendees and our event organizers can now simply download data to Excel if they need to contact with attendees or manage their data using Excel tools.

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• Simple way of converting server side objects into client side using JSON serialization for asp.net websites

  - by anil.kasalanati

   Introduction:- With the growth of Web2.0 and the need for faster user experience the spotlight has shifted onto javascript based applications built using REST pattern or asp.net AJAX Pagerequest manager. And when we are working with javascript wouldn’t it be much better if we could create objects in an OOAD way and easily push it to the client side.  Following are the reasons why you would push the server side objects onto client side -          Easy availability of the complex object. -          Use C# compiler and rick intellisense to create and maintain the objects but use them in the javascript. You could run code analysis etc. -          Reduce the number of calls we make to the server side by loading data on the pageload.   I would like to explain about the 3rd point because that proved to be highly beneficial to me when I was fixing the performance issues of a major website. There could be a scenario where in you be making multiple AJAX based webrequestmanager calls in order to get the same response in a single page. This happens in the case of widget based framework when all the widgets are independent but they need some common information available in the framework to load the data. So instead of making n multiple calls we could load the data needed during pageload. The above picture shows the scenario where in all the widgets need the common information and then call GetData webservice on the server side. Ofcourse the result can be cached on the client side but a better solution would be to avoid the call completely.  In order to do that we need to JSONSerialize the content and send it in the DOM.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Example:- I have developed a simple application to demonstrate the idea and I would explaining that in detail here. The class called SimpleClass would be sent as serialized JSON to the client side .   And this inherits from the base class which has the implementation for the GetJSONString method. You can create a single base class and all the object which need to be pushed to the client side can inherit from that class. The important thing to note is that the class should be annotated with DataContract attribute and the methods should have the Data Member attribute. This is needed by the .Net DataContractSerializer and this follows the opt-in mode so if you want to send an attribute to the client side then you need to annotate the DataMember attribute. So if I didn’t want to send the Result I would simple remove the DataMember attribute. This is default WCF/.Net 3.5 stuff but it provides the flexibility of have a fullfledged object on the server side but sending a smaller object to the client side. Sometimes you may hide some values due to security constraints. And thing you will notice is that I have marked the class as Serializable so that it can be stored in the Session and used in webfarm deployment scenarios. Following is the implementation of the base class –  This implements the default DataContractJsonSerializer and for more information or customization refer to following blogs – http://softcero.blogspot.com/2010/03/optimizing-net-json-serializing-and-ii.html http://weblogs.asp.net/gunnarpeipman/archive/2010/12/28/asp-net-serializing-and-deserializing-json-objects.aspx The next part is pretty simple, I just need to inject this object into the aspx page.   And in the aspx markup I have the following line – <script type="text/javascript"> var data =(<%=SimpleClassJSON  %>);   alert(data.ResultText); </script>   This will output the content as JSON into the variable data and this can be any element in the DOM. And you can verify the element by checking data in the Firebug console.    Design Consideration – If you have a lot of javascripts then you need to think about using Script # and you can write javascript in C#. Refer to Nikhil’s blog – http://projects.nikhilk.net/ScriptSharp Ensure that you are taking security into consideration while exposing server side objects on to client side. I have seen application exposing passwords, secret key so it is not a good practice.   The application can be tested using the following url – http://techconsulting.vpscustomer.com/Samples/JsonTest.aspx The source code is available at http://techconsulting.vpscustomer.com/Source/HistoryTest.zip

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• Microsoft Channel 9 Interviews Mei Liang to Introduce Sample Browser Extension for Visual Studio 2012 and 2010

  - by Jialiang

  This morning, Microsoft Channel 9 interviewed Mei Liang - Group Manager of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - to introduce the newest Sample Browser extension for Visual Studio 2012 &2010.   This extension provides a way for developers to search and download more than 4500 code samples from within Visual Studio, including over 700 Windows 8 samples and more than 1000 All-In-One Code Framework customer-driven code samples. Mei shows us not only the extension, but also the standalone version of the Sample Browser.   http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Sample-Browser-Visual-Studio-Extension   Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, working in close partnership with the Visual Studio product team and MSDN Samples Gallery, developed the Sample Browser extension for both Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2010.  As an effort to evolve the code sample use experience and improve developers' productivity, the Sample Browser allows programmers to search, download and open over 4500 code samples from within Visual Studio with just a few simple clicks.  If no existing code sample can meet the needs, developers can even request a code sample easily from Microsoft thanks to the free “Sample Request Service” offered by Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework.  Through innovations, the teams hope to put the power of tens of thousands of code samples at developers’ fingertips. In short 3 months, the Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension has been installed by 100K global users.  It is also selected as one of the six most highly regarded and commonly used tools for Visual Studio that will make your programming experience feel like never before.   Got to love the All-In-One Code Framework team! You guys know this is THE go to source for code samples. Get this extension and you'll never need to leave VS2012 (well except for bathroom trips, but that's TMI anyway... ;) Read More... From: Greg Duncan (Author of CoolThingOfTheDay) 9/6/2011 12:00 AM The one software design pattern that I have used in just about every application I’ve written is “cut-and-paste,” so the new “Sample Browser” – read sample as a noun not an adjective – is a great boon to my productivity. Read More... From: Jim O'Neil (Microsoft Developer Evangelist) 9/28/2011 12:00 AM Install: http://aka.ms/samplebrowservsx Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework also offers the standalone version of Sample Browser.   The standalone version is particularly useful to Visual Studio Express edition or Visual Studio 2008 users, who cannot install the Sample Browser Visual Studio extension.   From Grassroots’ Passion for Developers to the Innovation of Sample Browser This Sample Browser has come a very long way improving the code sample use experience.  The history can be traced back to a grass-root innovation three years ago.   In early 2009, a few MSDN forum support engineers observed that lots of developers were struggling to work in Visual Studio without adequate code samples. Programming tasks seem harder than they should be when you only read through the documentation.  Just a couple of lines of sample code could answer a lot of questions.   They had a brilliant idea: What if we produce code samples based on developers’ frequently asked programming tasks in forums, social networks and support incidents, and then aggregate all our sample code in a one-stop library to benefit developers?  And what if developers can request code samples directly from Microsoft, free of charge?  This small group of grassroots at Microsoft devoted their nights and weekends to prototyping such a customer-driven code sample library.  This simple idea eventually turned into “Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework”, aka. OneCode.  With the support from more and more passionate developers at Microsoft and the leaders in the Community and Online Support team and Microsoft Commercial Technical Services (CTS), the idea has become a continually growing library with over 1000 customer-driven code samples covering almost all Microsoft development technologies.  These code samples originated from developers’ common pains and needs should be able to help many developers.  However, if developers cannot easily discover the code samples, the effort would still be in vain.  So in early 2010, the team started the idea of Sample Browser to ease the discovery and access of these samples.  In just two months, the first version of Sample Browser was finished and released by a passionate developer.  It was a very simple application, only supporting the basic sample offline search.  Users had to download the whole 100MB sample package containing all samples first, and run the Sample Browser to search locally.   Though developers could not search and download samples on-demand, this simple application laid a solid foundation for the team’s continuous innovations of Sample Browsing experience. In 2011, MSDN Samples Gallery had a big refresh.  The online sample experience was brought to a new level thanks to its PM Steven Wilssens and the gallery team’s effort.  Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Team saw the opportunity to realize the “on-demand” sample search and download feature with the new gallery.  The two teams formed a strong partnership to upload all the customer-driven code samples to MSDN Samples Gallery, and released the new version of Sample Browser to support “on-demand” sample downloading in April, 2011.  Mei Liang, the Group Manager of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, was interviewed by Channel 9 to demo the Sample Browser.  Customers love the effort and the innovation!!  This can be clearly seen from the user comments in the publishing page.   It was very encouraging to the team of All-In-One Code Framework. The team continues innovating and evolving the Sample Browser.  They found the Visual Studio product team this time, and integrated the Sample Browsing experience into the latest Visual Studio 2012.  The newly released Sample Browser Visual Studio extension makes good use of Visual Studio 2012 IDE such as the new Quick Launch bar, the code editor, the toolbar and menus to offer easy access to thousands of code samples from within the development environment.   The Visual Studio Senior Program Manager Lead - Anthony Cangialosi, the Program Manager - Murali Krishna Hosabettu Kamalesha, the MSDN Samples Gallery PM – Steven Wilssens, and the Visual Studio Senior Escalation Engineer - Ed Dore shared lots of insightful suggestions with the team.  Thanks to the brilliant cross-group collaboration inside Microsoft, tens of new features including “Local Language Support” and “Favorite Samples”, as well as a face-lifted user interface, were added to further enhance the user experience. Since the new Sample Browser Visual Studio extension was released, it has received over 100 thousand downloads and five-star ratings.  A customer told the team that he officially falls in LOVE with Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework.   The Sample Browser Innovation for Developers Never Stops! The teams would never stop improving the Sample Browser for developers’ easier lives.   The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, Visual Studio and MSDN Samples Gallery teams are working closely to develop the next version of Sample Browser.  Here are the key functions in development or in discussion.  We hope to learn your feedback of the effort.  You can submit your suggestions to the official Visual Studio UserVoice site.  We look forward to hearing from you! 1) Offline Sample Search This is one of the top feature requests that we have received for Sample Browser.   The Sample Browser will support the offline search mode so that developers can search downloaded code samples when they do not have internet access.  This is particularly useful to developers in Enterprises with strict proxy settings. 2) Code Snippet Support and Visual Studio Editor Integration Today, the Sample Browser supports downloading and opening sample project.   However, when developers are searching for code samples, a better user experience would be to see the code snippets in the search result first.  Developers can quickly decide if the code snippet is relevant.   They can also drag and drop the code snippet into the Visual Studio Editor to solve some simple programming tasks.  If developers want to learn more about the sample, they can then choose to download the sample project and open it in Visual Studio. 3) Enterprise Sample Sharing and Searching Large enterprises have many code samples for their own internal tools and APIs that are not appropriate to be shared publicly in MSDN Samples Gallery.   In that case, today’s Sample Browser and MSDN Samples Gallery cannot help these Enterprise developers.  The idea is to create a Code Sample Repository in TFS, and provide an additional Visual Studio extension for Enterprise developers to quickly share code samples to TFS.  The Sample Browser can be configured to connect to the TFS Code Sample Repository to search for and download code samples.  This would potentially enable the Enterprise developers to be more productive. 4) Windows Store Sample Browser With the upcoming release of Windows RT and Microsoft Surface, developers are facing a completely new world of application platform.   Not like laptop, people would often use Microsoft Surface in commute and in travel.  Internet may not be available.  Today’s Visual Studio cannot be installed and run on Windows RT, however, our enthusiastic developers would hope to spend every minute on code.  They love code!   The idea is to create a Windows Store version of Sample Browser. Search and download samples from the online Samples Gallery when the user has internet access. Browse the sample code files and learn the sample documentation of downloaded samples with or without internet access.   In addition to the "browse” function, the Sample Browser could further support “bookmark”, “learning notes”, “code review”, and “quick social sharing". Make full use of the new touch and Windows Store App UI to give developers a new “relaxing” code browsing and learning experience, anytime, anywhere. With Windows Store Sample Browser, developers can enjoy A new relaxing and enjoyable experience for developers to learn code samples You do not have to sit in front of desk and formally open Visual Studio to read code samples.  Many developers get sub-health due to staying in front of desk for a very long time.  With Windows RT, Microsoft Surface and this Windows Store Sample Browser combining with the online MSDN Samples Gallery, developers can sit in a sofa, relaxingly hold the tablet and enjoy to learn their beloved sample code with detailed documentation. Anytime, anywhere Whether you have internet access or not, whether you are at home, in office, or in commute/airplane, developers can always easily access and browse the sample code. Lightweight and fast Particularly for learning a small sample project, the Windows Store Sample Browser would be more lightweight and faster to open and browse the sample code. Please submit your feedback and suggestion to Visual Studio UserVoice.  We look forward to hearing from you and deliver a better and better sample use experience.  Happy Coding!   Special Thanks to People working behind the latest release of Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension and the great partnerships!

