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  • SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #048

    - by Pinal Dave
    Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Order of Result Set of SELECT Statement on Clustered Indexed Table When ORDER BY is Not Used Above theory is true in most of the cases. However SQL Server does not use that logic when returning the resultset. SQL Server always returns the resultset which it can return fastest.In most of the cases the resultset which can be returned fastest is the resultset which is returned using clustered index. Effect of TRANSACTION on Local Variable – After ROLLBACK and After COMMIT One of the Jr. Developer asked me this question (What will be the Effect of TRANSACTION on Local Variable – After ROLLBACK and After COMMIT?) while I was rushing to an important meeting. I was getting late so I asked him to talk with his Application Tech Lead. When I came back from meeting both of them were looking for me. They said they are confused. I quickly wrote down following example for them. 2008 SQL SERVER – Guidelines and Coding Standards Complete List Download Coding standards and guidelines are very important for any developer on the path of a successful career. A coding standard is a set of guidelines, rules and regulations on how to write code. Coding standards should be flexible enough or should take care of the situation where they should not prevent best practices for coding. They are basically the guidelines that one should follow for better understanding. Download Guidelines and Coding Standards complete List Download Get Answer in Float When Dividing of Two Integer Many times we have requirements of some calculations amongst different fields in Tables. One of the software developers here was trying to calculate some fields having integer values and divide it which gave incorrect results in integer where accurate results including decimals was expected. Puzzle – Computed Columns Datatype Explanation SQL Server automatically does a cast to the data type having the highest precedence. So the result of INT and INT will be INT, but INT and FLOAT will be FLOAT because FLOAT has a higher precedence. If you want a different data type, you need to do an EXPLICIT cast. Renaming SP is Not Good Idea – Renaming Stored Procedure Does Not Update sys.procedures I have written many articles about renaming a tables, columns and procedures SQL SERVER – How to Rename a Column Name or Table Name, here I found something interesting about renaming the stored procedures and felt like sharing it with you all. The interesting fact is that when we rename a stored procedure using SP_Rename command, the Stored Procedure is successfully renamed. But when we try to test the procedure using sp_helptext, the procedure will be having the old name instead of new names. 2009 Insert Values of Stored Procedure in Table – Use Table Valued Function It is clear from the result set that , where I have converted stored procedure logic into the table valued function, is much better in terms of logic as it saves a large number of operations. However, this option should be used carefully. The performance of the stored procedure is “usually” better than that of functions. Interesting Observation – Index on Index View Used in Similar Query Recently, I was working on an optimization project for one of the largest organizations. While working on one of the queries, we came across a very interesting observation. We found that there was a query on the base table and when the query was run, it used the index, which did not exist in the base table. On careful examination, we found that the query was using the index that was on another view. This was very interesting as I have personally never experienced a scenario like this. In simple words, “Query on the base table can use the index created on the indexed view of the same base table.” Interesting Observation – Execution Plan and Results of Aggregate Concatenation Queries Working with SQL Server has never seemed to be monotonous – no matter how long one has worked with it. Quite often, I come across some excellent comments that I feel like acknowledging them as blog posts. Recently, I wrote an article on SQL SERVER – Execution Plan and Results of Aggregate Concatenation Queries Depend Upon Expression Location, which is well received in the community. 2010 I encourage all of you to go through complete series and write your own on the subject. If you write an article and send it to me, I will publish it on this blog with due credit to you. If you write on your own blog, I will update this blog post pointing to your blog post. SQL SERVER – ORDER BY Does Not Work – Limitation of the View 1 SQL SERVER – Adding Column is Expensive by Joining Table Outside View – Limitation of the View 2 SQL SERVER – Index Created on View not Used Often – Limitation of the View 3 SQL SERVER – SELECT * and Adding Column Issue in View – Limitation of the View 4 SQL SERVER – COUNT(*) Not Allowed but COUNT_BIG(*) Allowed – Limitation of the View 5 SQL SERVER – UNION Not Allowed but OR Allowed in Index View – Limitation of the View 6 SQL SERVER – Cross Database Queries Not Allowed in Indexed View – Limitation of the View 7 SQL SERVER – Outer Join Not Allowed in Indexed Views – Limitation of the View 8 SQL SERVER – SELF JOIN Not Allowed in Indexed View – Limitation of the View 9 SQL SERVER – Keywords View Definition Must Not Contain for Indexed View – Limitation of the View 10 SQL SERVER – View Over the View Not Possible with Index View – Limitations of the View 11 2011 Startup Parameters Easy to Configure If you are a regular reader of this blog, you must be aware that I have written about SQL Server Denali recently. Here is the quickest way to reach into the screen where we can change the startup parameters. Go to SQL Server Configuration Manager >> SQL Server Services >> Right Click on the Server >> Properties >> Startup Parameters 2012 Validating Unique Columnname Across Whole Database I sometimes come across very strange requirements and often I do not receive a proper explanation of the same. Here is the one of those examples. For example “Our business requirement is when we add new column we want it unique across current database.” Read the solution to this strange request in this blog post. Excel Losing Decimal Values When Value Pasted from SSMS ResultSet It is very common when users are coping the resultset to Excel, the floating point or decimals are missed. The solution is very much simple and it requires a small adjustment in the Excel. By default Excel is very smart and when it detects the value which is getting pasted is numeric it changes the column format to accommodate that. Basic Calculation and PEMDAS Order of Operation Read this interesting blog post for fantastic conversation about the subject. Copy Column Headers from Resultset – SQL in Sixty Seconds #027 – Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_-3tLqTRv0 Delete From Multiple Table – Update Multiple Table in Single Statement There are two questions which I get every single day multiple times. In my gmail, I have created standard canned reply for them. Let us see the questions here. I want to delete from multiple table in a single statement how will I do it? I want to update multiple table in a single statement how will I do it? Read the answer in the blog post. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Use BGInfo to Build a Database of System Information of Your Network Computers

    - by Sysadmin Geek
    One of the more popular tools of the Sysinternals suite among system administrators is BGInfo which tacks real-time system information to your desktop wallpaper when you first login. For obvious reasons, having information such as system memory, available hard drive space and system up time (among others) right in front of you is very convenient when you are managing several systems. A little known feature about this handy utility is the ability to have system information automatically saved to a SQL database or some other data file. With a few minutes of setup work you can easily configure BGInfo to record system information of all your network computers in a centralized storage location. You can then use this data to monitor or report on these systems however you see fit. BGInfo Setup If you are familiar with BGInfo, you can skip this section. However, if you have never used this tool, it takes just a few minutes to setup in order to capture the data you are looking for. When you first open BGInfo, a timer will be counting down in the upper right corner. Click the countdown button to keep the interface up so we can edit the settings. Now edit the information you want to capture from the available fields on the right. Since all the output will be redirected to a central location, don’t worry about configuring the layout or formatting. Configuring the Storage Database BGInfo supports the ability to store information in several database formats: SQL Server Database, Access Database, Excel and Text File. To configure this option, open File > Database. Using a Text File The simplest, and perhaps most practical, option is to store the BGInfo data in a comma separated text file. This format allows for the file to be opened in Excel or imported into a database. To use a text file or any other file system type (Excel or MS Access), simply provide the UNC to the respective file. The account running the task to write to this file will need read/write access to both the share and NTFS file permissions. When using a text file, the only option is to have BGInfo create a new entry each time the capture process is run which will add a new line to the respective CSV text file. Using a SQL Database If you prefer to have the data dropped straight into a SQL Server database, BGInfo support this as well. This requires a bit of additional configuration, but overall it is very easy. The first step is to create a database where the information will be stored. Additionally, you will want to create a user account to fill data into this table (and this table only). For your convenience, this script creates a new database and user account (run this as Administrator on your SQL Server machine): @SET Server=%ComputerName%.@SET Database=BGInfo@SET UserName=BGInfo@SET Password=passwordSQLCMD -S “%Server%” -E -Q “Create Database [%Database%]“SQLCMD -S “%Server%” -E -Q “Create Login [%UserName%] With Password=N’%Password%’, DEFAULT_DATABASE=[%Database%], CHECK_EXPIRATION=OFF, CHECK_POLICY=OFF”SQLCMD -S “%Server%” -E -d “%Database%” -Q “Create User [%UserName%] For Login [%UserName%]“SQLCMD -S “%Server%” -E -d “%Database%” -Q “EXEC sp_addrolemember N’db_owner’, N’%UserName%’” Note the SQL user account must have ‘db_owner’ permissions on the database in order for BGInfo to work correctly. This is why you should have a SQL user account specifically for this database. Next, configure BGInfo to connect to this database by clicking on the SQL button. Fill out the connection properties according to your database settings. Select the option of whether or not to only have one entry per computer or keep a history of each system. The data will then be dropped directly into a table named “BGInfoTable” in the respective database.   Configure User Desktop Options While the primary function of BGInfo is to alter the user’s desktop by adding system info as part of the wallpaper, for our use here we want to leave the user’s wallpaper alone so this process runs without altering any of the user’s settings. Click the Desktops button. Configure the Wallpaper modifications to not alter anything.   Preparing the Deployment Now we are all set for deploying the configuration to the individual machines so we can start capturing the system data. If you have not done so already, click the Apply button to create the first entry in your data repository. If all is configured correctly, you should be able to open your data file or database and see the entry for the respective machine. Now click the File > Save As menu option and save the configuration as “BGInfoCapture.bgi”.   Deploying to Client Machines Deployment to the respective client machines is pretty straightforward. No installation is required as you just need to copy the BGInfo.exe and the BGInfoCapture.bgi to each machine and place them in the same directory. Once in place, just run the command: BGInfo.exe BGInfoCapture.bgi /Timer:0 /Silent /NoLicPrompt Of course, you probably want to schedule the capture process to run on a schedule. This command creates a Scheduled Task to run the capture process at 8 AM every morning and assumes you copied the required files to the root of your C drive: SCHTASKS /Create /SC DAILY /ST 08:00 /TN “System Info” /TR “C:\BGInfo.exe C:\BGInfoCapture.bgi /Timer:0 /Silent /NoLicPrompt” Adjust as needed, but the end result is the scheduled task command should look something like this:   Download BGInfo from Sysinternals Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Create Your Own Custom ASCII Art from Any Image How To Process Camera Raw Without Paying for Adobe Photoshop How Do You Block Annoying Text Message (SMS) Spam? How to Use and Master the Notoriously Difficult Pen Tool in Photoshop HTG Explains: What Are the Differences Between All Those Audio Formats? How To Use Layer Masks and Vector Masks to Remove Complex Backgrounds in Photoshop Bring Summer Back to Your Desktop with the LandscapeTheme for Chrome and Iron The Prospector – Home Dash Extension Creates a Whole New Browsing Experience in Firefox KinEmote Links Kinect to Windows Why Nobody Reads Web Site Privacy Policies [Infographic] Asian Temple in the Snow Wallpaper 10 Weird Gaming Records from the Guinness Book

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  • Announcing: Improvements to the Windows Azure Portal

    - by ScottGu
    Earlier today we released a number of enhancements to the new Windows Azure Management Portal.  These new capabilities include: Service Bus Management and Monitoring Support for Managing Co-administrators Import/Export support for SQL Databases Virtual Machine Experience Enhancements Improved Cloud Service Status Notifications Media Services Monitoring Support Storage Container Creation and Access Control Support All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using immediately.  Below are more details on them: Service Bus Management and Monitoring The new Windows Azure Management Portal now supports Service Bus management and monitoring. Service Bus provides rich messaging infrastructure that can sit between applications (or between cloud and on-premise environments) and allow them to communicate in a loosely coupled way for improved scale and resiliency. With the new Service Bus experience, you can now create and manage Service Bus Namespaces, Queues, Topics, Relays and Subscriptions. You can also get rich monitoring for Service Bus Queues, Topics and Subscriptions. To create a Service Bus namespace, you can now select the “Service Bus” tab in the Windows Azure portal and then simply select the CREATE command: Doing so will bring up a new “Create a Namespace” dialog that allows you to name and create a new Service Bus Namespace: Once created, you can obtain security credentials associated with the Namespace via the ACCESS KEY command. This gives you the ability to obtain the connection string associated with the service namespace. You can copy and paste these values into any application that requires these credentials: It is also now easy to create Service Bus Queues and Topics via the NEW experience in the portal drawer.  Simply click the NEW command and navigate to the “App Services” category to create a new Service Bus entity: Once you provision a new Queue or Topic it can be managed in the portal.  Clicking on a namespace will display all queues and topics within it: Clicking on an item in the list will allow you to drill down into a dashboard view that allows you to monitor the activity and traffic within it, as well as perform operations on it. For example, below is a view of an “orders” queue – note how we now surface both the incoming and outgoing message flow rate, as well as the total queue length and queue size: To monitor pub/sub subscriptions you can use the ADD METRICS command within a topic and select a specific subscription to monitor. Support for Managing Co-Administrators You can now add co-administrators for your Windows Azure subscription using the new Windows Azure Portal. This allows you to share management of your Windows Azure services with other users. Subscription co-administrators share the same administrative rights and permissions that service administrator have - except a co-administrator cannot change or view billing details about the account, nor remove the service administrator from a subscription. In the SETTINGS section, click on the ADMINISTRATORS tab, and select the ADD button to add a co-administrator to your subscription: To add a co-administrator, you specify the email address for a Microsoft account (formerly Windows Live ID) or an organizational account, and choose the subscription you want to add them to: You can later update the subscriptions that the co-administrator has access to by clicking on the EDIT button, and then select or deselect the subscriptions to which they belong. Import/Export Support for SQL Databases The Windows Azure administration portal now supports importing and exporting SQL Databases to/from Blob Storage.  Databases can be imported/exported to blob storage using the same BACPAC file format that is supported with SQL Server 2012.  Among other benefits, this makes it easy to copy and migrate databases between on-premise and cloud environments. SQL Databases now have an EXPORT command in the bottom drawer that when pressed will prompt you to save your database to a Windows Azure storage container: The UI allows you to choose an existing storage account or create a new one, as well as the name of the BACPAC file to persist in blob storage: You can also now import and create a new SQL Database by using the NEW command.  This will prompt you to select the storage container and file to import the database from: The Windows Azure Portal enables you to monitor the progress of import and export operations. If you choose to log out of the portal, you can come back later and check on the status of all of the operations in the new history tab of the SQL Database server – this shows your entire import and export history and the status (success/fail) of each: Enhancements to the Virtual Machine Experience One of the common pain-points we have heard from customers using the preview of our new Virtual Machine support has been the inability to delete the associated VHDs when a VM instance (or VM drive) gets deleted. Prior to today’s release the VHDs would continue to be in your storage account and accumulate storage charges. You can now navigate to the Disks tab within the Virtual Machine extension, select a VM disk to delete, and click the DELETE DISK command: When you click the DELETE DISK button you have the option to delete the disk + associated .VHD file (completely clearing it from storage).  Alternatively you can delete the disk but still retain a .VHD copy of it in storage. Improved Cloud Service Status Notifications The Windows Azure portal now exposes more information of the health status of role instances.  If any of the instances are in a non-running state, the status at the top of the dashboard will summarize the status (and update automatically as the role health changes): Clicking the instance hyperlink within this status summary view will navigate you to a detailed role instance view, and allow you to get more detailed health status of each of the instances.  The portal has been updated to provide more specific status information within this detailed view – giving you better visibility into the health of your app: Monitoring Support for Media Services Windows Azure Media Services allows you to create media processing jobs (for example: encoding media files) in your Windows Azure Media Services account. In the Windows Azure Portal, you can now monitor the number of encoding jobs that are queued up for processing as well as active, failed and queued tasks for encoding jobs. On your media services account dashboard, you can visualize the monitoring data for last 6 hours, 24 hours or 7 days. Storage Container Creation and Access Control Support You can now create Windows Azure Storage storage containers from within the Windows Azure Portal.  After selecting a storage account, you can navigate to the CONTAINERS tab and click the ADD CONTAINER command: This will display a dialog that lets you name the new container and control access to it: You can also update the access setting as well as container metadata of existing containers by selecting one and then using the new EDIT CONTAINER command: This will then bring up the edit container dialog that allows you to change and save its settings: In addition to creating and editing containers, you can click on them within the portal to drill-in and view blobs within them.  Summary The above features are all now live in production and available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using them today.  Visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. We’ll have even more new features and enhancements coming later this month – including support for the recent Windows Server 2012 and .NET 4.5 releases (we will enable new web and worker role images with Windows Server 2012 and .NET 4.5, and support .NET 4.5 with Websites).  Keep an eye out on my blog for details as these new features become available. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • .NET to iOS: From WinForms to the iPad

