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• Clearcase - selective merge.

  - by Keshav

  Hi, I have a peculiar Clearcase doubt. I cannot fully describe why I'm doing such a confusing architecture, but I need to do it (thanks to the mistake done by someone long back). Ok, here's a bit of detail: B1 is a contaminated branch where both my group's changes and another group's changes got mixed together so badly that there is no way of finding which code is whose). So the solution proposed is to create a new branch called B2 (at the same level as B1) and put all the unmodified code of the other group on it (The way to do that would be to merge B1 with B2 and then go about removing all changes from it till it becomes original). Then create a CR branch on B1 and keep only my group's newly added files or modified files on that branch. Finally create an integration branch out of B2 and merge the changes from CR branch of B1 to integration branch of B2. So here is what I did: (The use case is where I have dir D where file a, b and c are there. My group ended up modifying file a while b and c are not modified at all). There is a branch B1 on which there are files a, b and c. There is another branch B2. A merge is done from B1 to B2. Now B2 also has a, b and c. At this point both branch B1 and B2 are same. Now I delete file a from branch B2 (rmname). Now B2 has b and c only. I put a label to this branch called Label1. This makes the code with label Label1 as the unmodified code from other group. Now I create a sub branch called CR1 from B1 and delete all the files that are there in B2 branch (i.e b and c) such that it contains only the modified code from original code on it. In my case it is file a. At this point branch B2 with label Label1 has files b and c (those are unmodified code) and branch CR1 coming off B1 has only a (that is modified by us). Now I create another branch called integration branch that comes off B2 Label1. And then I do a merge of CR branch on to that expecting that it will have all three files a, b and c for me. All I'd need to do is to do a version tree view and see who modified what. But the problem I face is that since I had done a rmname of file a on branch B2 earlier to putting Label. The merge does not really take the file a from CR branch. How to I get around that problem. I want to selectively merge. Is it possible? sorry if it is a bad design. I'm not really conversant with Clear case and have limited options and time to clear some one else's mess.

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• Question about unions and heap allocated memory

  - by Dennis Miller

  I was trying to use a union to so I could update the fields in one thread and then read allfields in another thread. In the actual system, I have mutexes to make sure everything is safe. The problem is with fieldB, before I had to change it fieldB was declared like field A and C. However, due to a third party driver, fieldB must be alligned with page boundary. When I changed field B to be allocated with valloc, I run into problems. Questions: 1) Is there a way to statically declare fieldB alligned on page boundary. Basically do the same thing as valloc, but on the stack? 2) Is it possible to do a union when field B, or any field is being allocated on the heap?. Not sure if that is even legal. Here's a simple Test program I was experimenting with. This doesn't work unless you declare fieldB like field A and C, and make the obvious changes in the public methods. #include <iostream> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <stdio.h> class Test { public: Test(void) { // field B must be alligned to page boundary // Is there a way to do this on the stack??? this->field.fieldB = (unsigned char*) valloc(10); }; //I know this is bad, this class is being treated like //a global structure. Its self contained in another class. unsigned char* PointerToFieldA(void) { return &this->field.fieldA[0]; } unsigned char* PointerToFieldB(void) { return this->field.fieldB; } unsigned char* PointerToFieldC(void) { return &this->field.fieldC[0]; } unsigned char* PointerToAllFields(void) { return &this->allFields[0]; } private: // Is this union possible with field B being // allocated on the heap? union { struct { unsigned char fieldA[10]; //This field has to be alligned to page boundary //Is there way to be declared on the stack unsigned char* fieldB; unsigned char fieldC[10]; } field; unsigned char allFields[30]; }; }; int main() { Test test; strncpy((char*) test.PointerToFieldA(), "0123456789", 10); strncpy((char*) test.PointerToFieldB(), "1234567890", 10); strncpy((char*) test.PointerToFieldC(), "2345678901", 10); char dummy[11]; dummy[10] = '\0'; strncpy(dummy, (char*) test.PointerToFieldA(), 10); printf("%s\n", dummy); strncpy(dummy, (char*) test.PointerToFieldB(), 10); printf("%s\n", dummy); strncpy(dummy, (char*) test.PointerToFieldC(), 10); printf("%s\n", dummy); char allFields[31]; allFields[30] = '\0'; strncpy(allFields, (char*) test.PointerToAllFields(), 30); printf("%s\n", allFields); return 0; }

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• Using Dynamic Proxies to centralize JPA code

  - by Daziplqa

  Hi All, Actually, This is not a question but really I need your opinions in a matter... I put his post here because I know you always active, so please don't consider this a bad question and share me your opinions. I've used Java dynamic proxies to Centralize The code of JPA that I used in a standalone mode, and Here's the dynamic proxy code: package com.forat.service; import java.lang.reflect.InvocationHandler; import java.lang.reflect.Method; import java.lang.reflect.Proxy; import java.util.logging.Level; import java.util.logging.Logger; import javax.persistence.EntityManager; import javax.persistence.EntityManagerFactory; import javax.persistence.EntityTransaction; import javax.persistence.Persistence; import com.forat.service.exceptions.DAOException; /** * Example of usage : * <pre> * OnlineFromService onfromService = * (OnlineFromService) DAOProxy.newInstance(new OnlineFormServiceImpl()); * try { * Student s = new Student(); * s.setName("Mohammed"); * s.setNationalNumber("123456"); * onfromService.addStudent(s); * }catch (Exception ex) { * System.out.println(ex.getMessage()); * } *</pre> * @author mohammed hewedy * */ public class DAOProxy implements InvocationHandler{ private Object object; private Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(this.getClass().getSimpleName()); private DAOProxy(Object object) { this.object = object; } public static Object newInstance(Object object) { return Proxy.newProxyInstance(object.getClass().getClassLoader(), object.getClass().getInterfaces(), new DAOProxy(object)); } @Override public Object invoke(Object proxy, Method method, Object[] args) throws Throwable { EntityManagerFactory emf = null; EntityManager em = null; EntityTransaction et = null; Object result = null; try { emf = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory(Constants.UNIT_NAME); em = emf.createEntityManager();; Method entityManagerSetter = object.getClass(). getDeclaredMethod(Constants.ENTITY_MANAGER_SETTER_METHOD, EntityManager.class); entityManagerSetter.invoke(object, em); et = em.getTransaction(); et.begin(); result = method.invoke(object, args); et.commit(); return result; }catch (Exception ex) { et.rollback(); Throwable cause = ex.getCause(); logger.log(Level.SEVERE, cause.getMessage()); if (cause instanceof DAOException) throw new DAOException(cause.getMessage(), cause); else throw new RuntimeException(cause.getMessage(), cause); }finally { em.close(); emf.close(); } } } And here's the link that contains more info (http://m-hewedy.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-dynamic-proxies-to-centralize-jpa.html) (plz don't consider this as adds, as I can copy and past the entire topic here if you want that) So, Please give me your opinions. Thanks.

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• Java Thread execution on same data

  - by AR89

  first of all here is the code, you can just copy an paste import java.util.ArrayList; public class RepetionCounter implements Runnable{ private int x; private int y; private int[][] matrix; private int xCounter; private int yCounter; private ArrayList<Thread> threadArray; private int rowIndex; private boolean[] countCompleted; public RepetionCounter(int x, int y, int [][]matrix) { this.x = x; this.y = y; this.matrix = matrix; this.threadArray = new ArrayList<Thread>(matrix.length); this.rowIndex = 0; for(int i = 0; i < matrix.length; i++){ threadArray.add(new Thread(this)); } countCompleted = new boolean[matrix.length]; } public void start(){ for (int i = 0; i < threadArray.size(); i++){ threadArray.get(i).start(); this.rowIndex++; } } public void count(int rowIndex) { for(int i = 0; i < matrix[rowIndex].length; i++){ if (matrix[rowIndex][i] == x){ this.xCounter++; } else if (matrix[rowIndex][i] == y){ this.yCounter++; } } } @Override public void run() { count(this.rowIndex); countCompleted[this.rowIndex] = true; } public int getxCounter() { return xCounter; } public void setxCounter(int xCounter) { this.xCounter = xCounter; } public int getyCounter() { return yCounter; } public void setyCounter(int yCounter) { this.yCounter = yCounter; } public boolean[] getCountCompleted() { return countCompleted; } public void setCountCompleted(boolean[] countCompleted) { this.countCompleted = countCompleted; } public static void main(String args[]){ int[][] matrix = {{0,2,1}, {2,3,4}, {3,2,0}}; RepetionCounter rc = new RepetionCounter(0, 2, matrix); rc.start(); boolean ready = false; while(!ready){ for(int i = 0; i < matrix.length; i++){ if (rc.getCountCompleted()[i]){ ready = true; } else { ready = false; } } } if (rc.getxCounter() > rc.getyCounter()){ System.out.println("Thre are more x than y"); } else {System.out.println("There are:"+rc.getxCounter()+" x and:"+rc.getyCounter()+" y"); } } } What I want this code to do: I give to the object a matrix and tow numbers, and I want to know how much times these two numbers occurs in the matrix. I create as many thread as the number of rows of the matrix (that' why there is that ArrayList), so in this object I have k threads (supposing k is the number of rows), each of them count the occurrences of the two numbers. The problem is: if I run it for the first time everything work, but if I try to execute it another time I get and IndexOutOfBoundException, or a bad count of the occurrences, the odd thing is that if I get the error, and modify the code, after that it will works again just for once. Can you explain to me why is this happening?

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• SSRS 2008 printing single page renders different for print

  - by user270437

  I have a problem with SSRS 2008 reports rendering differently on the reporting server than the way it renders when you print the report. I’m trying to figure out to print a single page and have the print show that same records as I see on the report on the screen. As a test, I created a simple report with no headers or footers and just added a Tablix table to display the records (no groupings). My data set for this test displays 2 ¼ pages of records when I deploy it to our reporting services server and run it. If I click the print Icon and preview the report is 2 ¾ pages. I haven’t found anything searching on this so it makes me think it is something simple I’m missing. A basically want the report to render the same records on each page in Report Manager as it does when it prints, how do I accomplish this? (In response to answer posted by Chris)…If that is the case then it is disappointing. Customers are accustomed to WYSIWYG and will have a hard time understanding that, I imagine we will be getting a lot of support calls. This still leaves an issue. I tried using print preview and could not find any way to single out a page. If I select a page up front to print, or preview it renders different so I get different records. And if I preview the entire document, I can only print the entire document. You mentioned the Excel render; we have customers that will want that also. The problem I have found with Excel exports is that even a basic report winds up merging some cells and that messes up sorting. I’m going to try your tip about grouping to see if I can get a clean export to a page. It would have been nice if they would have created a property for certain controls like the tablix table called “ExcelSheet”. Then all you would have to do is give it a name and it would create a new sheet for each control with a name, the name becoming the sheet title. Thanks for the information you supplied it is very useful as I’m new to SSRS. If you know how I can Preview in print render and select individual pages to print from the render let me know. Update 02/19/2010 After testing this more I now realize it is just a bad design of Report managers print driver or a limitation because it is server based. The options work differently than Windows apps drivers, But I did find a work around. Here is the test I performed comparing Excel to Report Manager. I bring up a report that will render more than 1 page when printed. I then export to Excel, in Excel I select print preview. I can navigate the pages in preview and then select a single page like page 3. I can then print just page 3 without leaving print preview and it prints just like it rendered. I cannot do this using print in report manager. If I select print preview in report manager then try to print while in preview it always prints the entire document. However if I close out of print preview, I can then select page 3 and print it as rendered. It is just one additional step once you know what to do, but it took some time to figure it out.

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• How to reserve public API to internal usage in .NET?

  - by mark

  Dear ladies and sirs. Let me first present the case, which will explain my question. This is going to be a bit long, so I apologize in advance :-). I have objects and collections, which should support the Merge API (it is my custom API, the signature of which is immaterial for this question). This API must be internal, meaning only my framework should be allowed to invoke it. However, derived types should be able to override the basic implementation. The natural way to implement this pattern as I see it, is this: The Merge API is declared as part of some internal interface, let us say IMergeable. Because the interface is internal, derived types would not be able to implement it directly. Rather they must inherit it from a common base type. So, a common base type is introduced, which would implement the IMergeable interface explicitly, where the interface methods delegate to respective protected virtual methods, providing the default implementation. This way the API is only callable by my framework, but derived types may override the default implementation. The following code snippet demonstrates the concept: internal interface IMergeable { void Merge(object obj); } public class BaseFrameworkObject : IMergeable { protected virtual void Merge(object obj) { // The default implementation. } void IMergeable.Merge(object obj) { Merge(obj); } } public class SomeThirdPartyObject : BaseFrameworkObject { protected override void Merge(object obj) { // A derived type implementation. } } All is fine, provided a single common base type suffices, which is usually true for non collection types. The thing is that collections must be mergeable as well. Collections do not play nicely with the presented concept, because developers do not develop collections from the scratch. There are predefined implementations - observable, filtered, compound, read-only, remove-only, ordered, god-knows-what, ... They may be developed from scratch in-house, but once finished, they serve wide range of products and should never be tailored to some specific product. Which means, that either: they do not implement the IMergeable interface at all, because it is internal to some product the scope of the IMergeable interface is raised to public and the API becomes open and callable by all. Let us refer to these collections as standard collections. Anyway, the first option screws my framework, because now each possible standard collection type has to be paired with the respective framework version, augmenting the standard with the IMergeable interface implementation - this is so bad, I am not even considering it. The second option breaks the framework as well, because the IMergeable interface should be internal for a reason (whatever it is) and now this interface has to open to all. So what to do? My solution is this. make IMergeable public API, but add an extra parameter to the Merge method, I call it a security token. The interface implementation may check that the token references some internal object, which is never exposed to the outside. If this is the case, then the method was called from within the framework, otherwise - some outside API consumer attempted to invoke it and so the implementation can blow up with a SecurityException. Here is the modified code snippet demonstrating this concept: internal static class InternalApi { internal static readonly object Token = new object(); } public interface IMergeable { void Merge(object obj, object token); } public class BaseFrameworkObject : IMergeable { protected virtual void Merge(object obj) { // The default implementation. } public void Merge(object obj, object token) { if (!object.ReferenceEquals(token, InternalApi.Token)) { throw new SecurityException("bla bla bla"); } Merge(obj); } } public class SomeThirdPartyObject : BaseFrameworkObject { protected override void Merge(object obj) { // A derived type implementation. } } Of course, this is less explicit than having an internally scoped interface and the check is moved from the compile time to run time, yet this is the best I could come up with. Now, I have a gut feeling that there is a better way to solve the problem I have presented. I do not know, may be using some standard Code Access Security features? I have only vague understanding of it, but can LinkDemand attribute be somehow related to it? Anyway, I would like to hear other opinions. Thanks.

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• Basic C question, concerning memory allocation and value assignment

  - by VHristov

  Hi there, I have recently started working on my master thesis in C that I haven't used in quite a long time. Being used to Java, I'm now facing all kinds of problems all the time. I hope someone can help me with the following one, since I've been struggling with it for the past two days. So I have a really basic model of a database: tables, tuples, attributes and I'm trying to load some data into this structure. Following are the definitions: typedef struct attribute { int type; char * name; void * value; } attribute; typedef struct tuple { int tuple_id; int attribute_count; attribute * attributes; } tuple; typedef struct table { char * name; int row_count; tuple * tuples; } table; Data is coming from a file with inserts (generated for the Wisconsin benchmark), which I'm parsing. I have only integer or string values. A sample row would look like: insert into table values (9205, 541, 1, 1, 5, 5, 5, 5, 0, 1, 9205, 10, 11, 'HHHHHHH', 'HHHHHHH', 'HHHHHHH'); I've "managed" to load and parse the data and also to assign it. However, the assignment bit is buggy, since all values point to the same memory location, i.e. all rows look identical after I've loaded the data. Here is what I do: char value[10]; // assuming no value is longer than 10 chars int i, j, k; table * data = (table*) malloc(sizeof(data)); data->name = "table"; data->row_count = number_of_lines; data->tuples = (tuple*) malloc(number_of_lines*sizeof(tuple)); tuple* current_tuple; for(i=0; i<number_of_lines; i++) { current_tuple = &data->tuples[i]; current_tuple->tuple_id = i; current_tuple->attribute_count = 16; // static in our system current_tuple->attributes = (attribute*) malloc(16*sizeof(attribute)); for(k = 0; k < 16; k++) { current_tuple->attributes[k].name = attribute_names[k]; // for int values: current_tuple->attributes[k].type = DB_ATT_TYPE_INT; // write data into value-field int v = atoi(value); current_tuple->attributes[k].value = &v; // for string values: current_tuple->attributes[k].type = DB_ATT_TYPE_STRING; current_tuple->attributes[k].value = value; } // ... } While I am perfectly aware, why this is not working, I can't figure out how to get it working. I've tried following things, none of which worked: memcpy(current_tuple->attributes[k].value, &v, sizeof(int)); This results in a bad access error. Same for the following code (since I'm not quite sure which one would be the correct usage): memcpy(current_tuple->attributes[k].value, &v, 1); Not even sure if memcpy is what I need here... Also I've tried allocating memory, by doing something like: current_tuple->attributes[k].value = (int *) malloc(sizeof(int)); only to get "malloc: * error for object 0x100108e98: incorrect checksum for freed object - object was probably modified after being freed." As far as I understand this error, memory has already been allocated for this object, but I don't see where this happened. Doesn't the malloc(sizeof(attribute)) only allocate the memory needed to store an integer and two pointers (i.e. not the memory those pointers point to)? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Regards, Vassil

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• If I use a facade class with generic methods to access the JPA API, how should I provide additional processing for specific types?