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• Using the HTML5 &lt;input type=&quot;file&quot; multiple=&quot;multiple&quot;&gt; Tag in ASP.NET

  - by Rick Strahl

  Per HTML5 spec the <input type="file" /> tag allows for multiple files to be picked from a single File upload button. This is actually a very subtle change that's very useful as it makes it much easier to send multiple files to the server without using complex uploader controls. Please understand though, that even though you can send multiple files using the <input type="file" /> tag, the process of how those files are sent hasn't really changed - there's still no progress information or other hooks that allow you to automatically make for a nicer upload experience without additional libraries or code. For that you will still need some sort of library (I'll post an example in my next blog post using plUpload). All the new features allow for is to make it easier to select multiple images from disk in one operation. Where you might have required many file upload controls before to upload several files, one File control can potentially do the job. How it works To create a file input box that allows with multiple file support you can simply do:<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> <label>Upload Images:</label> <input type="file" multiple="multiple" name="File1" id="File1" accept="image/*" /> <hr /> <input type="submit" id="btnUpload" value="Upload Images" /> </form> Now when the file open dialog pops up - depending on the browser and whether the browser supports it - you can pick multiple files. Here I'm using Firefox using the thumbnail preview I can easily pick images to upload on a form: Note that I can select multiple images in the dialog all of which get stored in the file textbox. The UI for this can be different in some browsers. For example Chrome displays 3 files selected as text next to the Browse… button when I choose three rather than showing any files in the textbox. Most other browsers display the standard file input box and display the multiple filenames as a comma delimited list in the textbox. Note that you can also specify the accept attribute in the <input> tag, which specifies a mime-type to specify what type of content to allow.Here I'm only allowing images (image/*) and the browser complies by just showing me image files to display. Likewise I could use text/* for all text formats registered on the machine or text/xml to only show XML files (which would include xml,xst,xsd etc.). Capturing Files on the Server with ASP.NET When you upload files to an ASP.NET server there are a couple of things to be aware of. When multiple files are uploaded from a single file control, they are assigned the same name. In other words if I select 3 files to upload on the File1 control shown above I get three file form variables named File1. This means I can't easily retrieve files by their name:HttpPostedFileBase file = Request.Files["File1"]; because there will be multiple files for a given name. The above only selects the first file. Instead you can only reliably retrieve files by their index. Below is an example I use in app to capture a number of images uploaded and store them into a database using a business object and EF 4.2.for (int i = 0; i < Request.Files.Count; i++) { HttpPostedFileBase file = Request.Files[i]; if (file.ContentLength == 0) continue; if (file.ContentLength > App.Configuration.MaxImageUploadSize) { ErrorDisplay.ShowError("File " + file.FileName + " is too large. Max upload size is: " + App.Configuration.MaxImageUploadSize); return View("UploadClassic",model); } var image = new ClassifiedsBusiness.Image(); var ms = new MemoryStream(16498); file.InputStream.CopyTo(ms); image.Entered = DateTime.Now; image.EntryId = model.Entry.Id; image.ContentType = "image/jpeg"; image.ImageData = ms.ToArray(); ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin); // resize image if necessary and turn into jpeg Bitmap bmp = Imaging.ResizeImage(ms.ToArray(), App.Configuration.MaxImageWidth, App.Configuration.MaxImageHeight); ms.Close(); ms = new MemoryStream(); bmp.Save(ms,ImageFormat.Jpeg); image.ImageData = ms.ToArray(); bmp.Dispose(); ms.Close(); model.Entry.Images.Add(image); } This works great and also allows you to capture input from multiple input controls if you are dealing with browsers that don't support multiple file selections in the file upload control. The important thing here is that I iterate over the files by index, rather than using a foreach loop over the Request.Files collection. The files collection returns key name strings, rather than the actual files (who thought that was good idea at Microsoft?), and so that isn't going to work since you end up getting multiple keys with the same name. Instead a plain for loop has to be used to loop over all files. Another Option in ASP.NET MVC If you're using ASP.NET MVC you can use the code above as well, but you have yet another option to capture multiple uploaded files by using a parameter for your post action method.public ActionResult Save(HttpPostedFileBase[] file1) { foreach (var file in file1) { if (file.ContentLength < 0) continue; // do something with the file }} Note that in order for this to work you have to specify each posted file variable individually in the parameter list. This works great if you have a single file upload to deal with. You can also pass this in addition to your main model to separate out a ViewModel and a set of uploaded files:public ActionResult Edit(EntryViewModel model,HttpPostedFileBase[] uploadedFile) You can also make the uploaded files part of the ViewModel itself - just make sure you use the appropriate naming for the variable name in the HTML document (since there's Html.FileFor() extension). Browser Support You knew this was coming, right? The feature is really nice, but unfortunately not supported universally yet. Once again Internet Explorer is the problem: No shipping version of Internet Explorer supports multiple file uploads. IE10 supposedly will, but even IE9 does not. All other major browsers - Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera - support multi-file uploads in their latest versions. So how can you handle this? If you need to provide multiple file uploads you can simply add multiple file selection boxes and let people either select multiple files with a single upload file box or use multiples. Alternately you can do some browser detection and if IE is used simply show the extra file upload boxes. It's not ideal, but either one of these approaches makes life easier for folks that use a decent browser and leaves you with a functional interface for those that don't. Here's a UI I recently built as an alternate uploader with multiple file upload buttons: I say this is my 'alternate' uploader - for my primary uploader I continue to use an add-in solution. Specifically I use plUpload and I'll discuss how that's implemented in my next post. Although I think that plUpload (and many of the other packaged JavaScript upload solutions) are a better choice especially for large uploads, for simple one file uploads input boxes work well enough. The advantage of this solution is that it's very easy to handle on the server side. Any of the JavaScript controls require special handling for uploads which I'll also discuss in my next post.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in HTML5  ASP.NET  MVC   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Social Business Forum Milano: Day 1

  - by me

  div.c50 {font-family: Helvetica;} div.c49 {position: relative; height: 0px; overflow: hidden;} span.c48 {color: #333333; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;} div.c47 {background-color: #ffffff; border-left: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.098); border-right: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.098); background-clip: padding-box;} div.c46 {color: #666666; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: normal} span.c45 {line-height: 14px;} div.c44 {border-width: 0px; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0px; outline-width: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; vertical-align: baseline} div.c43 {border-width: 0px; margin: 0px; outline-width: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; vertical-align: baseline;} p.c42 {color: #666666; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif} span.c41 {line-height: 14px; font-size: 11px;} h2.c40 {font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif} p.c39 {font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif} span.c38 {font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 80%; font-weight: bold} div.c37 {color: #999999; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18px} div.c36 {background-clip: padding-box; background-color: #ffffff; border-bottom: 1px solid #e8e8e8; border-left: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.098); border-right: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.098); cursor: pointer; margin-left: 58px; min-height: 51px; padding: 9px 12px; position: relative; z-index: auto} div.c35 {background-clip: padding-box; background-color: #ffffff; border-bottom: 1px solid #e8e8e8; border-left: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.098); border-right: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.098); cursor: pointer; margin-left: 58px; min-height: 51px; padding: 9px 12px; position: relative} div.c34 {overflow: hidden; font-size: 12px; padding-top: 1px;} ul.c33 {padding: 0px; margin: 0px; list-style-type: none; opacity: 0;} li.c32 {display: inline;} a.c31 {color: #298500; text-decoration: none; outline-width: 0px; font-size: 12px; margin-left: 8px;} a.c30 {color: #999999; text-decoration: none; outline-width: 0px; font-size: 12px; float: left; margin-right: 2px;} strong.c29 {font-weight: normal; color: #298500;} span.c28 {color: #999999;} div.c27 {font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0px; word-wrap: break-word} span.c26 {border-width: 0px; width: 48px; height: 48px; border-radius: 5px 5px 5px 5px; position: absolute; top: 12px; left: 12px;} small.c25 {font-size: 12px; color: #bbbbbb; position: absolute; top: 9px; right: 12px; float: right; margin-top: 1px;} a.c24 {color: #999999; text-decoration: none; outline-width: 0px; font-size: 12px;} h3.c23 {font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif} span.c22 {font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif} div.c21 {display: inline ! important; font-weight: normal} span.c20 {font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 80%} a.c19 {font-weight: normal;} span.c18 {font-weight: normal;} div.c17 {font-weight: normal;} div.c16 {margin: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;} a.c15 {color: #298500; text-decoration: none; outline-width: 0px;} strong.c14 {font-weight: normal; color: inherit;} span.c13 {color: #7eb566; text-decoration: none} span.c12 {color: #333333; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px} a.c11 {color: #999999; text-decoration: none; outline-width: 0px;} span.c10 {font-size: 12px; color: #999999; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed;} strong.c9 {font-weight: normal;} span.c8 {color: #bbbbbb; text-decoration: none} strong.c7 {font-weight: bold; color: #333333;} div.c6 {font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: normal} div.c5 {font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 80%; font-weight: normal} p.c4 {font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 80%; font-weight: normal} h3.c3 {font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: bold} span.c2 {font-size: 80%} span.c1 {font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;} Here are my impressions of the first day of the Social Business Forum in Milano A dialogue on Social Business Manifesto - Emanuele Scotti, Rosario Sica The presentation was focusing on Thesis and Anti-Thesis around Social Business My favorite one is: Peter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser social business manifesto theses #2: organizations are conversations - hello Oracle Social Network #sbf12 Here are the Thesis (auto-translated from italian to english) From Stress to Success - Pragmatic pathways for Social Business - John Hagel John Hagel talked about challenges of deploying new social technologies. Below are some key points participant tweeted during the session. 6hRhiannon Hughes ?@Rhi_Hughes Favourite quote this morning 'We need to strengthen the champions & neutralise the enemies' John Hagel. Not a hard task at all #sbf12 Expand Reply Retweet Favorite 8hElena Torresani ?@ElenaTorresani Minimize the power of the enemies of change. Maximize the power of the champions - John Hagel #sbf12 Expand Reply Retweet Favorite 8hGaetano Mazzanti ?@mgaewsj John Hagel change: minimize the power of the enemies #sbf12 Expand Reply Retweet Favorite 8hGaetano Mazzanti ?@mgaewsj John Hagel social software as band-aid for poor leadtime/waste management? mmm #sbf12 Expand Reply Retweet Favorite 8hElena Torresani ?@ElenaTorresani "information is power. We need access to information to get power"John Hagel, Deloitte &Touche #sbf12http://instagr.am/p/LcjgFqMXrf/ View photo Reply Retweet Favorite 8hItalo Marconi ?@italomarconi Information is power and Knowledge is subversive. John Hagel#sbf12 Expand Reply Retweet Favorite 8hdanielce ?@danielce #sbf12 john Hagel: innovation is not rational. from Milano, Milano Reply Retweet Favorite 8hGaetano Mazzanti ?@mgaewsj John Hagel: change is a political (not rational) process #sbf12 Expand Reply Retweet Favorite Enterprise gamification to drive engagement - Ray Wang Ray Wang did an excellent speech around engagement strategies and gamification More details can be found on the Harvard Business Review blog Panel Discussion: Does technology matter? Understanding how software enables or prevents participation Christian Finn, Ram Menon, Mike Gotta, moderated by Paolo Calderari Below are the highlights of the panel discussions as live tweets: 2hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser @cfinn Q: social silos: mega trend social suites - do we create social silos + apps silos + org silos ... #sbf12 Expand Reply Delete Favorite 2hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser @cfinn A: Social will be less siloed - more integrated into application design. Analyatics is key to make intelligent decisions #sbf12 Expand Reply Delete Favorite 2hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser @MikeGotta - A: its more social be design then social by layer - Better work experience using social design. #sbf12 Expand Reply Delete Favorite 2hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser Ram Menon: A: Social + Mobile + consumeration is coming together#sbf12 Expand Reply Delete Favorite 2hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser Q: What is the evolution for social business solution in the next 4-5 years? #sbf12 Expand Reply Delete Favorite 2hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser @cfinn Adoption: A: User experience is king - no training needed - We let you participate into a conversation via mobile and email#sbf12 Expand Reply Delete Favorite 2hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser @MikeGotta A:Adoption - how can we measure quality? Literacy - Are people get confident to talk to a invisible audience ? #sbf12 Expand Reply Delete Favorite 2hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser Ram Meno: A:Adoption - What should I measure ? Depend on business goal you want to active? #sbf12 Expand Reply Delete Favorite 2hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser Q: How can technology facilitate adoption #sbf12 Expand Reply Delete Favorite 2hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser #sbf12 @cfinn @mgotta Ram Menon at panel discussion about social technology @oraclewebcenter http://pic.twitter.com/Pquz73jO View photo Reply Delete Favorite 2hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser Ram Menon: 100% of data is in a system somewhere. 100% of collective intelligence is with people. Social System bridge both worlds Expand Reply Delete Favorite 2hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser #sbf12 @MikeGotta Adoption is specific to the culture of the company Expand Reply Delete Favorite 2hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser @cfinn - drive adoption is important @MikeGotta - activity stream + watch list is most important feature in a social system #sbf12 Expand Reply Delete Favorite 2hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser @MikeGotta Why just adoption? email as 100% adoption? #sbf12 Expand Reply Delete Favorite 2hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser @MikeGotta Ram Menon respond: there is only 1 questions to ask: What is the adoption? #sbf12 @socialadoption you like this ? #sbf12 Expand Reply Delete Favorite 3hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser @MikeGotta - just replacing old technology (e.g. email) with new technology does not help. we need to change model/attitude #sbf12 Expand Reply Delete Favorite 3hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser Ram Menon: CEO mandated to replace 6500 email aliases with Social Networking Software #sbf12 Expand Reply Delete Favorite 3hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser @MikeGotta A: How to bring interface together #sbf12 . Going from point tools to platform, UI, Architecture + Eco-system is important Expand Reply Delete Favorite 3hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser Q: How is technology important in Social Business #sbf12 A:@cfinn - technology is enabler , user experience -easy of use is important Expand Reply Delete Favorite 3hPeter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser @cfinn particiapte in panel "Does technology matter? Understanding how software enables or prevents participation" #sbf #webcenter