    - by RobertChipperfield
    One of the great things about working at Red Gate is getting to play with new technology - and right now, that means mobile. A few weeks ago, we decided that a little research into the tablet computing arena was due, and purely from a numbers point of view, that suggested the iPad as a good target device. A quick trip to iPhoneDevCon in San Diego later, and Marine and I came back full of ideas, and with some concept of how iOS development was meant to work. Here's how we went from there to the release of Stacks & Heaps, our geeky take on the classic "Snakes & Ladders" game. Step 1: Buy a Mac I've played with many operating systems in my time: from the original BBC Model B, through DOS, Windows, Linux, and others, but I'd so far managed to avoid buying fruit-flavoured computer hardware! If you want to develop for the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, that's the first thing that needs to change. If you've not used OS X before, the first thing you'll realise is that everything is different! In the interests of avoiding a flame war in the comments section, I'll only go so far as to say that a lot of my Windows-flavoured muscle memory no longer worked. If you're in the UK, you'll also realise your keyboard is lacking a # key, and that " and @ are the other way around from normal. The wonderful Ukelele keyboard layout editor restores some sanity here, as long as you don't look at the keyboard when you're typing. I couldn't give up the PC entirely, but a handy application called Synergy comes to the rescue - it lets you share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple machines. There's a few limitations: Alt-Tab always seems to go to the Mac, and Windows 7's UAC dialogs require the local mouse for security reasons, but it gets you a long way at least. Step 2: Register as an Apple Developer You can register as an Apple Developer free of charge, and that lets you download XCode and the iOS SDK. You also get the iPhone / iPad emulator, which is handy, since you'll need to be a paid member before you can deploy your apps to a real device. You can either enroll as an individual, or as a company. They both cost the same ($99/year), but there's a few differences between them. If you register as a company, you can add multiple developers to your team (all for the same $99 - not $99 per developer), and you get to use your company name in the App Store. However, you'll need to send off significantly more documentation to Apple, and I suspect the process takes rather longer than for an individual, where they just need to verify some credit card details. Here's a tip: if you're registering as a company, do so as early as possible. The approval process can take a while to complete, so get the application in in plenty of time. Step 3: Learn to love the square brackets! Objective-C is the language of the iPad. C and C++ are also supported, and if you're doing some serious game development, you'll probably spend most of your time in C++ talking OpenGL, but for forms-based apps, you'll be interacting with a lot of the Objective-C SDK. Like shifting from Ctrl-C to Cmd-C, it feels a little odd at first, with the familiar string.format(.) turning into: NSString *myString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Hello world, it's %@", [NSDate date]]; Thankfully XCode's auto-complete is normally passable, if not up to Visual Studio's standards, which coupled with a huge amount of content on Stack Overflow means you'll soon get to grips with the API. You'll need to get used to some terminology changes, though; here's an incomplete approximation: Coming from a .NET background, there's some luxuries you no longer have developing Objective C in XCode: Generics! Remember back in .NET 1.1, when all collections were just objects? Yup, we're back there now. ReSharper. Or, more generally, very much refactoring support. The not-many-keystrokes to rename a class, its file, and al references to it in Visual Studio turns into a much more painful experience in XCode. Garbage collection. This is actually rather less of an issue than you might expect: if you follow the rules, the reference counting provided by Objective C gets you a long way without too much pain. Circular references are their usual problematic self, though. Decent exception handling. You do have exceptions, but they're nowhere near as widely used. Generally, if something goes wrong, you get nil (see translation table above) back. Which brings me on to. Calling a method on a nil object isn't a failure - it just returns nil itself! There's many arguments for and against this, but personally I fall into the "stuff should fail as quickly and explicitly as possible" camp. Less specifically, I found that there's more chance of code failing at runtime rather than getting caught at compile-time: using the @selector(.) syntax to pass a method signature isn't (can't be) checked at compile-time, so the first you know about a typo is a crash when you try and call it. The solution to this is of course lots of great testing, both automated and manual, but I still find comfort in provably correct type safety being enforced in addition to testing. Step 4: Submit to the App Store Assuming you want to distribute to more than a handful of devices, you're going to need to submit your app to the Apple App Store. There's a few gotchas in terms of getting builds signed with the right certificates, and you'll be bouncing around between XCode and iTunes Connect a fair bit, but eventually you get everything checked off the to-do list, and are ready to upload your first binary! With some amount of anticipation, I pressed the Upload button in XCode, ready to release our creation into the world, but was instead greeted by an error informing me my XML file was malformed. Uh. A little Googling later, and it turned out that a simple rename from "Stacks&Heaps.app" to "StacksAndHeaps.app" worked around an XML escaping bug, and we were good to go. The next step is to wait for approval (or otherwise). After a couple of weeks of intensive development, this part is agonising. Did we make it? The Apple jury is still out at the moment, but our fingers are firmly crossed! In the meantime, you can see some screenshots and leave us your email address if you'd like us to get in touch when it does go live at the MobileFoo website. Step 5: Profit! Actually, that wasn't the idea here: Stacks & Heaps is free; there's no adverts, and we're not going to sell all your data either. So why did we do it? We wanted to get an idea of what it's like to move from coding for a desktop environment, to something completely different. We don't know whether in a year's time, the iPad will still be the dominant force, or whether Android will have smoothed out some bugs, tweaked the performance, and polished the UI, but I think it's a fairly sure bet that the tablet form factor is here to stay. We want to meet people who are using it, start chatting to them, and find out about some of the pain they're feeling. What better way to do that than do it ourselves, and get to write a cool game in the process?

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  • Recap: Oracle Fusion Middleware Strategies Driving Business Innovation

    - by Harish Gaur
    Hasan Rizvi, Executive Vice President of Oracle Fusion Middleware & Java took the stage on Tuesday to discuss how Oracle Fusion Middleware helps enable business innovation. Through a series of product demos and customer showcases, Hassan demonstrated how Oracle Fusion Middleware is a complete platform to harness the latest technological innovations (cloud, mobile, social and Fast Data) throughout the application lifecycle. Fig 1: Oracle Fusion Middleware is the foundation of business innovation This Session included 4 demonstrations to illustrate these strategies: 1. Build and deploy native mobile applications using Oracle ADF Mobile 2. Empower business user to model processes, design user interface and have rich mobile experience for process interaction using Oracle BPM Suite PS6. 3. Create collaborative user experience and integrate social sign-on using Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle WebCenter Content, Oracle Social Network & Oracle Identity Management 11g R2 4. Deploy and manage business applications on Oracle Exalogic Nike, LA Department of Water & Power and Nintendo joined Hasan on stage to share how their organizations are leveraging Oracle Fusion Middleware to enable business innovation. Managing Performance in the Wrld of Social and Mobile How do you provide predictable scalability and performance for an application that monitors active lifestyle of 8 million users on a daily basis? Nike’s answer is Oracle Coherence, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Exadata. Fig 2: Oracle Coherence enabled data grid improves performance of Nike+ Digital Sports Platform Nicole Otto, Sr. Director of Consumer Digital Technology discussed the vision of the Nike+ platform, a platform which represents a shift for NIKE from a  "product"  to  a "product +" experience.  There are currently nearly 8 million users in the Nike+ system who are using digitally-enabled Nike+ devices.  Once data from the Nike+ device is transmitted to Nike+ application, users access the Nike+ website or via the Nike mobile applicatoin, seeing metrics around their daily active lifestyle and even engage in socially compelling experiences to compare, compete or collaborate their data with their friends. Nike expects the number of users to grow significantly this year which will drive an explosion of data and potential new experiences. To deal with this challenge, Nike envisioned building a shared platform that would drive a consumer-centric model for the company. Nike built this new platform using Oracle Coherence and Oracle Exadata. Using Coherence, Nike built a data grid tier as a distributed cache, thereby provide low-latency access to most recent and relevant data to consumers. Nicole discussed how Nike+ Digital Sports Platform is unique in the way that it utilizes the Coherence Grid.  Nike takes advantage of Coherence as a traditional cache using both cache-aside and cache-through patterns.  This new tier has enabled Nike to create a horizontally scalable distributed event-driven processing architecture. Current data grid volume is approximately 150,000 request per minute with about 40 million objects at any given time on the grid. Improving Customer Experience Across Multiple Channels Customer experience is on top of every CIO's mind. Customer Experience needs to be consistent and secure across multiple devices consumers may use.  This is the challenge Matt Lampe, CIO of Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP) was faced with. Despite being the largest utilities company in the country, LADWP had been relying on a 38 year old customer information system for serving its customers. Their prior system  had been unable to keep up with growing customer demands. Last year, LADWP embarked on a journey to improve customer experience for 1.6million LA DWP customers using Oracle WebCenter platform. Figure 3: Multi channel & Multi lingual LADWP.com built using Oracle WebCenter & Oracle Identity Management platform Matt shed light on his efforts to drive customer self-service across 3 dimensions – new website, new IVR platform and new bill payment service. LADWP has built a new portal to increase customer self-service while reducing the transactions via IVR. LADWP's website is powered Oracle WebCenter Portal and is accessible by desktop and mobile devices. By leveraging Oracle WebCenter, LADWP eliminated the need to build, format, and maintain individual mobile applications or websites for different devices. Their entire content is managed using Oracle WebCenter Content and secured using Oracle Identity Management. This new portal automated their paper based processes to web based workflows for customers. This includes automation of Self Service implemented through My Account -  like Bill Pay, Payment History, Bill History and Usage Analysis. LADWP's solution went live in April 2012. Matt indicated that LADWP's Self-Service Portal has greatly improved customer satisfaction.  In a JD Power Associates website satisfaction survey, results indicate rankings have climbed by 25+ points, marking a remarkable increase in user experience. Bolstering Performance and Simplifying Manageability of Business Applications Ingvar Petursson, Senior Vice Preisdent of IT at Nintendo America joined Hasan on-stage to discuss their choice of Exalogic. Nintendo had significant new requirements coming their way for business systems, both internal and external, in the years to come, especially with new products like the WiiU on the horizon this holiday season. Nintendo needed a platform that could give them performance, availability and ease of management as they deploy business systems. Ingvar selected Engineered Systems for two reasons: 1. High performance  2. Ease of management Figure 4: Nintendo relies on Oracle Exalogic to run ATG eCommerce, Oracle e-Business Suite and several business applications Nintendo made a decision to run their business applications (ATG eCommerce, E-Business Suite) and several Fusion Middleware components on the Exalogic platform. What impressed Ingvar was the "stress” testing results during evaluation. Oracle Exalogic could handle their 3-year load estimates for many functions, which was better than Nintendo expected without any hardware expansion. Faster Processing of Big Data Middleware plays an increasingly important role in Big Data. Last year, we announced at OpenWorld the introduction of Oracle Data Integrator for Hadoop and Oracle Loader for Hadoop which helps in the ability to move, transform, load data to and from Big Data Appliance to Exadata.  This year, we’ve added new capabilities to find, filter, and focus data using Oracle Event Processing. This product can natively integrate with Big Data Appliance or runs standalone. Hasan briefly discussed how NTT Docomo, largest mobile operator in Japan, leverages Oracle Event Processing & Oracle Coherence to process mobile data (from 13 million smartphone users) at a speed of 700K events per second before feeding it Hadoop for distributed processing of big data. Figure 5: Mobile traffic data processing at NTT Docomo with Oracle Event Processing & Oracle Coherence    

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 17, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 17, 2010New ProjectsAstalanumerator: A JavaScript based recursive DOM/JS object inspector. Uses a simple tree menu to enumerate all properties of a object.BDD Log Converter: A simple .NET class and console application that will convert BDD logs (MDT) into XML format.CastleInvestProj: Castle Investigating project Easy Callback: This library facilitates the use of multiple asynchronous calls on the same page, and asynchronous calls from a user control also have a clean cod...Easy Wings: Small webApp to manage aircraft booking in flying club. French only for the moment.EPiServer Template Foundation: EPiServer Template Foundation builds on top of Page Type Builder to provide a framework for common site features such as basic page type properties...guidebook: a project to plan your road trip.Look into documents for e-discovery: Search, browse, tag, annotate documents such as MS Word, PDF, e-mail, etc. Good for legal professionals do e-discovery. One Bus Away for Windows Phone: A Windows Phone 7 application written in Silverlight for the OneBusAway (www.onebusaway.org) website. Allows mobile users to search for public tra...OneBusAway for Windows Phone 7: OneBusAway is a service with transit information for the Seattle, WA region. We are creating a mobile application for Windows Phone 7 utilizing th...PoFabLab - Poetry Generation Library and Editor in .NET: PoFabLab is an open source library and word processor designed for digital poets. The library can scan lines, perform Markov analysis, filter text...Project Axure: More details coming soon.Чат кутежа 2.0: ИРЦ чат специально для форума ЕНЕ简易代码生成器: 初次使用CodePlex,这只是一个测试项目。打算用WPF做一个简单的代码生成器,兼具SQL Server Client功能。使用.Net 4.0, C#开发。运营工作系统: TRAS(Team resource assist system) is a toolkit that help the studio to manage and distribute the daily work, like publish the news, GM broadcast a...New ReleasesAmuse - A New MU* Client For Windows: 2010 June: Important Notice to TestersPlease uninstall any previous versions of Amuse prior to this one before installing. Changes and InformationFirst relea...ASP.NET Generic Data Source Control: V1.0: GenericDataSource - Version 1.0Binary This is the first official binary release of the GenericDataSource for ASP.NET - stable and ready for product...Astalanumerator: Astalanumerator 0.7: I wanted to map all properties in javascript and inspect them regardless if they were objects or not. IE doesn’t support for(i in..) for native pro...BDD Log Converter: BDD Log Converter 0.1.0: First release (0.1.0).DVD Swarm: 0.8.10.616: Major update with improvements to encoding speed.Easy Callback: Easy Callback 1.0.0.0: Easy Callback library 1.0.0.0Facebook Connect Authentication for ASP.NET: Facebook Connect Authentication for ASP.NET - v1.0: Now supporting Facebook's new Open Graph API JavaScript SDK, this release of FBConnectAuth also adds support for running in partially trusted envir...FlickrNet API Library: 3.0 Beta 3: Another small Beta. Changed parsing code so exceptions aren't raised when new attributes are added by Flickr. This affects searches where you are ...Infragistics Analytics Framework: Infragistics Analytics Framework 10.2: An updated version of Infragistics Analytics Framework, which utilizes the newest version (v.1.4.4) of MSAF as well as the newest release (v.10.2) ...NUnit Add-in for Growl Notifications: NUnit Add-in for Growl Notifications 1.0 build 1: Version 1.0 build 1:[change] Test run failure notification now disappears automaticallyOpen Source PLM Activities: 3dxml player integration for Aras Innovator: This is just a simple html file you need to add to your Aras Innovator install directory. It loads the 3Dxml player for your 3dxml files. Tested o...patterns & practices - Windows Azure Guidance: WAAG - Part 2 - Drop 1: First code and docs drop for Part 2 of the Windows Azure Architecture Guide Part 1 of the Guide is released here. Highlights of this release are:...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (June 2010): Installer of the latest binaries of Phalanger 2.0 (June 2010) and its integration into Visual Studio 2008 SP1. * Improved compatibility with P...RIA Services Essentials: Book Club Application (June 16, 2010): Added some XAML to hide/show link to BookShelf page based on whether the user is logged in or not. Updated IsBookOwner authorization rule implement...secs4net: Relase 1.01: version 1.01 releasesELedit: sELedit v1.1c: Added: Tool for exporting NPC/Mob database file that is used by sNPCeditSharePoint Ad Rotator: SPAdRotator 2.0 Beta 2: Added: Open tool pane link to default Web Part text Made all images except the first hidden by default, so the Web Part will degrade gracefully w...sMAPtool: sMAPtool v0.7f (without Maps): Added: 3rd party magnifier softwaresNPCedit: sNPCedit v0.9c: Added: npc/mob names and corresponding datbaseSolidWorks Addin Development: GenericAddinFrameworkR1-06.17.2010: .sTASKedit: sTASKedit v0.8: Important BugFix: there was an mistake in the structure, team-member block and get-items block was swapped internally. Tasks that contains both blo...stefvanhooijdonk.com: UnitTesting-SP2010-TFS2010: Files for my post on TFS2010 and NUnit testing with SP2010 projects. see the post here: http://wp.me/pMnlQ-88 The XSLT here is from http://nunit4t...Telerik CAB Enabling Kit for RadControls for WinForms: TCEK 2010.1.10.504: What's new in v2010.1.0610 (Beta): RadDocking component has been replaced with the latest RadDock control Requirements: Visual Studio 2005+ Tele...TFS Buddy: TFS Buddy 1.2: Fixes a problem with notificationsThales Simulator Library: Version 0.9: The Thales Simulator Library is an implementation of a software emulation of the Thales (formerly Zaxus & Racal) Hardware Security Module cryptogra...Triton Application Framework: Tools - Code Generator - Build 1.0: This is the first release of the Generator. This is buggy but works.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30616.0: Automatic drop of latest buildXsltDb - DotNetNuke Module Builder: 01.01.27: Code completion for XsltDb, HTML and XSL stuff!! Full screen editing Some bugs are still in EditArea component and object lists in code completi...Чат кутежа 2.0: 0.9a build 2 версия: вторая сборка первой альфа-версии ирц-клиента.Most Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active ProjectsdotSpatialpatterns & practices: Enterprise Library Contribpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETLightweight Fluent WorkflowRhyduino - Arduino and Managed CodeSunlit World SchemeNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleSolidWorks Addin DevelopmentN2 CMS

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  • Dynamically loading Assemblies to reduce Runtime Dependencies