  - by Shaun

  Let's say I'm making a fairly simple web application using JAVA EE specs (I've heard this is possible). In this app, I only have about 10 domain/data objects, and these are represented by JPA Entities. Architecturally, I would consider the JPA API to perform the role of a DAO. Of course, I don't want to use the EntityManager directly in my UI (JSF) and I need to manage transactions, so I delegate these tasks to the so-called service layer. More specifically, I would like to be able to handle these tasks in a single DataService class (often also called CrudService) with generic methods. See this article by Adam Bien for an example interface: http://www.adam-bien.com/roller/abien/entry/generic_crud_service_aka_dao My project differs from that article in that I can't use EJBs, so my service classes are essentially just named beans and I handle transactions manually. Regardless, what I want is a single interface for simple CRUD operations on my data objects because having a different class for each data type would lead to a lot of duplicate and/or unnecessary code. Ideally, my views would be able to use a method such as public <T> List<T> findAll(Class<T> type) { ... } to retrieve data. Using JSF, it might look something like this: <h:dataTable value="#{dataService.findAll(data.class)}" var="d"> ... </h:dataTable> Similarly, after validating forms, my controller could submit the data with a method such as: public <T> void add(T entity) { ... } Granted, you'd probably actually want to return something useful to the caller. In any case, this works well if your data can be treated as homogenous in this manner. Alas, it breaks down when you need to perform additional processing on certain objects before passing them on to JPA. For example, let's say I'm dealing with Books and Authors which have a many-to-many relationship. Each Book has a set of IDs referring to its authors, and each Author has a set of IDs referring to their books. Normally, JPA can manage this kind of relationship for you, but in some cases it can't (for example, the google app engine JPA provider doesn't support this). Thus, when I persist a new book for example, I may need to update the corresponding author entities. My question, then, is if there's an elegant way to handle this or if I should reconsider the sanity of my whole design. Here's a couple ways I see of dealing with it: The instanceof operator. I could use this to target certain classes when special processing is needed. Perhaps maintainability suffers and it isn't beautiful code, but if there's only 10 or so domain objects it can't be all that bad... could it? Make a different service for each entity type (ie, BookService and AuthorService). All services would inherit from a generic DataService base class and override methods if special processing is needed. At this point, you could probably also just call them DAOs instead. As always, I appreciate the help. Let me know if any clarifications are needed, as I left out many smaller details.

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• Problems with this code?

  - by J4C3N-14

  I'm trying to use this code which is an example taken from here https://gist.github.com/2383248 , but it is coming up with a error on the public void onClick which is Multiple markers at this line - implements android.view.View.OnClickListener.onClick - Syntax error, insert "}" to complete MethodBody, but when I add the brace it just throws another error after many tries and fails of different suggestions and ideas. It may be a syntax error and bad coding from me (just started learning to program) but does anyone have any ideas how to resolve this or point me in the right direction I would be very grateful. public class ICSCalendarActivity extends Activity implements View.OnClickListener{ Button button1; int year1; int month1; int day1; int ShiftPattern; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); button1 = (Button)findViewById(R.id.openButton); button1.setText("open"); button1.setOnClickListener(this); Bundle extras = getIntent().getExtras(); year1 = extras.getInt("year1"); day1 = extras.getInt("day1"); month1 = extras.getInt("month1"); ShiftPattern = extras.getInt("ShiftPattern"); } public void onClick(View v){ private static void addToCalendar(Context ICSCalendarActivity, final String title, final long dtstart, final long dtend) { final ContentResolver cr = ICSCalendarActivity.getContentResolver(); Cursor cursor ; if (Integer.parseInt(Build.VERSION.SDK) >= 8 ) cursor = cr.query(Uri.parse("content://com.android.calendar/calendars"), new String[]{ "_id", "displayname" }, null, null, null); else cursor = cr.query(Uri.parse("content://calendar/calendars"), new String[]{ "_id", "displayname" }, null, null, null); if ( cursor.moveToFirst() ) { final String[] calNames = new String[cursor.getCount()]; final int[] calIds = new int[cursor.getCount()]; for (int i = 0; i < calNames.length; i++) { calIds[i] = cursor.getInt(0); calNames[i] = cursor.getString(1); cursor.moveToNext(); } AlertDialog.Builder builder = new AlertDialog.Builder(ICSCalendarActivity); builder.setSingleChoiceItems(calNames, -1, new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() { @Override public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) { ContentValues cv = new ContentValues(); cv.put("calendar_id", calIds[which]); cv.put("title", title); cv.put("dtstart", dtstart ); cv.put("hasAlarm", 1); cv.put("dtend", dtend); Uri newEvent ; if (Integer.parseInt(Build.VERSION.SDK) >= 8 ) newEvent = cr.insert(Uri.parse("content://com.android.calendar/events"), cv); else newEvent = cr.insert(Uri.parse("content://calendar/events"), cv); if (newEvent != null) { long id = Long.parseLong( newEvent.getLastPathSegment() ); ContentValues values = new ContentValues(); values.put( "event_id", id ); values.put( "method", 1 ); values.put( "minutes", 15 ); // 15 minutes if (Integer.parseInt(Build.VERSION.SDK) >= 8 ) cr.insert( Uri.parse( "content://com.android.calendar/reminders" ), values ); else cr.insert( Uri.parse( "content://calendar/reminders" ), values ); } dialog.cancel(); } }); builder.create().show(); } cursor.close(); } } Thank you.

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• "undefined reference" error with namespace across multiple files

  - by user1330734

  I've looked at several related posts but no luck with this error. I receive this undefined reference error message below when my namespace exists across multiple files. If I compile only ConsoleTest.cpp with contents of Console.cpp dumped into it the source compiles. I would appreciate any feedback on this issue, thanks in advance. g++ Console.cpp ConsoleTest.cpp -o ConsoleTest.o -Wall /tmp/cc8KfSLh.o: In function `getValueTest()': ConsoleTest.cpp:(.text+0x132): undefined reference to `void Console::getValue<unsigned int>(unsigned int&)' collect2: ld returned 1 exit status Console.h #include <iostream> #include <sstream> #include <string> namespace Console { std::string getLine(); template <typename T> void getValue(T &value); } Console.cpp #include "Console.h" using namespace std; namespace Console { string getLine() { string str; while (true) { cin.clear(); if (cin.eof()) { break; // handle eof (Ctrl-D) gracefully } if (cin.good()) { char next = cin.get(); if (next == '\n') break; str += next; // add character to string } else { cin.clear(); // clear error state string badToken; cin >> badToken; cerr << "Bad input encountered: " << badToken << endl; } } return str; } template <typename T> void getValue(T &value) { string inputStr = Console::getLine(); istringstream strStream(inputStr); strStream >> value; } } ConsoleTest.cpp #include "Console.h" void getLineTest() { std::string str; std::cout << "getLinetest" << std::endl; while (str != "next") { str = Console::getLine(); std::cout << "<string>" << str << "</string>"<< std::endl; } } void getValueTest() { std::cout << "getValueTest" << std::endl; unsigned x = 0; while (x != 12345) { Console::getValue(x); std::cout << "x: " << x << std::endl; } } int main() { getLineTest(); getValueTest(); return 0; }

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• database design help for game / user levels / progress

  - by sprugman

  Sorry this got long and all prose-y. I'm creating my first truly gamified web app and could use some help thinking about how to structure the data. The Set-up Users need to accomplish tasks in each of several categories before they can move up a level. I've got my Users, Tasks, and Categories tables, and a UserTasks table which joins the three. ("User 3 has added Task 42 in Category 8. Now they've completed it.") That's all fine and working wonderfully. The Challenge I'm not sure of the best way to track the progress in the individual categories toward each level. The "business" rules are: You have to achieve a certain number of points in each category to move up. If you get the number of points needed in Cat 8, but still have other work to do to complete the level, any new Cat 8 points count toward your overall score, but don't "roll over" into the next level. The number of Categories is small (five currently) and unlikely to change often, but by no means absolutely fixed. The number of points needed to level-up will vary per level, probably by a formula, or perhaps a lookup table. So the challenge is to track each user's progress toward the next level in each category. I've thought of a few potential approaches: Possible Solutions Add a column to the users table for each category and reset them all to zero each time a user levels-up. Have a separate UserProgress table with a row for each category for each user and the number of points they have. (Basically a Many-to-Many version of #1.) Add a userLevel column to the UserTasks table and use that to derive their progress with some kind of SUM statement. Their current level will be a simple int in the User table. Pros & Cons (1) seems like by far the most straightforward, but it's also the least flexible. Perhaps I could use a naming convention based on the category ids to help overcome some of that. (With code like "select cats; for each cat, get the value from Users.progress_{cat.id}.") It's also the one where I lose the most data -- I won't know which points counted toward leveling up. I don't have a need in mind for that, so maybe I don't care about that. (2) seems complicated: every time I add or subtract a user or a category, I have to maintain the other table. I foresee synchronization challenges. (3) Is somewhere in between -- cleaner than #2, but less intuitive than #1. In order to find out where a user is, I'd have mildly complex SQL like: SELECT categoryId, SUM(points) from UserTasks WHERE userId={user.id} & countsTowardLevel={user.level} groupBy categoryId Hmm... that doesn't seem so bad. I think I'm talking myself into #3 here, but would love any input, advice or other ideas.

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• When should I use Areas in TFS instead of Team Projects

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Well, it depends…. If you are a small company that creates a finite number of internal projects then you will find it easier to create a single project for each of your products and have TFS do the heavy lifting with reporting, SharePoint sites and Version Control. But what if you are not… Update 9th March 2010 Michael Fourie gave me some feedback which I have integrated. Ed Blankenship via @edblankenship offered encouragement and a nice quote. Ewald Hofman gave me a couple of Cons, and maybe a few more soon. Ewald’s company, Avanade, currently uses Areas, but it looks like the manual management is getting too much and the project is getting cluttered. What if you are likely to have hundreds of projects, possibly with a multitude of internal and external projects? You might have 1 project for a customer or 10. This is the situation that most consultancies find themselves in and thus they need a more sustainable and maintainable option. What I am advocating is that we should have 1 “Team Project” per customer, and use areas to create “sub projects” within that single “Team Project”. "What you describe is what we generally do internally and what we recommend. We make very heavy use of area path to categorize the work within a larger project." - Brian Harry, Microsoft Technical Fellow & Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server   "We tend to use areas to segregate multiple projects in the same team project and it works well." - Tiago Pascoal, Visual Studio ALM MVP   "In general, I believe this approach provides consistency [to multi-product engagements] and lowers the administration and maintenance costs. All good." - Michael Fourie, Visual Studio ALM MVP   “@MrHinsh BTW, I'm very much a fan of very large, if not huge, team projects in TFS. Just FYI :) Use Areas & Iterations.” Ed Blankenship, Visual Studio ALM MVP   This would mean that SSW would have a single Team Project called “SSW” that contains all of our internal projects and consequently all of the Areas and Iteration move down one hierarchy to accommodate this. Where we would have had “\SSW\Sprint 1” we now have “\SSW\SqlDeploy\Sprint1” with “SqlDeploy” being our internal project. At the moment SSW has over 70 internal projects and more than 170 total projects in TFS. This method has long term benefits that help to simplify the support model for companies that often have limited internal support time and many projects. But, there are implications as TFS does not provide this model “out-of-the-box”. These implications stretch across Areas, Iterations, Queries, Project Portal and Version Control. Michael made a good comment, he said: I agree with your approach, assuming that in a multi-product engagement with a client, they are happy to adopt the same process template across all products. If they are not, then it’ll either be easy to convince them or there is a valid reason for having a different template - Michael Fourie, Visual Studio ALM MVP   At SSW we have a standard template that we use and this is applied across the board, to all of our projects. We even apply any changes to the core process template to all of our existing projects as well. If you have multiple projects for the same clients on multiple templates and you want to keep it that way, then this approach will not work for you. However, if you want to standardise as we have at SSW then this approach may benefit you as well. Implications around Areas Areas should be used for topological classification/isolation of work items. You can think of this as architecture areas, organisational areas or even the main features of your application. In our scenario there is an additional top level item that represents the Project / Product that we want to chop our Team Project into. Figure: Creating a sub area to represent a product/project is easy. <teamproject> <teamproject>\<Functional Area/module whatever> Becomes: <teamproject> <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\ <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\<Functional Area/module whatever> Implications around Iterations Iterations should be used for chronological classification/isolation of work items. This could include isolated time boxes, milestones or release timelines and really depends on the logical flow of your project or projects. Due to the new level in Area we need to add the same level to Iteration. This is primarily because it is unlikely that the sprints in each of your projects/products will start and end at the same time. This is just a reality of managing multiple projects. Figure: Adding the same Area value to Iteration as the top level item adds flexibility to Iteration. <teamproject>\Sprint 1 Or <teamproject>\Release 1\Sprint 1 Becomes: <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\Sprint 1 Or <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\Release 1\Sprint 1 Implications around Queries Queries are used to filter your work items based on a specified level of granularity. There are a number of queries that are built into a project created using the MSF Agile 5.0 template, but we now have multiple projects and it would be a pain to have to edit all of the work items every time we changed project, and that would only allow one team to work on one project at a time.   Figure: The Queries that are created in a normal MSF Agile 5.0 project do not quite suit our new needs. In order for project contributors to be able to query based on their project we need a couple of things. The first thing I did was to create an “_Area Template” folder that has a copy of the project layout with all the queries setup to filter based on the “_Area Template” Area and the “_Sprint template” you can see in the Area and Iteration views. Figure: The template is currently easily drag and drop, but you then need to edit the queries to point at the right Area and Iteration. This needs a tool. I then created an “Areas” folder to hold all of the area specific queries. So, when you go to create a new TFS Sub-Project you just drag “_Area Template” while holding “Ctrl” and drop it onto “Areas”. There is a little setup here. That said I managed it in around 10 minutes which is not so bad, and I can imagine it being quite easy to build a tool to create these queries Figure: These new queries can be configured in around 10 minutes, which includes setting up the Area and Iteration as well. Version Control What about your source code? Well, that is the easiest of the lot. Just create a sub folder for each of your projects/products.   Figure: Creating sub folders in source control is easy as “Right click | Create new folder”. <teamproject>\DEV\Main\ Becomes: <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\DEV\Main\ Conclusion I think it is up to each company to make a call on how you want to configure your Team Projects and it depends completely on how many projects/products you are going to have for each customer including yourself. If we decide to utilise this route it will require some configuration to get our 170+ projects into this format, and I will probably be writing some tools to help. Pros You only have one project to upgrade when a process template changes – After going through an upgrade of over 170 project prior to the changes in the RC I can tell you that that many projects is no fun. Standardises your Process Template – You will always have the same Process implementation across projects/products without exception You get tighter control over the permissions – Yes, you can do this on a standard Team Project, but it gets a lot easier with practice. You can “move” work items from one “product” to another – Have we not always wanted to do that. You can rename your projects – Wahoo: everyone wants to do this, now you can. One set of Reporting Services reports to manage – You set an area and iteration to run reports anyway, so you may as well set both. Simplified Check-In Policies– There is only one set of check-in policies per client. This simplifies administration of policies. Simplified Alerts – As alerts are applied across multiple projects this simplifies your alert rules as per client. Cons All of these cons could be mitigated by a custom tool that helps automate creation of “Sub-projects” within Team Projects. This custom tool could create areas, Iteration, permissions, SharePoint and queries. It just does not exist yet :) You need to configure the Areas and Iterations You need to configure the permissions You may need to configure sub sites for SharePoint (depends on your requirement) – If you have two projects/products in the same Team Project then you will not see the burn down for each one out-of-the-box, but rather a cumulative for the Team Project. This is not really that much of a problem as you would have to configure your burndown graphs for your current iteration anyway. note: When you create a sub site to a TFS linked portal it will inherit the settings of its parent site :) This is fantastic as it means that you can easily create sub sites and then set the Area and Iteration path in each of the reports to be the correct one. Every team wants their own customization (via Ewald Hofman) - small teams of 2 persons against teams of 30 – or even outsourcing – need their own process, you cannot allow that because everybody gets the same work item types. note: Luckily at SSW this is not a problem as our template is standardised across all projects and customers. Large list of builds (via Ewald Hofman) – As the build list in Team Explorer is just a flat list it can get very cluttered. note: I would mitigate this by removing any build that has not been run in over 30 days. The build template and workflow will still be available in version control, but it will clean the list. Feedback Now that I have explained this method, what do you think? What other pros and cons can you see? What do you think of this approach? Will you be using it? What tools would you like to support you?   Technorati Tags: Visual Studio ALM,TFS Administration,TFS,Team Foundation Server,Project Planning,TFS Customisation

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• ASP.NET GZip Encoding Caveats