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• Understanding C# async / await (2) Awaitable / Awaiter Pattern

  - by Dixin

  What is awaitable Part 1 shows that any Task is awaitable. Actually there are other awaitable types. Here is an example: Task<int> task = new Task<int>(() => 0); int result = await task.ConfigureAwait(false); // Returns a ConfiguredTaskAwaitable<TResult>. The returned ConfiguredTaskAwaitable<TResult> struct is awaitable. And it is not Task at all: public struct ConfiguredTaskAwaitable<TResult> { private readonly ConfiguredTaskAwaiter m_configuredTaskAwaiter; internal ConfiguredTaskAwaitable(Task<TResult> task, bool continueOnCapturedContext) { this.m_configuredTaskAwaiter = new ConfiguredTaskAwaiter(task, continueOnCapturedContext); } public ConfiguredTaskAwaiter GetAwaiter() { return this.m_configuredTaskAwaiter; } } It has one GetAwaiter() method. Actually in part 1 we have seen that Task has GetAwaiter() method too: public class Task { public TaskAwaiter GetAwaiter() { return new TaskAwaiter(this); } } public class Task<TResult> : Task { public new TaskAwaiter<TResult> GetAwaiter() { return new TaskAwaiter<TResult>(this); } } Task.Yield() is a another example: await Task.Yield(); // Returns a YieldAwaitable. The returned YieldAwaitable is not Task either: public struct YieldAwaitable { public YieldAwaiter GetAwaiter() { return default(YieldAwaiter); } } Again, it just has one GetAwaiter() method. In this article, we will look at what is awaitable. The awaitable / awaiter pattern By observing different awaitable / awaiter types, we can tell that an object is awaitable if It has a GetAwaiter() method (instance method or extension method); Its GetAwaiter() method returns an awaiter. An object is an awaiter if: It implements INotifyCompletion or ICriticalNotifyCompletion interface; It has an IsCompleted, which has a getter and returns a Boolean; it has a GetResult() method, which returns void, or a result. This awaitable / awaiter pattern is very similar to the iteratable / iterator pattern. Here is the interface definitions of iteratable / iterator: public interface IEnumerable { IEnumerator GetEnumerator(); } public interface IEnumerator { object Current { get; } bool MoveNext(); void Reset(); } public interface IEnumerable<out T> : IEnumerable { IEnumerator<T> GetEnumerator(); } public interface IEnumerator<out T> : IDisposable, IEnumerator { T Current { get; } } In case you are not familiar with the out keyword, please find out the explanation in Understanding C# Covariance And Contravariance (2) Interfaces. The “missing” IAwaitable / IAwaiter interfaces Similar to IEnumerable and IEnumerator interfaces, awaitable / awaiter can be visualized by IAwaitable / IAwaiter interfaces too. This is the non-generic version: public interface IAwaitable { IAwaiter GetAwaiter(); } public interface IAwaiter : INotifyCompletion // or ICriticalNotifyCompletion { // INotifyCompletion has one method: void OnCompleted(Action continuation); // ICriticalNotifyCompletion implements INotifyCompletion, // also has this method: void UnsafeOnCompleted(Action continuation); bool IsCompleted { get; } void GetResult(); } Please notice GetResult() returns void here. Task.GetAwaiter() / TaskAwaiter.GetResult() is of such case. And this is the generic version: public interface IAwaitable<out TResult> { IAwaiter<TResult> GetAwaiter(); } public interface IAwaiter<out TResult> : INotifyCompletion // or ICriticalNotifyCompletion { bool IsCompleted { get; } TResult GetResult(); } Here the only difference is, GetResult() return a result. Task<TResult>.GetAwaiter() / TaskAwaiter<TResult>.GetResult() is of this case. Please notice .NET does not define these IAwaitable / IAwaiter interfaces at all. As an UI designer, I guess the reason is, IAwaitable interface will constraint GetAwaiter() to be instance method. Actually C# supports both GetAwaiter() instance method and GetAwaiter() extension method. Here I use these interfaces only for better visualizing what is awaitable / awaiter. Now, if looking at above ConfiguredTaskAwaitable / ConfiguredTaskAwaiter, YieldAwaitable / YieldAwaiter, Task / TaskAwaiter pairs again, they all “implicitly” implement these “missing” IAwaitable / IAwaiter interfaces. In the next part, we will see how to implement awaitable / awaiter. Await any function / action In C# await cannot be used with lambda. This code: int result = await (() => 0); will cause a compiler error: Cannot await 'lambda expression' This is easy to understand because this lambda expression (() => 0) may be a function or a expression tree. Obviously we mean function here, and we can tell compiler in this way: int result = await new Func<int>(() => 0); It causes an different error: Cannot await 'System.Func<int>' OK, now the compiler is complaining the type instead of syntax. With the understanding of the awaitable / awaiter pattern, Func<TResult> type can be easily made into awaitable. GetAwaiter() instance method, using IAwaitable / IAwaiter interfaces First, similar to above ConfiguredTaskAwaitable<TResult>, a FuncAwaitable<TResult> can be implemented to wrap Func<TResult>: internal struct FuncAwaitable<TResult> : IAwaitable<TResult> { private readonly Func<TResult> function; public FuncAwaitable(Func<TResult> function) { this.function = function; } public IAwaiter<TResult> GetAwaiter() { return new FuncAwaiter<TResult>(this.function); } } FuncAwaitable<TResult> wrapper is used to implement IAwaitable<TResult>, so it has one instance method, GetAwaiter(), which returns a IAwaiter<TResult>, which wraps that Func<TResult> too. FuncAwaiter<TResult> is used to implement IAwaiter<TResult>: public struct FuncAwaiter<TResult> : IAwaiter<TResult> { private readonly Task<TResult> task; public FuncAwaiter(Func<TResult> function) { this.task = new Task<TResult>(function); this.task.Start(); } bool IAwaiter<TResult>.IsCompleted { get { return this.task.IsCompleted; } } TResult IAwaiter<TResult>.GetResult() { return this.task.Result; } void INotifyCompletion.OnCompleted(Action continuation) { new Task(continuation).Start(); } } Now a function can be awaited in this way: int result = await new FuncAwaitable<int>(() => 0); GetAwaiter() extension method As IAwaitable shows, all that an awaitable needs is just a GetAwaiter() method. In above code, FuncAwaitable<TResult> is created as a wrapper of Func<TResult> and implements IAwaitable<TResult>, so that there is a  GetAwaiter() instance method. If a GetAwaiter() extension method  can be defined for Func<TResult>, then FuncAwaitable<TResult> is no longer needed: public static class FuncExtensions { public static IAwaiter<TResult> GetAwaiter<TResult>(this Func<TResult> function) { return new FuncAwaiter<TResult>(function); } } So a Func<TResult> function can be directly awaited: int result = await new Func<int>(() => 0); Using the existing awaitable / awaiter - Task / TaskAwaiter Remember the most frequently used awaitable / awaiter - Task / TaskAwaiter. With Task / TaskAwaiter, FuncAwaitable / FuncAwaiter are no longer needed: public static class FuncExtensions { public static TaskAwaiter<TResult> GetAwaiter<TResult>(this Func<TResult> function) { Task<TResult> task = new Task<TResult>(function); task.Start(); return task.GetAwaiter(); // Returns a TaskAwaiter<TResult>. } } Similarly, with this extension method: public static class ActionExtensions { public static TaskAwaiter GetAwaiter(this Action action) { Task task = new Task(action); task.Start(); return task.GetAwaiter(); // Returns a TaskAwaiter. } } an action can be awaited as well: await new Action(() => { }); Now any function / action can be awaited: await new Action(() => HelperMethods.IO()); // or: await new Action(HelperMethods.IO); If function / action has parameter(s), closure can be used: int arg0 = 0; int arg1 = 1; int result = await new Action(() => HelperMethods.IO(arg0, arg1)); Using Task.Run() The above code is used to demonstrate how awaitable / awaiter can be implemented. Because it is a common scenario to await a function / action, so .NET provides a built-in API: Task.Run(): public class Task2 { public static Task Run(Action action) { // The implementation is similar to: Task task = new Task(action); task.Start(); return task; } public static Task<TResult> Run<TResult>(Func<TResult> function) { // The implementation is similar to: Task<TResult> task = new Task<TResult>(function); task.Start(); return task; } } In reality, this is how we await a function: int result = await Task.Run(() => HelperMethods.IO(arg0, arg1)); and await a action: await Task.Run(() => HelperMethods.IO());

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• ODEE Green Field (Windows) Part 5 - Deployment and Validation

  - by AndyL-Oracle

  And here we are, almost finished with our installation of Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition ("ODEE") in a Windows green field environment. Let's recap what we've done so far: In part 1, I went over the basic process that I intended to show with installing an ODEE on a green field server. I walked you through the basic installation of Oracle 11g database In part 2, I covered the installation of WebLogic application server. In part 3, I showed you how to install SOA Suite for WebLogic. In part 4, we did the first part of the installation of ODEE itself. What remains after all of that, is the deployment of the ODEE components onto the database and application server - so let's get to it! DATABASE First, we'll deploy the schemas to the database. The schemas are created during the ODEE installation according to the responses provided during the install process. To deploy the schemas, you'll need to login to the database server in your green field environment. Open a command line and CD into ODEE_HOME\documaker\database\oracle11g.Run SQLPLUS as SYSDBA and execute dmkr_admin.sql:  sqlplus / as sysdba @dmkr_admin.sql Execute dmkr_asline.sql, dmkr_admin_correspondence_example.sql.  If you require additional languages, run the appropriate SQL scripts (e.g. dmkr_asline_es.sql for Spanish). APPLICATION SERVER Next, we'll deploy the WebLogic domain and it's components - Documaker web services, Documaker Interactive, Documaker dashboard, and more. To deploy the components, you'll need to login to the application server in your green field environment. 1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to ODEE_HOME\documaker\j2ee\weblogic\oracle11g\scripts.2. Using a text editor such as Notepad++, modify weblogic_installation_properties and set location of MIDDLEWARE_HOME and ODEE HOME. If you have used the defaults you’ll probably need to change the E: to C: and that’s it. Save the changes.3. Continuing in the same directory, use your text editor to modify set_middleware_env.cmd and set the drive and path to MIDDLEWARE_HOME. If you have used the defaults you’ll probably need to just change E: to C: and that’s it. Save the changes.4. In the same directory, execute wls_create_domain.cmd by double-clicking it. This should run to completion. If it does not, review any errors and correct them, and rerun the script.5. In the same directory, execute wls_add_correspondence.cmd by double-clicking it - again this should run to completion. 6. Next, we'll start the AdminServer - this is the main WebLogic domain server. To start it, use Windows Explorer and navigate to MIDDLEWARE_HOME\user_projects\domains\idocumaker_domain. Double-click startWebLogic.cmd and the server startup will begin. Once you see output that indicates that the server status changed to RUNNING you may proceed.  a. Note: if you saw database connection errors, you probably didn’t make sure your database name and connection type match. You can change this manually in the WebLogic Console. Open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:7001/console (replace localhost with the name of your application server host if you aren't opening the browser on the server), and login with the the weblogic credential you provided in the ODEE installation process. b. Once you're logged in, open Services?Data Sources. Select dmkr_admin and click Connection Pool.  c. The end of the URL should match the connection type you chose. If you chose ServiceName, the URL should be: jdbc:oracle:thin:@//<hostname>:1521/<serviceName> and if you chose SID, the URL should be: jdbc:oracle:thin:@//<hostname>:1521/<SIDname> d. An example serviceName is a fully qualified DNS-style name, e.g. "idmaker.us.oracle.com". (It does not need to actually resolve in DNS). An example SID is just a name, e.g. IDMAKER. e. Save the change and repeat for the data source dmkr_asline.  f. You will also need to make the same changes in the ODEE_HOME/documaker/docfactory/config/context/.bindings file - open the file in a text editor, locate the URL lines and make the appropriate change, then save the file.  7. Back in the ODEE_HOME\documaker\j2ee\weblogic\oracle11g\scripts directory, execute create_users_groups.cmd. 8. In the same directory, execute create_users_groups_correspondence_example.cmd. 9. Open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:7001/jpsquery. Replace localhost with the name of your application server host if you aren't running the browser on the application server. If you changed the default port for the AdminServer from 7001, use the port you changed it to. You should see output like this: 10. Start the WebLogic managed servers by opening a command prompt and navigating to MIDDLEWARE_HOME/user_projects/domains/idocumaker_domain/bin/. When you start the servers listed below, you will be prompted to enter the WebLogic credentials to start the server. You can prevent this by providing the credential in the startManagedwebLogic.cmd file for the WLS_USER and WLS_PASS values. Note that the credential will be stored in cleartext. To start the server, type in the command shown. a. Start the JMS Server: ./startManagedWebLogic.cmd jms_server b. Start Dashboard/Documaker Administrator: ./startManagedWebLogic.cmd dmkr_server c. Start Documaker Interactive for Correspondence: ./startManagedWebLogic.cmd idm_server SOA Composites  If you're planning on testing out the approval process components of BPEL that can be used with Documaker Interactive, then use the following steps to deploy the SOA composites. If you're not going to use BPEL, you can skip to the next section.1. Stop the servers listed in the previous section (Step 10) in the reverse order that they were started.2. Run the Domain configuration command: navigate to and execute MIDDLEWARE_HOME/wlserver_10.3/common/bin/config.cmd.3. Select Extend and click next. 4. Select the iDocumaker Domain and click Next. 5. Select the Oracle SOA Suite – 11.1.1.0 (this may automatically select other components which is OK). Click Next. 6. View the Configure JDBC resources screen. You should not make any changes. Click Next. 7. Check both connections and click Test Connections. After successful test, click Next. If the tests fail, something is broken. Go back to configure JDBC resources and check your service name/SID. 8. Check all schemas. Set a password (will be the same for all schemas). Enter the database information (service name, host name, port). Click Next. 9. Connections should test successfully. If not, go back and fix any errors. Click Next. 10. Click Next to pass through Optional Configuration. 11. Click Extend. 12. Click Done. 13. Open a terminal window and navigate to/execute: ODEE_HOME/documaker/j2ee/weblogic/oracle11g/bpel/antbuild.cmd14. Start the WebLogic Servers – AdminServer, jms_server, dmkr_server, idm_server. If you forgot how to do this, see the previous section Step 10. Note: if you previously changed the startManagedWebLogic.cmd script for WLS_USER and WLS_PASS you will need to make those changes again. 15. Start the WebLogic server soa_server1: MIDDLEWARE_HOME/user_projects/domains/idocumaker_domain/bin/startManagedWebLogic.cmd soa_server116. Open a browser to http://localhost:7001/console and login. 17. Navigate to Services?Data Sources and select DMKR_ASLINE. 18. Click the Targets tab. Check soa_server1, then click Save. Repeat for the DMKR_ADMIN data source. 19. Open a command prompt and navigate to ODEE_HOME/j2ee/weblogic/oracle11g/scripts, then execute deploy_soa.cmd. That's it! (As if that wasn't enough?) DOCUMAKER Deploy the sample MRL resources by navigating to/executing ODEE_HOME/documaker/mstrres/dmres/deploysamplemrl.bat. You should see approximately 500 resources deployed into the database. Start the Factory Services. Start?Run?services.msc. Locate the service named "ODDF xxxx" and right-click, select Start. Note that each Assembly Line has a separate Factory setup, including its own Factory service and Docupresentment service. The services are named for the assembly line and the machine on which they are installed (because you could have multiple machines servicing a single assembly line, so this allows for easy scripting to control all the services if you choose to do so. Repeat for the Docupresentment service. Note that each Assembly Line has a separate Docupresentment. Using Windows Explorer, navigate to ODEE_HOME/documaker/mstrres/dmres/input and select one of the XML files, and copy it into ODEE_HOME/documaker/hotdirectory. Note: if you chose a different hot directory during installation, copy the file there instead. Momentarily you should see the XML file disappear! Open browser and navigate to http://localhost:10001/DocumakerDashboard (previous versions 12.0-12.2 use http://localhost:10001/dashboard) and verify that job processed successfully. Note that some transactions may fail if you do not have a properly configured email server, and this is ok. You can set up a simple SMTP server (just search the internet for "SMTP developer" and you'll get several to choose from.  So... that's it? Where are we at this point? You now have a completely functional ODEE installation, from soup to nuts as they say. You can further expand your installation by doing some of the following activities: clustering WebLogic services configuring WebLogic for redundancy configuring Oracle 11g for RAC adding additional Factory servers for redundancy/processing capacity setting up a real MRL (instead of the sample resources) testing Documaker Web Services for job submission and more!  I certainly hope you've enjoyed this and find it useful. If you find yourself running into trouble, visit the Oracle Community for Documaker - there is plenty of activity there and you can ask questions. For more concentrated assistance, you can engage an Oracle consultant who is a subject matter expert to assist you. Feel free to email me [andy (dot) little (at) oracle (dot) com] and I can connect you with the appropriate resource to get started. Best of luck! -Andy 