    - by Rick Strahl
    I've been working on a request to the West Wind Application Configuration library to add JSON support. The config library is a very easy to use code-first approach to configuration: You create a class that holds the configuration data that inherits from a base configuration class, and then assign a persistence provider at runtime that determines where and how the configuration data is store. Currently the library supports .NET Configuration stores (web.config/app.config), XML files, SQL records and string storage.About once a week somebody asks me about JSON support and I've deflected this question for the longest time because frankly I think that JSON as a configuration store doesn't really buy a heck of a lot over XML. Both formats require the user to perform some fixup of the plain configuration data - in XML into XML tags, with JSON using JSON delimiters for properties and property formatting rules. Sure JSON is a little less verbose and maybe a little easier to read if you have hierarchical data, but overall the differences are pretty minor in my opinion. And yet - the requests keep rolling in.Hard Link Issues in a Component LibraryAnother reason I've been hesitant is that I really didn't want to pull in a dependency on an external JSON library - in this case JSON.NET - into the core library. If you're not using JSON.NET elsewhere I don't want a user to have to require a hard dependency on JSON.NET unless they want to use the JSON feature. JSON.NET is also sensitive to versions and doesn't play nice with multiple versions when hard linked. For example, when you have a reference to V4.4 in your project but the host application has a reference to version 4.5 you can run into assembly load problems. NuGet's Update-Package can solve some of this *if* you can recompile, but that's not ideal for a component that's supposed to be just plug and play. This is no criticism of JSON.NET - this really applies to any dependency that might change.  So hard linking the DLL can be problematic for a number reasons, but the primary reason is to not force loading of JSON.NET unless you actually need it when you use the JSON configuration features of the library.Enter Dynamic LoadingSo rather than adding an assembly reference to the project, I decided that it would be better to dynamically load the DLL at runtime and then use dynamic typing to access various classes. This allows me to run without a hard assembly reference and allows more flexibility with version number differences now and in the future.But there are also a couple of downsides:No assembly reference means only dynamic access - no compiler type checking or IntellisenseRequirement for the host application to have reference to JSON.NET or else get runtime errorsThe former is minor, but the latter can be problematic. Runtime errors are always painful, but in this case I'm willing to live with this. If you want to use JSON configuration settings JSON.NET needs to be loaded in the project. If this is a Web project, it'll likely be there already.So there are a few things that are needed to make this work:Dynamically create an instance and optionally attempt to load an Assembly (if not loaded)Load types into dynamic variablesUse Reflection for a few tasks like statics/enumsThe dynamic keyword in C# makes the formerly most difficult Reflection part - method calls and property assignments - fairly painless. But as cool as dynamic is it doesn't handle all aspects of Reflection. Specifically it doesn't deal with object activation, truly dynamic (string based) member activation or accessing of non instance members, so there's still a little bit of work left to do with Reflection.Dynamic Object InstantiationThe first step in getting the process rolling is to instantiate the type you need to work with. This might be a two step process - loading the instance from a string value, since we don't have a hard type reference and potentially having to load the assembly. Although the host project might have a reference to JSON.NET, that instance might have not been loaded yet since it hasn't been accessed yet. In ASP.NET this won't be a problem, since ASP.NET preloads all referenced assemblies on AppDomain startup, but in other executable project, assemblies are just in time loaded only when they are accessed.Instantiating a type is a two step process: Finding the type reference and then activating it. Here's the generic code out of my ReflectionUtils library I use for this:/// <summary> /// Creates an instance of a type based on a string. Assumes that the type's /// </summary> /// <param name="typeName">Common name of the type</param> /// <param name="args">Any constructor parameters</param> /// <returns></returns> public static object CreateInstanceFromString(string typeName, params object[] args) { object instance = null; Type type = null; try { type = GetTypeFromName(typeName); if (type == null) return null; instance = Activator.CreateInstance(type, args); } catch { return null; } return instance; } /// <summary> /// Helper routine that looks up a type name and tries to retrieve the /// full type reference in the actively executing assemblies. /// </summary> /// <param name="typeName"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static Type GetTypeFromName(string typeName) { Type type = null; // Let default name binding find it type = Type.GetType(typeName, false); if (type != null) return type; // look through assembly list var assemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies(); // try to find manually foreach (Assembly asm in assemblies) { type = asm.GetType(typeName, false); if (type != null) break; } return type; } To use this for loading JSON.NET I have a small factory function that instantiates JSON.NET and sets a bunch of configuration settings on the generated object. The startup code also looks for failure and tries loading up the assembly when it fails since that's the main reason the load would fail. Finally it also caches the loaded instance for reuse (according to James the JSON.NET instance is thread safe and quite a bit faster when cached). Here's what the factory function looks like in JsonSerializationUtils:/// <summary> /// Dynamically creates an instance of JSON.NET /// </summary> /// <param name="throwExceptions">If true throws exceptions otherwise returns null</param> /// <returns>Dynamic JsonSerializer instance</returns> public static dynamic CreateJsonNet(bool throwExceptions = true) { if (JsonNet != null) return JsonNet; lock (SyncLock) { if (JsonNet != null) return JsonNet; // Try to create instance dynamic json = ReflectionUtils.CreateInstanceFromString("Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer"); if (json == null) { try { var ass = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.Load("Newtonsoft.Json"); json = ReflectionUtils.CreateInstanceFromString("Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializer"); } catch (Exception ex) { if (throwExceptions) throw; return null; } } if (json == null) return null; json.ReferenceLoopHandling = (dynamic) ReflectionUtils.GetStaticProperty("Newtonsoft.Json.ReferenceLoopHandling", "Ignore"); // Enums as strings in JSON dynamic enumConverter = ReflectionUtils.CreateInstanceFromString("Newtonsoft.Json.Converters.StringEnumConverter"); json.Converters.Add(enumConverter); JsonNet = json; } return JsonNet; }This code's purpose is to return a fully configured JsonSerializer instance. As you can see the code tries to create an instance and when it fails tries to load the assembly, and then re-tries loading.Once the instance is loaded some configuration occurs on it. Specifically I set the ReferenceLoopHandling option to not blow up immediately when circular references are encountered. There are a host of other small config setting that might be useful to set, but the default seem to be good enough in recent versions. Note that I'm setting ReferenceLoopHandling which requires an Enum value to be set. There's no real easy way (short of using the cardinal numeric value) to set a property or pass parameters from static values or enums. This means I still need to use Reflection to make this work. I'm using the same ReflectionUtils class I previously used to handle this for me. The function looks up the type and then uses Type.InvokeMember() to read the static property.Another feature I need is have Enum values serialized as strings rather than numeric values which is the default. To do this I can use the StringEnumConverter to convert enums to strings by adding it to the Converters collection.As you can see there's still a bit of Reflection to be done even in C# 4+ with dynamic, but with a few helpers this process is relatively painless.Doing the actual JSON ConversionFinally I need to actually do my JSON conversions. For the Utility class I need serialization that works for both strings and files so I created four methods that handle these tasks two each for serialization and deserialization for string and file.Here's what the File Serialization looks like:/// <summary> /// Serializes an object instance to a JSON file. /// </summary> /// <param name="value">the value to serialize</param> /// <param name="fileName">Full path to the file to write out with JSON.</param> /// <param name="throwExceptions">Determines whether exceptions are thrown or false is returned</param> /// <param name="formatJsonOutput">if true pretty-formats the JSON with line breaks</param> /// <returns>true or false</returns> public static bool SerializeToFile(object value, string fileName, bool throwExceptions = false, bool formatJsonOutput = false) { dynamic writer = null; FileStream fs = null; try { Type type = value.GetType(); var json = CreateJsonNet(throwExceptions); if (json == null) return false; fs = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Create); var sw = new StreamWriter(fs, Encoding.UTF8); writer = Activator.CreateInstance(JsonTextWriterType, sw); if (formatJsonOutput) writer.Formatting = (dynamic)Enum.Parse(FormattingType, "Indented"); writer.QuoteChar = '"'; json.Serialize(writer, value); } catch (Exception ex) { Debug.WriteLine("JsonSerializer Serialize error: " + ex.Message); if (throwExceptions) throw; return false; } finally { if (writer != null) writer.Close(); if (fs != null) fs.Close(); } return true; }You can see more of the dynamic invocation in this code. First I grab the dynamic JsonSerializer instance using the CreateJsonNet() method shown earlier which returns a dynamic. I then create a JsonTextWriter and configure a couple of enum settings on it, and then call Serialize() on the serializer instance with the JsonTextWriter that writes the output to disk. Although this code is dynamic it's still fairly short and readable.For full circle operation here's the DeserializeFromFile() version:/// <summary> /// Deserializes an object from file and returns a reference. /// </summary> /// <param name="fileName">name of the file to serialize to</param> /// <param name="objectType">The Type of the object. Use typeof(yourobject class)</param> /// <param name="binarySerialization">determines whether we use Xml or Binary serialization</param> /// <param name="throwExceptions">determines whether failure will throw rather than return null on failure</param> /// <returns>Instance of the deserialized object or null. Must be cast to your object type</returns> public static object DeserializeFromFile(string fileName, Type objectType, bool throwExceptions = false) { dynamic json = CreateJsonNet(throwExceptions); if (json == null) return null; object result = null; dynamic reader = null; FileStream fs = null; try { fs = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read); var sr = new StreamReader(fs, Encoding.UTF8); reader = Activator.CreateInstance(JsonTextReaderType, sr); result = json.Deserialize(reader, objectType); reader.Close(); } catch (Exception ex) { Debug.WriteLine("JsonNetSerialization Deserialization Error: " + ex.Message); if (throwExceptions) throw; return null; } finally { if (reader != null) reader.Close(); if (fs != null) fs.Close(); } return result; }This code is a little more compact since there are no prettifying options to set. Here JsonTextReader is created dynamically and it receives the output from the Deserialize() operation on the serializer.You can take a look at the full JsonSerializationUtils.cs file on GitHub to see the rest of the operations, but the string operations are very similar - the code is fairly repetitive.These generic serialization utilities isolate the dynamic serialization logic that has to deal with the dynamic nature of JSON.NET, and any code that uses these functions is none the wiser that JSON.NET is dynamically loaded.Using the JsonSerializationUtils WrapperThe final consumer of the SerializationUtils wrapper is an actual ConfigurationProvider, that is responsible for handling reading and writing JSON values to and from files. The provider is simple a small wrapper around the SerializationUtils component and there's very little code to make this work now:The whole provider looks like this:/// <summary> /// Reads and Writes configuration settings in .NET config files and /// sections. Allows reading and writing to default or external files /// and specification of the configuration section that settings are /// applied to. /// </summary> public class JsonFileConfigurationProvider<TAppConfiguration> : ConfigurationProviderBase<TAppConfiguration> where TAppConfiguration: AppConfiguration, new() { /// <summary> /// Optional - the Configuration file where configuration settings are /// stored in. If not specified uses the default Configuration Manager /// and its default store. /// </summary> public string JsonConfigurationFile { get { return _JsonConfigurationFile; } set { _JsonConfigurationFile = value; } } private string _JsonConfigurationFile = string.Empty; public override bool Read(AppConfiguration config) { var newConfig = JsonSerializationUtils.DeserializeFromFile(JsonConfigurationFile, typeof(TAppConfiguration)) as TAppConfiguration; if (newConfig == null) { if(Write(config)) return true; return false; } DecryptFields(newConfig); DataUtils.CopyObjectData(newConfig, config, "Provider,ErrorMessage"); return true; } /// <summary> /// Return /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TAppConfig"></typeparam> /// <returns></returns> public override TAppConfig Read<TAppConfig>() { var result = JsonSerializationUtils.DeserializeFromFile(JsonConfigurationFile, typeof(TAppConfig)) as TAppConfig; if (result != null) DecryptFields(result); return result; } /// <summary> /// Write configuration to XmlConfigurationFile location /// </summary> /// <param name="config"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override bool Write(AppConfiguration config) { EncryptFields(config); bool result = JsonSerializationUtils.SerializeToFile(config, JsonConfigurationFile,false,true); // Have to decrypt again to make sure the properties are readable afterwards DecryptFields(config); return result; } }This incidentally demonstrates how easy it is to create a new provider for the West Wind Application Configuration component. Simply implementing 3 methods will do in most cases.Note this code doesn't have any dynamic dependencies - all that's abstracted away in the JsonSerializationUtils(). From here on, serializing JSON is just a matter of calling the static methods on the SerializationUtils class.Already, there are several other places in some other tools where I use JSON serialization this is coming in very handy. With a couple of lines of code I was able to add JSON.NET support to an older AJAX library that I use replacing quite a bit of code that was previously in use. And for any other manual JSON operations (in a couple of apps I use JSON Serialization for 'blob' like document storage) this is also going to be handy.Performance?Some of you might be thinking that using dynamic and Reflection can't be good for performance. And you'd be right… In performing some informal testing it looks like the performance of the native code is nearly twice as fast as the dynamic code. Most of the slowness is attributable to type lookups. To test I created a native class that uses an actual reference to JSON.NET and performance was consistently around 85-90% faster with the referenced code. This will change though depending on the size of objects serialized - the larger the object the more processing time is spent inside the actual dynamically activated components and the less difference there will be. Dynamic code is always slower, but how much it really affects your application primarily depends on how frequently the dynamic code is called in relation to the non-dynamic code executing. In most situations where dynamic code is used 'to get the process rolling' as I do here the overhead is small enough to not matter.All that being said though - I serialized 10,000 objects in 80ms vs. 45ms so this is hardly slouchy performance. For the configuration component speed is not that important because both read and write operations typically happen once on first access and then every once in a while. But for other operations - say a serializer trying to handle AJAX requests on a Web Server one would be well served to create a hard dependency.Dynamic Loading - Worth it?Dynamic loading is not something you need to worry about but on occasion dynamic loading makes sense. But there's a price to be paid in added code  and a performance hit which depends on how frequently the dynamic code is accessed. But for some operations that are not pivotal to a component or application and are only used under certain circumstances dynamic loading can be beneficial to avoid having to ship extra files adding dependencies and loading down distributions. These days when you create new projects in Visual Studio with 30 assemblies before you even add your own code, trying to keep file counts under control seems like a good idea. It's not the kind of thing you do on a regular basis, but when needed it can be a useful option in your toolset… © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in .NET  C#   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 01, 2014

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 01, 2014Popular ReleasesSandcastle Help File Builder: Help File Builder and Tools v2014.5.31.0: General InformationIMPORTANT: On some systems, the content of the ZIP file is blocked and the installer may fail to run. Before extracting it, right click on the ZIP file, select Properties, and click on the Unblock button if it is present in the lower right corner of the General tab in the properties dialog. This release completes removal of the branding transformations and implements the new VS2013 presentation style that utilizes the new lightweight website format. Several breaking cha...Tooltip Web Preview: ToolTip Web Preview: Version 1.0Database Helper: Release 1.0.0.0: First Release of Database HelperCoMaSy: CoMaSy1.0.2: !Contact Management SystemImage View Slider: Image View Slider: This is a .NET component. We create this using VB.NET. Here you can use an Image Viewer with several properties to your application form. We wish somebody to improve freely. Try this out! Author : Steven Renaldo Antony Yustinus Arjuna Purnama Putra Andre Wijaya P Martin Lidau PBK GENAP 2014 - TI UKDWAspose for Apache POI: Missing Features of Apache POI WP - v 1.1: Release contain the Missing Features in Apache POI WP SDK in Comparison with Aspose.Words for dealing with Microsoft Word. What's New ?Following Examples: Insert Picture in Word Document Insert Comments Set Page Borders Mail Merge from XML Data Source Moving the Cursor Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are yet to come here. Keep visiting us. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.babelua: V1.5.6.0: V1.5.6.0 - 2014.5.30New feature: support quick-cocos2d-x project now; support text search in scripts folder now, you can use this function in Search Result Window;SEToolbox: 01.032.014 Release 1: Added fix when loading game Textures for icons causing 'Unable to read beyond the end of the stream'. Added new Resource Report, that displays all in game resources in a concise report. Added in temp directory cleaner, to keep excess files from building up. Fixed use of colors on the windows, to work better with desktop schemes. Adding base support for multilingual resources. This will allow loading of the Space Engineers resources to show localized names, and display localized date a...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.71.2: More memory and performance improvements. Fixed an issue with pivot table field order.Fancontroller: Fancontroller: Initial releaseVi-AIO SearchBar: Vi – AIO Search Bar: Version 1.0Top Verses ( Ayat Emas ): Binary Top Verses: This one is the bin folder of the component. the .dll component is inside.Traditional Calendar Component: Traditional Calender Converter: Duta Wacana Christian University This file containing Traditional Calendar Component and Demo Aplication that using Traditional Calendar Component. This component made with .NET Framework 4 and the programming language is C# .SQLSetupHelper: 1.0.0.0: First Stable Version of SQL SetupComposite Iconote: Composite Iconote: This is a composite has been made by Microsoft Visual Studio 2013. Requirement: To develop this composite or use this component in your application, your computer must have .NET framework 4.5 or newer.Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.9.101: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.9.1. Breaking changes: - Int/short Set methods of WritablePixelCollection are now unsigned. - The Q16 build no longer uses HDRI, switch to the new Q16-HDRI build if you need HDRI.fnr.exe - Find And Replace Tool: 1.7: Bug fixes Refactored logic for encoding text values to command line to handle common edge cases where find/replace operation works in GUI but not in command line Fix for bug where selection in Encoding drop down was different when generating command line in some cases. It was reported in: https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/workitem/34 Fix for "Backslash inserted before dot in replacement text" reported here: https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/discussions/541024 Fix for finding replacing...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.59: changes NEW: Added Support for 'GokoImage.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ViperII.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'PixxxView.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgRex.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'PixLiv.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'imgsee.me' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgS.it' linksToolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011/2013: XrmToolBox (v1.2014.5.28): XrmToolbox improvement XrmToolBox updates (v1.2014.5.28)Fix connecting to a connection with custom authentication without saved password Tools improvement New tool!Solution Components Mover (v1.2014.5.22) Transfer solution components from one solution to another one Import/Export NN relationships (v1.2014.3.7) Allows you to import and export many to many relationships Tools updatesAttribute Bulk Updater (v1.2014.5.28) Audit Center (v1.2014.5.28) View Layout Replicator (v1.2014.5.28) Scrip...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 5.10: Fix for Issue #20875 - echo switch doesn't work for CSS CSS should honor the SASS source-file comments JS should allow multi-line comment directivesNew ProjectsCet MicroWPF: WPF-like library for simple graphic-UI application using Netduino (Plus) 2 and the FTDI FT800 Eve board.Fakemons: Some Fakmons, powered by XML, XSLT, CSS and JavascriptFling OS: Fling OS is a C# operating system project aiming to create a new, managed operating system from the ground up.MudRoom: Experimental tool sets in mud parsing and area definitionOOP-2112110158: My name's NgocDungRoslynResearch: Roslyn ResearchTHD - Control de Usuarios: control de usuarios y permisosWPF Kinect User Controls: WPF Kinect User Control project provide simple Tilt and Skeleton Tracking Parameter Controls.