  - by Rick Strahl

  GZip encoding in ASP.NET is pretty easy to accomplish using the built-in GZipStream and DeflateStream classes and applying them to the Response.Filter property.  While applying GZip and Deflate behavior is pretty easy there are a few caveats that you have watch out for as I found out today for myself with an application that was throwing up some garbage data. But before looking at caveats let’s review GZip implementation for ASP.NET. ASP.NET GZip/Deflate Basics Response filters basically are applied to the Response.OutputStream and transform it as data is written to it through the ASP.NET Response object. So a Response.Write eventually gets written into the output stream which if a filter is also written through the filter stream’s interface. To perform the actual GZip (and Deflate) encoding typically used by Web pages .NET includes the GZipStream and DeflateStream stream classes which can be readily assigned to the Repsonse.OutputStream. With these two stream classes in place it’s almost trivially easy to create a couple of reusable methods that allow you to compress your HTTP output. In my standard WebUtils utility class (from the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit) created two static utility methods – IsGZipSupported and GZipEncodePage – that check whether the client supports GZip encoding and then actually encodes the current output (note that although the method includes ‘Page’ in its name this code will work with any ASP.NET output). /// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter /// IMPORTANT: /// You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (IsGZipSupported()) { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate")) { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } else { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } } } As you can see the actual assignment of the Filter is as simple as: Response.Filter = new DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); which applies the filter to the OutputStream. You also need to ensure that your response reflects the new GZip or Deflate encoding and ensure that any pages that are cached in Proxy servers can differentiate between pages that were encoded with the various different encodings (or no encoding). To use this utility function now is trivially easy: In any ASP.NET code that wants to compress its Response output you simply use: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); Entry = WebLogFactory.GetEntry(); var entries = Entry.GetLastEntries(App.Configuration.ShowEntryCount, "pk,Title,SafeTitle,Body,Entered,Feedback,Location,ShowTopAd", "TEntries"); if (entries == null) throw new ApplicationException("Couldn't load WebLog Entries: " + Entry.ErrorMessage); this.repEntries.DataSource = entries; this.repEntries.DataBind(); } Here I use an ASP.NET page, but the above WebUtils.GZipEncode() method call will work in any ASP.NET application type including HTTP Handlers. The only requirement is that the filter needs to be applied before any other output is sent to the OutputStream. For example, in my CallbackHandler service implementation by default output over a certain size is GZip encoded. The output that is generated is JSON or XML and if the output is over 5k in size I apply WebUtils.GZipEncode(): if (sbOutput.Length > GZIP_ENCODE_TRESHOLD) WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); Response.ContentType = ControlResources.STR_JsonContentType; HttpContext.Current.Response.Write(sbOutput.ToString()); Ok, so you probably get the idea: Encoding GZip/Deflate content is pretty easy. Hold on there Hoss –Watch your Caching Or is it? There are a few caveats that you need to watch out for when dealing with GZip content. The fist issue is that you need to deal with the fact that some clients don’t support GZip or Deflate content. Most modern browsers support it, but if you have a programmatic Http client accessing your content GZip/Deflate support is by no means guaranteed. For example, WinInet Http clients don’t support GZip out of the box – it has to be explicitly implemented. Other low level HTTP clients on other platforms too don’t support GZip out of the box. The problem is that your application, your Web Server and Proxy Servers on the Internet might be caching your generated content. If you return content with GZip once and then again without, either caching is not applied or worse the wrong type of content is returned back to the client from a cache or proxy. The result is an unreadable response for *some clients* which is also very hard to debug and fix once in production. You already saw the issue of Proxy servers addressed in the GZipEncodePage() function: // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); This ensures that any Proxy servers also check for the Content-Encoding HTTP Header to cache their content – not just the URL. The same thing applies if you do OutputCaching in your own ASP.NET code. If you generate output for GZip on an OutputCached page the GZipped content will be cached (either by ASP.NET’s cache or in some cases by the IIS Kernel Cache). But what if the next client doesn’t support GZip? She’ll get served a cached GZip page that won’t decode and she’ll get a page full of garbage. Wholly undesirable. To fix this you need to add some custom OutputCache rules by way of the GetVaryByCustom() HttpApplication method in your global_ASAX file: public override string GetVaryByCustomString(HttpContext context, string custom) { // Override Caching for compression if (custom == "GZIP") { string acceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Response.Headers["Content-Encoding"]; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(acceptEncoding)) return ""; else if (acceptEncoding.Contains("gzip")) return "GZIP"; else if (acceptEncoding.Contains("deflate")) return "DEFLATE"; return ""; } return base.GetVaryByCustomString(context, custom); } In a page that use Output caching you then specify: <%@ OutputCache Duration="180" VaryByParam="none" VaryByCustom="GZIP" %> To use that custom rule. It’s all Fun and Games until ASP.NET throws an Error Ok, so you’re up and running with GZip, you have your caching squared away and your pages that you are applying it to are jamming along. Then BOOM, something strange happens and you get a lovely garbled page that look like this: Lovely isn’t it? What’s happened here is that I have WebUtils.GZipEncode() applied to my page, but there’s an error in the page. The error falls back to the ASP.NET error handler and the error handler removes all existing output (good) and removes all the custom HTTP headers I’ve set manually (usually good, but very bad here). Since I applied the Response.Filter (via GZipEncode) the output is now GZip encoded, but ASP.NET has removed my Content-Encoding header, so the browser receives the GZip encoded content without a notification that it is encoded as GZip. The result is binary output. Here’s what Fiddler says about the raw HTTP header output when an error occurs when GZip encoding was applied: HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2011 22:21:08 GMT Content-Length: 2138 Connection: close ?`I?%&/m?{J?J??t??` … binary output striped here Notice: no Content-Encoding header and that’s why we’re seeing this garbage. ASP.NET has stripped the Content-Encoding header but left our filter intact. So how do we fix this? In my applications I typically have a global Application_Error handler set up and in this case I’ve been using that. One thing that you can do in the Application_Error handler is explicitly clear out the Response.Filter and set it to null at the top: protected void Application_Error(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Remove any special filtering especially GZip filtering Response.Filter = null; … } And voila I get my Yellow Screen of Death or my custom generated error output back via uncompressed content. BTW, the same is true for Page level errors handled in Page_Error or ASP.NET MVC Error handling methods in a controller. Another and possibly even better solution is to check whether a filter is attached just before the headers are sent to the client as pointed out by Adam Schroeder in the comments: protected void Application_PreSendRequestHeaders() { // ensure that if GZip/Deflate Encoding is applied that headers are set // also works when error occurs if filters are still active HttpResponse response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (response.Filter is GZipStream && response.Headers["Content-encoding"] != "gzip") response.AppendHeader("Content-encoding", "gzip"); else if (response.Filter is DeflateStream && response.Headers["Content-encoding"] != "deflate") response.AppendHeader("Content-encoding", "deflate"); } This uses the Application_PreSendRequestHeaders() pipeline event to check for compression encoding in a filter and adjusts the content accordingly. This is actually a better solution since this is generic – it’ll work regardless of how the content is cleaned up. For example, an error Response.Redirect() or short error display might get changed and the filter not cleared and this code actually handles that. Sweet, thanks Adam. It’s unfortunate that ASP.NET doesn’t natively clear out Response.Filters when an error occurs just as it clears the Response and Headers. I can’t see where leaving a Filter in place in an error situation would make any sense, but hey - this is what it is and it’s easy enough to fix as long as you know where to look. Riiiight! IIS and GZip I should also mention that IIS 7 includes good support for compression natively. If you can defer encoding to let IIS perform it for you rather than doing it in your code by all means you should do it! Especially any static or semi-dynamic content that can be made static should be using IIS built-in compression. Dynamic caching is also supported but is a bit more tricky to judge in terms of performance and footprint. John Forsyth has a great article on the benefits and drawbacks of IIS 7 compression which gives some detailed performance comparisons and impact reviews. I’ll post another entry next with some more info on IIS compression since information on it seems to be a bit hard to come by. Related Content Built-in GZip/Deflate Compression in IIS 7.x HttpWebRequest and GZip Responses © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET   IIS7  

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• Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms - Client IDs (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series)

  - by ScottGu

  This is the sixteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post is the first of a few blog posts I’ll be doing that talk about some of the important changes we’ve made to make Web Forms in ASP.NET 4 generate clean, standards-compliant, CSS-friendly markup.  Today I’ll cover the work we are doing to provide better control over the “ID” attributes rendered by server controls to the client. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Clean, Standards-Based, CSS-Friendly Markup One of the common complaints developers have often had with ASP.NET Web Forms is that when using server controls they don’t have the ability to easily generate clean, CSS-friendly output and markup.  Some of the specific complaints with previous ASP.NET releases include: Auto-generated ID attributes within HTML make it hard to write JavaScript and style with CSS Use of tables instead of semantic markup for certain controls (in particular the asp:menu control) make styling ugly Some controls render inline style properties even if no style property on the control has been set ViewState can often be bigger than ideal ASP.NET 4 provides better support for building standards-compliant pages out of the box.  The built-in <asp:> server controls with ASP.NET 4 now generate cleaner markup and support CSS styling – and help address all of the above issues.  Markup Compatibility When Upgrading Existing ASP.NET Web Forms Applications A common question people often ask when hearing about the cleaner markup coming with ASP.NET 4 is “Great - but what about my existing applications?  Will these changes/improvements break things when I upgrade?” To help ensure that we don’t break assumptions around markup and styling with existing ASP.NET Web Forms applications, we’ve enabled a configuration flag – controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion – within web.config that let’s you decide if you want to use the new cleaner markup approach that is the default with new ASP.NET 4 applications, or for compatibility reasons render the same markup that previous versions of ASP.NET used:   When the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag is set to “3.5” your application and server controls will by default render output using the same markup generation used with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5.  When the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag is set to “4.0” your application and server controls will strictly adhere to the XHTML 1.1 specification, have cleaner client IDs, render with semantic correctness in mind, and have extraneous inline styles removed. This flag defaults to 4.0 for all new ASP.NET Web Forms applications built using ASP.NET 4. Any previous application that is upgraded using VS 2010 will have the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag automatically set to 3.5 by the upgrade wizard to ensure backwards compatibility.  You can then optionally change it (either at the application level, or scope it within the web.config file to be on a per page or directory level) if you move your pages to use CSS and take advantage of the new markup rendering. Today’s Cleaner Markup Topic: Client IDs The ability to have clean, predictable, ID attributes on rendered HTML elements is something developers have long asked for with Web Forms (ID values like “ctl00_ContentPlaceholder1_ListView1_ctrl0_Label1” are not very popular).  Having control over the ID values rendered helps make it much easier to write client-side JavaScript against the output, makes it easier to style elements using CSS, and on large pages can help reduce the overall size of the markup generated. New ClientIDMode Property on Controls ASP.NET 4 supports a new ClientIDMode property on the Control base class.  The ClientIDMode property indicates how controls should generate client ID values when they render.  The ClientIDMode property supports four possible values: AutoID—Renders the output as in .NET 3.5 (auto-generated IDs which will still render prefixes like ctrl00 for compatibility) Predictable (Default)— Trims any “ctl00” ID string and if a list/container control concatenates child ids (example: id=”ParentControl_ChildControl”) Static—Hands over full ID naming control to the developer – whatever they set as the ID of the control is what is rendered (example: id=”JustMyId”) Inherit—Tells the control to defer to the naming behavior mode of the parent container control The ClientIDMode property can be set directly on individual controls (or within container controls – in which case the controls within them will by default inherit the setting): Or it can be specified at a page or usercontrol level (using the <%@ Page %> or <%@ Control %> directives) – in which case controls within the pages/usercontrols inherit the setting (and can optionally override it): Or it can be set within the web.config file of an application – in which case pages within the application inherit the setting (and can optionally override it): This gives you the flexibility to customize/override the naming behavior however you want. Example: Using the ClientIDMode property to control the IDs of Non-List Controls Let’s take a look at how we can use the new ClientIDMode property to control the rendering of “ID” elements within a page.  To help illustrate this we can create a simple page called “SingleControlExample.aspx” that is based on a master-page called “Site.Master”, and which has a single <asp:label> control with an ID of “Message” that is contained with an <asp:content> container control called “MainContent”: Within our code-behind we’ll then add some simple code like below to dynamically populate the Label’s Text property at runtime:   If we were running this application using ASP.NET 3.5 (or had our ASP.NET 4 application configured to run using 3.5 rendering or ClientIDMode=AutoID), then the generated markup sent down to the client would look like below: This ID is unique (which is good) – but rather ugly because of the “ct100” prefix (which is bad). Markup Rendering when using ASP.NET 4 and the ClientIDMode is set to “Predictable” With ASP.NET 4, server controls by default now render their ID’s using ClientIDMode=”Predictable”.  This helps ensure that ID values are still unique and don’t conflict on a page, but at the same time it makes the IDs less verbose and more predictable.  This means that the generated markup of our <asp:label> control above will by default now look like below with ASP.NET 4: Notice that the “ct100” prefix is gone. Because the “Message” control is embedded within a “MainContent” container control, by default it’s ID will be prefixed “MainContent_Message” to avoid potential collisions with other controls elsewhere within the page. Markup Rendering when using ASP.NET 4 and the ClientIDMode is set to “Static” Sometimes you don’t want your ID values to be nested hierarchically, though, and instead just want the ID rendered to be whatever value you set it as.  To enable this you can now use ClientIDMode=static, in which case the ID rendered will be exactly the same as what you set it on the server-side on your control.  This will cause the below markup to be rendered with ASP.NET 4: This option now gives you the ability to completely control the client ID values sent down by controls. Example: Using the ClientIDMode property to control the IDs of Data-Bound List Controls Data-bound list/grid controls have historically been the hardest to use/style when it comes to working with Web Form’s automatically generated IDs.  Let’s now take a look at a scenario where we’ll customize the ID’s rendered using a ListView control with ASP.NET 4. The code snippet below is an example of a ListView control that displays the contents of a data-bound collection — in this case, airports: We can then write code like below within our code-behind to dynamically databind a list of airports to the ListView above: At runtime this will then by default generate a <ul> list of airports like below.  Note that because the <ul> and <li> elements in the ListView’s template are not server controls, no IDs are rendered in our markup: Adding Client ID’s to Each Row Item Now, let’s say that we wanted to add client-ID’s to the output so that we can programmatically access each <li> via JavaScript.  We want these ID’s to be unique, predictable, and identifiable. A first approach would be to mark each <li> element within the template as being a server control (by giving it a runat=server attribute) and by giving each one an id of “airport”: By default ASP.NET 4 will now render clean IDs like below (no ctl001-like ids are rendered):   Using the ClientIDRowSuffix Property Our template above now generates unique ID’s for each <li> element – but if we are going to access them programmatically on the client using JavaScript we might want to instead have the ID’s contain the airport code within them to make them easier to reference.  The good news is that we can easily do this by taking advantage of the new ClientIDRowSuffix property on databound controls in ASP.NET 4 to better control the ID’s of our individual row elements. To do this, we’ll set the ClientIDRowSuffix property to “Code” on our ListView control.  This tells the ListView to use the databound “Code” property from our Airport class when generating the ID: And now instead of having row suffixes like “1”, “2”, and “3”, we’ll instead have the Airport.Code value embedded within the IDs (e.g: _CLE, _CAK, _PDX, etc): You can use this ClientIDRowSuffix approach with other databound controls like the GridView as well. It is useful anytime you want to program row elements on the client – and use clean/identified IDs to easily reference them from JavaScript code. Summary ASP.NET 4 enables you to generate much cleaner HTML markup from server controls and from within your Web Forms applications.  In today’s post I covered how you can now easily control the client ID values that are rendered by server controls.  In upcoming posts I’ll cover some of the other markup improvements that are also coming with the ASP.NET 4 release. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Gone With the Wind?

  - by antony.reynolds

  Where Have All the Composites Gone? I was just asked to help out with an interesting problem at a customer.  All their composites had disappeared from the EM console, none of them showed as loading in the log files and there was an ominous error message in the logs. Symptoms After a server restart the customer noticed that none of his composites were available, they didn’t show in the EM console and in the log files they saw this error message: SEVERE: WLSFabricKernelInitializer.getCompositeList Error during parsing and processing of deployed-composites.xml file This indicates some sort of problem when parsing the deployed-composites.xml file.  This is very bad because the deployed-composites.xml file is basically the table of contents that tells SOA Infrastructure what composites to load and where to find them in MDS.  If you can’t read this file you can’t load any composites and your SOA Server now has all the utility of a chocolate teapot. Verification We can look at the deployed-composites.xml file from MDS either by connecting JDeveloper to MDS, exporting the file using WLST or exporting the whole soa-infra MDS partition by using EM->SOA->soa-infra->Administration->MDS Configuration.  Exporting via EM is probably the easiest because it then prepares you to fix the problem later.  After exporting the partition to local storage on the SOA Server I then ran an XSLT transform across the file deployed-composites/deployed-composites.xml. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">     <xsl:output indent="yes"/>     <xsl:template match="/">         <testResult>             <composite-series>                 <xsl:attribute name="elementCount"><xsl:value-of select="count(deployed-composites/composite-series)"/></xsl:attribute>                 <xsl:attribute name="nameAttributeCount"><xsl:value-of select="count(deployed-composites/composite-series[@name])"/></xsl:attribute>                 <xsl:attribute name="defaultAttributeCount"><xsl:value-of select="count(deployed-composites/composite-series[@default])"/></xsl:attribute>                 <composite-revision>                     <xsl:attribute name="elementCount"><xsl:value-of select="count(deployed-composites/composite-series/composite-revision)"/></xsl:attribute>                     <xsl:attribute name="dnAttributeCount"><xsl:value-of select="count(deployed-composites/composite-series/composite-revision[@dn])"/></xsl:attribute>                     <xsl:attribute name="stateAttributeCount"><xsl:value-of select="count(deployed-composites/composite-series/composite-revision[@state])"/></xsl:attribute>                     <xsl:attribute name="modeAttributeCount"><xsl:value-of select="count(deployed-composites/composite-series/composite-revision[@mode])"/></xsl:attribute>                     <xsl:attribute name="locationAttributeCount"><xsl:value-of select="count(deployed-composites/composite-series/composite-revision[@location])"/></xsl:attribute>                     <composite>                         <xsl:attribute name="elementCount"><xsl:value-of select="count(deployed-composites/composite-series/composite-revision/composite)"/></xsl:attribute>                         <xsl:attribute name="dnAttributeCount"><xsl:value-of select="count(deployed-composites/composite-series/composite-revision/composite[@dn])"/></xsl:attribute>                         <xsl:attribute name="deployedTimeAttributeCount"><xsl:value-of select="count(deployed-composites/composite-series/composite-revision/composite[@deployedTime])"/></xsl:attribute>                     </composite>                 </composite-revision>                 <xsl:apply-templates select="deployed-composites/composite-series"/>             </composite-series>         </testResult>     </xsl:template>     <xsl:template match="composite-series">             <xsl:if test="not(@name) or not(@default) or composite-revision[not(@dn) or not(@state) or not(@mode) or not(@location)]">                 <ErrorNode>                     <xsl:attribute name="elementPos"><xsl:value-of select="position()"/></xsl:attribute>                     <xsl:copy-of select="."/>                 </ErrorNode>             </xsl:if>     </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> The output from this is not pretty but it shows any <composite-series> tags that are missing expected attributes (name and default).  It also shows how many composites are in the file (111) and how many revisions of those composites (115). <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <testResult xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">    <composite-series elementCount="111" nameAttributeCount="110" defaultAttributeCount="110">       <composite-revision elementCount="115" dnAttributeCount="114" stateAttributeCount="115"                           modeAttributeCount="115"                           locationAttributeCount="114">          <composite elementCount="115" dnAttributeCount="114" deployedTimeAttributeCount="115"/>       </composite-revision>       <ErrorNode elementPos="82">          <composite-series xmlns="">             <composite-revision state="on" mode="active">                <composite deployedTime="2010-12-15T11:50:16.067+01:00"/>             </composite-revision>          </composite-series>       </ErrorNode>    </composite-series> </testResult> From this I could see that one of the <composite-series> elements (number 82 of 111) seemed to be corrupt. Having found the problem I now needed to fix it. Fixing the Problem The solution was really quite easy.  First for safeties sake I took a backup of the exported MDS partition.  I then edited the deployed-composites/deployed-composites.xml file to remove the offending <composite-series> tag. Finally I restarted the SOA domain and was rewarded by seeing that the deployed composites were now visible. Summary One possible cause of not being able to see deployed composites after a SOA 11g system restart is a corrupt deployed-composites.xml file.  Retrieving this file from MDS, repairing it, and replacing it back into MDS can solve the problem.  This still leaves the problem of how did this file become corrupt!