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• Building extensions for Expression Blend 4 using MEF

  - by Timmy Kokke

  Introduction Although it was possible to write extensions for Expression Blend and Expression Design, it wasn’t very easy and out of the box only one addin could be used. With Expression Blend 4 it is possible to write extensions using MEF, the Managed Extensibility Framework. Until today there’s no documentation on how to build these extensions, so look thru the code with Reflector is something you’ll have to do very often. Because Blend and Design are build using WPF searching the visual tree with Snoop and Mole belong to the tools you’ll be using a lot exploring the possibilities.  Configuring the extension project Extensions are regular .NET class libraries. To create one, load up Visual Studio 2010 and start a new project. Because Blend is build using WPF, choose a WPF User Control Library from the Windows section and give it a name and location. I named mine DemoExtension1. Because Blend looks for addins named *.extension.dll  you’ll have to tell Visual Studio to use that in the Assembly Name. To change the Assembly Name right click your project and go to Properties. On the Application tab, add .Extension to name already in the Assembly name text field. To be able to debug this extension, I prefer to set the output path on the Build tab to the extensions folder of Expression Blend. This means that everything that used to go into the Debug folder is placed in the extensions folder. Including all referenced assemblies that have the copy local property set to false. One last setting. To be able to debug your extension you could start Blend and attach the debugger by hand. I like it to be able to just hit F5. Go to the Debug tab and add the the full path to Blend.exe in the Start external program text field. Extension Class Add a new class to the project.  This class needs to be inherited from the IPackage interface. The IPackage interface can be found in the Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility namespace. To get access to this namespace add Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility.dll to your references. This file can be found in the same folder as the (Expression Blend 4 Beta) Blend.exe file. Make sure the Copy Local property is set to false in this reference. After implementing the interface the class would look something like: using Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility; namespace DemoExtension1 { public class DemoExtension1:IPackage { public void Load(IServices services) { } public void Unload() { } } } These two methods are called when your addin is loaded and unloaded. The parameter passed to the Load method, IServices services, is your main entry point into Blend. The IServices interface exposes the GetService<T> method. You will be using this method a lot. Almost every part of Blend can be accessed thru a service. For example, you can use to get to the commanding services of Blend by calling GetService<ICommandService>() or to get to the Windowing services by calling GetService<IWindowService>(). To get Blend to load the extension we have to implement MEF. (You can get up to speed on MEF on the community site or read the blog of Mr. MEF, Glenn Block.)  In the case of Blend extensions, all that needs to be done is mark the class with an Export attribute and pass it the type of IPackage. The Export attribute can be found in the System.ComponentModel.Composition namespace which is part of the .NET 4 framework. You need to add this to your references. using System.ComponentModel.Composition; using Microsoft.Expression.Extensibility;   namespace DemoExtension1 { [Export(typeof(IPackage))] public class DemoExtension1:IPackage { Blend is able to find your addin now. Adding UI The addin doesn’t do very much at this point. The WPF User Control Library came with a UserControl so lets use that in this example. I just drop a Button and a TextBlock onto the surface of the control to have something to show in the demo. To get the UserControl to work in Blend it has to be registered with the WindowService.  Call GetService<IWindowService>() on the IServices interface to get access to the windowing services. The UserControl will be used in Blend on a Palette and has to be registered to enable it. This is done by calling the RegisterPalette on the IWindowService interface and passing it an identifier, an instance of the UserControl and a caption for the palette. public void Load(IServices services) { IWindowService windowService = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); UserControl1 uc = new UserControl1(); windowService.RegisterPalette("DemoExtension", uc, "Demo Extension"); } After hitting F5 to start debugging Expression Blend will start. You should be able to find the addin in the Window menu now. Activating this window will show the “Demo Extension” palette with the UserControl, style according to the settings of Blend. Now what? Because little is publicly known about how to access different parts of Blend adding breakpoints in Debug mode and browsing thru objects using the Quick Watch feature of Visual Studio is something you have to do very often. This demo extension can be used for that purpose very easily. Add the click event handler to the button on the UserControl. Change the contructor to take the IServices interface and store this in a field. Set a breakpoint in the Button_Click method. public partial class UserControl1 : UserControl { private readonly IServices _services;   public UserControl1(IServices services) { _services = services; InitializeComponent(); }   private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { } } Change the call to the constructor in the load method and pass it the services property. public void Load(IServices services) { IWindowService service = services.GetService<IWindowService>(); UserControl1 uc = new UserControl1(services); service.RegisterPalette("DemoExtension", uc, "Demo Extension"); } Hit F5 to compile and start Blend. Got to the window menu and start show the addin. Click on  the button to hit the breakpoint. Now place the carrot text _services text in the code window and hit Shift+F9 to show the Quick Watch window. Now start exploring and discovering where to find everything you need.  More Information The are no official resources available yet. Microsoft has released one extension for expression Blend that is very useful as a reference, the Microsoft Expression Blend® Add-in Preview for Windows® Phone. This will install a .extension.dll file in the extension folder of Blend. You can load this file with Reflector and have a peek at how Microsoft is building his addins. Conclusion I hope this gives you something to get started building extensions for Expression Blend. Until Microsoft releases the final version, which hopefully includes more information about building extensions, we’ll have to work on documenting it in the community.

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• MSCC: Purpose and benefits of Version Control Systems (VCS)