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  • class hierarchy design for small java project

    - by user523956
    I have written a java code which does following:- Main goal is to fetch emails from (inbox, spam) folders and store them in database. It fetches emails from gmail,gmx,web.de,yahoo and Hotmail. Following attributes are stored in mysql database. Slno, messagedigest, messageid, foldername, dateandtime, receiver, sender, subject, cc, size and emlfile. For gmail,gmy and web.de, I have used javamail API, because email form it can be fetched with IMAP. For yahoo and hotmail, I have used html parser and httpclient to fetch emails form spam folder and for inbox folder, I have used pop3 javamail API. I want to have proper class hierarchy which makes my code efficient and easily reusable. As of now I have designed class hierarchy as below: I am sure it can still be improved. So I would like to have different opinions on it. I have following classes and methods as of now. MainController:- Here I pass emailid, password and foldername from which emails have to be fetched. Abstract Class :-EmailProtocol Abstract Methods of it (All methods except executeParser contains method definition):- connectImap() // used by gmx,gmail and web.de email ids connectPop3() // used by hotmail and yahoo to fetch emails of inbox folder createMessageDigest // used by every email provider(gmx, gmail,web.de,yahoo,hotmail) establishDBConnection // used by every email emailAlreadyExists // used by every email which checks whether email already exists in db or not, if not then store it. storeemailproperties // used by every email to store emails properties to mysql database executeParser // nothing written in it. Overwridden and used by just hotmail and yahoo to fetch emails form spam folder. Imap extends EmailProtocol (nothing in it. But I have to have it to access methods of EmailProtocol. This is used to fetch emails from gmail,gmx and web.de) I know this is really a bad way but don't know how to do it other way. Hotmsil extends EmailProtocol Methods:- executeParser() :- This is used by just hotmail email id. fetchjunkemails() :- This is also very specific for only hotmail email id. Yahoo extends EmailProtocol Methods:- executeParser() storeEmailtotemptable() MoveEmailtoInbox() getFoldername() nullorEquals() All above methods are specific for yahoo email id. public DateTimeFormat(class) format() //this formats datetime of gmax,gmail and web.de emails. formatYahoodate //this formats datetime of yahoo email. formatHotmaildate // this formats datetime of hotmail email. public StringFormat ConvertStreamToString() // Accessed by every class except DateTimeFormat class. formatFromTo() // Accessed by every class except DateTimeFormat class. public Class CheckDatabaseExistance public static void checkForDatabaseTablesAvailability() (This method checks at the beginnning whether database and required tables exist in mysql or not. if not it creates them) Please see code of my MainController class so that You can have an idea about how I use different classes. public class MainController { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { ArrayList<String> web_de_folders = new ArrayList<String>(); web_de_folders.add("INBOX"); web_de_folders.add("Unbekannt"); web_de_folders.add("Spam"); web_de_folders.add("OUTBOX"); web_de_folders.add("SENT"); web_de_folders.add("DRAFTS"); web_de_folders.add("TRASH"); web_de_folders.add("Trash"); ArrayList<String> gmx_folders = new ArrayList<String>(); gmx_folders.add("INBOX"); gmx_folders.add("Archiv"); gmx_folders.add("Entwürfe"); gmx_folders.add("Gelöscht"); gmx_folders.add("Gesendet"); gmx_folders.add("Spamverdacht"); gmx_folders.add("Trash"); ArrayList<String> gmail_folders = new ArrayList<String>(); gmail_folders.add("Inbox"); gmail_folders.add("[Google Mail]/Spam"); gmail_folders.add("[Google Mail]/Trash"); gmail_folders.add("[Google Mail]/Sent Mail"); ArrayList<String> pop3_folders = new ArrayList<String>(); pop3_folders.add("INBOX"); CheckDatabaseExistance.checkForDatabaseTablesAvailability(); EmailProtocol imap = new Imap(); System.out.println("CHECKING FOR NEW EMAILS IN WEB.DE...(IMAP)"); System.out.println("*********************************************************************************"); imap.connectImap("[email protected]", "pwd", web_de_folders); System.out.println("\nCHECKING FOR NEW EMAILS IN GMX.DE...(IMAP)"); System.out.println("*********************************************************************************"); imap.connectImap("[email protected]", "pwd", gmx_folders); System.out.println("\nCHECKING FOR NEW EMAILS IN GMAIL...(IMAP)"); System.out.println("*********************************************************************************"); imap.connectImap("[email protected]", "pwd", gmail_folders); EmailProtocol yahoo = new Yahoo(); Yahoo y=new Yahoo(); System.out.println("\nEXECUTING YAHOO PARSER"); System.out.println("*********************************************************************************"); y.executeParser("http://de.mc1321.mail.yahoo.com/mc/welcome?ymv=0","[email protected]","pwd"); System.out.println("\nCHECKING FOR NEW EMAILS IN INBOX OF YAHOO (POP3)"); System.out.println("*********************************************************************************"); yahoo.connectPop3("[email protected]","pwd",pop3_folders); System.out.println("\nCHECKING FOR NEW EMAILS IN INBOX OF HOTMAIL (POP3)"); System.out.println("*********************************************************************************"); yahoo.connectPop3("[email protected]","pwd",pop3_folders); EmailProtocol hotmail = new Hotmail(); Hotmail h=new Hotmail(); System.out.println("\nEXECUTING HOTMAIL PARSER"); System.out.println("*********************************************************************************"); h.executeParser("https://login.live.com/ppsecure/post.srf","[email protected]","pwd"); } } I have kept DatetimeFormat and StringFormat class public so that I can access its public methods by just (DatetimeFormat.formatYahoodate for e.g. from different methods). This is the first time I have developed something in java. It serves its purpose but of course code is still not so efficient I think. I need your suggestions on this project.

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  • Does Test Driven Development (TDD) improve Quality and Correctness? (Part 1)

    - by David V. Corbin
    Since the dawn of the computer age, various methodologies have been introduced to improve quality and reduce cost. In this posting, I will by sharing my experiences with Test Driven Development; both its benefits and limitations. To start this topic, we need to agree on what TDD is. The first is to define each of the three words as used in this context. Test - An item or action which measures something in some quantifiable form. Driven - The primary motivation or focus of a series of activities (process) Development - All phases of a software project/product from concept through delivery. The above are very simple definitions that result in the following: "TDD is a process where the primary focus is on measuring and quantifying all aspects of the creation of a (software) product." There are many places where TDD is used outside of software development, even though it is not known by this name. Consider the (conventional) education process that most of us grew up on. The focus was to get the best grades as measured by different tests. Many of these tests measured rote memorization and not understanding of the subject matter. The result of this that many people graduated with high scores but without "quality and correctness" in their ability to utilize the subject matter (of course, the flip side is true where certain people DID understand the material but were not very good at taking this type of test). Returning to software development, let us look at some common scenarios. While these items are generally applicable regardless of platform, language and tools; the remainder of this post will utilize Microsoft Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (TFS) for examples. It should be realized that everyone does at least some aspect of TDD. At the most rudimentary level, getting a program to compile involves a "pass/fail" measurement (is the syntax valid) that drives their ability to proceed further (run the program). Other developers may create "Unit Tests" in the belief that having a test for every method/property of a class and good code coverage is the goal of TDD. These items may be helpful and even important, but really only address a small aspect of the overall effort. To see TDD in a bigger view, lets identify the various activities that are part of the Software Development LifeCycle. These are going to be presented in a Waterfall style for simplicity, but each item also occurs within Iterative methodologies such as Agile/Scrum. the key ones here are: Requirements Gathering Architecture Design Implementation Quality Assurance Can each of these items be subjected to a process which establishes metrics (quantified metrics) that reflect both the quality and correctness of each item? It should be clear that conventional Unit Tests do not apply to all of these items; at best they can verify that a local aspect (e.g. a Class/Method) of implementation matches the (test writers perspective of) the appropriate design document. So what can we do? For each of area, the goal is to create tests that are quantifiable and durable. The ability to quantify the measurements (beyond a simple pass/fail) is critical to tracking progress(eventually measuring the level of success that has been achieved) and for providing clear information on what items need to be addressed (along with the appropriate time to address them - in varying levels of detail) . Durability is important so that the test can be reapplied (ideally in an automated fashion) over the entire cycle. Returning for a moment back to our "education example", one must also be careful of how the tests are organized and how the measurements are taken. If a test is in a multiple choice format, there is a significant statistical probability that a correct answer might be the result of a random guess. Also, in many situations, having the student simply provide a final answer can obscure many important elements. For example, on a math test, having the student simply provide a numeric answer (rather than showing the methodology) may result in a complete mismatch between the process and the result. It is hard to determine which is worse: The student who makes a simple arithmetric error at one step of a long process (resulting in a wrong answer) or The student who (without providing the "workflow") uses a completely invalid approach, yet still comes up with the right number. The "Wrong Process"/"Right Answer" is probably the single biggest problem in software development. Even very simple items can suffer from this. As an example consider the following code for a "straight line" calculation....Is it correct? (for Integral Points)         int Solve(int m, int b, int x) { return m * x + b; }   Most people would respond "Yes". But let's take the question one step further... Is it correct for all possible values of m,b,x??? (no fair if you cheated by being focused on the bolded text!)  Without additional information regarding constrains on "the possible values of m,b,x" the answer must be NO, there is the risk of overflow/wraparound that will produce an incorrect result! To properly answer this question (i.e. Test the Code), one MUST be able to backtrack from the implementation through the design, and architecture all the way back to the requirements. And the requirement itself must be tested against the stakeholder(s). It is only when the bounding conditions are defined that it is possible to determine if the code is "Correct" and has "Quality". Yet, how many of us (myself included) have written such code without even thinking about it. In many canses we (think we) "know" what the bounds are, and that the code will be correct. As we all know, requirements change, "code reuse" causes implementations to be applied to different scenarios, etc. This leads directly to the types of system failures that plague so many projects. This approach to TDD is much more holistic than ones which start by focusing on the details. The fundamental concepts still apply: Each item should be tested. The test should be defined/implemented before (or concurrent with) the definition/implementation of the actual item. We also add concepts that expand the scope and alter the style by recognizing: There are many things beside "lines of code" that benefit from testing (measuring/evaluating in a formal way) Correctness and Quality can not be solely measured by "correct results" In the future parts, we will examine in greater detail some of the techniques that can be applied to each of these areas....

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  • Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt 3)

    - by Geoff N. Hiten
    The Controller Now we get to the meat of the matter.  You want a virtual cluster, the first thing you have to do is create your own portable domain.  Start with a plain vanilla install of Windows 2003 R2 Standard on a semi-default VM. (1 GB RAM, 2 cores, 2 NICs, 128GB dynamically expanding VHD file).  I chose this because it had the smallest disk and memory footprint of any current supported Microsoft Server product.  I created the VM with a single dynamically expanding VHD, one fixed 16 GB VHD, and two NICs.  One NIC is connected to the outside world and the other one is part of an internal-only network.  The first NIC is set up as a DHCP client.  We will get to the other one later. I actually tried this with Windows 2008 R2, but it failed miserably.  Not sure whether it was 2008 R2 or the fact I tried to use cloned VMs in the cluster.  Clustering is one place where NewSID would really come in handy.  Too bad Microsoft bought and buried it. Load and Patch the OS (hence the need for the outside connection).This is a good time to go get dinner.  Maybe a movie too.  There are close to a hundred patches that need to be downloaded and applied.  Avoiding that mess was why I put so much time into trying to get the 2008 R2 version working.  Maybe next time.  Don’t forget to add the extensions for VMLite (or whatever virtualization product you prefer). Set a fixed IP address on the internal-only NIC.  Do not give it a gateway.  Put the same IP address for the NIC and for the DNS Server.  This IP should be in a range that is never available on your public network.  You will need all the addresses in the range available.  See the previous post for the exact settings I used. I chose 10.97.230.1 as the server.  The rest of the 10.97.230 range is what I will use later.  For the curious, those numbers are based on elements of my home address.  Not truly random, but good enough for this project. Do not bridge the network connections.  I never allowed the cluster nodes direct access to any public network. Format the fixed VHD and leave it alone for now. Promote the VM to a Domain Controller.  If you have never done this, don’t worry.  The only meaningful decision is what to call the new domain.  I prefer a bogus name that does not correspond to a real Top-Level Domain (TLD).  .com, .biz., .net, .org  are all TLDs that we know and love.  I chose .test as the TLD since it is descriptive AND it does not exist in the real world.  The domain is called MicroAD.  This gives me MicroAD.Test as my domain. During the promotion process, you will be prompted to install DNS as part of the Domain creation process.  You want to accept this option.  The installer will automatically assign this DNS server as the authoritative owner of the MicroAD.test DNS domain (not to be confused with the MicroAD.test Active Directory domain.) For the rest of the DCPROMO process, just accept the defaults. Now let’s make our IP address management easy.  Add the DHCP Role to the server.  Add the server (10.97.230.1 in this case) as the default gateway to assign to DHCP clients.  Here is where you have to be VERY careful and bind it ONLY to the Internal NIC.  Trust me, your network admin will NOT like an extra DHCP server “helping” out on her network.  Go ahead and create a range of 10-20 IP Addresses in your scope.  You might find other uses for a pocket domain controller <cough> Mirroring </cough> than just for building a cluster.  And Clustering in SQL 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 fully supports DHCP addresses. Now we have three of the five key roles ready.  Two more to go. Next comes file sharing.  Since your cluster node VMs will not have access to any outside, you have to have some way to get files into these VMs.  I simply go to the root of C: and create a “Shared” folder.  I then share it out and grant full control to “Everyone” to both the share and to the underlying NTFS folder.   This will be immensely useful for Service Packs, demo databases, and any other software that isn’t packaged as an ISO that we can mount to the VM. Finally we need to create a block-level multi-connect storage device.  The kind folks at Starwinds Software (http://www.starwindsoftware.com/) graciously gave me a non-expiring demo license for expressly this purpose.  Their iSCSI SAN software lets you create an iSCSI target from nearly any storage medium.  Refreshingly, their product does exactly what they say it does.  Thanks. Remember that 16 GB VHD file?  That is where we are going to carve into our LUNs.  I created an iSCSI folder off the root, just so I can keep everything organized.  I then carved 5 ea. 2 GB iSCSI targets from that folder.  I chose a fixed VHD for performance.  I tried this earlier with a dynamically expanding VHD, but too many layers of abstraction and sparseness combined to make it unusable even for a demo.  Stick with a fixed VHD so there is a one-to-one mapping between abstract and physical storage.  If you read the previous post, you know what I named these iSCSI LUNs and why.  Yes, I do have some left over space.  Always leave yourself room for future growth or options. This gets us up to where we can actually build the nodes and install SQL.  As with most clusters, the real work happens long before the individual nodes get installed and configured.  At least it does if you want the cluster to be a true high-availability platform.

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  • Adding proper THEAD sections to a GridView

    - by Rick Strahl
    I’m working on some legacy code for a customer today and dealing with a page that has my favorite ‘friend’ on it: A GridView control. The ASP.NET GridView control (and also the older DataGrid control) creates some pretty messed up HTML. One of the more annoying things it does is to generate all rows including the header into the page in the <tbody> section of the document rather than in a properly separated <thead> section. Here’s is typical GridView generated HTML output: <table class="tablesorter blackborder" cellspacing="0" rules="all" border="1" id="Table1" style="border-collapse:collapse;"> <tr> <th scope="col">Name</th> <th scope="col">Company</th> <th scope="col">Entered</th><th scope="col">Balance</th> </tr> <tr> <td>Frank Hobson</td><td>Hobson Inc.</td> <td>10/20/2010 12:00:00 AM</td><td>240.00</td> </tr> ... </table> Notice that all content – both the headers and the body of the table – are generated directly under the <table> tag and there’s no explicit use of <tbody> or <thead> (or <tfooter> for that matter). When the browser renders this the document some default settings kick in and the DOM tree turns into something like this: <table> <tbody> <tr> <-- header <tr> <—detail row <tr> <—detail row </tbody> </table> Now if you’re just rendering the Grid server side and you’re applying all your styles through CssClass assignments this isn’t much of a problem. However, if you want to style your grid more generically using hierarchical CSS selectors it gets a lot more tricky to format tables that don’t properly delineate headers and body content. Also many plug-ins and other JavaScript utilities that work on tables require a properly formed table layout, and many of these simple won’t work out of the box with a GridView. For example, one of the things I wanted to do for this app is use the jQuery TableSorter plug-in which – not surprisingly – requires to work of table headers in the DOM document. Out of the box, the TableSorter plug-in doesn’t work with GridView controls, because the lack of a <thead> section to work on. Luckily with a little help of some jQuery scripting there’s a real easy fix to this problem. Basically, if we know the GridView generated table has a header in it, code like the following will move the headers from <tbody> to <thead>: <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { // Fix up GridView to support THEAD tags $("#gvCustomers tbody").before("<thead><tr></tr></thead>"); $("#gvCustomers thead tr").append($("#gvCustomers th")); $("#gvCustomers tbody tr:first").remove(); $("#gvCustomers").tablesorter({ sortList: [[1, 0]] }); }); </script> And voila you have a table that now works with the TableSorter plug-in. If you use GridView’s a lot you might want something a little more generic so the following does the same thing but should work more generically on any GridView/DataGrid missing its <thead> tag: function fixGridView(tableEl) {            var jTbl = $(tableEl);         if(jTbl.find("tbody>tr>th").length > 0) {         jTbl.find("tbody").before("<thead><tr></tr></thead>");         jTbl.find("thead tr").append(jTbl.find("th"));         jTbl.find("tbody tr:first").remove();     } } which you can call like this: $(document).ready(function () { fixGridView( $("#gvCustomers") ); $("#gvCustomers").tablesorter({ sortList: [[1, 0]] }); }); Server Side THEAD Rendering [updated from comments 11/21/2010] Several commenters pointed out that you can also do this on the server side by using the GridView.HeaderRow.TableSection property to force rendering with a proper table header. I was unaware of this option actually – not exactly an easy one to discover. One issue here is that timing of this needs to happen during the databinding process so you need to use an event handler: this.gvCustomers.DataBound += (object o, EventArgs ev) => { gvCustomers.HeaderRow.TableSection = TableRowSection.TableHeader; }; this.gvCustomers.DataSource = custList; this.gvCustomers.DataBind(); You can apply the same logic for the FooterRow. It’s beyond me why this rendering mode isn’t the default for a GridView – why would you ever want to have a table that doesn’t use a THEAD section??? But I disgress :-) I don’t use GridViews much anymore – opting for more flexible approaches using ListViews or even plain code based views or other custom displays that allow more control over layout, but I still see a lot of old code that does use them old clunkers including my own :) (gulp) and this does make life a little bit easier especially if you’re working with any of the jQuery table related plug-ins that expect a proper table structure.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  jQuery  

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  • PowerShell Script to Enumerate SharePoint 2010 or 2013 Permissions and Active Directory Group Membership