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• Developing web apps using ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor and EF Code First - Part 1

  - by shiju

  In this post, I will demonstrate web application development using ASP. NET MVC 3, Razor and EF code First. This post will also cover Dependency Injection using Unity 2.0 and generic Repository and Unit of Work for EF Code First. The following frameworks will be used for this step by step tutorial. ASP.NET MVC 3 EF Code First CTP 5 Unity 2.0 Define Domain Model Let’s create domain model for our simple web application Category class public class Category {     public int CategoryId { get; set; }     [Required(ErrorMessage = "Name Required")]     [StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Must be less than 25 characters")]     public string Name { get; set;}     public string Description { get; set; }     public virtual ICollection<Expense> Expenses { get; set; } }   Expense class public class Expense {             public int ExpenseId { get; set; }            public string  Transaction { get; set; }     public DateTime Date { get; set; }     public double Amount { get; set; }     public int CategoryId { get; set; }     public virtual Category Category { get; set; } } We have two domain entities - Category and Expense. A single category contains a list of expense transactions and every expense transaction should have a Category. In this post, we will be focusing on CRUD operations for the entity Category and will be working on the Expense entity with a View Model object in the later post. And the source code for this application will be refactored over time. The above entities are very simple POCO (Plain Old CLR Object) classes and the entity Category is decorated with validation attributes in the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace. Now we want to use these entities for defining model objects for the Entity Framework 4. Using the Code First approach of Entity Framework, we can first define the entities by simply writing POCO classes without any coupling with any API or database library. This approach lets you focus on domain model which will enable Domain-Driven Development for applications. EF code first support is currently enabled with a separate API that is runs on top of the Entity Framework 4. EF Code First is reached CTP 5 when I am writing this article. Creating Context Class for Entity Framework We have created our domain model and let’s create a class in order to working with Entity Framework Code First. For this, you have to download EF Code First CTP 5 and add reference to the assembly EntitFramework.dll. You can also use NuGet to download add reference to EEF Code First.    public class MyFinanceContext : DbContext {     public MyFinanceContext() : base("MyFinance") { }     public DbSet<Category> Categories { get; set; }     public DbSet<Expense> Expenses { get; set; }         }   The above class MyFinanceContext is derived from DbContext that can connect your model classes to a database. The MyFinanceContext class is mapping our Category and Expense class into database tables Categories and Expenses using DbSet<TEntity> where TEntity is any POCO class. When we are running the application at first time, it will automatically create the database. EF code-first look for a connection string in web.config or app.config that has the same name as the dbcontext class. If it is not find any connection string with the convention, it will automatically create database in local SQL Express database by default and the name of the database will be same name as the dbcontext class. You can also define the name of database in constructor of the the dbcontext class. Unlike NHibernate, we don’t have to use any XML based mapping files or Fluent interface for mapping between our model and database. The model classes of Code First are working on the basis of conventions and we can also use a fluent API to refine our model. The convention for primary key is ‘Id’ or ‘<class name>Id’.  If primary key properties are detected with type ‘int’, ‘long’ or ‘short’, they will automatically registered as identity columns in the database by default. Primary key detection is not case sensitive. We can define our model classes with validation attributes in the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace and it automatically enforces validation rules when a model object is updated or saved. Generic Repository for EF Code First We have created model classes and dbcontext class. Now we have to create generic repository pattern for data persistence with EF code first. If you don’t know about the repository pattern, checkout Martin Fowler’s article on Repository Let’s create a generic repository to working with DbContext and DbSet generics. public interface IRepository<T> where T : class     {         void Add(T entity);         void Delete(T entity);         T GetById(long Id);         IEnumerable<T> All();     }   RepositoryBasse – Generic Repository class public abstract class RepositoryBase<T> where T : class { private MyFinanceContext database; private readonly IDbSet<T> dbset; protected RepositoryBase(IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory) {     DatabaseFactory = databaseFactory;     dbset = Database.Set<T>(); }   protected IDatabaseFactory DatabaseFactory {     get; private set; }   protected MyFinanceContext Database {     get { return database ?? (database = DatabaseFactory.Get()); } } public virtual void Add(T entity) {     dbset.Add(entity);            }        public virtual void Delete(T entity) {     dbset.Remove(entity); }   public virtual T GetById(long id) {     return dbset.Find(id); }   public virtual IEnumerable<T> All() {     return dbset.ToList(); } }   DatabaseFactory class public class DatabaseFactory : Disposable, IDatabaseFactory {     private MyFinanceContext database;     public MyFinanceContext Get()     {         return database ?? (database = new MyFinanceContext());     }     protected override void DisposeCore()     {         if (database != null)             database.Dispose();     } } Unit of Work If you are new to Unit of Work pattern, checkout Fowler’s article on Unit of Work . According to Martin Fowler, the Unit of Work pattern "maintains a list of objects affected by a business transaction and coordinates the writing out of changes and the resolution of concurrency problems." Let’s create a class for handling Unit of Work   public interface IUnitOfWork {     void Commit(); }   UniOfWork class public class UnitOfWork : IUnitOfWork {     private readonly IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory;     private MyFinanceContext dataContext;       public UnitOfWork(IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory)     {         this.databaseFactory = databaseFactory;     }       protected MyFinanceContext DataContext     {         get { return dataContext ?? (dataContext = databaseFactory.Get()); }     }       public void Commit()     {         DataContext.Commit();     } }   The Commit method of the UnitOfWork will call the commit method of MyFinanceContext class and it will execute the SaveChanges method of DbContext class.   Repository class for Category In this post, we will be focusing on the persistence against Category entity and will working on other entities in later post. Let’s create a repository for handling CRUD operations for Category using derive from a generic Repository RepositoryBase<T>.   public class CategoryRepository: RepositoryBase<Category>, ICategoryRepository     {     public CategoryRepository(IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory)         : base(databaseFactory)         {         }                } public interface ICategoryRepository : IRepository<Category> { } If we need additional methods than generic repository for the Category, we can define in the CategoryRepository. Dependency Injection using Unity 2.0 If you are new to Inversion of Control/ Dependency Injection or Unity, please have a look on my articles at http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/tags/IoC/default.aspx. I want to create a custom lifetime manager for Unity to store container in the current HttpContext.   public class HttpContextLifetimeManager<T> : LifetimeManager, IDisposable {     public override object GetValue()     {         return HttpContext.Current.Items[typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName];     }     public override void RemoveValue()     {         HttpContext.Current.Items.Remove(typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName);     }     public override void SetValue(object newValue)     {         HttpContext.Current.Items[typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName] = newValue;     }     public void Dispose()     {         RemoveValue();     } }   Let’s create controller factory for Unity in the ASP.NET MVC 3 application. public class UnityControllerFactory : DefaultControllerFactory { IUnityContainer container; public UnityControllerFactory(IUnityContainer container) {     this.container = container; } protected override IController GetControllerInstance(RequestContext reqContext, Type controllerType) {     IController controller;     if (controllerType == null)         throw new HttpException(                 404, String.Format(                     "The controller for path '{0}' could not be found" +     "or it does not implement IController.",                 reqContext.HttpContext.Request.Path));       if (!typeof(IController).IsAssignableFrom(controllerType))         throw new ArgumentException(                 string.Format(                     "Type requested is not a controller: {0}",                     controllerType.Name),                     "controllerType");     try     {         controller= container.Resolve(controllerType) as IController;     }     catch (Exception ex)     {         throw new InvalidOperationException(String.Format(                                 "Error resolving controller {0}",                                 controllerType.Name), ex);     }     return controller; }   }   Configure contract and concrete types in Unity Let’s configure our contract and concrete types in Unity for resolving our dependencies.   private void ConfigureUnity() {     //Create UnityContainer               IUnityContainer container = new UnityContainer()                 .RegisterType<IDatabaseFactory, DatabaseFactory>(new HttpContextLifetimeManager<IDatabaseFactory>())     .RegisterType<IUnitOfWork, UnitOfWork>(new HttpContextLifetimeManager<IUnitOfWork>())     .RegisterType<ICategoryRepository, CategoryRepository>(new HttpContextLifetimeManager<ICategoryRepository>());                 //Set container for Controller Factory                ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(             new UnityControllerFactory(container)); }   In the above ConfigureUnity method, we are registering our types onto Unity container with custom lifetime manager HttpContextLifetimeManager. Let’s call ConfigureUnity method in the Global.asax.cs for set controller factory for Unity and configuring the types with Unity.   protected void Application_Start() {     AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();     RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilters.Filters);     RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);     ConfigureUnity(); }   Developing web application using ASP.NET MVC 3 We have created our domain model for our web application and also have created repositories and configured dependencies with Unity container. Now we have to create controller classes and views for doing CRUD operations against the Category entity. Let’s create controller class for Category Category Controller   public class CategoryController : Controller {     private readonly ICategoryRepository categoryRepository;     private readonly IUnitOfWork unitOfWork;           public CategoryController(ICategoryRepository categoryRepository, IUnitOfWork unitOfWork)     {         this.categoryRepository = categoryRepository;         this.unitOfWork = unitOfWork;     }       public ActionResult Index()     {         var categories = categoryRepository.All();         return View(categories);     }     [HttpGet]     public ActionResult Edit(int id)     {         var category = categoryRepository.GetById(id);         return View(category);     }       [HttpPost]     public ActionResult Edit(int id, FormCollection collection)     {         var category = categoryRepository.GetById(id);         if (TryUpdateModel(category))         {             unitOfWork.Commit();             return RedirectToAction("Index");         }         else return View(category);                 }       [HttpGet]     public ActionResult Create()     {         var category = new Category();         return View(category);     }           [HttpPost]     public ActionResult Create(Category category)     {         if (!ModelState.IsValid)         {             return View("Create", category);         }                     categoryRepository.Add(category);         unitOfWork.Commit();         return RedirectToAction("Index");     }       [HttpPost]     public ActionResult Delete(int  id)     {         var category = categoryRepository.GetById(id);         categoryRepository.Delete(category);         unitOfWork.Commit();         var categories = categoryRepository.All();         return PartialView("CategoryList", categories);       }        }   Creating Views in Razor Now we are going to create views in Razor for our ASP.NET MVC 3 application.  Let’s create a partial view CategoryList.cshtml for listing category information and providing link for Edit and Delete operations. CategoryList.cshtml @using MyFinance.Helpers; @using MyFinance.Domain; @model IEnumerable<Category>      <table>         <tr>         <th>Actions</th>         <th>Name</th>          <th>Description</th>         </tr>     @foreach (var item in Model) {             <tr>             <td>                 @Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit",new { id = item.CategoryId })                 @Ajax.ActionLink("Delete", "Delete", new { id = item.CategoryId }, new AjaxOptions { Confirm = "Delete Expense?", HttpMethod = "Post", UpdateTargetId = "divCategoryList" })                           </td>             <td>                 @item.Name             </td>             <td>                 @item.Description             </td>         </tr>          }       </table>     <p>         @Html.ActionLink("Create New", "Create")     </p> The delete link is providing Ajax functionality using the Ajax.ActionLink. This will call an Ajax request for Delete action method in the CategoryCotroller class. In the Delete action method, it will return Partial View CategoryList after deleting the record. We are using CategoryList view for the Ajax functionality and also for Index view using for displaying list of category information. Let’s create Index view using partial view CategoryList  Index.chtml @model IEnumerable<MyFinance.Domain.Category> @{     ViewBag.Title = "Index"; }    <h2>Category List</h2>    <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>    <div id="divCategoryList">               @Html.Partial("CategoryList", Model) </div>   We can call the partial views using Html.Partial helper method. Now we are going to create View pages for insert and update functionality for the Category. Both view pages are sharing common user interface for entering the category information. So I want to create an EditorTemplate for the Category information. We have to create the EditorTemplate with the same name of entity object so that we can refer it on view pages using @Html.EditorFor(model => model) . So let’s create template with name Category. Let’s create view page for insert Category information   @model MyFinance.Domain.Category   @{     ViewBag.Title = "Save"; }   <h2>Create</h2>   <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>   @using (Html.BeginForm()) {     @Html.ValidationSummary(true)     <fieldset>         <legend>Category</legend>                @Html.EditorFor(model => model)               <p>             <input type="submit" value="Create" />         </p>     </fieldset> }   <div>     @Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index") </div> ViewStart file In Razor views, we can add a file named _viewstart.cshtml in the views directory  and this will be shared among the all views with in the Views directory. The below code in the _viewstart.cshtml, sets the Layout page for every Views in the Views folder.      @{     Layout = "~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml"; }   Source Code You can download the source code from http://efmvc.codeplex.com/ . The source will be refactored on over time.   Summary In this post, we have created a simple web application using ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First. We have discussed on technologies and practices such as ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor, EF Code First, Unity 2, generic Repository and Unit of Work. In my later posts, I will modify the application and will be discussed on more things. Stay tuned to my blog  for more posts on step by step application building.

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• Do’s and Don’ts Building SharePoint Applications