  Unfortunately, there was no monthly meetup during May. Which means that it was even more important and interesting to go forward with a great topic for this month. Earlier this year I already spoke to Nayar Joolfoo about doing a presentation on version control systems (VCS), and he gladly agreed since then. It was just about finding the right date for the action. Furthermore, it was also a great coincidence that Avinash Meetoo announced on social media networks that Knowledge 7 is about to have a new training on "Effective git" - which correlates to a book title Avinash is currently working on - all the best with your approach on this and reach out to our MSCC craftsmen for recessions. Once again a big Thank you to Orange Ebene Accelerator on providing the venue for us, and the MSCC members involved on securing the time slot for our event. Unfortunately, it's kind of tough to get an early confirmation for our meetups these days. I'll keep you posted on that one as there are some interesting and exciting options coming up soon. Okay, let's talk about the meeting and version control systems again. As usual, I'm going to put my first impression of the meetup: "Absolutely great topic, questions and discussions on version control systems, like git or VSO. I was also highly pleased by the number of first timers and female IT geeks. Hopefully, we will be able to keep this trend for future get-togethers." And I really have to emphasise the amount of fresh blood coming to our gathering. Also, during the initial phase it was surprising to see that exactly those first-timers, most of them students at various campuses here on the island, had absolutely no idea about version control systems. More about further down... Reactions of other attendees If I counted correctly, we had a total of 17 attendees this month, and I'd like to give you feedback from some of them: "Inspiring. Helped me understand more about GIT." -- Sean on event comments "Joined the meetup today with literally no idea what is a version control system. I have several reasons why I should be starting to use VCS as from NOW in my projects. Thanks Nayar, Jochen and other participants :)" -- Yudish on event comments "Was present today and I'm very satisfied.I was not aware if there was a such tool like git available. Thanks to those who contributed for this meetup.It was great. Learned a lot from this meetup!!" -- Leonardo on event comments "Seriously, I can see how it’s going to ease my task and help me save time. Gone are the issues with files backups.  And since I’ll be doing my dissertation this year, using Git would help me a lot for my backups and I’m grateful to Nayar for the great explanation." -- Swan-Iyah on MSCC meetup : Version Controls Hopefully, I'll be able to get some other sources - personal blogs preferred - on our meeting. Geeks, thank you so much for those encouraging comments. It's really great to experience that we, all members of the MSCC, are doing the right thing to get more IT information out, and to help each other to improve and evolve in our professional careers. Our agenda of the day Honestly, we had a bumpy start... First, I was battling a little bit with the movable room divider in order to maximize the space. I mean, we had 24 RSVPs and usually there might additional people coming along. Then, for what ever reason, we were facing power outages - actually twice in short periods. Not too good for the projector after all, but hey it went smooth for the rest of the time being. And last but not least... our first speaker Nayar got stuck somewhere on the road. ;-) Anyway, not a real show-stopper and we used the time until Nayar's arrival to introduce ourselves a little bit. It is always important for me to get to know the "newbies" a little bit, and as a result we had lots of students of university - first year, second year and recent graduates - among them. Surprisingly, none of them was ever in contact with version control systems at all. I mean, this is a shocking discovery! Similar to the ability of touch-typing I'd say that being able to use (and master) any kind of version control system is compulsory in any job in the IT industry. Seriously, I'm wondering what is being taught during the classes on the campus. All of them have to work on semester assessments or final projects, even in small teams of 2-4 people. That's the perfect occasion to get started with VCS. Already in this phase, we had great input from more experienced VCS users, like Sean, Avinash and myself. git - a modern approach to VCS - Nayar What a tour! Nayar gave us the full round of git from start to finish, even touching some more advanced techniques. First, he started to explain about the importance of version control systems as an essential tool for software developers, even working alone on a project, and the ability to have a kind of "time machine" that allows you to inspect and revert to a previous version of source code at any time. Then he showed how easy it is to install git on an Ubuntu based system but also mentioned that git is literally available for any operating system, like Windows, Mac OS X and of course other Linux distributions. Next, he showed us how to set the initial configuration values of user name and email address which simplifies the daily usage of the git client while working with your repositories. Then he initialised and added a new repository for some local development of a blogging software. All commands were done using the command line interface (CLI) so that they can be repeated on any system as reference. The syntax and the procedure is always the same, and Nayar clearly mentioned this to the attendees. Now, having a git repository in place it was about time to work on some "important" changes on the blogging software - just for the sake of demonstrating the ease of use and power of git. One interesting question came very early: "How many commands do we have to learn? It looks quite difficult at the moment" - Well, rest assured that during daily development circles you will need less than 10 git commands on a regular base: git add, commit, push, pull, checkout, and merge And Nayar demo'd all of them. Much to the delight of everyone he also showed gitk which is the git repository browser. It's an UI tool to display changes in a repository or a selected set of commits. This includes visualizing the commit graph, showing information related to each commit, and the files in the trees of each revision. Using gitk to display and browse information of a local git repository And last but not least, we took advantage of the internet connectivity and reached out to various online portals offering git hosting for free. Nayar showed us how to push the local repository into a remote system on github. Showing the web-based git browser and history handling, and then also explained and demo'd on how to connect to existing online repositories in order to get access to either your own source code or other people's open source projects. Next to github, we also spoke about bitbucket and gitlab as potential online platforms for your projects. Have a look at the conditions and details about their free service packages and what you can get additionally as a paying customer. Usually, you already get a lot of services for up to five users for free but there might be other important aspects that might have an impact on your decision. Anyways, moving git-based repositories between systems is a piece of cake, and changing online platforms is possible at any stage of your development. Visual Studio Online (VSO) - Jochen Well, Nayar literally covered all elements of working with git during his session, including the use of external online platforms. So, what would be the advantage of talking about Visual Studio Online (VSO)? First of all, VSO is "just another" online platform for hosting and managing git repositories on remote systems, equivalent to github, bitbucket, or any other web site. At the moment (of writing), Microsoft also provides a free package of up to five users / developers on a git repository but there is more in that package. Of course, it is related to software development on the Windows systems and the bonds are tightened towards the use of Visual Studio but out of experience you are absolutely not restricted to that. Connecting a Linux or Mac OS X machine with a git client or an integrated development environment (IDE) like Eclipse or Xcode works as smooth as expected. So, why should one opt in for VSO? Well, one of the main aspects that I would like to mention here is that VSO integrates the Application Life Cycle Methodology (ALM) of Microsoft in their platform. Meaning that you get agile project management with Backlogs, Sprints, Burn-down charts as well as the ability to track tasks, bug reports and work items next to collaborative team chats. It's the whole package of agile development you'll get. And, something I mentioned briefly during the begin of our meeting, VSO gives you the possibility of an automated continuous integrated (CI) process which builds and can run tests of your source code after each commit of changes. Having a proper CI strategy is also part of the Clean Code Developer practices - on Level Green actually -, and not only simplifies your life as a software developer but also reduces the sources of potential errors. Seamless integration and automated deployment between Microsoft Azure Web Sites and git repository But my favourite feature is the seamless continuous deployment to Microsoft Azure. Especially, while working on web projects it's absolutely astounishing that as soon as you commit your chances it just takes a couple of seconds until your modifications are deployed and available on your Azure-hosted web sites. Upcoming Events and networking Due to the adjusted times, everybody was kind of hungry and we didn't follow up on networking or upcoming events - very unfortunate to my opinion and this will have an impact on future planning of our meetups. Because I rather would like to see more conversations during and at the end of our meetings than everyone just packing their laptops, bags and accessories and rush off to grab some food. I was hoping to get some information regarding this year's Code Challenge - supposedly to be organised during July? Maybe someone could leave a comment on that - but I couldn't get any updates. Well, I'll keep digging... In case that you would like to get more into git and how to use it effectively, please check out Knowledge 7's upcoming course on "Effective git". Thanks Avinash for your vital input into today's conversation and I'm looking forward to get a grip on your book title very soon. My resume of the day Do not work in IT without any kind of version control system! Seriously, without a VCS in place you're doing it wrong. It's like driving a car without seat belts attached or riding your bike without safety helmet. You don't do that! End of discussion. ;-) Nowadays, having access to free (as in cost) tools to install on your machine and numerous online platforms to host your source code for free for up to five users it's a no-brainer to get yourself familiar with VCS. Today's sessions gave a good overview on how to start using git and how to connect to various remote services like github or VSO.

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• The Proper Use of the VM Role in Windows Azure

  - by BuckWoody

  At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) in 2010 we announced an addition to the Computational Roles in Windows Azure, called the VM Role. This new feature allows a great deal of control over the applications you write, but some have confused it with our full infrastructure offering in Windows Hyper-V. There is a proper architecture pattern for both of them. Virtualization Virtualization is the process of taking all of the hardware of a physical computer and replicating it in software alone. This means that a single computer can “host” or run several “virtual” computers. These virtual computers can run anywhere - including at a vendor’s location. Some companies refer to this as Cloud Computing since the hardware is operated and maintained elsewhere. IaaS The more detailed definition of this type of computing is called Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) since it removes the need for you to maintain hardware at your organization. The operating system, drivers, and all the other software required to run an application are still under your control and your responsibility to license, patch, and scale. Microsoft has an offering in this space called Hyper-V, that runs on the Windows operating system. Combined with a hardware hosting vendor and the System Center software to create and deploy Virtual Machines (a process referred to as provisioning), you can create a Cloud environment with full control over all aspects of the machine, including multiple operating systems if you like. Hosting machines and provisioning them at your own buildings is sometimes called a Private Cloud, and hosting them somewhere else is often called a Public Cloud. State-ful and Stateless Programming This paradigm does not create a new, scalable way of computing. It simply moves the hardware away. The reason is that when you limit the Cloud efforts to a Virtual Machine, you are in effect limiting the computing resources to what that single system can provide. This is because much of the software developed in this environment maintains “state” - and that requires a little explanation. “State-ful programming” means that all parts of the computing environment stay connected to each other throughout a compute cycle. The system expects the memory, CPU, storage and network to remain in the same state from the beginning of the process to the end. You can think of this as a telephone conversation - you expect that the other person picks up the phone, listens to you, and talks back all in a single unit of time. In “Stateless” computing the system is designed to allow the different parts of the code to run independently of each other. You can think of this like an e-mail exchange. You compose an e-mail from your system (it has the state when you’re doing that) and then you walk away for a bit to make some coffee. A few minutes later you click the “send” button (the network has the state) and you go to a meeting. The server receives the message and stores it on a mail program’s database (the mail server has the state now) and continues working on other mail. Finally, the other party logs on to their mail client and reads the mail (the other user has the state) and responds to it and so on. These events might be separated by milliseconds or even days, but the system continues to operate. The entire process doesn’t maintain the state, each component does. This is the exact concept behind coding for Windows Azure. The stateless programming model allows amazing rates of scale, since the message (think of the e-mail) can be broken apart by multiple programs and worked on in parallel (like when the e-mail goes to hundreds of users), and only the order of re-assembling the work is important to consider. For the exact same reason, if the system makes copies of those running programs as Windows Azure does, you have built-in redundancy and recovery. It’s just built into the design. The Difference Between Infrastructure Designs and Platform Designs When you simply take a physical server running software and virtualize it either privately or publicly, you haven’t done anything to allow the code to scale or have recovery. That all has to be handled by adding more code and more Virtual Machines that have a slight lag in maintaining the running state of the system. Add more machines and you get more lag, so the scale is limited. This is the primary limitation with IaaS. It’s also not as easy to deploy these VM’s, and more importantly, you’re often charged on a longer basis to remove them. your agility in IaaS is more limited. Windows Azure is a Platform - meaning that you get objects you can code against. The code you write runs on multiple nodes with multiple copies, and it all works because of the magic of Stateless programming. you don’t worry, or even care, about what is running underneath. It could be Windows (and it is in fact a type of Windows Server), Linux, or anything else - but that' isn’t what you want to manage, monitor, maintain or license. You don’t want to deploy an operating system - you want to deploy an application. You want your code to run, and you don’t care how it does that. Another benefit to PaaS is that you can ask for hundreds or thousands of new nodes of computing power - there’s no provisioning, it just happens. And you can stop using them quicker - and the base code for your application does not have to change to make this happen. Windows Azure Roles and Their Use If you need your code to have a user interface, in Visual Studio you add a Web Role to your project, and if the code needs to do work that doesn’t involve a user interface you can add a Worker Role. They are just containers that act a certain way. I’ll provide more detail on those later. Note: That’s a general description, so it’s not entirely accurate, but it’s accurate enough for this discussion. So now we’re back to that VM Role. Because of the name, some have mistakenly thought that you can take a Virtual Machine running, say Linux, and deploy it to Windows Azure using this Role. But you can’t. That’s not what it is designed for at all. If you do need that kind of deployment, you should look into Hyper-V and System Center to create the Private or Public Infrastructure as a Service. What the VM Role is actually designed to do is to allow you to have a great deal of control over the system where your code will run. Let’s take an example. You’ve heard about Windows Azure, and Platform programming. You’re convinced it’s the right way to code. But you have a lot of things you’ve written in another way at your company. Re-writing all of your code to take advantage of Windows Azure will take a long time. Or perhaps you have a certain version of Apache Web Server that you need for your code to work. In both cases, you think you can (or already have) code the the software to be “Stateless”, you just need more control over the place where the code runs. That’s the place where a VM Role makes sense. Recap Virtualizing servers alone has limitations of scale, availability and recovery. Microsoft’s offering in this area is Hyper-V and System Center, not the VM Role. The VM Role is still used for running Stateless code, just like the Web and Worker Roles, with the exception that it allows you more control over the environment of where that code runs.

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• Best of Breed vs. Suite – Oracle’s SaaS Delivers Both