    - by Brian T. Jackett
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/bjackett/archive/2013/07/01/powershell-script-to-enumerate-sharepoint-2010-or-2013-permissions-and.aspx   In this post I will present a script to enumerate SharePoint 2010 or 2013 permissions across the entire farm down to the site (SPWeb) level.  As a bonus this script also recursively expands the membership of any Active Directory (AD) group including nested groups which you wouldn’t be able to find through the SharePoint UI.   History     Back in 2009 (over 4 years ago now) I published one my most read blog posts about enumerating SharePoint 2007 permissions.  I finally got around to updating that script to remove deprecated APIs, supporting the SharePoint 2010 commandlets, and fixing a few bugs.  There are 2 things that script did that I had to remove due to major architectural or procedural changes in the script. Indenting the XML output Ability to search for a specific user    I plan to add back the ability to search for a specific user but wanted to get this version published first.  As for indenting the XML that could be added but would take some effort.  If there is user demand for it (let me know in the comments or email me using the contact button at top of blog) I’ll move it up in priorities.    As a side note you may also notice that I’m not using the Active Directory commandlets.  This was a conscious decision since not all environments have them available.  Instead I’m relying on the older [ADSI] type accelerator and APIs.  It does add a significant amount of code to the script but it is necessary for compatibility.  Hopefully in a few years if I need to update again I can remove that legacy code.   Solution    Below is the script to enumerate SharePoint 2010 and 2013 permissions down to site level.  You can also download it from my SkyDrive account or my posting on the TechNet Script Center Repository. SkyDrive TechNet Script Center Repository http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Enumerate-SharePoint-2010-35976bdb   001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016 017 018 019 020 021 022 023 024 025 026 027 028 029 030 031 032 033 034 035 036 037 038 039 040 041 042 043 044 045 046 047 048 049 050 051 052 053 054 055 056 057 058 059 060 061 062 063 064 065 066 067 068 069 070 071 072 073 074 075 076 077 078 079 080 081 082 083 084 085 086 087 088 089 090 091 092 093 094 095 096 097 098 099 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 ########################################################### #DisplaySPWebApp8.ps1 # #Author: Brian T. Jackett #Last Modified Date: 2013-07-01 # #Traverse the entire web app site by site to display # hierarchy and users with permissions to site. ########################################################### function Expand-ADGroupMembership {     Param     (         [Parameter(Mandatory=$true,                    Position=0)]         [string]         $ADGroupName,         [Parameter(Position=1)]         [string]         $RoleBinding     )     Process     {         $roleBindingText = ""         if(-not [string]::IsNullOrEmpty($RoleBinding))         {             $roleBindingText = " RoleBindings=`"$roleBindings`""         }         Write-Output "<ADGroup Name=`"$($ADGroupName)`"$roleBindingText>"         $domain = $ADGroupName.substring(0, $ADGroupName.IndexOf("\") + 1)         $groupName = $ADGroupName.Remove(0, $ADGroupName.IndexOf("\") + 1)                                     #BEGIN - CODE ADAPTED FROM SCRIPT CENTER SAMPLE CODE REPOSITORY         #http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/scripts/powershell/search/users/srch106.mspx         #GET AD GROUP FROM DIRECTORY SERVICES SEARCH         $strFilter = "(&(objectCategory=Group)(name="+($groupName)+"))"         $objDomain = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry         $objSearcher = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher         $objSearcher.SearchRoot = $objDomain         $objSearcher.Filter = $strFilter         # specify properties to be returned         $colProplist = ("name","member","objectclass")         foreach ($i in $colPropList)         {             $catcher = $objSearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add($i)         }         $colResults = $objSearcher.FindAll()         #END - CODE ADAPTED FROM SCRIPT CENTER SAMPLE CODE REPOSITORY         foreach ($objResult in $colResults)         {             if($objResult.Properties["Member"] -ne $null)             {                 foreach ($member in $objResult.Properties["Member"])                 {                     $indMember = [adsi] "LDAP://$member"                     $fullMemberName = $domain + ($indMember.Name)                                         #if($indMember["objectclass"]                         # if child AD group continue down chain                         if(($indMember | Select-Object -ExpandProperty objectclass) -contains "group")                         {                             Expand-ADGroupMembership -ADGroupName $fullMemberName                         }                         elseif(($indMember | Select-Object -ExpandProperty objectclass) -contains "user")                         {                             Write-Output "<ADUser>$fullMemberName</ADUser>"                         }                 }             }         }                 Write-Output "</ADGroup>"     } } #end Expand-ADGroupMembership # main portion of script if((Get-PSSnapin -Name microsoft.sharepoint.powershell) -eq $null) {     Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell } $farm = Get-SPFarm Write-Output "<Farm Guid=`"$($farm.Id)`">" $webApps = Get-SPWebApplication foreach($webApp in $webApps) {     Write-Output "<WebApplication URL=`"$($webApp.URL)`" Name=`"$($webApp.Name)`">"     foreach($site in $webApp.Sites)     {         Write-Output "<SiteCollection URL=`"$($site.URL)`">"                 foreach($web in $site.AllWebs)         {             Write-Output "<Site URL=`"$($web.URL)`">"             # if site inherits permissions from parent then stop processing             if($web.HasUniqueRoleAssignments -eq $false)             {                 Write-Output "<!-- Inherits role assignments from parent -->"             }             # else site has unique permissions             else             {                 foreach($assignment in $web.RoleAssignments)                 {                     if(-not [string]::IsNullOrEmpty($assignment.Member.Xml))                     {                         $roleBindings = ($assignment.RoleDefinitionBindings | Select-Object -ExpandProperty name) -join ","                         # check if assignment is SharePoint Group                         if($assignment.Member.XML.StartsWith('<Group') -eq "True")                         {                             Write-Output "<SPGroup Name=`"$($assignment.Member.Name)`" RoleBindings=`"$roleBindings`">"                             foreach($SPGroupMember in $assignment.Member.Users)                             {                                 # if SharePoint group member is an AD Group                                 if($SPGroupMember.IsDomainGroup)                                 {                                     Expand-ADGroupMembership -ADGroupName $SPGroupMember.Name                                 }                                 # else SharePoint group member is an AD User                                 else                                 {                                     # remove claim portion of user login                                     #Write-Output "<ADUser>$($SPGroupMember.UserLogin.Remove(0,$SPGroupMember.UserLogin.IndexOf("|") + 1))</ADUser>"                                     Write-Output "<ADUser>$($SPGroupMember.UserLogin)</ADUser>"                                 }                             }                             Write-Output "</SPGroup>"                         }                         # else an indivdually listed AD group or user                         else                         {                             if($assignment.Member.IsDomainGroup)                             {                                 Expand-ADGroupMembership -ADGroupName $assignment.Member.Name -RoleBinding $roleBindings                             }                             else                             {                                 # remove claim portion of user login                                 #Write-Output "<ADUser>$($assignment.Member.UserLogin.Remove(0,$assignment.Member.UserLogin.IndexOf("|") + 1))</ADUser>"                                                                 Write-Output "<ADUser RoleBindings=`"$roleBindings`">$($assignment.Member.UserLogin)</ADUser>"                             }                         }                     }                 }             }             Write-Output "</Site>"             $web.Dispose()         }         Write-Output "</SiteCollection>"         $site.Dispose()     }     Write-Output "</WebApplication>" } Write-Output "</Farm>"      The output from the script can be sent to an XML which you can then explore using the [XML] type accelerator.  This lets you explore the XML structure however you see fit.  See the screenshot below for an example.      If you do view the XML output through a text editor (Notepad++ for me) notice the format.  Below we see a SharePoint site that has a SharePoint group Demo Members with Edit permissions assigned.  Demo Members has an AD group corp\developers as a member.  corp\developers has a child AD group called corp\DevelopersSub with 1 AD user in that sub group.  As you can see the script recursively expands the AD hierarchy.   Conclusion    It took me 4 years to finally update this script but I‘m happy to get this published.  I was able to fix a number of errors and smooth out some rough edges.  I plan to develop this into a more full fledged tool over the next year with more features and flexibility (copy permissions, search for individual user or group, optional enumerate lists / items, etc.).  If you have any feedback, feature requests, or issues running it please let me know.  Enjoy the script!         -Frog Out

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  • Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt3)

    - by Geoff N. Hiten
    The Controller Now we get to the meat of the matter.  You want a virtual cluster, the first thing you have to do is create your own portable domain.  IStart with a plain vanilla install of Windows 2003 R2 Standard on a semi-default VM. (1 GB RAM, 2 cores, 2 NICs, 128GB dynamically expanding VHD file).  I chose this because it had the smallest disk and memory footprint of any current supported Microsoft Server product.  I created the VM with a single dynamically expanding VHD, one fixed 16 GB VHD, and two NICs.  One NIC is connected to the outside world and the other one is part of an internal-only network.  The first NIC is set up as a DHCP client.  We will get to the other one later. I actually tried this with Windows 2008 R2, but it failed miserably.  Not sure whether it was 2008 R2 or the fact I tried to use cloned VMs in the cluster.  Clustering is one place where NewSID would really come in handy.  Too bad Microsoft bought and buried it. Load and Patch the OS (hence the need for the outside connection).This is a good time to go get dinner.  Maybe a movie too.  There are close to a hundred patches that need to be downloaded and applied.  Avoiding that mess was why I put so much time into trying to get the 2008 R2 version working.  Maybe next time.  Don’t forget to add the extensions for VMLite (or whatever virtualization product you prefer). Set a fixed IP address on the internal-only NIC.  Do not give it a gateway.  Put the same IP address for the NIC and for the DNS Server.  This IP should be in a range that is never available on your public network.  You will need all the addresses in the range available.  See the previous post for the exact settings I used. I chose 10.97.230.1 as the server.  The rest of the 10.97.230 range is what I will use later.  For the curious, those numbers are based on elements of my home address.  Not truly random, but good enough for this project. Do not bridge the network connections.  I never allowed the cluster nodes direct access to any public network. Format the fixed VHD and leave it alone for now. Promote the VM to a Domain Controller.  If you have never done this, don’t worry.  The only meaningful decision is what to call the new domain.  I prefer a bogus name that does not correspond to a real Top-Level Domain (TLD).  .com, .biz., .net, .org  are all TLDs that we know and love.  I chose .test as the TLD since it is descriptive AND it does not exist in the real world.  The domain is called MicroAD.  This gives me MicroAD.Test as my domain. During the promotion process, you will be prompted to install DNS as part of the Domain creation process.  You want to accept this option.  The installer will automatically assign this DNS server as the authoritative owner of the MicroAD.test DNS domain (not to be confused with the MicroAD.test Active Directory domain.) For the rest of the DCPROMO process, just accept the defaults. Now let’s make our IP address management easy.  Add the DHCP Role to the server.  Add the server (10.97.230.1 in this case) as the default gateway to assign to DHCP clients.  Here is where you have to be VERY careful and bind it ONLY to the Internal NIC.  Trust me, your network admin will NOT like an extra DHCP server “helping” out on her network.  Go ahead and create a range of 10-20 IP Addresses in your scope.  You might find other uses for a pocket domain controller <cough> Mirroring </cough> than just for building a cluster.  And Clustering in SQL 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 fully supports DHCP addresses. Now we have three of the five key roles ready.  Two more to go. Next comes file sharing.  Since your cluster node VMs will not have access to any outside, you have to have some way to get files into these VMs.  I simply go to the root of C: and create a “Shared” folder.  I then share it out and grant full control to “Everyone” to both the share and to the underlying NTFS folder.   This will be immensely useful for Service Packs, demo databases, and any other software that isn’t packaged as an ISO that we can mount to the VM. Finally we need to create a block-level multi-connect storage device.  The kind folks at Starwinds Software (http://www.starwindsoftware.com/) graciously gave me a non-expiring demo license for expressly this purpose.  Their iSCSI SAN software lets you create an iSCSI target from nearly any storage medium.  Refreshingly, their product does exactly what they say it does.  Thanks. Remember that 16 GB VHD file?  That is where we are going to carve into our LUNs.  I created an iSCSI folder off the root, just so I can keep everything organized.  I then carved 5 ea. 2 GB iSCSI targets from that folder.  I chose a fixed VHD for performance.  I tried this earlier with a dynamically expanding VHD, but too many layers of abstraction and sparseness combined to make it unusable even for a demo.  Stick with a fixed VHD so there is a one-to-one mapping between abstract and physical storage.  If you read the previous post, you know what I named these iSCSI LUNs and why.  Yes, I do have some left over space.  Always leave yourself room for future growth or options. This gets us up to where we can actually build the nodes and install SQL.  As with most clusters, the real work happens long before the individual nodes get installed and configured.  At least it does if you want the cluster to be a true high-availability platform.

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  • No GLX on Intel card with multiseat with additional nVidia card

    - by MeanEYE
    I have multiseat configured and my Xorg has 2 server layouts. One is for nVidia card and other is for Intel card. They both work, but display server assigned to Intel card doesn't have hardware acceleration since DRI and GLX module being used is from nVidia driver. So my question is, can I configure layouts somehow to use right DRI and GLX with each card? My Xorg.conf: Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Default" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 Option "Xinerama" "0" EndSection Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "TV" Screen 0 "Screen1" 0 0 Option "Xinerama" "0" EndSection Section "Monitor" # HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Unknown" ModelName "DELL E198WFP" HorizSync 30.0 - 83.0 VertRefresh 56.0 - 75.0 Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor1" VendorName "Unknown" Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Device0" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" BoardName "GeForce GT 610" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Device1" Driver "intel" BusID "PCI:0:2:0" Option "AccelMethod" "uxa" EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Device0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultDepth 24 Option "Stereo" "0" Option "nvidiaXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-1" Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +1440+0, DFP-1: nvidia-auto-select +0+0" SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen1" Device "Device1" Monitor "Monitor1" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Log file for Intel: [ 18.239] X.Org X Server 1.13.0 Release Date: 2012-09-05 [ 18.239] X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 [ 18.239] Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.24-32-xen x86_64 Ubuntu [ 18.239] Current Operating System: Linux bytewiper 3.5.0-18-generic #29-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 19 10:26:51 UTC 2012 x86_64 [ 18.239] Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-18-generic root=UUID=fc0616fd-f212-4846-9241-ba4a492f0513 ro quiet splash [ 18.239] Build Date: 20 September 2012 11:55:20AM [ 18.239] xorg-server 2:1.13.0+git20120920.70e57668-0ubuntu0ricotz (For technical support please see http://www.ubuntu.com/support) [ 18.239] Current version of pixman: 0.26.0 [ 18.239] Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org to make sure that you have the latest version. [ 18.239] Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting, (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational, (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. [ 18.239] (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.1.log", Time: Wed Nov 21 18:32:14 2012 [ 18.239] (==) Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" [ 18.239] (==) Using system config directory "/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d" [ 18.239] (++) ServerLayout "TV" [ 18.239] (**) |-->Screen "Screen1" (0) [ 18.239] (**) | |-->Monitor "Monitor1" [ 18.240] (**) | |-->Device "Device1" [ 18.240] (**) Option "Xinerama" "0" [ 18.240] (==) Automatically adding devices [ 18.240] (==) Automatically enabling devices [ 18.240] (==) Automatically adding GPU devices [ 18.240] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic" does not exist. [ 18.240] Entry deleted from font path. [ 18.240] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/" does not exist. [ 18.240] Entry deleted from font path. [ 18.240] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/" does not exist. [ 18.240] Entry deleted from font path. [ 18.240] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi" does not exist. [ 18.240] Entry deleted from font path. [ 18.240] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi" does not exist. [ 18.240] Entry deleted from font path. [ 18.240] (WW) The directory "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType" does not exist. [ 18.240] Entry deleted from font path. [ 18.240] (==) FontPath set to: /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc, /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1, built-ins [ 18.240] (==) ModulePath set to "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xorg/extra-modules,/usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules,/usr/lib/xorg/modules" [ 18.240] (II) The server relies on udev to provide the list of input devices. If no devices become available, reconfigure udev or disable AutoAddDevices. [ 18.240] (II) Loader magic: 0x7f6917944c40 [ 18.240] (II) Module ABI versions: [ 18.240] X.Org ANSI C Emulation: 0.4 [ 18.240] X.Org Video Driver: 13.0 [ 18.240] X.Org XInput driver : 18.0 [ 18.240] X.Org Server Extension : 7.0 [ 18.240] (II) config/udev: Adding drm device (/dev/dri/card0) [ 18.241] (--) PCI: (0:0:2:0) 8086:0152:1043:84ca rev 9, Mem @ 0xf7400000/4194304, 0xd0000000/268435456, I/O @ 0x0000f000/64 [ 18.241] (--) PCI:*(0:1:0:0) 10de:104a:1458:3546 rev 161, Mem @ 0xf6000000/16777216, 0xe0000000/134217728, 0xe8000000/33554432, I/O @ 0x0000e000/128, BIOS @ 0x????????/524288 [ 18.241] (II) Open ACPI successful (/var/run/acpid.socket) [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension Generic Event Extension [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension SHAPE [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension MIT-SHM [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XInputExtension [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XTEST [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension BIG-REQUESTS [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension SYNC [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XKEYBOARD [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XC-MISC [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension SECURITY [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XINERAMA [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XFIXES [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension RENDER [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension RANDR [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension COMPOSITE [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension DAMAGE [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension MIT-SCREEN-SAVER [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension DOUBLE-BUFFER [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension RECORD [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension DPMS [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension X-Resource [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XVideo [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XVideo-MotionCompensation [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XFree86-VidModeExtension [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XFree86-DGA [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension XFree86-DRI [ 18.241] Initializing built-in extension DRI2 [ 18.241] (II) LoadModule: "glx" [ 18.241] (II) Loading /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xorg/extra-modules/libglx.so [ 18.247] (II) Module glx: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation" [ 18.247] compiled for 4.0.2, module version = 1.0.0 [ 18.247] Module class: X.Org Server Extension [ 18.247] (II) NVIDIA GLX Module 310.19 Thu Nov 8 01:12:43 PST 2012 [ 18.247] Loading extension GLX [ 18.247] (II) LoadModule: "intel" [ 18.248] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so [ 18.248] (II) Module intel: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 18.248] compiled for 1.13.0, module version = 2.20.13 [ 18.248] Module class: X.Org Video Driver [ 18.248] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 13.0 [ 18.248] (II) intel: Driver for Intel Integrated Graphics Chipsets: i810, i810-dc100, i810e, i815, i830M, 845G, 854, 852GM/855GM, 865G, 915G, E7221 (i915), 915GM, 945G, 945GM, 945GME, Pineview GM, Pineview G, 965G, G35, 965Q, 946GZ, 965GM, 965GME/GLE, G33, Q35, Q33, GM45, 4 Series, G45/G43, Q45/Q43, G41, B43, B43, Clarkdale, Arrandale, Sandybridge Desktop (GT1), Sandybridge Desktop (GT2), Sandybridge Desktop (GT2+), Sandybridge Mobile (GT1), Sandybridge Mobile (GT2), Sandybridge Mobile (GT2+), Sandybridge Server, Ivybridge Mobile (GT1), Ivybridge Mobile (GT2), Ivybridge Desktop (GT1), Ivybridge Desktop (GT2), Ivybridge Server, Ivybridge Server (GT2), Haswell Desktop (GT1), Haswell Desktop (GT2), Haswell Desktop (GT2+), Haswell Mobile (GT1), Haswell Mobile (GT2), Haswell Mobile (GT2+), Haswell Server (GT1), Haswell Server (GT2), Haswell Server (GT2+), Haswell SDV Desktop (GT1), Haswell SDV Desktop (GT2), Haswell SDV Desktop (GT2+), Haswell SDV Mobile (GT1), Haswell SDV Mobile (GT2), Haswell SDV Mobile (GT2+), Haswell SDV Server (GT1), Haswell SDV Server (GT2), Haswell SDV Server (GT2+), Haswell ULT Desktop (GT1), Haswell ULT Desktop (GT2), Haswell ULT Desktop (GT2+), Haswell ULT Mobile (GT1), Haswell ULT Mobile (GT2), Haswell ULT Mobile (GT2+), Haswell ULT Server (GT1), Haswell ULT Server (GT2), Haswell ULT Server (GT2+), Haswell CRW Desktop (GT1), Haswell CRW Desktop (GT2), Haswell CRW Desktop (GT2+), Haswell CRW Mobile (GT1), Haswell CRW Mobile (GT2), Haswell CRW Mobile (GT2+), Haswell CRW Server (GT1), Haswell CRW Server (GT2), Haswell CRW Server (GT2+), ValleyView PO board [ 18.248] (++) using VT number 8 [ 18.593] (II) intel(0): using device path '/dev/dri/card0' [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32 [ 18.593] (==) intel(0): RGB weight 888 [ 18.593] (==) intel(0): Default visual is TrueColor [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): Option "AccelMethod" "uxa" [ 18.593] (--) intel(0): Integrated Graphics Chipset: Intel(R) Ivybridge Desktop (GT1) [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): Relaxed fencing enabled [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): Wait on SwapBuffers? enabled [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): Triple buffering? enabled [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): Framebuffer tiled [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): Pixmaps tiled [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): 3D buffers tiled [ 18.593] (**) intel(0): SwapBuffers wait enabled ... [ 20.312] (II) Module fb: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 20.312] compiled for 1.13.0, module version = 1.0.0 [ 20.312] ABI class: X.Org ANSI C Emulation, version 0.4 [ 20.312] (II) Loading sub module "dri2" [ 20.312] (II) LoadModule: "dri2" [ 20.312] (II) Module "dri2" already built-in [ 20.312] (==) Depth 24 pixmap format is 32 bpp [ 20.312] (II) intel(0): [DRI2] Setup complete [ 20.312] (II) intel(0): [DRI2] DRI driver: i965 [ 20.312] (II) intel(0): Allocated new frame buffer 1920x1080 stride 7680, tiled [ 20.312] (II) UXA(0): Driver registered support for the following operations: [ 20.312] (II) solid [ 20.312] (II) copy [ 20.312] (II) composite (RENDER acceleration) [ 20.312] (II) put_image [ 20.312] (II) get_image [ 20.312] (==) intel(0): Backing store disabled [ 20.312] (==) intel(0): Silken mouse enabled [ 20.312] (II) intel(0): Initializing HW Cursor [ 20.312] (II) intel(0): RandR 1.2 enabled, ignore the following RandR disabled message. [ 20.313] (**) intel(0): DPMS enabled [ 20.313] (==) intel(0): Intel XvMC decoder enabled [ 20.313] (II) intel(0): Set up textured video [ 20.313] (II) intel(0): [XvMC] xvmc_vld driver initialized. [ 20.313] (II) intel(0): direct rendering: DRI2 Enabled [ 20.313] (==) intel(0): hotplug detection: "enabled" [ 20.332] (--) RandR disabled [ 20.335] (EE) Failed to initialize GLX extension (Compatible NVIDIA X driver not found) [ 20.335] (II) intel(0): Setting screen physical size to 508 x 285 [ 20.338] (II) XKB: reuse xkmfile /var/lib/xkb/server-B20D7FC79C7F597315E3E501AEF10E0D866E8E92.xkm [ 20.340] (II) config/udev: Adding input device Power Button (/dev/input/event1) [ 20.340] (**) Power Button: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" [ 20.340] (II) LoadModule: "evdev" [ 20.340] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/evdev_drv.so