  - by Bil Simser

  SharePoint is a great platform for building quick LOB applications. Simple things from employee time trackers to server and software inventory to full blown Help Desks can be crafted up using SharePoint from just customizing Lists. No programming necessary. However there are a few tricks I’ve painfully learned over the years that you can use for your own solutions. DO What’s In A Name? When you create a new list, column, or view you’ll commonly name it something like “Expense Reports”. However this has the ugly effect of creating a url to the list as “Expense%20Reports”. Or worse, an internal field name of “Expense_x0x0020_Reports” which is not only cryptic but hard to remember when you’re trying to find the column by internal name. While “Expense Reports 2011” is user friendly, “ExpenseReports2011” is not (unless you’re a programmer). So that’s not the solution. Well, not entirely. Instead when you create your column or list or view use the scrunched up name (I can’t think of the technical term for it right now) of “ExpenseReports2011”, “WomenAtTheOfficeThatAreMen” or “KoalaMeatIsGoodWhenBroiled”. After you’ve created it, go back and change the name to the more friendly “Silly Expense Reports That Nobody Reads”. The original internal name will be the url and code friendly one without spaces while the one used on data entry forms and view headers will be the human version. Smart Columns When building a view include columns that make sense. By default when you add a column the “Add to default view” is checked. Resist the urge to be lazy and leave it checked. Uncheck that puppy and decide consciously what columns should be included in the view. Pick columns that make sense to what the user is trying to do. This means you have to talk to the user. Yes, I know. That can be trying at times and even painful. Go ahead, talk to them. You might learn something. Find out what’s important to them and why. If they’re doing something repetitively as part of their job, try to make their life easier by including what’s most important to them. Do they really need to see the Created *and* Modified date of a document or do they just need the title and author? You’ll only find out after talking to them (or getting them drunk in a bar and leaving them in the back alley handcuffed to a garbage bin, don’t ask). Gotta Keep it Separated Hey, views are there for a reason. Use them. While “All Items” is a fine way to present a list of well, all items, it’s hardly sufficient to present a list of servers built before the Y2K bug hit. You’ll be scrolling the list for hours finally arriving at Page 387 of 12,591 and cursing that SharePoint guy for convincing you that putting your hardware into a list would be of any use to anyone. Next to collecting the data, presenting it is just as important. Views are often overlooked and many times ignored or misused. They’re the way you can slice and dice the data up so that you’re not trying to consume 3,000 years of human evolution on a single web page. Remember views can be filtered so feel free to create a view for each status or one for each operating system or one for each species of Information Worker you might be putting in that list or document library. Not only will it reduce the number of items someone sees at one time, it’ll also make the information that much more relevant. Also remember that each view is a separate page. Use it in navigation by creating a menu on the Quick Launch to each view. The discoverability of the Views menu isn’t overly obvious and if you violate the rule of columns (see Horizontally Scrolling below) the view menu doesn’t even show up until you shuffle the scroll bar to the left. Navigation links, big giant buttons, a screaming flashing “CLICK ME NOW” will help your users find their way. Sort It! Views are great so we’re building nice, rich views for the user. Awesomesauce. However sort is not very discoverable by the user. For example when you’re looking at a view how do you know if it’s ascending or descending and what is it sorted on. Maybe it’s sorted using two fields so what’s that all about? Help your users by letting them know the information they’re looking at is sorted. Maybe you name the view something appropriate like “Bogus Expense Claims Sorted By Deadbeats”. If you use the naming strategy just make sure you keep the name consistent with the description. In the previous example their better be a Deadbeat column so I can see the sort in action. Having a “Loser” column, while equally correct, is a little obtuse to the average Information Worker. Remember, they usually don’t use acronyms and even if they knew how to, it’s not immediately obvious to them that’s what you’re trying to convey. Another option is to simply drop a Content Editor Web Part above the list and explain exactly the view they’re looking at. Each view is it’s own page so one CEWP won’t be used across the board. Be descriptive in what the user is seeing but try to keep it brief. Dumping the first chapter of I, Claudius might be informative to the data but can gobble up screen real estate and miss the point of having the list. DO NOT Useless Attachments The attachments column is, in a word, useless. For the most part. Sure it indicates there’s an attachment on the list item but in the grand scheme of things that’s not overly informative. Maybe it is and by all means, if it makes sense to you include it. Colour it. Make it shine and stand like the Return of Clippy on every SharePoint list. Without it being functional it can be boring. EndUserSharePoint.com has an article to make the son of Clippy that much more useful so feel free to head over and check out this blog post by Paul Grenier on the task (Warning code ahead! Danger Will Robinson!) In any case, I would suggest you remove it from your views. Again if it’s important then include it but consider the jQuery solution above to make it functional. It’s added by default to views and one of things that people forget to clean up. Horizontal Scrolling Screen real estate is premium so building a list that contains 8,000 columns and stretches horizontally across 15 screens probably isn’t the most user friendly experience. Most users can’t figure out how to scroll vertically let alone horizontally so don’t make it even that more confusing for them. Take the Steve Krug approach in your view designs and try not to make the user think. Again views are your friend. Consider splitting up the data into views where one view contains 10 columns and other view contains the other 10. Okay, maybe your information doesn’t work that way but humans can only process 7 pieces of data at a time, 10 at most (then their heads explode and you don’t want to clean that mess up, especially on a Friday night before the big dance). It drives me batshit crazy when I see a view with 80 columns of data. I often ask the user “So what do you do with all this information”. The response is usually “With this data [the first 10 columns] I decide if I’m going to fire everyone, and with this data [the next 10 columns] I decide if I’m going to set the building on fire and collect the insurance”. It’s at that point I show them how to create two new views “People Who Are About To Get The Axe” and “Beach Time For The Executives”. Again, talk to your users and try to reason with them on cutting down the number of columns they see at once. Vertical Scrolling Another big faux pas I find is the use of multi-line comment fields in views. It’s not so bad when you have a statement like this in your view: “I really like, oh my god, thought I was going to scream when I saw this turtle then I decided what I was going to have for dinner and frankly I hate having to work late so when I was talking to the customer I thought, oh my god, what if the customer has turtles and then it appeared to me that I really was hungry so I'm going to have lunch now.” It’s fine if that’s the only column along with two or three others, but once you slap those 20 columns of data into the list, the comment field wraps and forms a new multi-page novel that takes up your entire screen. Do everyone a favour and just avoid adding the column to views. Train the user to just click through to the item if they need to see the contents. Duplicate Information Duplication is never good. Views and great as you can group data together. For example create a view of project status reports grouped by author. Then you can see what project manager is being a dip and not submitting their report. However if you group by author do you really need the Created By field as well in the view? Or if the view is grouped by Project then Author do you need both. Horizontal real estate is always at a premium so try not to clutter up the view with duplicate data like this. Oh  yeah, if you’re scratching your head saying “But Bil, if I don’t include the Project name in the view and I have a lot of items then how do I know which one I’m looking at”. That’s a hint that your grouping is too vague or you have too much data in the view based on that criteria. Filter it down a notch, create some views, and try to keep the group down to a single screen where you can see the group header at the top of the page. Again it’s just managing the information you have. Redundant, See Redundant This partially relates to duplicate information and smart columns but basically remember to not include the obvious in a view. Remember, don’t make me think. If you’ve gone to the trouble (and it was a lot of trouble wasn’t it?) to create separate views of your data by creating a “September Zombie Brain Sales”, “October Zombie Brain Sales”, etc. then please for the love of all that is holy do not include the Month and Product columns in your view. Similarly if you create a “My” view of anything (“My Favourite Brands of Spandex”, “My Co-Workers I Find The Urge To Disinfect”) then again, do not include the owner or author field (or whatever field you use to identify “My”). That’s just silly. Hope that helps! Happy customizing!

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• Extending NerdDinner: Adding Geolocated Flair

  - by Jon Galloway

  NerdDinner is a website with the audacious goal of “Organizing the world’s nerds and helping them eat in packs.” Because nerds aren’t likely to socialize with others unless a website tells them to do it. Scott Hanselman showed off a lot of the cool features we’ve added to NerdDinner lately during his popular talk at MIX10, Beyond File | New Company: From Cheesy Sample to Social Platform. Did you miss it? Go ahead and watch it, I’ll wait. One of the features we wanted to add was flair. You know about flair, right? It’s a way to let folks who like your site show it off in their own site. For example, here’s my StackOverflow flair: Great! So how could we add some of this flair stuff to NerdDinner? What do we want to show? If we’re going to encourage our users to give up a bit of their beautiful website to show off a bit of ours, we need to think about what they’ll want to show. For instance, my StackOverflow flair is all about me, not StackOverflow. So how will this apply to NerdDinner? Since NerdDinner is all about organizing local dinners, in order for the flair to be useful it needs to make sense for the person viewing the web page. If someone visits from Egypt visits my blog, they should see information about NerdDinners in Egypt. That’s geolocation – localizing site content based on where the browser’s sitting, and it makes sense for flair as well as entire websites. So we’ll set up a simple little callout that prompts them to host a dinner in their area: Hopefully our flair works and there is a dinner near your viewers, so they’ll see another view which lists upcoming dinners near them: The Geolocation Part Generally website geolocation is done by mapping the requestor’s IP address to a geographic area. It’s not an exact science, but I’ve always found it to be pretty accurate. There are (at least) three ways to handle it: You pay somebody like MaxMind for a database (with regular updates) that sits on your server, and you use their API to do lookups. I used this on a pretty big project a few years ago and it worked well. You use HTML 5 Geolocation API or Google Gears or some other browser based solution. I think those are cool (I use Google Gears a lot), but they’re both in flux right now and I don’t think either has a wide enough of an install base yet to rely on them. You might want to, but I’ve heard you do all kinds of crazy stuff, and sometimes it gets you in trouble. I don’t mean talk out of line, but we all laugh behind your back a bit. But, hey, it’s up to you. It’s your flair or whatever. There are some free webservices out there that will take an IP address and give you location information. Easy, and works for everyone. That’s what we’re doing. I looked at a few different services and settled on IPInfoDB. It’s free, has a great API, and even returns JSON, which is handy for Javascript use. The IP query is pretty simple. We hit a URL like this: http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip=74.125.45.100&timezone=false … and we get an XML response back like this… <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Response> <Ip>74.125.45.100</Ip> <Status>OK</Status> <CountryCode>US</CountryCode> <CountryName>United States</CountryName> <RegionCode>06</RegionCode> <RegionName>California</RegionName> <City>Mountain View</City> <ZipPostalCode>94043</ZipPostalCode> <Latitude>37.4192</Latitude> <Longitude>-122.057</Longitude> </Response> So we’ll build some data transfer classes to hold the location information, like this: public class LocationInfo { public string Country { get; set; } public string RegionName { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } public string ZipPostalCode { get; set; } public LatLong Position { get; set; } } public class LatLong { public float Lat { get; set; } public float Long { get; set; } } And now hitting the service is pretty simple: public static LocationInfo HostIpToPlaceName(string ip) { string url = "http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip={0}&timezone=false"; url = String.Format(url, ip); var result = XDocument.Load(url); var location = (from x in result.Descendants("Response") select new LocationInfo { City = (string)x.Element("City"), RegionName = (string)x.Element("RegionName"), Country = (string)x.Element("CountryName"), ZipPostalCode = (string)x.Element("CountryName"), Position = new LatLong { Lat = (float)x.Element("Latitude"), Long = (float)x.Element("Longitude") } }).First(); return location; } Getting The User’s IP Okay, but first we need the end user’s IP, and you’d think it would be as simple as reading the value from HttpContext: HttpContext.Current.Request.UserHostAddress But you’d be wrong. Sorry. UserHostAddress just wraps HttpContext.Current.Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"], but that doesn’t get you the IP for users behind a proxy. That’s in another header, “HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR". So you can either hit a wrapper and then check a header, or just check two headers. I went for uniformity: string SourceIP = string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]) ? Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"] : Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]; We’re almost set to wrap this up, but first let’s talk about our views. Yes, views, because we’ll have two. Selecting the View We wanted to make it easy for people to include the flair in their sites, so we looked around at how other people were doing this. The StackOverflow folks have a pretty good flair system, which allows you to include the flair in your site as either an IFRAME reference or a Javascript include. We’ll do both. We have a ServicesController to handle use of the site information outside of NerdDinner.com, so this fits in pretty well there. We’ll be displaying the same information for both HTML and Javascript flair, so we can use one Flair controller action which will return a different view depending on the requested format. Here’s our general flow for our controller action: Get the user’s IP Translate it to a location Grab the top three upcoming dinners that are near that location Select the view based on the format (defaulted to “html”) Return a FlairViewModel which contains the list of dinners and the location information public ActionResult Flair(string format = "html") { string SourceIP = string.IsNullOrEmpty( Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]) ? Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"] : Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]; var location = GeolocationService.HostIpToPlaceName(SourceIP); var dinners = dinnerRepository. FindByLocation(location.Position.Lat, location.Position.Long). OrderByDescending(p => p.EventDate).Take(3); // Select the view we'll return. // Using a switch because we'll add in JSON and other formats later. string view; switch (format.ToLower()) { case "javascript": view = "JavascriptFlair"; break; default: view = "Flair"; break; } return View( view, new FlairViewModel { Dinners = dinners.ToList(), LocationName = string.IsNullOrEmpty(location.City) ? "you" : String.Format("{0}, {1}", location.City, location.RegionName) } ); } Note: I’m not in love with the logic here, but it seems like overkill to extract the switch statement away when we’ll probably just have two or three views. What do you think? The HTML View The HTML version of the view is pretty simple – the only thing of any real interest here is the use of an extension method to truncate strings that are would cause the titles to wrap. public static string Truncate(this string s, int maxLength) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(s) || maxLength <= 0) return string.Empty; else if (s.Length > maxLength) return s.Substring(0, maxLength) + "..."; else return s; }   So here’s how the HTML view ends up looking: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<FlairViewModel>" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Helpers" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Models" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Nerd Dinner</title> <link href="/Content/Flair.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="nd-wrapper"> <h2 id="nd-header">NerdDinner.com</h2> <div id="nd-outer"> <% if (Model.Dinners.Count == 0) { %> <div id="nd-bummer"> Looks like there's no Nerd Dinners near <%:Model.LocationName %> in the near future. Why not <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nerddinner.com/Dinners/Create">host one</a>?</div> <% } else { %> <h3> Dinners Near You</h3> <ul> <% foreach (var item in Model.Dinners) { %> <li> <%: Html.ActionLink(String.Format("{0} with {1} on {2}", item.Title.Truncate(20), item.HostedBy, item.EventDate.ToShortDateString()), "Details", "Dinners", new { id = item.DinnerID }, new { target = "_blank" })%></li> <% } %> </ul> <% } %> <div id="nd-footer"> More dinners and fun at <a target="_blank" href="http://nrddnr.com">http://nrddnr.com</a></div> </div> </div> </body> </html> You’d include this in a page using an IFRAME, like this: <IFRAME height=230 marginHeight=0 src="http://nerddinner.com/services/flair" frameBorder=0 width=160 marginWidth=0 scrolling=no></IFRAME> The Javascript view The Javascript flair is written so you can include it in a webpage with a simple script include, like this: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://nerddinner.com/services/flair?format=javascript"></script> The goal of this view is very similar to the HTML embed view, with a few exceptions: We’re creating a script element and adding it to the head of the document, which will then document.write out the content. Note that you have to consider if your users will actually have a <head> element in their documents, but for website flair use cases I think that’s a safe bet. Since the content is being added to the existing page rather than shown in an IFRAME, all links need to be absolute. That means we can’t use Html.ActionLink, since it generates relative routes. We need to escape everything since it’s being written out as strings. We need to set the content type to application/x-javascript. The easiest way to do that is to use the <%@ Page ContentType%> directive. <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<NerdDinner.Models.FlairViewModel>" ContentType="application/x-javascript" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Helpers" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Models" %> document.write('<script>var link = document.createElement(\"link\");link.href = \"http://nerddinner.com/content/Flair.css\";link.rel = \"stylesheet\";link.type = \"text/css\";var head = document.getElementsByTagName(\"head\")[0];head.appendChild(link);</script>'); document.write('<div id=\"nd-wrapper\"><h2 id=\"nd-header\">NerdDinner.com</h2><div id=\"nd-outer\">'); <% if (Model.Dinners.Count == 0) { %> document.write('<div id=\"nd-bummer\">Looks like there\'s no Nerd Dinners near <%:Model.LocationName %> in the near future. Why not <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://www.nerddinner.com/Dinners/Create\">host one</a>?</div>'); <% } else { %> document.write('<h3> Dinners Near You</h3><ul>'); <% foreach (var item in Model.Dinners) { %> document.write('<li><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://nrddnr.com/<%: item.DinnerID %>\"><%: item.Title.Truncate(20) %> with <%: item.HostedBy %> on <%: item.EventDate.ToShortDateString() %></a></li>'); <% } %> document.write('</ul>'); <% } %> document.write('<div id=\"nd-footer\"> More dinners and fun at <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://nrddnr.com\">http://nrddnr.com</a></div></div></div>'); Getting IP’s for Testing There are a variety of online services that will translate a location to an IP, which were handy for testing these out. I found http://www.itouchmap.com/latlong.html to be most useful, but I’m open to suggestions if you know of something better. Next steps I think the next step here is to minimize load – you know, in case people start actually using this flair. There are two places to think about – the NerdDinner.com servers, and the services we’re using for Geolocation. I usually think about caching as a first attack on server load, but that’s less helpful here since every user will have a different IP. Instead, I’d look at taking advantage of Asynchronous Controller Actions, a cool new feature in ASP.NET MVC 2. Async Actions let you call a potentially long-running webservice without tying up a thread on the server while waiting for the response. There’s some good info on that in the MSDN documentation, and Dino Esposito wrote a great article on Asynchronous ASP.NET Pages in the April 2010 issue of MSDN Magazine. But let’s think of the children, shall we? What about ipinfodb.com? Well, they don’t have specific daily limits, but they do throttle you if you put a lot of traffic on them. From their FAQ: We do not have a specific daily limit but queries that are at a rate faster than 2 per second will be put in "queue". If you stay below 2 queries/second everything will be normal. If you go over the limit, you will still get an answer for all queries but they will be slowed down to about 1 per second. This should not affect most users but for high volume websites, you can either use our IP database on your server or we can whitelist your IP for 5$/month (simply use the donate form and leave a comment with your server IP). Good programming practices such as not querying our API for all page views (you can store the data in a cookie or a database) will also help not reaching the limit. So the first step there is to save the geolocalization information in a time-limited cookie, which will allow us to look up the local dinners immediately without having to hit the geolocation service.