  - by yaldahhakim

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} The debate of which is better: “best of breed” business applications vs. an integrated suite is certainly not a new conversation. This has been argued between IT vendors and CIOs for years. It’s also important to clarify that “best of breed” does not necessarily translate into being the richest functionality; rather it’s often about just having the best fit solution to solve a specific business problem or need. So what does cloud have to do with the niche vs. suite debate? Consuming business applications in a cloud or SaaS deployment model can change the best of breed vs. suite discussion - if the cloud is done right. It’s having your cake and eating it too only better: you don’t have to gather all the ingredients or wait to bake your cake, and you can adjust how big of slice you take. Before you eat, it’s worth pausing to recall much of what we learned about IT over the last decade. These basic IT principles still hold true even though the financial model has changed from buying to renting. In other words, what’s under the technology hood still matters. Architecture and development methodologies like building an application based on open standards so it works with other systems - is still important. Data and information silos, complex integrations, and proprietary technologies that lock you in, are still bad. While some may argue that IT no longer matters with cloud, the opposite is actually true. If anything cloud can help return IT back to its rightful place as key strategic asset vs. a liability on the balance sheet. The “I” in CIO was never meant to stand for “integration” yet it’s amazing how much time and money is poured into these types of initiatives for most organizations each year. Rather the “I” needs to stand for “innovation”. This is where Oracle SaaS can uniquely help. Oracle’s application strategy has not really changed over the years. It’s always been about bringing the best and richest functionality across the enterprise to our customers while leveraging a common, standards-based, and enterprise-grade platform. So not jut best fit, but the best capabilities based on the input of thousands of enterprise customers across the globe. Oracle invests billions in R&D every year to add new capabilities to the broadest cloud portfolio in the industry, spanning across functional pillars like CRM, HCM, ERP, etc. And where it makes sense, Oracle combines key strategic acquisitions to complement organic functionality. The result is best of breed delivered in a suite. Again this is not something new. The game changer now with cloud is that it impacts HOW Oracle customers adopt the richest, most modern applications across the business – and continue on getting it. Consuming oracle applications in the cloud means you can adopt new capabilities and updates very quickly and easily. There’s no hardware to buy or software to manage. Oracle does it for you. Low upfront costs and an OpEx financial model is the easy part. Oracle Cloud Applications take it a big step further. For organizations that demand having the latest and richest functionality and accelerating the time to value from their IT investment, Oracle Cloud is the right path. It’s about holistically changing the “hows” and the “whys” of the organization by leveraging transformational innovations like social, mobile, and big data in a consistent and more powerful way. Not just about sales force automation or talent management. These technologies should impact all parts of the company and Oracle Cloud is the enterprise-grade delivery vehicle. Oracle SaaS helps break down barriers of adoption and is eases the headache of upgrades, investing in new supporting hardware, or adding internal expertise to manage it all. With Oracle Cloud, customers can get best of breed capabilities in either a full suite model or a la carte. And because it’s entirely built on open standards, it’s built to co-exist with existing IT investments. Updates can be automatic or delayed based on a customer’s requirements. And it’s complete – a full suite of cross pillar functionality. Even better, if you don’t like it, need more or less, just turn the dial up or down. Just like your utility bill, you pay for what you use, and can consume more or less power whenever you need it. Lower cost, lower investment risk, without compromising on functionality, security, or performance. Technology still matters in the cloud. So our cloud customers also like that when they adopt our cloud applications, they also get the best underlying technology, from the middleware and database platform down to infrastructure and Oracle’s engineered systems. Therefore it’s not just the greatest and latest in application functionality, but everything underneath that makes it work is also the latest and greatest. The best of breed technology stack powering best of breed business applications, and all delivered in a subscription based model. The best of both worlds. Yep, that’s the idea.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, December 19, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, December 19, 2010Popular ReleasesTeam Foundation Server Administration Tool: 2.1: TFS Administration Tool 2.1, is the first version of the TFS Administration Tool which is built on top of the Team Foundation Server 2010 object model. TFS Administration Tool 2.1 can be installed on machines that are running either Team Explorer 2010, or Team Foundation Server 2010.SQL Monitor: SQL Monitor 3.0 alpha 5: 1. fix a problem with not expanding nodes in object explorer, sorryHacker Passwords: HackerPasswords.zip: Source code, executable and documentationWatchersNET.SiteMap: WatchersNET.SiteMap 01.03.03: Whats NewSkin Object: You can now filter by Terms for Example use: <object id="dnnSITEMAPSL" codetype="dotnetnuke/server" codebase="SITEMAPSL"> <param name="TaxMode" value="terms" /> <param name="TaxTerms" value="TermName1,TermName2" /> </object> changes Tax Term Filter should work correct nowSubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.3: - Added .srt FileAssociation & Win7 ShowRecentCategory feature. - Applied UnifiedYeKe to fix Persian search problems. - Reduced file size of Persian subtitles for uploading @OSDB.EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.3 ALPHA: 2.2.3 ALPHAThis release adds in the changes for 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Added in th...Facebook C# SDK: 4.1.0: - Lots of bug fixes - Removed Dynamic Runtime Language dependencies from non-dynamic platforms. - Samples included in release for ASP.NET, MVC, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, WPF, WinForms, and one Visual Basic Sample - Changed internal serialization to use Json.net - BREAKING CHANGE: Canvas Session is no longer support. Use Signed Request instead. Canvas Session has been deprecated by Facebook. - BREAKING CHANGE: Some renames and changes with Authorizer, CanvasAuthorizer, and Authorization ac...NuGet (formerly NuPack): NuGet 1.0 build 11217.102: Note: this release is slightly newer than RC1, and fixes a couple issues relating to updating packages to newer versions. NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. This new build targets the newer feed (h...WCF Community Site: WCF Web APIs 10.12.17: Welcome to the second release of WCF Web APIs on codeplex Here is what is new in this release. WCF Support for jQuery - create WCF web services that are easy to consume from JavaScript clients, in particular jQuery. Better support for using JsonValue as dynamic Support for JsonValue change notification events for databinding and other purposes Support for going between JsonValue and CLR types WCF HTTP - create HTTP / REST based web services. This is a minor release which contains fixe...Orchard Project: Orchard 0.9: Orchard Release Notes Build: 0.9.253 Published: 12/16/2010 How to Install OrchardTo install the Orchard tech preview using Web PI, follow these instructions: http://www.orchardproject.net/docs/Installing-Orchard-Using-Web-PI.ashx Web PI will detect your hardware environment and install the application. --OR-- Alternatively, to install the release manually, download the Orchard.Web.0.9.253.zip file. The zip contents are pre-built and ready-to-run. Simply extract the contents of the Orch...Pyxis 2: Beta 2.2: An issue stopping the Checkbox from working properly has been resolved (gradient background has also been added) A TabDialog control has been added NumericUpDown control added A driver for the VS1053 has been added (not yet in use) PyxisAPI.OpenFile now works with all its features PyxisAPI.SaveFile now works with all features Settings window is now available from the Pyxis menu You can now connect using Static IP or DHCP You can now set your system time from the Settings windo...sgMotion Animation Library: sgMotion v1.3 for SunBurn 2.0.9 [Includes Sample]: sgMotion 1.3 release for use with SunBurn 2.0.9 (all editions). Includes example project with assets, and full Windows and Xbox support. (tested on all platforms)DotSpatial: DotSpatial 12-15-2010: This release contains a few minor bug fixes and hopefully the GDAL libraries for the 3.5 x86 build actually built to the correct directory this time.DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.06.01 Beta: This is the initial Beta of DotNetNuke 5.6.1. See the DotNetNuke Roadmap a full list of changes in this release.MSBuild Extension Pack: December 2010: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack December 2010 release provides a collection of over 380 MSBuild tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following: System Items: Active Directory, Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, FTP, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound Code: Assemblies, AsyncExec, CAB Files, Code Signing, DynamicExecute, File Detokenisation, GU...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 5: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 5 ChangesMaintenance release with user reported fixes Preview 4 ChangesReintroduced fluent interface support via satellite assembly Added entities support, entity segmentation, and ITweetable/ITweeter interfaces for client development Numerous fixes reported by preview users Preview 3 ChangesNumerous ...Silverlight Contrib: Silverlight Contrib 2010.1.0: 2010.1.0 New FeaturesCompatibility Release for Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010FlickrNet API Library: 3.1.4000: Newest release. Now contains dedicated Windows Phone 7 DLL as well as all previous DLLs. Also contains Windows Help file documentation now as standard.mojoPortal: 2.3.5.8: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2358-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2010 Code Samples 2010-12-13: Code samples for Visual Studio 2010New ProjectsANLP - Another .NET Lexer Parser: This project aims to have a lexer/parser working in Silverlight and help people to write their own grammar and make the lexer/parser available in Silverlight.Better App Tab Shortcuts Firefox Extension: An extension for Firefox 4.0 which improves the shortcuts for selecting tabs.BizTalk Map Converter: Converts BizTalk Maps into ExcelCampo Minado: Campo minado em SilverlightCSharpHASH: Hash project is an college project conserning business software development. Written in C#.DS_HW1: hw1DynamicViewModel: MVVM using POCOs with .NET 4.0: This project aims to provide a way to implement the Model View ViewModel (MVVM) architectural pattern using Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs) while taking full advantage of .NET 4.0 DynamicObject Class.Evolution Game: Evolution game that uses genetic algorithms to visualize life of different species.Fluent Parser: Fluent Parser is a library allowing to build a syntaxic analyser in C#. The grammar is built using only .NET objects into the form of a Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG).GoogleMusic Player: Choose and play music from newly launched google Music http://www.google.co.in/music create and save playlists Using C#Gracefully update SharePoint 2010 document metadata: Users want to update the metadata for a document in a document library, for which they don’t have access or if they wanted to update some read-only fields. Hacker Passwords: Hacker Passwords generator - free open sourceHTML5 Canvas FlowView: FlowView is a simple to use API for creating/implementing a flowview style element in HTML5/Canvas. The FlowView looks much like something from Apple's cover view.L#: A F# program to provide similar functionalities offered by Prolog for F# oriented applications.MapInfo Tools: Utilities for working with MapInfo files.Notepad X: Notepad X is an alternative open source text editor for Microsoft Windows, with a lot of customization options created to help users managing text documents, featuring tab navigation.OpenFlyClient: An educational open source of a client written in C# for FlyFF. This is for educational and evaluation purposes only. Using this for private servers is not allowed.Orkut API Library: Orkut API Library (more of a wrapper) for .NET makes it easier for .NET developers creating web and/or desktop applications to leverage Orkut OpenSocial API from within the familiar Visual Studio environment. PasteHtml.NET: PasteHtml.NET is a .NET API for using the PasteHtml.com service.Photon: Silverlight MVVM Framework RSATasync: Running analyses in RiskSpectrum PSA Professional software is a time-consuming task. RSATasync is a middleware, which uses .NET4 Parallel Extensions to parallelize analyses sent by the editor to the analyzer in the RiskSpectrum software.The Killie01 Project: all killie01 projects (opensource)United Nations News for Windows Phone 7: Open source project for United Nations News for Windows Phone 7. WCF SIP Stack: WCF SIPWordpress .NET: WPDotnet is a library to ease the Wordpress integration with ASP.NET. Some Server controls are implemented. If you don't want to use them, you can just use the classes.

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• How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project

  - by constant

  While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack. After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades? On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea. Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company. Engineering Systems is Hard Work! The backbone of Exalogic is its InfiniBand network: 4 times better bandwidth than even 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and only about a tenth of its latency. What a potential for increased scalability and throughput across the middleware and database layers! But InfiniBand is a beast that needs to be tamed: It is true that Exalogic uses a standard, open-source Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) InfiniBand driver stack. Unfortunately, this software has been developed by the HPC community with fastest speed in mind (which is good) but, despite the name, not many other enterprise-class requirements are included (which is less good). Here are some of the improvements that Oracle's InfiniBand development team had to add to the OFED stack to make it enterprise-ready, simply because typical HPC users didn't have the need to implement them: More than 100 bug fixes in the pieces that were not related to the Message Passing Interface Protocol (MPI), which is the protocol that HPC users use most of the time, but which is less useful in the enterprise. Performance optimizations and tuning across the whole IB stack: From Switches, Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) and drivers to low-level protocols, middleware and applications. Yes, even the standard HPC IB stack could be improved in terms of performance. Ethernet over IB (EoIB): Exalogic uses InfiniBand internally to reach high performance, but it needs to play nicely with datacenters around it. That's why Oracle added Ethernet over InfiniBand technology to it that allows for creating many virtual 10GBE adapters inside Exalogic's nodes that are aggregated and connected to Exalogic's IB gateway switches. While this is an open standard, it's up to the vendor to implement it. In this case, Oracle integrated the EoIB stack with Oracle's own IB to 10GBE gateway switches, and made it fully virtualized from the beginning. This means that Exalogic customers can completely rewire their server infrastructure inside the rack without having to physically pull or plug a single cable - a must-have for every cloud deployment. Anybody who wants to match this level of integration would need to add an InfiniBand switch development team to their project. Or just buy Oracle's gateway switches, which are conveniently shipped with a whole server infrastructure attached! IPv6 support for InfiniBand's Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP), Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS), TCP/IP over IB (IPoIB) and EoIB protocols. Because no IPv6 = not very enterprise-class. HA capability for SDP. High Availability is not a big requirement for HPC, but for enterprise-class application servers it is. Every node in Exalogic's InfiniBand network is connected twice for redundancy. If any cable or port or HCA fails, there's always a replacement link ready to take over. This requires extra magic at the protocol level to work. So in addition to Weblogic's failover capabilities, Oracle implemented IB automatic path migration at the SDP level to avoid unnecessary failover operations at the middleware level. Security, for example spoof-protection. Another feature that is less important for traditional users of InfiniBand, but very important for enterprise customers. InfiniBand Partitioning and Quality-of-Service (QoS): One of the first questions we get from customers about Exalogic is: “How can we implement multi-tenancy?” The answer is to partition your IB network, which effectively creates many networks that work independently and that are protected at the lowest networking layer possible. In addition to that, QoS allows administrators to prioritize traffic flow in multi-tenancy environments so they can keep their service levels where it matters most. Resilient IB Fabric Management: InfiniBand is a self-managing network, so a lot of the magic lies in coming up with the right topology and in teaching the subnet manager how to properly discover and manage the network. Oracle's Infiniband switches come with pre-integrated, highly available fabric management with seamless integration into Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center. In short: Oracle elevated the OFED InfiniBand stack into an enterprise-class networking infrastructure. Many years and multiple teams of manpower went into the above improvements - this is something you can only get from Oracle, because no other InfiniBand vendor can give you these features across the whole stack! Exabus: Because it's not About the Size of Your Network, it's How You Use it! So let's assume that you somehow were able to get your hands on an enterprise-class IB driver stack. Or maybe you don't care and are just happy with the standard OFED one? Anyway, the next step is to actually leverage that InfiniBand performance. Here are the choices: Use traditional TCP/IP on top of the InfiniBand stack, Develop your own integration between your middleware and the lower-level (but faster) InfiniBand protocols. While more bandwidth is always a good thing, it's actually the low latency that enables superior performance for your applications when running on any networking infrastructure: The lower the latency, the faster the response travels through the network and the more transactions you can close per second. The reason why InfiniBand is such a low latency technology is that it gets rid of most if not all of your traditional networking protocol stack: Data is literally beamed from one region of RAM in one server into another region of RAM in another server with no kernel/drivers/UDP/TCP or other networking stack overhead involved! Which makes option 1 a no-go: Adding TCP/IP on top of InfiniBand is like adding training wheels to your racing bike. It may be ok in the beginning and for development, but it's not quite the performance IB was meant to deliver. Which only leaves option 2: Integrating your middleware with fast, low-level InfiniBand protocols. And this is what Exalogic's "Exabus" technology is all about. Here are a few Exabus features that help applications leverage the performance of InfiniBand in Exalogic: RDMA and SDP integration at the JDBC driver level (SDP), for Oracle Weblogic (SDP), Oracle Coherence (RDMA), Oracle Tuxedo (RDMA) and the new Oracle Traffic Director (RDMA) on Exalogic. Using these protocols, middleware can communicate a lot faster with each other and the Oracle database than by using standard networking protocols, Seamless Integration of Ethernet over InfiniBand from Exalogic's Gateway switches into the OS, Oracle Weblogic optimizations for handling massive amounts of parallel transactions. Because if you have an 8-lane Autobahn, you also need to improve your ramps so you can feed it with many cars in parallel. Integration of Weblogic with Oracle Exadata for faster performance, optimized session management and failover. As you see, “Exabus” is Oracle's word for describing all the InfiniBand enhancements Oracle put into Exalogic: OFED stack enhancements, protocols for faster IB access, and InfiniBand support and optimizations at the virtualization and middleware level. All working together to deliver the full potential of InfiniBand performance. Who else has 100% control over their middleware so they can develop their own low-level protocol integration with InfiniBand? Even if you take an open source approach, you're looking at years of development work to create, test and support a whole new networking technology in your middleware! The Extras: Less Hassle, More Productivity, Faster Time to Market And then there are the other advantages of Engineered Systems that are true for Exalogic the same as they are for every other Engineered System: One simple purchasing process: No headaches due to endless RFPs and no “Will X work with Y?” uncertainties. Everything has been engineered together: All kinds of bugs and problems have been already fixed at the design level that would have only manifested themselves after you have built the system from scratch. Everything is built, tested and integrated at the factory level . Less integration pain for you, faster time to market. Every Exalogic machine world-wide is identical to Oracle's own machines in the lab: Instant replication of any problems you may encounter, faster time to resolution. Simplified patching, management and operations. One throat to choke: Imagine finger-pointing hell for systems that have been put together using several different vendors. Oracle's Engineered Systems have a single phone number that customers can call to get their problems solved. For more business-centric values, read The Business Value of Engineered Systems. Conclusion: Buy Exalogic, or get ready for a 6-12 Month Science Project And here's the reason why it's not easy to "build your own Exalogic": There's a lot of work required to make such a system fly. In fact, anybody who is starting to "just put together a bunch of servers and an InfiniBand network" is really looking at a 6-12 month science project. And the outcome is likely to not be very enterprise-class. And it won't have Exalogic's performance either. Because building an Engineered System is literally rocket science: It takes a lot of time, effort, resources and many iterations of design/test/analyze/fix to build such a system. That's why InfiniBand has been reserved for HPC scientists for such a long time. And only Oracle can bring the power of InfiniBand in an enterprise-class, ready-to use, pre-integrated version to customers, without the develop/integrate/support pain. For more details, check the new Exalogic overview white paper which was updated only recently. P.S.: Thanks to my colleagues Ola, Paul, Don and Andy for helping me put together this article! var flattr_uid = '26528'; var flattr_tle = 'How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project'; var flattr_dsc = 'While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack.After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades?On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea.Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company.'; var flattr_tag = 'Engineered Systems,Engineered Systems,Infiniband,Integration,latency,Oracle,performance'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_url = 'http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2012/04/how-avoid-your-next-12-month-science-project'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'