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  • Anatomy of a .NET Assembly - CLR metadata 1

    - by Simon Cooper
    Before we look at the bytes comprising the CLR-specific data inside an assembly, we first need to understand the logical format of the metadata (For this post I only be looking at simple pure-IL assemblies; mixed-mode assemblies & other things complicates things quite a bit). Metadata streams Most of the CLR-specific data inside an assembly is inside one of 5 streams, which are analogous to the sections in a PE file. The name of each section in a PE file starts with a ., and the name of each stream in the CLR metadata starts with a #. All but one of the streams are heaps, which store unstructured binary data. The predefined streams are: #~ Also called the metadata stream, this stream stores all the information on the types, methods, fields, properties and events in the assembly. Unlike the other streams, the metadata stream has predefined contents & structure. #Strings This heap is where all the namespace, type & member names are stored. It is referenced extensively from the #~ stream, as we'll be looking at later. #US Also known as the user string heap, this stream stores all the strings used in code directly. All the strings you embed in your source code end up in here. This stream is only referenced from method bodies. #GUID This heap exclusively stores GUIDs used throughout the assembly. #Blob This heap is for storing pure binary data - method signatures, generic instantiations, that sort of thing. Items inside the heaps (#Strings, #US, #GUID and #Blob) are indexed using a simple binary offset from the start of the heap. At that offset is a coded integer giving the length of that item, then the item's bytes immediately follow. The #GUID stream is slightly different, in that GUIDs are all 16 bytes long, so a length isn't required. Metadata tables The #~ stream contains all the assembly metadata. The metadata is organised into 45 tables, which are binary arrays of predefined structures containing information on various aspects of the metadata. Each entry in a table is called a row, and the rows are simply concatentated together in the file on disk. For example, each row in the TypeRef table contains: A reference to where the type is defined (most of the time, a row in the AssemblyRef table). An offset into the #Strings heap with the name of the type An offset into the #Strings heap with the namespace of the type. in that order. The important tables are (with their table number in hex): 0x2: TypeDef 0x4: FieldDef 0x6: MethodDef 0x14: EventDef 0x17: PropertyDef Contains basic information on all the types, fields, methods, events and properties defined in the assembly. 0x1: TypeRef The details of all the referenced types defined in other assemblies. 0xa: MemberRef The details of all the referenced members of types defined in other assemblies. 0x9: InterfaceImpl Links the types defined in the assembly with the interfaces that type implements. 0xc: CustomAttribute Contains information on all the attributes applied to elements in this assembly, from method parameters to the assembly itself. 0x18: MethodSemantics Links properties and events with the methods that comprise the get/set or add/remove methods of the property or method. 0x1b: TypeSpec 0x2b: MethodSpec These tables provide instantiations of generic types and methods for each usage within the assembly. There are several ways to reference a single row within a table. The simplest is to simply specify the 1-based row index (RID). The indexes are 1-based so a value of 0 can represent 'null'. In this case, which table the row index refers to is inferred from the context. If the table can't be determined from the context, then a particular row is specified using a token. This is a 4-byte value with the most significant byte specifying the table, and the other 3 specifying the 1-based RID within that table. This is generally how a metadata table row is referenced from the instruction stream in method bodies. The third way is to use a coded token, which we will look at in the next post. So, back to the bytes Now we've got a rough idea of how the metadata is logically arranged, we can now look at the bytes comprising the start of the CLR data within an assembly: The first 8 bytes of the .text section are used by the CLR loader stub. After that, the CLR-specific data starts with the CLI header. I've highlighted the important bytes in the diagram. In order, they are: The size of the header. As the header is a fixed size, this is always 0x48. The CLR major version. This is always 2, even for .NET 4 assemblies. The CLR minor version. This is always 5, even for .NET 4 assemblies, and seems to be ignored by the runtime. The RVA and size of the metadata header. In the diagram, the RVA 0x20e4 corresponds to the file offset 0x2e4 Various flags specifying if this assembly is pure-IL, whether it is strong name signed, and whether it should be run as 32-bit (this is how the CLR differentiates between x86 and AnyCPU assemblies). A token pointing to the entrypoint of the assembly. In this case, 06 (the last byte) refers to the MethodDef table, and 01 00 00 refers to to the first row in that table. (after a gap) RVA of the strong name signature hash, which comes straight after the CLI header. The RVA 0x2050 corresponds to file offset 0x250. The rest of the CLI header is mainly used in mixed-mode assemblies, and so is zeroed in this pure-IL assembly. After the CLI header comes the strong name hash, which is a SHA-1 hash of the assembly using the strong name key. After that comes the bodies of all the methods in the assembly concatentated together. Each method body starts off with a header, which I'll be looking at later. As you can see, this is a very small assembly with only 2 methods (an instance constructor and a Main method). After that, near the end of the .text section, comes the metadata, containing a metadata header and the 5 streams discussed above. We'll be looking at this in the next post. Conclusion The CLI header data doesn't have much to it, but we've covered some concepts that will be important in later posts - the logical structure of the CLR metadata and the overall layout of CLR data within the .text section. Next, I'll have a look at the contents of the #~ stream, and how the table data is arranged on disk.

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  • Microsoft Business Intelligence Seminar 2011

    - by DavidWimbush
    I was lucky enough to attend the maiden presentation of this at Microsoft Reading yesterday. It was pretty gripping stuff not only because of what was said but also because of what could only be hinted at. Here's what I took away from the day. (Disclaimer: I'm not a BI guru, just a reasonably experienced BI developer, so I may have misunderstood or misinterpreted a few things. Particularly when so much of the talk was about the vision and subtle hints of what is coming. Please comment if you think I've got anything wrong. I'm also not going to even try to cover Master Data Services as I struggled to imagine how you would actually use it.) I was a bit worried when I learned that the whole day was going to be presented by one guy but Rafal Lukawiecki is a very engaging speaker. He's going to be presenting this about 20 times around the world over the coming months. If you get a chance to hear him speak, I say go for it. No doubt some of the hints will become clearer as Denali gets closer to RTM. Firstly, things are definitely happening in the SQL Server Reporting and BI world. Traditionally IT would build a data warehouse, then cubes on top of that, and then publish them in a structured and controlled way. But, just as with many IT projects in general, by the time it's finished the business has moved on and the system no longer meets their requirements. This not sustainable and something more agile is needed but there has to be some control. Apparently we're going to be hearing the catchphrase 'Balancing agility with control' a lot. More users want more access to more data. Can they define what they want? Of course not, but they'll recognise it when they see it. It's estimated that only 28% of potential BI users have meaningful access to the data they need, so there is a real pent-up demand. The answer looks like: give them some self-service tools so they can experiment and see what works, and then IT can help to support the results. It's estimated that 32% of Excel users are comfortable with its analysis tools such as pivot tables. It's the power user's preferred tool. Why fight it? That's why PowerPivot is an Excel add-in and that's why they released a Data Mining add-in for it as well. It does appear that the strategy is going to be to use Reporting Services (in SharePoint mode), PowerPivot, and possibly something new (smiles and hints but no details) to create reports and explore data. Everything will be published and managed in SharePoint which gives users the ability to mash-up, share and socialise what they've found out. SharePoint also gives IT tools to understand what people are looking at and where to concentrate effort. If PowerPivot report X becomes widely used, it's time to check that it shows what they think it does and perhaps get it a bit more under central control. There was more SharePoint detail that went slightly over my head regarding where Excel Services and Excel Web Application fit in, the differences between them, and the suggestion that it is likely they will one day become one (but not in the immediate future). That basic pattern is set to be expanded upon by further exploiting Vertipaq (the columnar indexing engine that enables PowerPivot to store and process a lot of data fast and in a small memory footprint) to provide scalability 'from the desktop to the data centre', and some yet to be detailed advances in 'frictionless deployment' (part of which is about making the difference between local and the cloud pretty much irrelevant). Excel looks like becoming Microsoft's primary BI client. It already has: the ability to consume cubes strong visualisation tools slicers (which are part of Excel not PowerPivot) a data mining add-in PowerPivot A major hurdle for self-service BI is presenting the data in a consumable format. You can't just give users PowerPivot and a server with a copy of the OLTP database(s). Building cubes is labour intensive and doesn't always give the user what they need. This is where the BI Semantic Model (BISM) comes in. I gather it's a layer of metadata you define that can combine multiple data sources (and types of data source) into a clear 'interface' that users can work with. It comes with a new query language called DAX. SSAS cubes are unlikely to go away overnight because, with their pre-calculated results, they are still the most efficient way to work with really big data sets. A few other random titbits that came up: Reporting Services is going to get some good new stuff in Denali. Keep an eye on www.projectbotticelli.com for the slides. You can also view last year's seminar sessions which covered a lot of the same ground as far as the overall strategy is concerned. They plan to add more material as Denali's features are publicly exposed. Check out the PASS keynote address for a showing of Yahoo's SQL BI servers. Apparently they wheeled the rack out on stage still plugged in and running! Check out the Excel 2010 Data Mining Add-Ins. 32 bit only at present but 64 bit is on the way. There are lots of data sets, many of them free, at the Windows Azure Marketplace Data Market (where you can also get ESRI shape files). If you haven't already seen it, have a look at the Silverlight Pivot Viewer (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/06/29/silverlight-pivotviewer-now-available.aspx). The Bing Maps Data Connector is worth a look if you're into spatial stuff (http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2010/07/13/data-connector-sql-server-2008-spatial-amp-bing-maps.aspx).  

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  • Oracle Database 12 c New Partition Maintenance Features by Gwen Lazenby

    - by hamsun
    One of my favourite new features in Oracle Database 12c is the ability to perform partition maintenance operations on multiple partitions. This means we can now add, drop, truncate and merge multiple partitions in one operation, and can split a single partition into more than two partitions also in just one command. This would certainly have made my life slightly easier had it been available when I administered a data warehouse at Oracle 9i. To demonstrate this new functionality and syntax, I am going to create two tables, ORDERS and ORDERS_ITEMS which have a parent-child relationship. ORDERS is to be partitioned using range partitioning on the ORDER_DATE column, and ORDER_ITEMS is going to partitioned using reference partitioning and its foreign key relationship with the ORDERS table. This form of partitioning was a new feature in 11g and means that any partition maintenance operations performed on the ORDERS table will also take place on the ORDER_ITEMS table as well. First create the ORDERS table - SQL CREATE TABLE orders ( order_id NUMBER(12), order_date TIMESTAMP, order_mode VARCHAR2(8), customer_id NUMBER(6), order_status NUMBER(2), order_total NUMBER(8,2), sales_rep_id NUMBER(6), promotion_id NUMBER(6), CONSTRAINT orders_pk PRIMARY KEY(order_id) ) PARTITION BY RANGE(order_date) (PARTITION Q1_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-APR-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q2_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-JUL-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q3_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-OCT-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q4_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-JAN-2008','DD-MON-YYYY')) ); Table created. Now the ORDER_ITEMS table SQL CREATE TABLE order_items ( order_id NUMBER(12) NOT NULL, line_item_id NUMBER(3) NOT NULL, product_id NUMBER(6) NOT NULL, unit_price NUMBER(8,2), quantity NUMBER(8), CONSTRAINT order_items_fk FOREIGN KEY(order_id) REFERENCES orders(order_id) on delete cascade) PARTITION BY REFERENCE(order_items_fk) tablespace example; Table created. Now look at DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS to get details of what partitions we have in the two tables – SQL select table_name,partition_name, partition_position position, high_value from dba_tab_partitions where table_owner='SH' and table_name like 'ORDER_%' order by partition_position, table_name; TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME POSITION HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- -------- ------------------------- ORDERS Q1_2007 1 TIMESTAMP' 2007-04-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q1_2007 1 ORDERS Q2_2007 2 TIMESTAMP' 2007-07-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q2_2007 2 ORDERS Q3_2007 3 TIMESTAMP' 2007-10-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q3_2007 3 ORDERS Q4_2007 4 TIMESTAMP' 2008-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2007 4 Just as an aside it is also now possible in 12c to use interval partitioning on reference partitioned tables. In 11g it was not possible to combine these two new partitioning features. For our first example of the new 12cfunctionality, let us add all the partitions necessary for 2008 to the tables using one command. Notice that the partition specification part of the add command is identical in format to the partition specification part of the create command as shown above - SQL alter table orders add PARTITION Q1_2008 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-APR-2008','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q2_2008 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-JUL-2008','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q3_2008 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-OCT-2008','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q4_2008 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-JAN-2009','DD-MON-YYYY')); Table altered. Now look at DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS and we can see that the 4 new partitions have been added to both tables – SQL select table_name,partition_name, partition_position position, high_value from dba_tab_partitions where table_owner='SH' and table_name like 'ORDER_%' order by partition_position, table_name; TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME POSITION HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- -------- ------------------------- ORDERS Q1_2007 1 TIMESTAMP' 2007-04-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q1_2007 1 ORDERS Q2_2007 2 TIMESTAMP' 2007-07-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q2_2007 2 ORDERS Q3_2007 3 TIMESTAMP' 2007-10-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q3_2007 3 ORDERS Q4_2007 4 TIMESTAMP' 2008-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2007 4 ORDERS Q1_2008 5 TIMESTAMP' 2008-04-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q1_2008 5 ORDERS Q2_2008 6 TIMESTAMP' 2008-07-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEM Q2_2008 6 ORDERS Q3_2008 7 TIMESTAMP' 2008-10-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q3_2008 7 ORDERS Q4_2008 8 TIMESTAMP' 2009-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2008 8 Next, we can drop or truncate multiple partitions by giving a comma separated list in the alter table command. Note the use of the plural ‘partitions’ in the command as opposed to the singular ‘partition’ prior to 12c– SQL alter table orders drop partitions Q3_2008,Q2_2008,Q1_2008; Table altered. Now look at DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS and we can see that the 3 partitions have been dropped in both the two tables – TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME POSITION HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- -------- ------------------------- ORDERS Q1_2007 1 TIMESTAMP' 2007-04-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q1_2007 1 ORDERS Q2_2007 2 TIMESTAMP' 2007-07-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q2_2007 2 ORDERS Q3_2007 3 TIMESTAMP' 2007-10-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q3_2007 3 ORDERS Q4_2007 4 TIMESTAMP' 2008-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2007 4 ORDERS Q4_2008 5 TIMESTAMP' 2009-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2008 5 Now let us merge all the 2007 partitions together to form one single partition – SQL alter table orders merge partitions Q1_2005, Q2_2005, Q3_2005, Q4_2005 into partition Y_2007; Table altered. TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME POSITION HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- -------- ------------------------- ORDERS Y_2007 1 TIMESTAMP' 2008-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Y_2007 1 ORDERS Q4_2008 2 TIMESTAMP' 2009-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2008 2 Splitting partitions is a slightly more involved. In the case of range partitioning one of the new partitions must have no high value defined, and in list partitioning one of the new partitions must have no list of values defined. I call these partitions the ‘everything else’ partitions, and will contain any rows contained in the original partition that are not contained in the any of the other new partitions. For example, let us split the Y_2007 partition back into 4 quarterly partitions – SQL alter table orders split partition Y_2007 into (PARTITION Q1_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-APR-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q2_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-JUL-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q3_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-OCT-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q4_2007); Now look at DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS to get details of the new partitions – TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME POSITION HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- -------- ------------------------- ORDERS Q1_2007 1 TIMESTAMP' 2007-04-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q1_2007 1 ORDERS Q2_2007 2 TIMESTAMP' 2007-07-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q2_2007 2 ORDERS Q3_2007 3 TIMESTAMP' 2007-10-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q3_2007 3 ORDERS Q4_2007 4 TIMESTAMP' 2008-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2007 4 ORDERS Q4_2008 5 TIMESTAMP' 2009-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2008 5 Partition Q4_2007 has a high value equal to the high value of the original Y_2007 partition, and so has inherited its upper boundary from the partition that was split. As for a list partitioning example let look at the following another table, SALES_PAR_LIST, which has 2 partitions, Americas and Europe and a partitioning key of country_name. SQL select table_name,partition_name, high_value from dba_tab_partitions where table_owner='SH' and table_name = 'SALES_PAR_LIST'; TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- ----------------------------- SALES_PAR_LIST AMERICAS 'Argentina', 'Canada', 'Peru', 'USA', 'Honduras', 'Brazil', 'Nicaragua' SALES_PAR_LIST EUROPE 'France', 'Spain', 'Ireland', 'Germany', 'Belgium', 'Portugal', 'Denmark' Now split the Americas partition into 3 partitions – SQL alter table sales_par_list split partition americas into (partition south_america values ('Argentina','Peru','Brazil'), partition north_america values('Canada','USA'), partition central_america); Table altered. Note that no list of values was given for the ‘Central America’ partition. However it should have inherited any values in the original ‘Americas’ partition that were not assigned to either the ‘North America’ or ‘South America’ partitions. We can confirm this by looking at the DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS view. SQL select table_name,partition_name, high_value from dba_tab_partitions where table_owner='SH' and table_name = 'SALES_PAR_LIST'; TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME HIGH_VALUE --------------- --------------- -------------------------------- SALES_PAR_LIST SOUTH_AMERICA 'Argentina', 'Peru', 'Brazil' SALES_PAR_LIST NORTH_AMERICA 'Canada', 'USA' SALES_PAR_LIST CENTRAL_AMERICA 'Honduras', 'Nicaragua' SALES_PAR_LIST EUROPE 'France', 'Spain', 'Ireland', 'Germany', 'Belgium', 'Portugal', 'Denmark' In conclusion, I hope that DBA’s whose work involves maintaining partitions will find the operations a bit more straight forward to carry out once they have upgraded to Oracle Database 12c. Gwen Lazenby is a Principal Training Consultant at Oracle. She is part of Oracle University's Core Technology delivery team based in the UK, teaching Database Administration and Linux courses. Her specialist topics include using Oracle Partitioning and Parallelism in Data Warehouse environments, as well as Oracle Spatial and RMAN.