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• .htaccess file size causes 500 Internal Server Error

  - by moobot

  As soon as my .htaccess goes over approx 8410 bytes, I get a 500 Internal Server Error. I don't think this is due to a bad redirect, as I have experimented with redirects in the .htaccess and then with just text that is commented out #. (no actual commands in the .htaccess file) Is there anything obvious that can cause this? Update: The site is on WordPress. Here are the redirects I was originally trying to add: RewriteEngine On ## 301 Redirects of old URLs to new # 301 Redirect 1 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^accesseries/underlay/prod_37\.html$ /product-category/accessories/underlays? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 2 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^accessories/acoustic-underlay/prod_29\.html$ /product/acoustic-underlay/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 3 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^accessories/cat_4\.html$ /product-category/accessories/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 4 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-bamboo-flooring/accessories/cat_8\.html$ /product-category/accessories/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 5 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-bamboo-flooring/bamboo-floor/natural-strandwoven-bamboo-semi-gloss-wide-board-135mm-click/prod_151\.html$ /product/natural-strand-woven-bamboo-semi-gloss-wide-board-135mm-click/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 6 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-bamboo-flooring/bamboo-floor/strandwoven-chocolate-135mm-bamboo-flooring/prod_174\.html$ /product/strand-woven-chocolate-135mm-bamboo-flooring/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 7 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-bamboo-flooring/bamboo-floor/strand-woven-kempas-bamboo-flooring/prod_173\.html$ /product/strand-woven-kempas-bamboo-flooring/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 8 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-bamboo-flooring/bamboo-floor/strandwoven-walnut-wired-135mm-bamboo-flooring/prod_176\.html$ /product/strand-woven-walnut-wired-135mm-bamboo-flooring/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 9 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-bamboo-flooring/cat_7\.html$ /product-category/bamboo-floor/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 10 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-bamboo-installation/info_8\.html$ /bamboo-installation/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 11 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=cart$ [NC] RewriteRule ^cart\.php$ /cart/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 12 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^contact-us/info_2\.html$ /contact-us/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 13 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^faqs/info_9\.html$ /faqs/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 14 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-floating-timber-floor/black-butt-engineered-floating-timber/prod_213\.html$ /product/black-butt-engineered-floating-timber/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 15 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-floating-timber-floor/doussie-engineered-floating-timber/prod_208\.html$ /product/doussie-engineered-floating-timber/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 16 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-floating-timber-floor/smoked-oak-engineered-floating-timber/prod_217\.html$ /product/smoked-oak-engineered-floating-timber/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 17 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=thanks$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.xxxxxxxxxx.com/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 18 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewCat&catId=13$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product-category/samples/bamboo-flooring-samples/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 19 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewCat&catId=18$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product/bamboo-plastic-composite/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 20 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewCat&catId=2$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product-category/bamboo-floor/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 21 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewCat&catId=20$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /products/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 22 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewCat&catId=3$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product-category/floating-timber-floor/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 23 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewCat&catId=5$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product-category/laminate-flooring/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 24 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewCat&catId=6$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product-category/accessories/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 25 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewCat&catId=saleItems$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product-category/clearance-sale/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 26 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewDoc&docId=3$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /faqs/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 27 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewDoc&docId=4$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /faqs/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 28 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewProd&productId=137$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product/laminate-flooring-goustein-wood/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 29 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewProd&productId=164$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product/modern-black-brushed-finish-strand-woven-flooring/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 30 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewProd&productId=165$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product/lime-wash-strand-woven-bamboo-flooring/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 31 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewProd&productId=168$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product/country-bark/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 32 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewProd&productId=173$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product-category/bamboo-floor/14mm-bamboo-flooring/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 33 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewProd&productId=178$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product/blue-gum-136-floating-timber/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 34 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewProd&productId=199$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product/jarrah-laminate-floor-sample/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 35 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewProd&productId=205$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product/elm-12mm-laminate-floor-sample/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 36 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewProd&productId=209$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product/iroko-engineered-floating-timber/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 37 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewProd&productId=222$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product/european-oak-engineered-floating-timber-sample/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 38 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewProd&productId=236$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product/black-forest-5mm-vinyl-flooring/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 39 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewProd&productId=65$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product/stair-nose/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 40 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^act=viewProd&productId=83$ [NC] RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /product/laminate-flooring-warm-teak/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 41 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-laminate-flooring/12mm-laminate-flooring/blackbutt/prod_156\.html$ /product/blackbutt-12mm-laminate-floor/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 42 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-laminate-flooring/12mm-laminate-flooring/tasmanian-oak/prod_171\.html$ /product/tasmanian-oak/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 43 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-laminate-flooring/8-3mm-laminate-flooring/laminate-flooring-warm-teak/prod_8\.html$ /product/laminate-flooring-warm-teak/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 44 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-laminate-flooring/accessories/cat_6\.html$ /product-category/accessories/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 45 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-laminate-flooring/cat_5\.html$ /product-category/laminate-flooring/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 46 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-laminate-flooring/country-classic-12mm-laminate/cat_19\.html$ /product-category/laminate-flooring/12mm-country-classic-laminate-floor/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 47 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-laminate-installation/info_7\.html$ /laminate-installation/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 48 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^privacy-policy/info_4\.html$ /faqs/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 49 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^-quotation-request/info_5\.html$ /quotation-request/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 50 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^rainbow-flooring/cat_16\.html$ /product-category/rainbow-flooring/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 51 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^rainbow-flooring/walnut-rainbow-flooring/prod_112\.html$ /product/walnut-rainbow-flooring/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 52 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^samples/12mm-laminate-floor-samples/kempas-laminate-floor-sample/prod_195\.html$ /product/kempas-laminate-floor-sample/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 53 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^samples/12mm-laminate-floor-samples/spotted-gum-laminate-floor-sample/prod_196\.html$ /product/spotted-gum-laminate-floor-sample/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 54 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^samples/12mm-laminate-floor-samples/tasmanian-oak-laminate-floor-sample/prod_197\.html$ /product/tasmanian-oak-laminate-floor-sample/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 55 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^samples/bamboo-flooring-samples/cat_13\.html$ /product-category/samples/bamboo-flooring-samples/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 56 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^samples/bamboo-flooring-samples/rosewood-strandwoven-bamboo-floor-135mm-click-sample/prod_191\.html$ /product/rosewood-strand-woven-bamboo-floor-135mm-click-sample/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 57 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^samples/cat_9\.html$ /samples/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 58 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^samples/floating-timber-floor-samples/iroko-engineered-floating-timber-floor-sample/prod_223\.html$ /product/iroko-engineered-floating-timber-floor-sample/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 59 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^samples/floating-timber-floor-samples/jarrah-engineered-floating-timber-sample/prod_224\.html$ /product/jarrah-engineered-floating-timber-sample/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 60 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^samples/floating-timber-floor-samples/merbau-engineered-floating-timber-sample/prod_226\.html$ /product/merbau-engineered-floating-timber-sample/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 61 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^samples/floating-timber-floor-samples/spotted-gum-engineered-floating-timber-sample/prod_228\.html$ /product/spotted-gum-engineered-floating-timber-sample/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 62 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^samples/floating-timber-floor-samples/sydney-blue-gum-engineered-floating-timber-sample/prod_220\.html$ /product/sydney-blue-gum-engineered-floating-timber-sample/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 63 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^shop\.php/-laminate-flooring/accessories/laminate-flooring-accessories-click-stairnose/prod_251\.html$ /product/stair-nose/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 64 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^shop\.php/-laminate-flooring/country-classic-12mm-laminate/country-classic-polar-white/prod_243\.html$ /product/country-classic-polar-white/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 65 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^shop\.php/samples/12mm-laminate-floor-samples/country-classic-polar-white/prod_244\.html$ /product/country-classic-polar-white-sample/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 66 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^shop\.php/samples/12mm-laminate-floor-samples/rustic-oak-12mm-laminate-floor/prod_248\.html$ /product/rustic-oak-12mm-laminate-floor-sample/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 67 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^shop\.php/samples/vinyl-flooring-samples/cat_25\.html$ /product-category/samples/vinyl-flooring-samples/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 68 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^shop\.php/vinyl-flooring/cat_24\.html$ /product-category/vinyl-floor/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 69 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^solardeck-tiles/cat_22\.html$ /product-category/solardeck-tiles/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 70 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^solardeck-tiles/solardeck-tiles/prod_206\.html$ /product/solardeck-tiles/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] # 301 Redirect 71 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$ RewriteRule ^terms-conditions/info_3\.html$ /faqs/? [R=301,NE,NC,L] I'm getting errors like this in my log: Invalid command 'aminate-flooring/tasmanian-oak/prod_171\\.html$', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration, referer: http://www.xxxxxxxx.com/laminate-installation/ Invalid command ',NE,NC,L]', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration Invalid command ',L]#', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

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• T-SQL Tuesday #33: Trick Shots: Undocumented, Underdocumented, and Unknown Conspiracies!

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  Mike Fal (b | t) is hosting this month's T-SQL Tuesday on Trick Shots.  I love this choice because I've been preoccupied with sneaky/tricky/evil SQL Server stuff for a long time and have been presenting on it for the past year.  Mike's directives were "Show us a cool trick or process you developed…It doesn’t have to be useful", which most of my blogging definitely fits, and "Tell us what you learned from this trick…tell us how it gave you insight in to how SQL Server works", which is definitely a new concept.  I've done a lot of reading and watching on SQL Server Internals and even attended training, but sometimes I need to go explore on my own, using my own tools and techniques.  It's an itch I get every few months, and, well, it sure beats workin'. I've found some people to be intimidated by SQL Server's internals, and I'll admit there are A LOT of internals to keep track of, but there are tons of excellent resources that clearly document most of them, and show how knowing even the basics of internals can dramatically improve your database's performance.  It may seem like rocket science, or even brain surgery, but you don't have to be a genius to understand it. Although being an "evil genius" can help you learn some things they haven't told you about. ;) This blog post isn't a traditional "deep dive" into internals, it's more of an approach to find out how a program works.  It utilizes an extremely handy tool from an even more extremely handy suite of tools, Sysinternals.  I'm not the only one who finds Sysinternals useful for SQL Server: Argenis Fernandez (b | t), Microsoft employee and former T-SQL Tuesday host, has an excellent presentation on how to troubleshoot SQL Server using Sysinternals, and I highly recommend it.  Argenis didn't cover the Strings.exe utility, but I'll be using it to "hack" the SQL Server executable (DLL and EXE) files. Please note that I'm not promoting software piracy or applying these techniques to attack SQL Server via internal knowledge. This is strictly educational and doesn't reveal any proprietary Microsoft information.  And since Argenis works for Microsoft and demonstrated Sysinternals with SQL Server, I'll just let him take the blame for it. :P (The truth is I've used Strings.exe on SQL Server before I ever met Argenis.) Once you download and install Strings.exe you can run it from the command line.  For our purposes we'll want to run this in the Binn folder of your SQL Server instance (I'm referencing SQL Server 2012 RTM): cd "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn" C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn> strings *sql*.dll > sqldll.txt C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn> strings *sql*.exe > sqlexe.txt   I've limited myself to DLLs and EXEs that have "sql" in their names.  There are quite a few more but I haven't examined them in any detail. (Homework assignment for you!) If you run this yourself you'll get 2 text files, one with all the extracted strings from every SQL DLL file, and the other with the SQL EXE strings.  You can open these in Notepad, but you're better off using Notepad++, EditPad, Emacs, Vim or another more powerful text editor, as these will be several megabytes in size. And when you do open it…you'll find…a TON of gibberish.  (If you think that's bad, just try opening the raw DLL or EXE file in Notepad.  And by the way, don't do this in production, or even on a running instance of SQL Server.)  Even if you don't clean up the file, you can still use your editor's search function to find a keyword like "SELECT" or some other item you expect to be there.  As dumb as this sounds, I sometimes spend my lunch break just scanning the raw text for anything interesting.  I'm boring like that. Sometimes though, having these files available can lead to some incredible learning experiences.  For me the most recent time was after reading Joe Sack's post on non-parallel plan reasons.  He mentions a new SQL Server 2012 execution plan element called NonParallelPlanReason, and demonstrates a query that generates "MaxDOPSetToOne".  Joe (formerly on the Microsoft SQL Server product team, so he knows this stuff) mentioned that this new element was not currently documented and tried a few more examples to see what other reasons could be generated. Since I'd already run Strings.exe on the SQL Server DLLs and EXE files, it was easy to run grep/find/findstr for MaxDOPSetToOne on those extracts.  Once I found which files it belonged to (sqlmin.dll) I opened the text to see if the other reasons were listed.  As you can see in my comment on Joe's blog, there were about 20 additional non-parallel reasons.  And while it's not "documentation" of this underdocumented feature, the names are pretty self-explanatory about what can prevent parallel processing. I especially like the ones about cursors – more ammo! - and am curious about the PDW compilation and Cloud DB replication reasons. One reason completely stumped me: NoParallelHekatonPlan.  What the heck is a hekaton?  Google and Wikipedia were vague, and the top results were not in English.  I found one reference to Greek, stating "hekaton" can be translated as "hundredfold"; with a little more Wikipedia-ing this leads to hecto, the prefix for "one hundred" as a unit of measure.  I'm not sure why Microsoft chose hekaton for such a plan name, but having already learned some Greek I figured I might as well dig some more in the DLL text for hekaton.  Here's what I found: hekaton_slow_param_passing Occurs when a Hekaton procedure call dispatch goes to slow parameter passing code path The reason why Hekaton parameter passing code took the slow code path hekaton_slow_param_pass_reason sp_deploy_hekaton_database sp_undeploy_hekaton_database sp_drop_hekaton_database sp_checkpoint_hekaton_database sp_restore_hekaton_database e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\hkproc.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\matgen.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\matquery.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\sqlmeta.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\resultset.cpp Interesting!  The first 4 entries (in red) mention parameters and "slow code".  Could this be the foundation of the mythical DBCC RUNFASTER command?  Have I been passing my parameters the slow way all this time? And what about those sp_xxxx_hekaton_database procedures (in blue)? Could THEY be the secret to a faster SQL Server? Could they promise a "hundredfold" improvement in performance?  Are these special, super-undocumented DIB (databases in black)? I decided to look in the SQL Server system views for any objects with hekaton in the name, or references to them, in hopes of discovering some new code that would answer all my questions: SELECT name FROM sys.all_objects WHERE name LIKE '%hekaton%' SELECT name FROM sys.all_objects WHERE object_definition(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%hekaton%' Which revealed: name ------------------------ (0 row(s) affected) name ------------------------ sp_createstats sp_recompile sp_updatestats (3 row(s) affected)   Hmm.  Well that didn't find much.  Looks like these procedures are seriously undocumented, unknown, perhaps forbidden knowledge. Maybe a part of some unspeakable evil? (No, I'm not paranoid, I just like mysteries and thought that punching this up with that kind of thing might keep you reading.  I know I'd fall asleep without it.) OK, so let's check out those 3 procedures and see what they reveal when I search for "Hekaton": sp_createstats: -- filter out local temp tables, Hekaton tables, and tables for which current user has no permissions -- Note that OBJECTPROPERTY returns NULL on type="IT" tables, thus we only call it on type='U' tables   OK, that's interesting, let's go looking down a little further: ((@table_type<>'U') or (0 = OBJECTPROPERTY(@table_id, 'TableIsInMemory'))) and -- Hekaton table   Wellllll, that tells us a few new things: There's such a thing as Hekaton tables (UPDATE: I'm not the only one to have found them!) They are not standard user tables and probably not in memory UPDATE: I misinterpreted this because I didn't read all the code when I wrote this blog post. The OBJECTPROPERTY function has an undocumented TableIsInMemory option Let's check out sp_recompile: -- (3) Must not be a Hekaton procedure.   And once again go a little further: if (ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsExecuted') <> 0 AND ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsInlineFunction') = 0 AND ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsView') = 0 AND -- Hekaton procedure cannot be recompiled -- Make them go through schema version bumping branch, which will fail ObjectProperty(@objid, 'ExecIsCompiledProc') = 0)   And now we learn that hekaton procedures also exist, they can't be recompiled, there's a "schema version bumping branch" somewhere, and OBJECTPROPERTY has another undocumented option, ExecIsCompiledProc.  (If you experiment with this you'll find this option returns null, I think it only works when called from a system object.) This is neat! Sadly sp_updatestats doesn't reveal anything new, the comments about hekaton are the same as sp_createstats.  But we've ALSO discovered undocumented features for the OBJECTPROPERTY function, which we can now search for: SELECT name, object_definition(OBJECT_ID) FROM sys.all_objects WHERE object_definition(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%OBJECTPROPERTY(%'   I'll leave that to you as more homework.  I should add that searching the system procedures was recommended long ago by the late, great Ken Henderson, in his Guru's Guide books, as a great way to find undocumented features.  That seems to be really good advice! Now if you're a programmer/hacker, you've probably been drooling over the last 5 entries for hekaton (in green), because these are the names of source code files for SQL Server!  Does this mean we can access the source code for SQL Server?  As The Oracle suggested to Neo, can we return to The Source??? Actually, no. Well, maybe a little bit.  While you won't get the actual source code from the compiled DLL and EXE files, you'll get references to source files, debugging symbols, variables and module names, error messages, and even the startup flags for SQL Server.  And if you search for "DBCC" or "CHECKDB" you'll find a really nice section listing all the DBCC commands, including the undocumented ones.  Granted those are pretty easy to find online, but you may be surprised what those web sites DIDN'T tell you! (And neither will I, go look for yourself!)  And as we saw earlier, you'll also find execution plan elements, query processing rules, and who knows what else.  It's also instructive to see how Microsoft organizes their source directories, how various components (storage engine, query processor, Full Text, AlwaysOn/HADR) are split into smaller modules. There are over 2000 source file references, go do some exploring! So what did we learn?  We can pull strings out of executable files, search them for known items, browse them for unknown items, and use the results to examine internal code to learn even more things about SQL Server.  We've even learned how to use command-line utilities!  We are now 1337 h4X0rz!  (Not really.  I hate that leetspeak crap.) Although, I must confess I might've gone too far with the "conspiracy" part of this post.  I apologize for that, it's just my overactive imagination.  There's really no hidden agenda or conspiracy regarding SQL Server internals.  It's not The Matrix.  It's not like you'd find anything like that in there: Attach Matrix Database DM_MATRIX_COMM_PIPELINES MATRIXXACTPARTICIPANTS dm_matrix_agents   Alright, enough of this paranoid ranting!  Microsoft are not really evil!  It's not like they're The Borg from Star Trek: ALTER FEDERATION DROP ALTER FEDERATION SPLIT DROP FEDERATION   #tsql2sday

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• An Honest look at SharePoint Web Services