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

  - by Gene Eun

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

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• 10 Reasons Why Java is the Top Embedded Platform

  - by Roger Brinkley

  With the release of Oracle ME Embedded 3.2 and Oracle Java Embedded Suite, Java is now ready to fully move into the embedded developer space, what many have called the "Internet of Things". Here are 10 reasons why Java is the top embedded platform. 1. Decouples software development from hardware development cycle Development is typically split between both hardware and software in a traditional design flow . This leads to complicated co-design and requires prototype hardware to be built. This parallel and interdependent hardware / software design process typically leads to two or more re-development phases. With Embedded Java, all specific work is carried out in software, with the (processor) hardware implementation fully decoupled. This with eliminate or at least reduces the need for re-spins of software or hardware and the original development efforts can be carried forward directly into product development and validation. 2. Development and testing can be done (mostly) using standard desktop systems through emulation Because the software and hardware are decoupled it now becomes easier to test the software long before it reaches the hardware through hardware emulation. Emulation is the ability of a program in an electronic device to imitate another program or device. In the past Java tools like the Java ME SDK and the SunSPOTs Solarium provided developers with emulation for a complete set of mobile telelphones and SunSpots. This often included network interaction or in the case of SunSPOTs radio communication. What emulation does is speed up the development cycle by refining the software development process without the need of hardware. The software is fixed, redefined, and refactored without the timely expense of hardware testing. With tools like the Java ME 3.2 SDK, Embedded Java applications can be be quickly developed on Windows based platforms. In the end of course developers should do a full set of testing on the hardware as incompatibilities between emulators and hardware will exist, but the amount of time to do this should be significantly reduced. 3. Highly productive language, APIs, runtime, and tools mean quick time to market Charles Nutter probably said it best in twitter blog when he tweeted, "Every time I see a piece of C code I need to port, my heart dies a little. Then I port it to 1/4 as much Java, and feel better." The Java environment is a very complex combination of a Java Virtual Machine, the Java Language, and it's robust APIs. Combine that with the Java ME SDK for small devices or just Netbeans for the larger devices and you have a development environment where development time is reduced significantly meaning the product can be shipped sooner. Of course this is assuming that the engineers don't get slap happy adding new features given the extra time they'll have.  4. Create high-performance, portable, secure, robust, cross-platform applications easily The latest JIT compilers for the Oracle JVM approach the speed of C/C++ code, and in some memory allocation intensive circumstances, exceed it. And specifically for the embedded devices both ME Embedded and SE Embedded have been optimized for the smaller footprints.  In portability Java uses Bytecode to make the language platform independent. This creates a write once run anywhere environment that allows you to develop on one platform and execute on others and avoids a platform vendor lock in. For security, Java achieves protection by confining a Java program to a Java execution environment and not allowing it to access other parts of computer.  In variety of systems the program must execute reliably to be robust. Finally, Oracle Java ME Embedded is a cross-industry and cross-platform product optimized in release version 3.2 for chipsets based on the ARM architectures. Similarly Oracle Java SE Embedded works on a variety of ARM V5, V6, and V7, X86 and Power Architecture Linux. 5. Java isolates your apps from language and platform variations (e.g. C/C++, kernel, libc differences) This has been a key factor in Java from day one. Developers write to Java and don't have to worry about underlying differences in the platform variations. Those platform variations are being managed by the JVM. Gone are the C/C++ problems like memory corruptions, stack overflows, and other such bugs which are extremely difficult to isolate. Of course this doesn't imply that you won't be able to get away from native code completely. There could be some situations where you have to write native code in either assembler or C/C++. But those instances should be limited. 6. Most popular embedded processors supported allowing design flexibility Java SE Embedded is now available on ARM V5, V6, and V7 along with Linux on X86 and Power Architecture platforms. Java ME Embedded is available on system based on ARM architecture SOCs with low memory footprints and a device emulation environment for x86/Windows desktop computers, integrated with the Java ME SDK 3.2. A standard binary of Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 for ARM KEIL development boards based on ARM Cortex M-3/4 (KEIL MCBSTM32F200 using ST Micro SOC STM32F207IG) will soon be available for download from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). 7. Support for key embedded features (low footprint, power mgmt., low latency, etc) All embedded devices by there very nature are constrained in some way. Economics may dictate a device with a less RAM and ROM. The CPU needs can dictate a less powerful device. Power consumption is another major resource in some embedded devices as connecting to consistent power source not always desirable or possible. For others they have to constantly on. Often many of these systems are headless (in the embedded space it's almost always Halloween).  For memory resources ,Java ME Embedded can run in environment as low as 130KB RAM/350KB ROM for a minimal, customized configuration up to 700KB RAM/1500KB ROM for the full, standard configuration. Java SE Embedded is designed for environments starting at 32MB RAM/39MB  ROM. Key functionality of embedded devices such as auto-start and recovery, flexible networking are fully supported. And while Java SE Embedded has been optimized for mid-range to high-end embedded systems, Java ME Embedded is a Java runtime stack optimized for small embedded systems. It provides a robust and flexible application platform with dedicated embedded functionality for always-on, headless (no graphics/UI), and connected devices. 8. Leverage huge Java developer ecosystem (expertise, existing code) There are over 9 million developers in world that work on Java, and while not all of them work on embedded systems, their wealth of expertise in developing applications is immense. In short, getting a java developer to work on a embedded system is pretty easy, you probably have a java developer living in your subdivsion.  Then of course there is the wealth of existing code. The Java Embedded Community on Java.net is central gathering place for embedded Java developers. Conferences like Embedded Java @ JavaOne and the a variety of hardware vendor conferences like Freescale Technlogy Forums offer an excellent opportunity for those interested in embedded systems. 9. Easily create end-to-end solutions integrated with Java back-end services In the "Internet of Things" things aren't on an island doing an single task. For instance and embedded drink dispenser doesn't just dispense a beverage, but could collect money from a credit card and also send information about current sales. Similarly, an embedded house power monitoring system doesn't just manage the power usage in a house, but can also send that data back to the power company. In both cases it isn't about the individual thing, but monitoring a collection of  things. How much power did your block, subdivsion, area of town, town, county, state, nation, world use? How many Dr Peppers were purchased from thing1, thing2, thingN? The point is that all this information can be collected and transferred securely  (and believe me that is key issue that Java fully supports) to back end services for further analysis. And what better back in service exists than a Java back in service. It's interesting to note that on larger embedded platforms that support the Java Embedded Suite some of the analysis might be done on the embedded device itself as JES has a glassfish server and Java Database as part of the installation. The result is an end to end Java solution. 10. Solutions from constrained devices to server-class systems Just take a look at some of the embedded Java systems that have already been developed and you'll see a vast range of solutions. Livescribe pen, Kindle, each and every Blu-Ray player, Cisco's Advanced VOIP phone, KronosInTouch smart time clock, EnergyICT smart metering, EDF's automated meter management, Ricoh Printers, and Stanford's automated car  are just a few of the list of embedded Java implementation that continues to grow. Conclusion Now if your a Java Developer you probably look at some of the 10 reasons and say "duh", but for the embedded developers this is should be an eye opening list. And with the release of ME Embedded 3.2 and the Java Embedded Suite the embedded developers life is now a whole lot easier. For the Java developer your employment opportunities are about to increase. For both it's a great time to start developing Java for the "Internet of Things".