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  • More Great Improvements to the Windows Azure Management Portal

    - by ScottGu
    Over the last 3 weeks we’ve released a number of enhancements to the new Windows Azure Management Portal.  These new capabilities include: Localization Support for 6 languages Operation Log Support Support for SQL Database Metrics Virtual Machine Enhancements (quick create Windows + Linux VMs) Web Site Enhancements (support for creating sites in all regions, private github repo deployment) Cloud Service Improvements (deploy from storage account, configuration support of dedicated cache) Media Service Enhancements (upload, encode, publish, stream all from within the portal) Virtual Networking Usability Enhancements Custom CNAME support with Storage Accounts All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using immediately.  Below are more details on them: Localization Support The Windows Azure Portal now supports 6 languages – English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Japanese. You can easily switch between languages by clicking on the Avatar bar on the top right corner of the Portal: Selecting a different language will automatically refresh the UI within the portal in the selected language: Operation Log Support The Windows Azure Portal now supports the ability for administrators to review the “operation logs” of the services they manage – making it easy to see exactly what management operations were performed on them.  You can query for these by selecting the “Settings” tab within the Portal and then choosing the “Operation Logs” tab within it.  This displays a filter UI that enables you to query for operations by date and time: As of the most recent release we now show logs for all operations performed on Cloud Services and Storage Accounts.  You can click on any operation in the list and click the “Details” button in the command bar to retrieve detailed status about it.  This now makes it possible to retrieve details about every management operation performed. In future updates you’ll see us extend the operation log capability to apply to all Windows Azure Services – which will enable great post-mortem and audit support. Support for SQL Database Metrics You can now monitor the number of successful connections, failed connections and deadlocks in your SQL databases using the new “Dashboard” view provided on each SQL Database resource: Additionally, if the database is added as a “linked resource” to a Web Site or Cloud Service, monitoring metrics for the linked SQL database are shown along with the Web Site or Cloud Service metrics in the dashboard. This helps with viewing and managing aggregated information across both resources in your application. Enhancements to Virtual Machines The most recent Windows Azure Portal release brings with it some nice usability improvements to Virtual Machines: Integrated Quick Create experience for Windows and Linux VMs Creating a new Windows or Linux VM is now easy using the new “Quick Create” experience in the Portal: In addition to Windows VM templates you can also now select Linux image templates in the quick create UI: This makes it incredibly easy to create a new Virtual Machine in only a few seconds. Enhancements to Web Sites Prior to this past month’s release, users were forced to choose a single geographical region when creating their first site.  After that, subsequent sites could only be created in that same region.  This restriction has now been removed, and you can now create sites in any region at any time and have up to 10 free sites in each supported region: One of the new regions we’ve recently opened up is the “East Asia” region.  This allows you to now deploy sites to North America, Europe and Asia simultaneously.  Private GitHub Repository Support This past week we also enabled Git based continuous deployment support for Web Sites from private GitHub and BitBucket repositories (previous to this you could only enable this with public repositories).  Enhancements to Cloud Services Experience The most recent Windows Azure Portal release brings with it some nice usability improvements to Cloud Services: Deploy a Cloud Service from a Windows Azure Storage Account The Windows Azure Portal now supports deploying an application package and configuration file stored in a blob container in Windows Azure Storage. The ability to upload an application package from storage is available when you custom create, or upload to, or update a cloud service deployment. To upload an application package and configuration, create a Cloud Service, then select the file upload dialog, and choose to upload from a Windows Azure Storage Account: To upload an application package from storage, click the “FROM STORAGE” button and select the application package and configuration file to use from the new blob storage explorer in the portal. Configure Windows Azure Caching in a caching enabled cloud service If you have deployed the new dedicated cache within a cloud service role, you can also now configure the cache settings in the portal by navigating to the configuration tab of for your Cloud Service deployment. The configuration experience is similar to the one in Visual Studio when you create a cloud service and add a caching role.  The portal now allows you to add or remove named caches and change the settings for the named caches – all from within the Portal and without needing to redeploy your application. Enhancements to Media Services You can now upload, encode, publish, and play your video content directly from within the Windows Azure Portal.  This makes it incredibly easy to get started with Windows Azure Media Services and perform common tasks without having to write any code. Simply navigate to your media service and then click on the “Content” tab.  All of the media content within your media service account will be listed here: Clicking the “upload” button within the portal now allows you to upload a media file directly from your computer: This will cause the video file you chose from your local file-system to be uploaded into Windows Azure.  Once uploaded, you can select the file within the content tab of the Portal and click the “Encode” button to transcode it into different streaming formats: The portal includes a number of pre-set encoding formats that you can easily convert media content into: Once you select an encoding and click the ok button, Windows Azure Media Services will kick off an encoding job that will happen in the cloud (no need for you to stand-up or configure a custom encoding server).  When it’s finished, you can select the video in the “Content” tab and then click PUBLISH in the command bar to setup an origin streaming end-point to it: Once the media file is published you can point apps against the public URL and play the content using Windows Azure Media Services – no need to setup or run your own streaming server.  You can also now select the file and click the “Play” button in the command bar to play it using the streaming endpoint directly within the Portal: This makes it incredibly easy to try out and use Windows Azure Media Services and test out an end-to-end workflow without having to write any code.  Once you test things out you can of course automate it using script or code – providing you with an incredibly powerful Cloud Media platform that you can use. Enhancements to Virtual Network Experience Over the last few months, we have received feedback on the complexity of the Virtual Network creation experience. With these most recent Portal updates, we have added a Quick Create experience that makes the creation experience very simple. All that an administrator now needs to do is to provide a VNET name, choose an address space and the size of the VNET address space. They no longer need to understand the intricacies of the CIDR format or walk through a 4-page wizard or create a VNET / subnet. This makes creating virtual networks really simple: The portal also now has a “Register DNS Server” task that makes it easy to register DNS servers and associate them with a virtual network. Enhancements to Storage Experience The portal now lets you register custom domain names for your Windows Azure Storage Accounts.  To enable this, select a storage resource and then go to the CONFIGURE tab for a storage account, and then click MANAGE DOMAIN on the command bar: Clicking “Manage Domain” will bring up a dialog that allows you to register any CNAME you want: Summary The above features are all now live in production and available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using them today.  Visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. One of the other cool features that is now live within the portal is our new Windows Azure Store – which makes it incredibly easy to try and purchase developer services from a variety of partners.  It is an incredibly awesome new capability – and something I’ll be doing a dedicated post about shortly. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • Using Apache FOP from .NET level

    - by Lukasz Kurylo
    In one of my previous posts I was talking about FO.NET which I was using to generate a pdf documents from XSL-FO. FO.NET is one of the .NET ports of Apache FOP. Unfortunatelly it is no longer maintained. I known it when I decidec to use it, because there is a lack of available (free) choices for .NET to render a pdf form XSL-FO. I hoped in this implementation I will find all I need to create a pdf file with my really simple requirements. FO.NET is a port from some old version of Apache FOP and I found really quickly that there is a lack of some features that I needed, like dotted borders, double borders or support for margins. So I started to looking for some alternatives. I didn’t try the NFOP, another port of Apache FOP, because I found something I think much more better, the IKVM.NET project.   IKVM.NET it is not a pdf renderer. So what it is? From the project site:   IKVM.NET is an implementation of Java for Mono and the Microsoft .NET Framework. It includes the following components: a Java Virtual Machine implemented in .NET a .NET implementation of the Java class libraries tools that enable Java and .NET interoperability   In the simplest form IKVM.NET allows to use a Java code library in the C# code and vice versa.   I tried to use an Apache FOP, the best I think open source pdf –> XSL-FO renderer written in Java from my project written in C# using an IKVM.NET and it work like a charm. In the rest of the post I want to show, how to prepare a .NET *.dll class library from Apache FOP *.jar’s with IKVM.NET and generate a simple Hello world pdf document.   To start playing with IKVM.NET and Apache FOP we need to download their packages: IKVM.NET Apache FOP and then unpack them.   From the FOP directory copy all the *.jar’s files from lib and build catalogs to some location, e.g. d:\fop. Second step is to build the *.dll library from these files. On the console execute the following comand:   ikvmc –target:library –out:d:\fop\fop.dll –recurse:d:\fop   The ikvmc is located in the bin subdirectory where you unpacked the IKVM.NET. You must execute this command from this catalog, add this path to the global variable PATH or specify the full path to the bin subdirectory.   In no error occurred during this process, the fop.dll library should be created. Right now we can create a simple project to test if we can create a pdf file.   So let’s create a simple console project application and add reference to the fop.dll and the IKVM dll’s: IKVM.OpenJDK.Core and IKVM.OpenJDK.XML.API.   Full code to generate a pdf file from XSL-FO template:   static void Main(string[] args)         {             //initialize the Apache FOP             FopFactory fopFactory = FopFactory.newInstance();               //in this stream we will get the generated pdf file             OutputStream o = new DotNetOutputMemoryStream();             try             {                 Fop fop = fopFactory.newFop("application/pdf", o);                 TransformerFactory factory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();                 Transformer transformer = factory.newTransformer();                   //read the template from disc                 Source src = new StreamSource(new File("HelloWorld.fo"));                 Result res = new SAXResult(fop.getDefaultHandler());                 transformer.transform(src, res);             }             finally             {                 o.close();             }             using (System.IO.FileStream fs = System.IO.File.Create("HelloWorld.pdf"))             {                 //write from the .NET MemoryStream stream to disc the generated pdf file                 var data = ((DotNetOutputMemoryStream)o).Stream.GetBuffer();                 fs.Write(data, 0, data.Length);             }             Process.Start("HelloWorld.pdf");             System.Console.ReadLine();         }   Apache FOP be default using a Java’s Xalan to work with XML files. I didn’t find a way to replace this piece of code with equivalent from .NET standard library. If any error or warning will occure during generating the pdf file, on the console will ge shown, that’s why I inserted the last line in the sample above. The DotNetOutputMemoryStream this is my wrapper for the Java OutputStream. I have created it to have the possibility to exchange data between the .NET <-> Java objects. It’s implementation:   class DotNetOutputMemoryStream : OutputStream     {         private System.IO.MemoryStream ms = new System.IO.MemoryStream();         public System.IO.MemoryStream Stream         {             get             {                 return ms;             }         }         public override void write(int i)         {             ms.WriteByte((byte)i);         }         public override void write(byte[] b, int off, int len)         {             ms.Write(b, off, len);         }         public override void write(byte[] b)         {             ms.Write(b, 0, b.Length);         }         public override void close()         {             ms.Close();         }         public override void flush()         {             ms.Flush();         }     } The last thing we need, this is the HelloWorld.fo template.   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <fo:root xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"          xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">   <fo:layout-master-set>     <fo:simple-page-master master-name="simple"                   page-height="29.7cm"                   page-width="21cm"                   margin-top="1.8cm"                   margin-bottom="0.8cm"                   margin-left="1.6cm"                   margin-right="1.2cm">       <fo:region-body margin-top="3cm"/>       <fo:region-before extent="3cm"/>       <fo:region-after extent="1.5cm"/>     </fo:simple-page-master>   </fo:layout-master-set>   <fo:page-sequence master-reference="simple">     <fo:flow flow-name="xsl-region-body">       <fo:block font-size="18pt" color="black" text-align="center">         Hello, World!       </fo:block>     </fo:flow>   </fo:page-sequence> </fo:root>   I’m not going to explain how how this template is created, because this will be covered in the near future posts.   Generated pdf file should look that:

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  • Full-text Indexing Books Online

    - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)
    While preparing for a recent SQL Saturday presentation, I was struck by a crazy idea (shocking, I know): Could someone import the content of SQL Server Books Online into a database and apply full-text indexing to it?  The answer is yes, and it's really quite easy to do. The first step is finding the installed help files.  If you have SQL Server 2012, BOL is installed under the Microsoft Help Library.  You can find the install location by opening SQL Server Books Online and clicking the gear icon for the Help Library Manager.  When the new window pops up click the Settings link, you'll get the following: You'll see the path under Library Location. Once you navigate to that path you'll have to drill down a little further, to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\HelpLibrary\content\Microsoft\store.  This is where the help file content is kept if you downloaded it for offline use. Depending on which products you've downloaded help for, you may see a few hundred files.  Fortunately they're named well and you can easily find the "SQL_Server_Denali_Books_Online_" files.  We are interested in the .MSHC files only, and can skip the Installation and Developer Reference files. Despite the .MHSC extension, these files are compressed with the standard Zip format, so your favorite archive utility (WinZip, 7Zip, WinRar, etc.) can open them.  When you do, you'll see a few thousand files in the archive.  We are only interested in the .htm files, but there's no harm in extracting all of them to a folder.  7zip provides a command-line utility and the following will extract to a D:\SQLHelp folder previously created: 7z e –oD:\SQLHelp "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\HelpLibrary\content\Microsoft\store\SQL_Server_Denali_Books_Online_B780_SQL_110_en-us_1.2.mshc" *.htm Well that's great Rob, but how do I put all those files into a full-text index? I'll tell you in a second, but first we have to set up a few things on the database side.  I'll be using a database named Explore (you can certainly change that) and the following setup is a fragment of the script I used in my presentation: USE Explore; GO CREATE SCHEMA help AUTHORIZATION dbo; GO -- Create default fulltext catalog for later FT indexes CREATE FULLTEXT CATALOG FTC AS DEFAULT; GO CREATE TABLE help.files(file_id int not null IDENTITY(1,1) CONSTRAINT PK_help_files PRIMARY KEY, path varchar(256) not null CONSTRAINT UNQ_help_files_path UNIQUE, doc_type varchar(6) DEFAULT('.xml'), content varbinary(max) not null); CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX ON help.files(content TYPE COLUMN doc_type LANGUAGE 1033) KEY INDEX PK_help_files; This will give you a table, default full-text catalog, and full-text index on that table for the content you're going to insert.  I'll be using the command line again for this, it's the easiest method I know: for %a in (D:\SQLHelp\*.htm) do sqlcmd -S. -E -d Explore -Q"set nocount on;insert help.files(path,content) select '%a', cast(c as varbinary(max)) from openrowset(bulk '%a', SINGLE_CLOB) as c(c)" You'll need to copy and run that as one line in a command prompt.  I'll explain what this does while you run it and watch several thousand files get imported: The "for" command allows you to loop over a collection of items.  In this case we want all the .htm files in the D:\SQLHelp folder.  For each file it finds, it will assign the full path and file name to the %a variable.  In the "do" clause, we'll specify another command to be run for each iteration of the loop.  I make a call to "sqlcmd" in order to run a SQL statement.  I pass in the name of the server (-S.), where "." represents the local default instance. I specify -d Explore as the database, and -E for trusted connection.  I then use -Q to run a query that I enclose in double quotes. The query uses OPENROWSET(BULK…SINGLE_CLOB) to open the file as a data source, and to treat it as a single character large object.  In order for full-text indexing to work properly, I have to convert the text content to varbinary. I then INSERT these contents along with the full path of the file into the help.files table created earlier.  This process continues for each file in the folder, creating one new row in the table. And that's it! 5 SQL Statements and 2 command line statements to unzip and import SQL Server Books Online!  In case you're wondering why I didn't use FILESTREAM or FILETABLE, it's simply because I haven't learned them…yet. I may return to this blog after I figure that out and update it with the steps to do so.  I believe that will make it even easier. In the spirit of exploration, I'll leave you to work on some fulltext queries of this content.  I also recommend playing around with the sys.dm_fts_xxxx DMVs (I particularly like sys.dm_fts_index_keywords, it's pretty interesting).  There are additional example queries in the download material for my presentation linked above. Many thanks to Kevin Boles (t) for his advice on (re)checking the content of the help files.  Don't let that .htm extension fool you! The 2012 help files are actually XML, and you'd need to specify '.xml' in your document type column in order to extract the full-text keywords.  (You probably noticed this in the default definition for the doc_type column.)  You can query sys.fulltext_document_types to get a complete list of the types that can be full-text indexed. I also need to thank Hilary Cotter for giving me the original idea. I believe he used MSDN content in a full-text index for an article from waaaaaaaaaaay back, that I can't find now, and had forgotten about until just a few days ago.  He is also co-author of Pro Full-Text Search in SQL Server 2008, which I highly recommend.  He also has some FTS articles on Simple Talk: http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/learn-sql-server/sql-server-full-text-search-language-features/ http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/learn-sql-server/sql-server-full-text-search-language-features,-part-2/