  - by juanlarios

  INTRODUCTION If you are a SharePoint developer you know that there are two basic ways to develop against SharePoint. 1) The object Model 2) Web services. SharePoint object model has the advantage of being quite rich. Anything you can do through the SharePoint UI as an administrator or end user, you can do through the object model. In fact everything that is done through the UI is done through the object model behind the scenes. The major disadvantage to getting at SharePoint this way is that the code needs to run on the server. This means that all web parts, event receivers, features, etc… all of this is code that is deployed to the server. The second way to get to SharePoint is through the built in web services. There are many articles on how to manipulate web services, how to authenticate to them and interact with them. The basic idea is that a remote application or process can contact SharePoint through a web service. Lots has been written about how great these web services are. This article is written to document the limitations, some of the issues and frustrations with working with SharePoint built in web services. Ultimately, for the tasks I was given to , SharePoint built in web services did not suffice. My evaluation of SharePoint built in services was compared against creating my own WCF Services to do what I needed. The current project I'm working on right now involved several "integration points". A remote application, installed on a separate server was to contact SharePoint and perform an task or operation. So I decided to start up Visual Studio and built a DLL and basically have 2 layers of logic. An integration layer and a data layer. A good friend of mine pointed me to SOLID principles and referred me to some videos and tutorials about it. I decided to implement the methodology (although a lot of the principles are common sense and I already incorporated in my coding practices). I was to deliver this dll to the application team and they would simply call the methods exposed by this dll and voila! it would do some task or operation in SharePoint. SOLUTION My integration layer implemented an interface that defined some of the basic integration tasks that I was to put together. My data layer was about the same, it implemented an interface with some of the tasks that I was going to develop. This gave me the opportunity to develop different data layers, ultimately different ways to get at SharePoint if I needed to. This is a classic SOLID principle. In this case it proved to be quite helpful because I wrote one data layer completely implementing SharePoint built in Web Services and another implementing my own WCF Service that I wrote. I should mention there is another layer underneath the data layer. In referencing SharePoint or WCF services in my visual studio project I created a class for every web service call. So for example, if I used List.asx. I created a class called "DocumentRetreival" this class would do the grunt work to connect to the correct URL, It would perform the basic operation of contacting the service and so on. If I used a view.asmx, I implemented a class called "ViewRetrieval" with the same idea as the last class but it would now interact with all he operations in view.asmx. This gave my data layer the ability to perform multiple calls without really worrying about some of the grunt work each class performs. This again, is a classic SOLID principle. So, in order to compare them side by side we can look at both data layers and with is involved in each. Lets take a look at the "Create Project" task or operation. The integration point is described as , "dll is to provide a way to create a project in SharePoint". Projects , in this case are basically document libraries. I am to implement a way in which a remote application can create a document library in SharePoint. Easy enough right? Use the list.asmx Web service in SharePoint. So here we go! Lets take a look at the code. I added the List.asmx web service reference to my project and this is the class that contacts it:  class DocumentRetrieval     {         private ListsSoapClient _service;      d   private bool _impersonation;         public DocumentRetrieval(bool impersonation, string endpt)         {             _service = new ListsSoapClient();             this.SetEndPoint(string.Format("{0}/{1}", endpt, ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["List"]));             _impersonation = impersonation;             if (_impersonation)             {                 _service.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential.Password = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["password"];                 _service.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential.UserName = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["username"];                 _service.ClientCredentials.Windows.AllowedImpersonationLevel =                     System.Security.Principal.TokenImpersonationLevel.Impersonation;             }     private void SetEndPoint(string p)          {             _service.Endpoint.Address = new EndpointAddress(p);          }          /// <summary>         /// Creates a document library with specific name and templateID         /// </summary>         /// <param name="listName">New list name</param>         /// <param name="templateID">Template ID</param>         /// <returns></returns>         public XmlElement CreateLibrary(string listName, int templateID, ref ExceptionContract exContract)         {             XmlDocument sample = new XmlDocument();             XmlElement viewCol = sample.CreateElement("Empty");             try             {                 _service.Open();                 viewCol = _service.AddList(listName, "", templateID);             }             catch (Exception ex)             {                 exContract = new ExceptionContract("DocumentRetrieval/CreateLibrary", ex.GetType(), "Connection Error", ex.StackTrace, ExceptionContract.ExceptionCode.error);                             }finally             {                 _service.Close();             }                                      return viewCol;         } } There was a lot more in this class (that I am not including) because i was reusing the grunt work and making other operations with LIst.asmx, For example, updating content types, changing or configuring lists or document libraries. One of the first things I noticed about working with the built in services is that you are really at the mercy of what is available to you. Before creating a document library (Project) I wanted to expose a IsProjectExisting method. This way the integration or data layer could recognize if a library already exists. Well there is no service call or method available to do that check. So this is what I wrote:   public bool DocLibExists(string listName, ref ExceptionContract exContract)         {             try             {                 var allLists = _service.GetListCollection();                                return allLists.ChildNodes.OfType<XmlElement>().ToList().Exists(x => x.Attributes["Title"].Value ==listName);             }             catch (Exception ex)             {                 exContract = new ExceptionContract("DocumentRetrieval/GetList/GetListWSCall", ex.GetType(), "Unable to Retrieve List Collection", ex.StackTrace, ExceptionContract.ExceptionCode.error);             }             return false;         } This really just gets an XMLElement with all the lists. It was then up to me to sift through the clutter and noise and see if Document library already existed. This took a little bit of getting used to. Now instead of working with code, you are working with XMLElement response format from web service. I wrote a LINQ query to go through and find if the attribute "Title" existed and had a value of the listname then it would return True, if not False. I didn't particularly like working this way. Dealing with XMLElement responses and then having to manipulate it to get at the exact data I was looking for. Once the check for the DocLibExists, was done, I would either create the document library or send back an error indicating the document library already existed. Now lets examine the code that actually creates the document library. It does what you are really after, it creates a document library. Notice how the template ID is really an integer. Every document library template in SharePoint has an ID associated with it. Document libraries, Image Library, Custom List, Project Tasks, etc… they all he a unique integer associated with it. Well, that's great but the client came back to me and gave me some specifics that each "project" or document library, should have. They specified they had 3 types of projects. Each project would have unique views, about 10 views for each project. Each Project specified unique configurations (auditing, versioning, content types, etc…) So what turned out to be a simple implementation of creating a document library as a repository for a project, turned out to be quite involved.  The first thing I thought of was to create a template for document library. There are other ways you can do this too. Using the web Service call, you could configure views, versioning, even content types, etc… the only catch is, you have to be working quite extensively with CAML. I am not fond of CAML. I can do it and work with it, I just don't like doing it. It is quite touchy and at times it is quite tough to understand where errors were made with CAML statements. Working with Web Services and CAML proved to be quite annoying. The service call would return a generic error message that did not particularly point me to a CAML statement syntax error, or even a CAML error. I was not sure if it was a security , performance or code based issue. It was quite tough to work with. At times it was difficult to work with because of the way SharePoint handles metadata. There are "Names", "Display Name", and "StaticName" fields. It was quite tough to understand at times, which one to use. So it took a lot of trial and error. There are tools that can help with CAML generation. There is also now intellisense for CAML statements in Visual Studio that might help but ultimately I'm not fond of CAML with Web Services.   So I decided on the template. So my plan was to create create a document library, configure it accordingly and then use The Template Builder that comes with the SharePoint SDK. This tool allows you to create site templates, list template etc… It is quite interesting because it does not generate an STP file, it actually generates an xml definition and a feature you can activate and make that template available on a site or site collection. The first issue I experienced with this is that one of the specifications to this template was that the "All Documents" view was to have 2 web parts on it. Well, it turns out that using the template builder , it did not include the web parts as part of the list template definition it generated. It backed up the settings, the views, the content types but not the custom web parts. I still decided to try this even without the web parts on the page. This new template defined a new Document library definition with a unique ID. The problem was that the service call accepts an int but it only has access to the built in library int definitions. Any new ones added or created will not be available to create. So this made it impossible for me to approach the problem this way.     I should also mention that one of the nice features about SharePoint is the ability to create list templates, back them up and then create lists based on that template. It can all be done by end user administrators. These templates are quite unique because they are saved as an STP file and not an xml definition. I also went this route and tried to see if there was another service call where I could create a document library based no given template name. Nope! none.      After some thinking I decide to implement a WCF service to do this creation for me. I was quite certain that the object model would allow me to create document libraries base on a template in which an ID was required and also templates saved as STP files. Now I don't want to bother with posting the code to contact WCF service because it's self explanatory, but I will post the code that I used to create a list with custom template. public ServiceResult CreateProject(string name, string templateName, string projectId)         {             string siteurl = SPContext.Current.Site.Url;             Guid webguid = SPContext.Current.Web.ID;                        using (SPSite site = new SPSite(siteurl))             {                 using (SPWeb rootweb = site.RootWeb)                 {                     SPListTemplateCollection temps = site.GetCustomListTemplates(rootweb);                     ProcessWeb(siteurl, webguid, web => Act_CreateProject(web, name, templateName, projectId, temps));                 }//SpWeb             }//SPSite              return _globalResult;                   }         private void Act_CreateProject(SPWeb targetsite, string name, string templateName, string projectId, SPListTemplateCollection temps) {                         var temp = temps.Cast<SPListTemplate>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Name.Equals(templateName));             if (temp != null)             {                             try                 {                                         Guid listGuid = targetsite.Lists.Add(name, "", temp);                     SPList newList = targetsite.Lists[listGuid];                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(true, "Success", "Success");                 }                 catch (Exception ex)                 {                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(false, (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ex.Message) ? "None" : ex.Message + " " + templateName), ex.StackTrace.ToString());                 }                                       }        private void ProcessWeb(string siteurl, Guid webguid, Action<SPWeb> action) {                        using (SPSite sitecollection = new SPSite(siteurl)) {                 using (SPWeb web = sitecollection.AllWebs[webguid]) {                     action(web);                 }                     }                  } This code is actually some of the code I implemented for the service. there was a lot more I did on Project Creation which I will cover in my next blog post. I implemented an ACTION method to process the web. This allowed me to properly dispose the SPWEb and SPSite objects and not rewrite this code over and over again. So I implemented a WCF service to create projects for me, this allowed me to do a lot more than just create a document library with a template, it now gave me the flexibility to do just about anything the client wanted at project creation. Once this was implemented , the client came back to me and said, "we reference all our projects with ID's in our application. we want SharePoint to do the same". This has been something I have been doing for a little while now but I do hope that SharePoint 2010 can have more of an answer to this and address it properly. I have been adding metadata to SPWebs through property bag. I believe I have blogged about it before. This time it required metadata added to a document library. No problem!!! I also mentioned these web parts that were to go on the "All Documents" View. I took the opportunity to configure them to the appropriate settings. There were two settings that needed to be set on these web parts. One of them was a Project ID configured in the webpart properties. The following code enhances and replaces the "Act_CreateProject " method above:  private void Act_CreateProject(SPWeb targetsite, string name, string templateName, string projectId, SPListTemplateCollection temps) {                         var temp = temps.Cast<SPListTemplate>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Name.Equals(templateName));             if (temp != null)             {                 SPLimitedWebPartManager wpmgr = null;                               try                 {                                         Guid listGuid = targetsite.Lists.Add(name, "", temp);                     SPList newList = targetsite.Lists[listGuid];                     SPFolder rootFolder = newList.RootFolder;                     rootFolder.Properties.Add(KEY, projectId);                     rootFolder.Update();                     if (rootFolder.ParentWeb != targetsite)                         rootFolder.ParentWeb.Dispose();                     if (!templateName.Contains("Natural"))                     {                         SPView alldocumentsview = newList.Views.Cast<SPView>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Title.Equals(ALLDOCUMENTS));                         SPFile alldocfile = targetsite.GetFile(alldocumentsview.ServerRelativeUrl);                         wpmgr = alldocfile.GetLimitedWebPartManager(PersonalizationScope.Shared);                         ConfigureWebPart(wpmgr, projectId, CUSTOMWPNAME);                                              alldocfile.Update();                     }                                        if (newList.ParentWeb != targetsite)                         newList.ParentWeb.Dispose();                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(true, "Success", "Success");                 }                 catch (Exception ex)                 {                     _globalResult = new ServiceResult(false, (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ex.Message) ? "None" : ex.Message + " " + templateName), ex.StackTrace.ToString());                 }                 finally                 {                     if (wpmgr != null)                     {                         wpmgr.Web.Dispose();                         wpmgr.Dispose();                     }                 }             }                         }       private void ConfigureWebPart(SPLimitedWebPartManager mgr, string prjId, string webpartname)         {             var wp = mgr.WebParts.Cast<System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.DisplayTitle.Equals(webpartname));             if (wp != null)             {                           (wp as ListRelationshipWebPart.ListRelationshipWebPart).ProjectID = prjId;                 mgr.SaveChanges(wp);             }         }   This Shows you how I was able to set metadata on the document library. It has to be added to the RootFolder of the document library, Unfortunately, the SPList does not have a Property bag that I can add a key\value pair to. It has to be done on the root folder. Now everything in the integration will reference projects by ID's and will not care about names. My, "DocLibExists" will now need to be changed because a web service is not set up to look at property bags.  I had to write another method on the Service to do the equivalent but with ID's instead of names.  The second thing you will notice about the code is the use of the Webpartmanager. I have seen several examples online, and also read a lot about memory leaks, The above code does not produce memory leaks. The web part manager creates an SPWeb, so just dispose it like I did. CONCLUSION This is a long long post so I will stop here for now, I will continue with more comparisons and limitations in my next post. My conclusion for this example is that Web Services will do the trick if you can suffer through CAML and if you are doing some simple operations. For Everything else, there's WCF! **** fireI apologize for the disorganization of this post, I was on a bus on a 12 hour trip to IOWA while I wrote it, I was half asleep and half awake, hopefully it makes enough sense to someone.

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• Building the Ultimate SharePoint 2010 Development Environment

  - by Manesh Karunakaran

  It’s been more than a month since SharePoint 2010 RTMed. And a lot of people have downloaded and set up their very own SharePoint 2010 development rigs. And quite a few people have written blogs about setting up good development environments, there is even an MSDN article on it. Two of the blogs worth noting are from MVPs Sahil Malik and Wictor Wilén. Make sure that you check these out as well. Part of the bad side-effects of being a geek is the need to do the technical stuff the best way possible (pragmatic or otherwise), but the problem with this is that what is considered “best” is relative. Precisely the reason why you are reading this post now. Most of the posts that I read are out dated/need updations or are using the wrong OS’es or virtualization solutions (again, opinions vary) or using them the wrong way. Here’s a developer’s view of Building the Ultimate SharePoint 2010 Development Rig. If you are a sales guy, it’s time to close this window. Confusion 1: Which Host Operating System and Virtualization Solution to use? This point has been beaten to death in numerous blog posts in the past, if you have time to invest, read this excellent post by our very own SharePoint Joel on this subject. But if you are planning to build the Ultimate Development Rig, then Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V is the option that you should be looking at. I have been using this as my primary OS for about 6-7 months now, and I haven’t had any Driver issue or Application compatibility issue. In my experience all the Windows 7 drivers work fine with WIN2008 R2 also. You can enable Aero for eye candy (and the Windows 7 look and feel) and except for a few things like the Hibernation support (which a can be enabled if you really want it), Windows Server 2008 R2, is the best Workstation OS that I have used till date. But frankly the answer to this question of which OS to use depends primarily on one question - Are you willing to change your primary OS? If the answer to that is ‘Yes’, then Windows 2008 R2 with Hyper-V is the best option, if not look at vmWare or VirtualBox, both are equally good. Those who are familiar with a Virtual PC background might prefer Sun VirtualBox. Besides, these provide support for running 64 bit guest machines on 32 bit hosts if the underlying hardware is truly 64 bit. See my earlier post on this. Since we are going to make the ultimate rig, we will use Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, for reasons mentioned above. Confusion 2: Should I use a multi-(virtual) server set up? A lot of people use multiple servers for their development environments - like Wictor Wilén is suggesting - one server hosting the Active directory, one hosting SharePoint Server and another one for SQL Server. True, this mimics the production environment the best possible way, but as somebody who has fallen for this set up earlier, I can tell you that you don’t really get anything by doing this. Microsoft has done well to ensure that if you can do it on one machine, you can do it in a farm environment as well. Besides, when you run multiple Server class machine instances in parallel, there are a lot of unwanted processor cycles wasted for no good use. In my personal experience, as somebody who needs to switch between MOSS 2007/SharePoint 2010 environments from time to time, the best possible solution is to Make the host Windows Server 2008 R2 machine your Domain Controller (AD Server) Make all your Virtual Guest OS’es join this domain. Have each Individual Guest OS Image have it’s own local SQL Server instance. The advantages are that you can reuse the users and groups in each of the Guest operating systems, you can manage the users in one place, AD is light weight and doesn't take too much resources on your host machine and also having separate SQL instances for each of the Development images gives you maximum flexibility in terms of configuration, for example your SharePoint rigs can have simpler DB configurations, compared to your MS BI blast pits. Confusion 3: Which Operating System should I use to run SharePoint 2010 Now that’s a no brainer. Use Windows 2008 R2 as your Guest OS. When you are building the ultimate rig, why compromise? If you are planning to run Windows Server 2008 as your Guest OS, there are a few patches that you need to install at different times during the installation, for that follow the steps mentioned here Okay now that we have made our choices, let’s get to the interesting part of building the rig, Step 1: Prepare the host machine – Install Windows Server 2008 R2 Install Windows Server 2008 R2 on your best Desktop/Laptop. If you have read this far, I am quite sure that you are somebody who can install an OS on your own, so go ahead and do that. Make sure that you run the compatibility wizard before you go ahead and nuke your current OS. There are plenty of blogs telling you how to make a good Windows 2008 R2 Workstation that feels and behaves like a Windows 7 machine, follow one and once you are done, head to Step 2. Step 2: Configure the host machine as a Domain Controller Before we begin this, let me tell you, this step is completely optional, you don’t really need to do this, you can simply use the local users on the Guest machines instead, but if this is a much cleaner approach to manage users and groups if you run multiple guest operating systems.  This post neatly explains how to configure your Windows Server 2008 R2 host machine as a Domain Controller. Follow those simple steps and you are good to go. If you are not able to get it to work, try this. Step 3: Prepare the guest machine – Install Windows Server 2008 R2 Open Hyper-V Manager Choose to Create a new Guest Operating system Allocate at least 2 GB of Memory to the Guest OS Choose the Windows 2008 R2 Installation Media Start the Virtual Machine to commence installation. Once the Installation is done, Activate the OS. Step 4: Make the Guest operating systems Join the Domain This step is quite simple, just follow these steps below, Fire up Hyper-V Manager, open your Guest OS Click on Start, and Right click on ‘Computer’ and choose ‘Properties’ On the window that pops-up, click on ‘Change Settings’ On the ‘System Properties’ Window that comes up, Click on the ‘Change’ button Now a window named ‘Computer Name/Domain Changes’ opens up, In the text box titled Domain, type in the Domain name from Step 2. Click Ok and windows will show you the welcome to domain message and ask you to restart the machine, click OK to restart. If the addition to domain fails, that means that you have not set up networking in Hyper-V for the Guest OS to communicate with the Host. To enable it, follow the steps I had mentioned in this post earlier. Step 5: Install SQL Server 2008 R2 on the Guest Machine SQL Server 2008 R2 gets installed with out hassle on Windows Server 2008 R2. SQL Server 2008 needs SP2 to work properly on WIN2008 R2. Also SQL Server 2008 R2 allows you to directly add PowerPivot support to SharePoint. Choose to install in SharePoint Integrated Mode in Reporting Server Configuration. Step 6: Install KB971831 and SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisites Now install the WCF Hotfix for Microsoft Windows (KB971831) from this location, and SharePoint 2010 Pre-requisites from the SP2010 Installation media. Step 7: Install and Configure SharePoint 2010 Install SharePoint 2010 from the installation media, after the installation is complete, you are prompted to start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. If you are using a local instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, install the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64 before starting the wizard. If your development environment uses a remote instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 or if it has a pre-existing installation of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 on which KB 970315 x64 has already been applied, this step is not necessary. With the wizard open, do the following: Install SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64. After the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64 installation is finished, complete the wizard. Alternatively, you can choose not to run the wizard by clearing the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard check box and closing the completed installation dialog box. Install SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64, and then manually start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard by opening a Command Prompt window and executing the following command: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared Debug\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN\psconfigui.exe The SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard may fail if you are using a computer that is joined to a domain but that is not connected to a domain controller. Step 8: Install Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 SDK Install Visual Studio 2010 Download and Install the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SDK Step 9: Install PowerPivot for SharePoint and Configure Reporting Services Pop-In the SQLServer 2008 R2 installation media once again and install PowerPivot for SharePoint. This will get added as another instance named POWERPIVOT. Configure Reporting Services by following the steps mentioned here, if you need to get down to the details on how the integration between SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 works, see Working Together: SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Integration in SharePoint 2010 an excellent article by Alan Le Marquand Step 10: Download and Install Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2 SharePoint 2010 comes with a lot of cool stuff like PerformancePoint Services and BCS, if you need to try these out, you need to have data in your databases. So if you want to save yourself the trouble of creating sample data for your PerformancePoint and BCS experiments, download and install Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2 from CodePlex. And you are done! Fire up your Visual Studio 2010 and Start Coding away!!