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• Looking Back at MIX10

  - by WeigeltRo

  It’s the sad truth of my life that even though I’m fascinated by airplanes and flight in general since my childhood days, my body doesn’t like flying. Even the ridiculously short flights inside Germany are taking their toll on me each time. Now combine this with sitting in the cramped space of economy class for many hours on a transatlantic flight from Germany to Las Vegas and back, and factor in some heavy dose of jet lag (especially on my way eastwards), and you get an idea why after coming back home I had this question on my mind: Was it really worth it to attend MIX10? This of course is a question that will also be asked by my boss at Comma Soft (for other reasons, obviously), who decided to send me and my colleague Jens Schaller, to the MIX10 conference. (A note to my German readers: An dieser Stelle der Hinweis, dass Comma Soft noch Silverlight-Entwickler und/oder UI-Designer für den Standort Bonn sucht – aussagekräftige Bewerbungen bitte an [email protected]) Too keep things short: My answer is yes. Before I’ll go into detail, let me ask the heretical questions whether tech conferences in general still make sense. There was a time, where actually being at a tech conference gave you a head-start in regard to learning about new technologies. Nowadays this is no longer true, where every bit of information and every detail is immediately twittered, blogged and whatevered to death. In the case of MIX10 you even can download the video-taped sessions shortly after. So: Does visiting a conference still make sense? It depends on what you expect from a conference. It should be clear to everybody that you’ll neither get exclusive information, nor receive training in a small group. What a conference does offer that sitting in front of your computer does not can be summarized as follows: Focus Being away from work and home will help you to focus on the presented information. Of course there are always the poor guys who are haunted by their work (with mails and short text messages reporting the latest showstopper problem), but in general being out of your office makes a huge difference. Inspiration With the focus comes the emotional involvement. I find it much easier to absorb information if I feel that certain vibe when sitting in a session. This still means that I have put work into reviewing the information later, but it’s a better starting point. And all the impressions collected at a (good) conference combined lead to a higher motivation – be it by the buzz (“this is gonna be sooo cool!”) or by the fear to fall behind (“man, we’ll have work on this, or else…”). People At a conference it’s pretty easy to get into contact with other people during breakfast, lunch and other breaks. This is a good opportunity to get a feel for what other development teams are doing (on a very general level of course, nobody will tell you about their secret formula) and what they are thinking about specific technologies. So MIX10 did offer focus, inspiration and people, but that would have meant nothing without valuable content. When I (being a frontend developer with a strong interest in UI/UX) planned my visit to MIX10, I made the decision to focus on the "soft" topics of design, interaction and user experience. I figured that I would be bombarded with all the technical details about Silverlight 4 anyway in the weeks and months to come. Actually, I would have liked to catch a few technical sessions, but the agenda wasn’t exactly in favor of people interested in any kind of Silverlight and UI/UX/Design topics. That’s one of my few complaints about the conference – I would have liked one more day and/or more sessions per day. Overall, the quality of the workshops and sessions was pretty high. In fact, looking back at my collection of conferences I’ve visited in the past I’d say that MIX10 ranks somewhere near the top spot. Here’s an overview of the workshops/sessions I attended (I’ll leave out the keynotes): Day 0 (Workshops on Sunday) Design Fundamentals for Developers Robby Ingebretsen is the man! Great workshop in three parts with the perfect mix of examples, well-structured definition of terminology and the right dose of humor. Robby was part of the WPF team before founding his own company so he not only has a strong interest in design (and the skillz!) but also the technical background.   Design Tools and Techniques Originally announced to be held by Arturo Toledo, the Rosso brothers from ArcheType filled in for the first two parts, and Corrina Black had a pretty general part about the Windows Phone UI. The first two thirds were a mixed bag; the two guys definitely knew what they were talking about, and the demos were great, but the talk lacked the preparation and polish of a truly great presentation. Corrina was not allowed to go into too much detail before the keynote on Monday, but the session was still very interesting as it showed how much thought went into the Windows Phone UI (and there’s always a lot to learn when people talk about their thought process). Day 1 (Monday) Designing Rich Experiences for Data-Centric Applications I wonder whether there was ever a test-run for this session, but what Ken Azuma and Yoshihiro Saito delivered in the first 15 minutes of a 30-minutes-session made me walk out. A commercial for a product (just great: a video showing a SharePoint plug-in in an all-Japanese UI) combined with the most generic blah blah one could imagine. EPIC FAIL.   Great User Experiences: Seamlessly Blending Technology & Design I switched to this session from the one above but I guess I missed the interesting part – what I did catch was what looked like a “look at the cool stuff we did” without being helpful. Or maybe I was just in a bad mood after the other session.   The Art, Technology and Science of Reading This talk by Kevin Larson was very interesting, but was more a presentation of what Microsoft is doing in research (pretty impressive) and in the end lacked a bit the helpful advice one could have hoped for.   10 Ways to Attack a Design Problem and Come Out Winning Robby Ingebretsen again, and again a great mix of theory and practice. The clean and simple, yet effective, UI of the reader app resulted in a simultaneous “wow” of Jens and me. If you’d watch only one session video, this should be it. Microsoft has to bring Robby back next year! Day 2 (Tuesday) Touch in Public: Multi-touch Interaction Design for Kiosks & Architectural Experiences Very interesting session by Jason Brush, a great inspiration with many details to look out for in the examples. Exactly what I was hoping for – and then some!   Designing Bing: Heart and Science How hard can it be to design the UI for a search engine? An input field and a list of results, that should be it, right? Well, not so fast! The talk by Paul Ray showed the many iterations to finally get it right (up to the choice of a specific blue for the links). And yes, I want an eye-tracking device to play around with!   The Elephant in the Room When Nishant Kothary presented a long list of what his session was not about, I told to myself (not having the description text present) “Am I in the wrong talk? Should I leave?”. Boy, was I wrong. A great talk about human factors in the process of designing stuff.   An Hour with Bill Buxton Having seen Bill Buxton’s presentation in the keynote, I just had to see this man again – even though I didn’t know what to expect. Being more or less unplanned and intended to be more of a conversation, the session didn’t provide a wealth of immediately useful information. Nevertheless Bill Buxton was impressive with his huge knowledge of seemingly everything. But this could/should have been a session some when in the evening and not in parallel to at least two other interesting talks. Day 3 (Wednesday) Design the Ordinary, Like the Fixie This session by DL Byron and Kevin Tamura started really well and brought across the message to keep things simple. But towards the end the talk lost some of its steam. And, as a member of the audience pointed out, they kind of ignored their own advice when they used a fancy presentation software other then PowerPoint that sometimes got in the way of showing things.   Developing Natural User Interfaces Speaking of alternative presentation software, Joshua Blake definitely had the most remarkable alternative to PowerPoint, a self-written program called NaturalShow that was controlled using multi-touch on a touch screen. Not a PowerPoint-killer, but impressive nevertheless. The (excellent) talk itself was kind of eye-opening in regard to what “multi-touch support” on various platforms (WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone) actually means.   Treat your Content Right The talk by Tiffani Jones Brown wasn’t even on my planned schedule, but somehow I ended up in that session – and it was great. And even for people who don’t necessarily have to write content for websites, some points made by Tiffani are valid in many places, notably wherever you put texts with more than a single word into your UI. Creating Effective Info Viz in Microsoft Silverlight The last session of MIX10 I attended was kind of disappointing. At first things were very promising, with Matthias Shapiro giving a brief but well-structured introduction to info graphics and interactive visualizations. Then the live-coding began and while the result was interesting, too much time was spend on wrestling to get the code working. Ending earlier than planned, the talk was a bit light on actual content, but at least it included a nice list of resources. Conclusion It could be felt all across MIX10, UIs will take a huge leap forward; in fact, there are enough examples that have already. People who both have the technical know-how and at least a basic understanding of design (“literacy” as Bill Buxton called it) are in high demand. The concept of the MIX conference and initiatives like design.toolbox shows that Microsoft understands very well that frontend developers have to acquire new knowledge besides knowing how to hack code and putting buttons on a form. There are extremely exciting times before us, with lots of opportunity for those who are eager to develop their skills, that is for sure.

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• C#: My World Clock

  - by Bruce Eitman

  [Placeholder:  I will post the entire project soon] I have been working on cleaning my office of 8 years of stuff from several engineers working on many projects.  It turns out that we have a few extra single board computers with displays, so at the end of the day last Friday I though why not create a little application to display the time, you know, a clock.  How difficult could that be?  It turns out that it is quite simple – until I decided to gold plate the project by adding time displays for our offices around the world. I decided to use C#, which actually made creating the main clock quite easy.   The application was simply a text box and a timer.  I set the timer to fire a couple of times a second, and when it does use a DateTime object to get the current time and retrieve a string to display. And I could have been done, but of course that gold plating came up.   Seems simple enough, simply offset the time from the local time to the location that I want the time for and display it.    Sure enough, I had the time displayed for UK, Italy, Kansas City, Japan and China in no time at all. But it is October, and for those of us still stuck with Daylight Savings Time, we know that the clocks are about to change.   My first attempt was to simply check to see if the local time was DST or Standard time, then change the offset for China.  China doesn’t have Daylight Savings Time. If you know anything about the time changes around the world, you already know that my plan is flawed – in a big way.   It turns out that the transitions in and out of DST take place at different times around the world.   If you didn’t know that, do a quick search for “Daylight Savings” and you will find many WEB sites dedicated to tracking the time changes dates, and times. Now the real challenge of this application; how do I programmatically find out when the time changes occur and handle them correctly?  After a considerable amount of research it turns out that the solution is to read the data from the registry and parse it to figure out when the time changes occur. Reading Time Change Information from the Registry Reading the data from the registry is simple, using the data is a little more complicated.  First, reading from the registry can be done like:             byte[] binarydata = (byte[])Registry.GetValue("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\Time Zones\\Eastern Standard Time", "TZI", null);   Where I have hardcoded the registry key for example purposes, but in the end I will use some variables.   We now have a binary blob with the data, but it needs to be converted to use the real data.   To start we will need a couple of structs to hold the data and make it usable.   We will need a SYSTEMTIME and REG_TZI_FORMAT.   You may have expected that we would need a TIME_ZONE_INFORMATION struct, but we don’t.   The data is stored in the registry as a REG_TZI_FORMAT, which excludes some of the values found in TIME_ZONE_INFORMATION.     struct SYSTEMTIME     {         internal short wYear;         internal short wMonth;         internal short wDayOfWeek;         internal short wDay;         internal short wHour;         internal short wMinute;         internal short wSecond;         internal short wMilliseconds;     }       struct REG_TZI_FORMAT     {         internal long Bias;         internal long StdBias;         internal long DSTBias;         internal SYSTEMTIME StandardStart;         internal SYSTEMTIME DSTStart;     }   Now we need to convert the binary blob to a REG_TZI_FORMAT.   To do that I created the following helper functions:         private void BinaryToSystemTime(ref SYSTEMTIME ST, byte[] binary, int offset)         {             ST.wYear = (short)(binary[offset + 0] + (binary[offset + 1] << 8));             ST.wMonth = (short)(binary[offset + 2] + (binary[offset + 3] << 8));             ST.wDayOfWeek = (short)(binary[offset + 4] + (binary[offset + 5] << 8));             ST.wDay = (short)(binary[offset + 6] + (binary[offset + 7] << 8));             ST.wHour = (short)(binary[offset + 8] + (binary[offset + 9] << 8));             ST.wMinute = (short)(binary[offset + 10] + (binary[offset + 11] << 8));             ST.wSecond = (short)(binary[offset + 12] + (binary[offset + 13] << 8));             ST.wMilliseconds = (short)(binary[offset + 14] + (binary[offset + 15] << 8));         }             private REG_TZI_FORMAT ConvertFromBinary(byte[] binarydata)         {             REG_TZI_FORMAT RTZ = new REG_TZI_FORMAT();               RTZ.Bias = binarydata[0] + (binarydata[1] << 8) + (binarydata[2] << 16) + (binarydata[3] << 24);             RTZ.StdBias = binarydata[4] + (binarydata[5] << 8) + (binarydata[6] << 16) + (binarydata[7] << 24);             RTZ.DSTBias = binarydata[8] + (binarydata[9] << 8) + (binarydata[10] << 16) + (binarydata[11] << 24);             BinaryToSystemTime(ref RTZ.StandardStart, binarydata, 4 + 4 + 4);             BinaryToSystemTime(ref RTZ.DSTStart, binarydata, 4 + 16 + 4 + 4);               return RTZ;         }   I am the first to admit that there may be a better way to get the settings from the registry and into the REG_TXI_FORMAT, but I am not a great C# programmer which I have said before on this blog.   So sometimes I chose brute force over elegant. Now that we have the Bias information and the start date information, we can start to make sense of it.   The bias is an offset, in minutes, from local time (if already in local time for the time zone in question) to get to UTC – or as Microsoft defines it: UTC = local time + bias.  Standard bias is an offset to adjust for standard time, which I think is usually zero.   And DST bias is and offset to adjust for daylight savings time. Since we don’t have the local time for a time zone other than the one that the computer is set to, what we first need to do is convert local time to UTC, which is simple enough using:                 DateTime.Now.ToUniversalTime(); Then, since we have UTC we need to do a little math to alter the formula to: local time = UTC – bias.  In other words, we need to subtract the bias minutes. I am ahead of myself though, the standard and DST start dates really aren’t dates.   Instead they indicate the month, day of week and week number of the time change.   The dDay member of SYSTEM time will be set to the week number of the date change indicating that the change happens on the first, second… day of week of the month.  So we need to convert them to dates so that we can determine which bias to use, and when to change to a different bias.   To do that, I wrote the following function:         private DateTime SystemTimeToDateTimeStart(SYSTEMTIME Time, int Year)         {             DayOfWeek[] Days = { DayOfWeek.Sunday, DayOfWeek.Monday, DayOfWeek.Tuesday, DayOfWeek.Wednesday, DayOfWeek.Thursday, DayOfWeek.Friday, DayOfWeek.Saturday };             DateTime InfoTime = new DateTime(Year, Time.wMonth, Time.wDay == 1 ? 1 : ((Time.wDay - 1) * 7) + 1, Time.wHour, Time.wMinute, Time.wSecond, DateTimeKind.Utc);             DateTime BestGuess = InfoTime;             while (BestGuess.DayOfWeek != Days[Time.wDayOfWeek])             {                 BestGuess = BestGuess.AddDays(1);             }             return BestGuess;         }   SystemTimeToDateTimeStart gets two parameters; a SYSTEMTIME and a year.   The reason is that we will try this year and next year because we are interested in start dates that are in the future, not the past.  The function starts by getting a new Datetime with the first possible date and then looking for the correct date. Using the start dates, we can then determine the correct bias to use, and the next date that time will change:             NextTimeChange = StandardChange;             CurrentBias = TimezoneSettings.Bias + TimezoneSettings.DSTBias;             if (DSTChange.Year != 1 && StandardChange.Year != 1)             {                 if (DSTChange.CompareTo(StandardChange) < 0)                 {                     NextTimeChange = DSTChange;                     CurrentBias = TimezoneSettings.StdBias + TimezoneSettings.Bias;                 }             }             else             {                 // I don't like this, but it turns out that China Standard Time                 // has a DSTBias of -60 on every Windows system that I tested.                 // So, if no DST transitions, then just use the Bias without                 // any offset                 CurrentBias = TimezoneSettings.Bias;             }   Note that some time zones do not change time, in which case the years will remain set to 1.   Further, I found that the registry settings are actually wrong in that the DST Bias is set to -60 for China even though there is not DST in China, so I ignore the standard and DST bias for those time zones. There is one thing that I have not solved, and don’t plan to solve.  If the time zone for this computer changes, this application will not update the clock using the new time zone.  I tell  you this because you may need to deal with it – I do not because I won’t let the user get to the control panel applet to change the timezone. Copyright © 2012 – Bruce Eitman All Rights Reserved

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