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• Part 2: Career development as a Software Developer without becoming a manager.

  - by albertpascual

  Seems like my previous post inspired by the work of Michael “Doc” Norton was a great success for the amount of emails I have received. Yet amazed how many people didn’t want to discuss their questions in the comments  sections. I would encourage people to be more public, still I would like to reply to all of you on this public media. I still welcome those emails. What I found out is that many people feels like me, they want to be developers and still be compensated for their experience without wanting to take a job as a manager. Their perfect day is a full day of coding and learning. Many believe their companies will never pay a manager’s salary to a developer no matter what. Most of you ask how to get the ball rolling. And is the later that I’m addressing here, the previous group, will never try. What companies understand developers value and where can I find them? This is a very difficult question to ask, I don’t have a list of those companies or departments, I have seen in my past signs in companies bending backwards to compensate, in more ways the monetary, a developer that is a good resource to them. Allowing the person to move out of the state and still let them work for the company from home is a sign that company goes by individual cases. Allowing them to go to conference that will not benefit the company is another big sign. Simple signs like flexible hours and letting some people work from home. To see those signs you need to be working in that company for awhile and look at the departments where the manager is taking care of their employees in individual cases. Look for the department where people get quiet extra perks, where some people in the department work from home or remotely. In my experience, but not always true, medium to big companies, are prompt to recognize good developers. Then again, some companies just don’t get it and is when you see many technical people managing developers. For all the people that email me stating that developers can also be very good managers, I do not disagree, I just think that a good developers loves writing code, when you remove that part the better salary isn’t enough to keep a developer happy. Burned out developers appreciate being promoted to managers. How do I know I work in a bad company? In my experience I have been a consultant and seen many companies, a few signs I have learned about companies that will not recognize good developers are: When the turn over is pretty high, when developers are moving out in a big rate, no rocket scientist needs to tap you in the shoulder. When the company is looking always to outsource their development resources. The product is not that interesting nor the company cares too much for their final result and support. Code sweat shops. You’ll know when you start working in one of those. Run for the hills! Where do I start? Disclaimer: I have only based this post on Michael “Doc” Norton, this is just my interpretation and ideas. First thing is to look at Michael “Doc” Norton presentation Take Control of Your Development Career http://docondev.blogspot.com/ That should be the first thing any developer should look and follow like it was a pattern. I would personally recommend to find some language or pattern you are interested with and learn it, learn something that will make you happy. Second, join a User Group and get involve in the community. There are hundreds of user groups, and I’m sure you’ll find one in your city or near you town. Code Camps are Developers Meet Ups are also good resources. Third, I would join a open source project you are interested or better yet, create a new open source project with the new technology that you have learn and get coding. Fourth, create a Twitter account and follow the people that talks about the technology you are interested on. If you follow this 4 steps above I think you’ll be on your way, after they are complete, when you release your Open Source project you can say that you accomplished the first steps. Now, do not expect anything to change in your career life, you are changing and should not expect anything in return, besides borrowing some time from sleeping and your family. Creating a good schedule may help you, I find wasted time in many places that I use. Flying for work is actually one of those that allows me to do my best work on a airplane, don’t need to borrow time from anywhere else. Making sure you always have a light, charged laptop is so important. Next steps following the Michael “Doc” Norton Pattern or my interpretation of. First, help run a user group or better yet, start a new user group. I’ll add, as well, go to one conference a year and free development events around your city; Code Camps, Geek Dinners, etc. There are many free events sponsored by different companies for developers to get to know their products, I highly recommend those as the way to get connected. Second, chose a mentor, this is a very hard thing to do I experienced, find an expert in the technology you are learning that has the time for you, it is difficult, I wish you best of luck. Third, learn another technology or pattern, open your horizons a little bit more. Why not, if you had fun previously, keep doing it. Fourth, get involved in forums to answer and ask questions, getting notice in public forums is rewarding for your ego after such a long journey. Final steps following the Michael “Doc” Norton Pattern Teach what you know, become humble on your knowledge, find as many opportunities to teach and to get involved with the community, bring all that to your day job. Mr. Norton talks about getting naked, expose yourself to others in your knowledge and what you do not know. You are never too important for small opportunities, yet don’t  be afraid to take anything big and learn from the experience. Anytime you have the opportunity to talk to somebody that has reach the point the community knows his or her name, means that you should learn from it. Take opportunities that won’t make you money, yet will make you happy. Sometimes you need to spend money and time. Register talks in Code Camps and Dev Meet Ups, those are free, also go to Conference, Development Summits and Geek Diners for example. One day, people will pay you to attend. When will all these pay off? I don’t know. I’m still in the path, there are a few things that during your journey you may get little acknowledgements that you are in the correct path. In my case I think those are the little signs that tells you about your journey. I got awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for ASP.NET in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. I got selected to speak at the DevConnections in Las Vegas in 2010 and Orlando 2011. I do believe that I do have a long way to go, yet what I do makes me happy and I hope I can keep doing for years to come. Every year I can see an improvement on my code, and more frameworks and languages are under my belt, I learn to embrace them all as well as in my daily job, I have been able to work in a few projects beyond my department. I’m a learner and believer of the Michael “Doc” Norton pattern. Looking forward to learn more about it to be able to apply it better. In my short journey I now see my mistakes, I did a few things right, I have been listening the intelligent people and not being afraid to move along the technology changes. In my professional life, I have tried to avoid being placed in only one technology and product. I have always share my code and never confused anybody that wanted to take over any of my projects, I didn’t think anything I created as my own nor care too much when politics didn’t see my vision. I stayed flexible, ready and visible, yet humble. I keep my head just below the clouds, and avoided managers meetings. I credit my manager for my success, and I faulted publicly only myself for the failures. Hope this helps. Cheers, Al Follow me in Twitter  Read my previous post tweetmeme_url = 'http://weblogs.asp.net/albertpascual/archive/2010/12/09/part-2-career-development-as-a-software-developer-without-becoming-a-manager.aspx'; tweetmeme_source = 'alpascual';

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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. 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• Hello Operator, My Switch Is Bored

  - by Paul White

  This is a post for T-SQL Tuesday #43 hosted by my good friend Rob Farley. The topic this month is Plan Operators. I haven’t taken part in T-SQL Tuesday before, but I do like to write about execution plans, so this seemed like a good time to start. This post is in two parts. The first part is primarily an excuse to use a pretty bad play on words in the title of this blog post (if you’re too young to know what a telephone operator or a switchboard is, I hate you). The second part of the post looks at an invisible query plan operator (so to speak). 1. My Switch Is Bored Allow me to present the rare and interesting execution plan operator, Switch: Books Online has this to say about Switch: Following that description, I had a go at producing a Fast Forward Cursor plan that used the TOP operator, but had no luck. That may be due to my lack of skill with cursors, I’m not too sure. The only application of Switch in SQL Server 2012 that I am familiar with requires a local partitioned view: CREATE TABLE dbo.T1 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 00 AND 24)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T2 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 25 AND 49)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T3 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 50 AND 74)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T4 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 75 AND 99)); GO CREATE VIEW V1 AS SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T1 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T2 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T3 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T4; Not only that, but it needs an updatable local partitioned view. We’ll need some primary keys to meet that requirement: ALTER TABLE dbo.T1 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T1 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T2 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T2 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T3 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T3 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T4 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T4 PRIMARY KEY (c1); We also need an INSERT statement that references the view. Even more specifically, to see a Switch operator, we need to perform a single-row insert (multi-row inserts use a different plan shape): INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1); And now…the execution plan: The Constant Scan manufactures a single row with no columns. The Compute Scalar works out which partition of the view the new value should go in. The Assert checks that the computed partition number is not null (if it is, an error is returned). The Nested Loops Join executes exactly once, with the partition id as an outer reference (correlated parameter). The Switch operator checks the value of the parameter and executes the corresponding input only. If the partition id is 0, the uppermost Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T1. If the partition id is 1, the next lower Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T2…and so on. In case you were wondering, here’s a query and execution plan for a multi-row insert to the view: INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1), (2); Yuck! An Eager Table Spool and four Filters! I prefer the Switch plan. My guess is that almost all the old strategies that used a Switch operator have been replaced over time, using things like a regular Concatenation Union All combined with Start-Up Filters on its inputs. Other new (relative to the Switch operator) features like table partitioning have specific execution plan support that doesn’t need the Switch operator either. This feels like a bit of a shame, but perhaps it is just nostalgia on my part, it’s hard to know. Please do let me know if you encounter a query that can still use the Switch operator in 2012 – it must be very bored if this is the only possible modern usage! 2. Invisible Plan Operators The second part of this post uses an example based on a question Dave Ballantyne asked using the SQL Sentry Plan Explorer plan upload facility. If you haven’t tried that yet, make sure you’re on the latest version of the (free) Plan Explorer software, and then click the Post to SQLPerformance.com button. That will create a site question with the query plan attached (which can be anonymized if the plan contains sensitive information). Aaron Bertrand and I keep a close eye on questions there, so if you have ever wanted to ask a query plan question of either of us, that’s a good way to do it. The problem The issue I want to talk about revolves around a query issued against a calendar table. The script below creates a simplified version and adds 100 years of per-day information to it: USE tempdb; GO CREATE TABLE dbo.Calendar ( dt date NOT NULL, isWeekday bit NOT NULL, theYear smallint NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT PK__dbo_Calendar_dt PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (dt) ); GO -- Monday is the first day of the week for me SET DATEFIRST 1;   -- Add 100 years of data INSERT dbo.Calendar WITH (TABLOCKX) (dt, isWeekday, theYear) SELECT CA.dt, isWeekday = CASE WHEN DATEPART(WEEKDAY, CA.dt) IN (6, 7) THEN 0 ELSE 1 END, theYear = YEAR(CA.dt) FROM Sandpit.dbo.Numbers AS N CROSS APPLY ( VALUES (DATEADD(DAY, N.n - 1, CONVERT(date, '01 Jan 2000', 113))) ) AS CA (dt) WHERE N.n BETWEEN 1 AND 36525; The following query counts the number of weekend days in 2013: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; It returns the correct result (104) using the following execution plan: The query optimizer has managed to estimate the number of rows returned from the table exactly, based purely on the default statistics created separately on the two columns referenced in the query’s WHERE clause. (Well, almost exactly, the unrounded estimate is 104.289 rows.) There is already an invisible operator in this query plan – a Filter operator used to apply the WHERE clause predicates. We can see it by re-running the query with the enormously useful (but undocumented) trace flag 9130 enabled: Now we can see the full picture. The whole table is scanned, returning all 36,525 rows, before the Filter narrows that down to just the 104 we want. Without the trace flag, the Filter is incorporated in the Clustered Index Scan as a residual predicate. It is a little bit more efficient than using a separate operator, but residual predicates are still something you will want to avoid where possible. The estimates are still spot on though: Anyway, looking to improve the performance of this query, Dave added the following filtered index to the Calendar table: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear) WHERE isWeekday = 0; The original query now produces a much more efficient plan: Unfortunately, the estimated number of rows produced by the seek is now wrong (365 instead of 104): What’s going on? The estimate was spot on before we added the index! Explanation You might want to grab a coffee for this bit. Using another trace flag or two (8606 and 8612) we can see that the cardinality estimates were exactly right initially: The highlighted information shows the initial cardinality estimates for the base table (36,525 rows), the result of applying the two relational selects in our WHERE clause (104 rows), and after performing the COUNT_BIG(*) group by aggregate (1 row). All of these are correct, but that was before cost-based optimization got involved :) Cost-based optimization When cost-based optimization starts up, the logical tree above is copied into a structure (the ‘memo’) that has one group per logical operation (roughly speaking). The logical read of the base table (LogOp_Get) ends up in group 7; the two predicates (LogOp_Select) end up in group 8 (with the details of the selections in subgroups 0-6). These two groups still have the correct cardinalities as trace flag 8608 output (initial memo contents) shows: During cost-based optimization, a rule called SelToIdxStrategy runs on group 8. It’s job is to match logical selections to indexable expressions (SARGs). It successfully matches the selections (theYear = 2013, is Weekday = 0) to the filtered index, and writes a new alternative into the memo structure. The new alternative is entered into group 8 as option 1 (option 0 was the original LogOp_Select): The new alternative is to do nothing (PhyOp_NOP = no operation), but to instead follow the new logical instructions listed below the NOP. The LogOp_GetIdx (full read of an index) goes into group 21, and the LogOp_SelectIdx (selection on an index) is placed in group 22, operating on the result of group 21. The definition of the comparison ‘the Year = 2013’ (ScaOp_Comp downwards) was already present in the memo starting at group 2, so no new memo groups are created for that. New Cardinality Estimates The new memo groups require two new cardinality estimates to be derived. First, LogOp_Idx (full read of the index) gets a predicted cardinality of 10,436. This number comes from the filtered index statistics: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH STAT_HEADER; The second new cardinality derivation is for the LogOp_SelectIdx applying the predicate (theYear = 2013). To get a number for this, the cardinality estimator uses statistics for the column ‘theYear’, producing an estimate of 365 rows (there are 365 days in 2013!): DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, theYear) WITH HISTOGRAM; This is where the mistake happens. Cardinality estimation should have used the filtered index statistics here, to get an estimate of 104 rows: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH HISTOGRAM; Unfortunately, the logic has lost sight of the link between the read of the filtered index (LogOp_GetIdx) in group 22, and the selection on that index (LogOp_SelectIdx) that it is deriving a cardinality estimate for, in group 21. The correct cardinality estimate (104 rows) is still present in the memo, attached to group 8, but that group now has a PhyOp_NOP implementation. Skipping over the rest of cost-based optimization (in a belated attempt at brevity) we can see the optimizer’s final output using trace flag 8607: This output shows the (incorrect, but understandable) 365 row estimate for the index range operation, and the correct 104 estimate still attached to its PhyOp_NOP. This tree still has to go through a few post-optimizer rewrites and ‘copy out’ from the memo structure into a tree suitable for the execution engine. One step in this process removes PhyOp_NOP, discarding its 104-row cardinality estimate as it does so. To finish this section on a more positive note, consider what happens if we add an OVER clause to the query aggregate. This isn’t intended to be a ‘fix’ of any sort, I just want to show you that the 104 estimate can survive and be used if later cardinality estimation needs it: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) OVER () FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; The estimated execution plan is: Note the 365 estimate at the Index Seek, but the 104 lives again at the Segment! We can imagine the lost predicate ‘isWeekday = 0’ as sitting between the seek and the segment in an invisible Filter operator that drops the estimate from 365 to 104. Even though the NOP group is removed after optimization (so we don’t see it in the execution plan) bear in mind that all cost-based choices were made with the 104-row memo group present, so although things look a bit odd, it shouldn’t affect the optimizer’s plan selection. I should also mention that we can work around the estimation issue by including the index’s filtering columns in the index key: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear, isWeekday) WHERE isWeekday = 0 WITH (DROP_EXISTING = ON); There are some downsides to doing this, including that changes to the isWeekday column may now require Halloween Protection, but that is unlikely to be a big problem for a static calendar table ;)  With the updated index in place, the original query produces an execution plan with the correct cardinality estimation showing at the Index Seek: That’s all for today, remember to let me know about any Switch plans you come across on a modern instance of SQL Server! Finally, here are some other posts of mine that cover other plan operators: Segment and Sequence Project Common Subexpression Spools Why Plan Operators Run Backwards Row Goals and the Top Operator Hash Match Flow Distinct Top N Sort Index Spools and Page Splits Singleton and Range Seeks Bitmaps Hash Join Performance Compute Scalar © 2013 Paul White – All Rights Reserved Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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