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  • Changing CSS with jQuery syntax in Silverlight using jLight

    - by Timmy Kokke
    Lately I’ve ran into situations where I had to change elements or had to request a value in the DOM from Silverlight. jLight, which was introduced in an earlier article, can help with that. jQuery offers great ways to change CSS during runtime. Silverlight can access the DOM, but it isn’t as easy as jQuery. All examples shown in this article can be looked at in this online demo. The code can be downloaded here.   Part 1: The easy stuff Selecting and changing properties is pretty straight forward. Setting the text color in all <B> </B> elements can be done using the following code:   jQuery.Select("b").Css("color", "red");   The Css() method is an extension method on jQueryObject which is return by the jQuery.Select() method. The Css() method takes to parameters. The first is the Css style property. All properties used in Css can be entered in this string. The second parameter is the value you want to give the property. In this case the property is “color” and it is changed to “red”. To specify which element you want to select you can add a :selector parameter to the Select() method as shown in the next example.   jQuery.Select("b:first").Css("font-family", "sans-serif");   The “:first” pseudo-class selector selects only the first element. This example changes the “font-family” property of the first <B></B> element to “sans-serif”. To make use of intellisense in Visual Studio I’ve added a extension methods to help with the pseudo-classes. In the example below the “font-weight” of every “Even” <LI></LI> is set to “bold”.   jQuery.Select("li".Even()).Css("font-weight", "bold");   Because the Css() extension method returns a jQueryObject it is possible to chain calls to Css(). The following example show setting the “color”, “background-color” and the “font-size” of all headers in one go.   jQuery.Select(":header").Css("color", "#12FF70") .Css("background-color", "yellow") .Css("font-size", "25px");   Part 2: More complex stuff In only a few cases you need to change only one style property. More often you want to change an entire set op style properties all in one go.  You could chain a lot of Css() methods together. A better way is to add a class to a stylesheet and define all properties in there. With the AddClass() method you can set a style class to a set of elements. This example shows how to add the “demostyle” class to all <B></B> in the document.   jQuery.Select("b").AddClass("demostyle");   Removing the class works in the same way:   jQuery.Select("b").RemoveClass("demostyle");   jLight is build for interacting with to the DOM from Silverlight using jQuery. A jQueryObjectCss object can be used to define different sets of style properties in Silverlight. The over 60 most common Css style properties are defined in the jQueryObjectCss class. A string indexer can be used to access all style properties ( CssObject1[“background-color”] equals CssObject1.BackgroundColor). In the code below, two jQueryObjectCss objects are defined and instantiated.   private jQueryObjectCss CssObject1; private jQueryObjectCss CssObject2;   public Demo2() { CssObject1 = new jQueryObjectCss { BackgroundColor = "Lime", Color="Black", FontSize = "12pt", FontFamily = "sans-serif", FontWeight = "bold", MarginLeft = 150, LineHeight = "28px", Border = "Solid 1px #880000" }; CssObject2 = new jQueryObjectCss { FontStyle = "Italic", FontSize = "48", Color = "#225522" }; InitializeComponent(); }   Now instead of chaining to set all different properties you can just pass one of the jQueryObjectCss objects to the Css() method. In this case all <LI></LI> elements are set to match this object.   jQuery.Select("li").Css(CssObject1); When using the jQueryObjectCss objects chaining is still possible. In the following example all headers are given a blue backgroundcolor and the last is set to match CssObject2.   jQuery.Select(":header").Css(new jQueryObjectCss{BackgroundColor = "Blue"}) .Eq(-1).Css(CssObject2);   Part 3: The fun stuff Having Silverlight call JavaScript and than having JavaScript to call Silverlight requires a lot of plumbing code. Everything has to be registered and strings are passed back and forth to execute the JavaScript. jLight makes this kind of stuff so easy, it becomes fun to use. In a lot of situations jQuery can call a function to decide what to do, setting a style class based on complex expressions for example. jLight can do the same, but the callback methods are defined in Silverlight. This example calls the function() method for each <LI></LI> element. The callback method has to take a jQueryObject, an integer and a string as parameters. In this case jLight differs a bit from the actual jQuery implementation. jQuery uses only the index and the className parameters. A jQueryObject is added to make it simpler to access the attributes and properties of the element. If the text of the listitem starts with a ‘D’ or an ‘M’ the class is set. Otherwise null is returned and nothing happens.   private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { jQuery.Select("li").AddClass(function); }   private string function(jQueryObject obj, int index, string className) { if (obj.Text[0] == 'D' || obj.Text[0] == 'M') return "demostyle"; return null; }   The last thing I would like to demonstrate uses even more Silverlight and less jLight, but demonstrates the power of the combination. Animating a style property using a Storyboard with easing functions. First a dependency property is defined. In this case it is a double named Intensity. By handling the changed event the color is set using jQuery.   public double Intensity { get { return (double)GetValue(IntensityProperty); } set { SetValue(IntensityProperty, value); } }   public static readonly DependencyProperty IntensityProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("Intensity", typeof(double), typeof(Demo3), new PropertyMetadata(0.0, IntensityChanged));   private static void IntensityChanged(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e) { var i = (byte)(double)e.NewValue; jQuery.Select("span").Css("color", string.Format("#{0:X2}{0:X2}{0:X2}", i)); }   An animation has to be created. This code defines a Storyboard with one keyframe that uses a bounce ease as an easing function. The animation is set to target the Intensity dependency property defined earlier.   private Storyboard CreateAnimation(double value) { Storyboard storyboard = new Storyboard(); var da = new DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames(); var d = new EasingDoubleKeyFrame { EasingFunction = new BounceEase(), KeyTime = KeyTime.FromTimeSpan(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1.0)), Value = value }; da.KeyFrames.Add(d); Storyboard.SetTarget(da, this); Storyboard.SetTargetProperty(da, new PropertyPath(Demo3.IntensityProperty)); storyboard.Children.Add(da); return storyboard; }   Initially the Intensity is set to 128 which results in a gray color. When one of the buttons is pressed, a new animation is created an played. One to animate to black, and one to animate to white.   public Demo3() { InitializeComponent(); Intensity = 128; }   private void button2_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { CreateAnimation(255).Begin(); }   private void button3_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { CreateAnimation(0).Begin(); }   Conclusion As you can see jLight can make the life of a Silverlight developer a lot easier when accessing the DOM. Almost all jQuery functions that are defined in jLight use the same constructions as described above. I’ve tried to stay as close as possible to the real jQuery. Having JavaScript perform callbacks to Silverlight using jLight will be described in more detail in a future tutorial about AJAX or eventing.

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  • Thoughts on Build 2013

    - by D'Arcy Lussier
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dlussier/archive/2013/06/30/153294.aspxAnd so another Build conference has come to an end. Below are my thoughts/perspectives on various aspects of the event. I’ll do a separate blog post on my thoughts of the Build message for developers. The Good Moscone center was a great venue for Build! Easy to get around, easy to get to, and well maintained, it was a very comfortable conference venue. Yeah, the free swag was nice. Build has built up an expectation that attendees will always get something; it’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft maintains this expectation over the next few Build events. I still maintain that free swag should never be the main reason one attends an event, and for me this was definitely just an added bonus. I’m planning on trying to use the Surface as a dedicated 2nd device at work for meetings, I’ll share my experiences over the next few months. The hackathon event was a great idea, although personally I couldn’t justify spending the money on a conference registration just to spend the entire conference coding. Still, the apps that were created were really great and there was a lot of passion and excitement around the hackathon. I wonder if they couldn’t have had the hackathon on the Monday/Tuesday for those that wanted to participate so they didn’t miss any of the actual conference over Wed/Thurs. San Francisco was a great city to host Build. Getting from hotels to the conference center was very easy (well especially for me, I was only 3 blocks away) and the city itself felt very safe. However, if I never have to fly into SFO again I’ll be alright with that! Delays going into and out of SFO and both apparently were due to the airport itself. The Bad Build is one of those oddities on the conference landscape where people will pay to commit to attending an event without knowing anything about the sessions. We got our list of conference sessions when we registered on Tuesday, not before. And even then, we only got titles and not descriptions (those were eventually made available via the conference’s mobile application). I get it…they’re going to make announcements and they don’t want to give anything away through the session titles. But honestly, there wasn’t anything in the session titles that I would have considered a surprise. Breakfasts were brutal. High-carb pastries, donuts, and muffins with fruit and hard boiled eggs does not a conference breakfast make. I can’t believe that the difference between a continental breakfast per person and a hot breakfast buffet would have been a huge impact to a conference fee that was already around $2000. The vendor area was anemic. I don’t know why Microsoft forces the vendors into cookie-cutter booth areas (this year they were all made of plywood material). WPC, TechEd – booth areas there allow the vendors to be creative with their displays. Not so much for Build. Really odd was the lack of Microsoft’s own representation around Bing. In the day 1 keynote Microsoft made a big deal about Bing as an API. Yet there was nobody in the vendor area set up to provide more information or have discussions with about the Bing API. The Ugly Our name badges were NFC enabled. The purpose of this, beyond the vendors being able to scan your info, wasn’t really made clear. An attendee I talked to showed how you could get a reader app on your phone so you can scan other members cards and collect their contact info – which is a kewl idea; business cards are so 1990’s. But I was *shocked* at the amount of information that was on our name badges! Here’s what’s displayed on our name badge: - Name - Company - Twitter Handle I’m ok with that. But here’s what actually gets read: - Name - Company - Address Used for Registration - Phone Number Used for Registration So sharing that info with another attendee, they get way more of my info than just how to find me on Twitter! Microsoft, you need to fix this for the future. If vendors want to collect information on attendees, they should be able to collect an ID from the badge, then get a report with corresponding records afterwards. My personal information should not be so readily available, and without my knowledge! Final Verdict Maybe its my older age, maybe its where I’m at in life with family, maybe its where I’m at in my career, but when I consider whether a conference experience was valuable I get to the core reason I attend: opportunities to learn, opportunities to network, opportunities to engage with Microsoft. Opportunities to Learn:  Sessions I attended were generally OK, with some really stand out ones on Day 2. I would love to see Microsoft adopt the Dojo format for a portion of their sessions. Hands On Labs are dull, lecture style sessions are great for information sharing. But a guided hands-on coding session (Read: Dojo) provides the best of both worlds. Being that all content is publically available online to everyone (Build attendee or not), the value of attending the conference sessions is decreased. The value though is in the discussions that take part in person afterwards, which leads to… Opportunities to Network: I enjoyed getting together with old friends and connecting with Twitter friends in person for the first time. I also had an opportunity to meet total strangers. So from a networking perspective, Build was fantastic! I still think it would have been great to have an area for ad-hoc discussions – where speakers could announce they’d be available for more questions after their sessions, or attendees who wanted to discuss more in depth on a topic with other attendees could arrange space. Some people have no problems being outgoing and making these things happen, but others are not and a structured model is more attractive. Opportunities to Engage with Microsoft: Hit and miss on this one. Outside of the vendor area, unless you cornered or reached out to a speaker, there wasn’t any defined way to connect with blue badges. And as I mentioned above, Microsoft didn’t have full representation in the vendor area (no Bing). All in all, Build was a fun party where I was informed about some new stuff and got some free swag. Was it worth the time away from home and the hit to my PD budget? I’d say Somewhat. Build is a great informational conference, but I wouldn’t call it a learning conference. Considering that TechEd seems to be moving to more of an IT Pro focus, independent developer conferences seem to be the best value for those looking to learn and not just be informed. With the rapid development cycle Microsoft is embracing, we’re already seeing Build happening twice within a 12 month period. If that continues, the value of attending Build in person starts to diminish – especially with so much content available online. If Microsoft wants Build to be a must-attend event in the future, they need to start incorporating aspects of Tech Ed, past PDCs, and other conferences so those that want to leave with more than free swag have something to attract them.

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  • Benchmarking MySQL Replication with Multi-Threaded Slaves

    - by Mat Keep
    0 0 1 1145 6530 Homework 54 15 7660 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} The objective of this benchmark is to measure the performance improvement achieved when enabling the Multi-Threaded Slave enhancement delivered as a part MySQL 5.6. As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves delivers 5x higher replication performance based on a configuration with 10 databases/schemas. For real-world deployments, higher replication performance directly translates to: · Improved consistency of reads from slaves (i.e. reduced risk of reading "stale" data) · Reduced risk of data loss should the master fail before replicating all events in its binary log (binlog) The multi-threaded slave splits processing between worker threads based on schema, allowing updates to be applied in parallel, rather than sequentially. This delivers benefits to those workloads that isolate application data using databases - e.g. multi-tenant systems deployed in cloud environments. Multi-Threaded Slaves are just one of many enhancements to replication previewed as part of the MySQL 5.6 Development Release, which include: · Global Transaction Identifiers coupled with MySQL utilities for automatic failover / switchover and slave promotion · Crash Safe Slaves and Binlog · Optimized Row Based Replication · Replication Event Checksums · Time Delayed Replication These and many more are discussed in the “MySQL 5.6 Replication: Enabling the Next Generation of Web & Cloud Services” Developer Zone article  Back to the benchmark - details are as follows. Environment The test environment consisted of two Linux servers: · one running the replication master · one running the replication slave. Only the slave was involved in the actual measurements, and was based on the following configuration: - Hardware: Oracle Sun Fire X4170 M2 Server - CPU: 2 sockets, 6 cores with hyper-threading, 2930 MHz. - OS: 64-bit Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.1 - Memory: 48 GB Test Procedure Initial Setup: Two MySQL servers were started on two different hosts, configured as replication master and slave. 10 sysbench schemas were created, each with a single table: CREATE TABLE `sbtest` (    `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,    `k` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',    `c` char(120) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',    `pad` char(60) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',    PRIMARY KEY (`id`),    KEY `k` (`k`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 10,000 rows were inserted in each of the 10 tables, for a total of 100,000 rows. When the inserts had replicated to the slave, the slave threads were stopped. The slave data directory was copied to a backup location and the slave threads position in the master binlog noted. 10 sysbench clients, each configured with 10 threads, were spawned at the same time to generate a random schema load against each of the 10 schemas on the master. Each sysbench client executed 10,000 "update key" statements: UPDATE sbtest set k=k+1 WHERE id = <random row> In total, this generated 100,000 update statements to later replicate during the test itself. Test Methodology: The number of slave workers to test with was configured using: SET GLOBAL slave_parallel_workers=<workers> Then the slave IO thread was started and the test waited for all the update queries to be copied over to the relay log on the slave. The benchmark clock was started and then the slave SQL thread was started. The test waited for the slave SQL thread to finish executing the 100k update queries, doing "select master_pos_wait()". When master_pos_wait() returned, the benchmark clock was stopped and the duration calculated. The calculated duration from the benchmark clock should be close to the time it took for the SQL thread to execute the 100,000 update queries. The 100k queries divided by this duration gave the benchmark metric, reported as Queries Per Second (QPS). Test Reset: The test-reset cycle was implemented as follows: · the slave was stopped · the slave data directory replaced with the previous backup · the slave restarted with the slave threads replication pointer repositioned to the point before the update queries in the binlog. The test could then be repeated with identical set of queries but a different number of slave worker threads, enabling a fair comparison. The Test-Reset cycle was repeated 3 times for 0-24 number of workers and the QPS metric calculated and averaged for each worker count. MySQL Configuration The relevant configuration settings used for MySQL are as follows: binlog-format=STATEMENT relay-log-info-repository=TABLE master-info-repository=TABLE As described in the test procedure, the slave_parallel_workers setting was modified as part of the test logic. The consequence of changing this setting is: 0 worker threads:    - current (i.e. single threaded) sequential mode    - 1 x IO thread and 1 x SQL thread    - SQL thread both reads and executes the events 1 worker thread:    - sequential mode    - 1 x IO thread, 1 x Coordinator SQL thread and 1 x Worker thread    - coordinator reads the event and hands it to the worker who executes 2+ worker threads:    - parallel execution    - 1 x IO thread, 1 x Coordinator SQL thread and 2+ Worker threads    - coordinator reads events and hands them to the workers who execute them Results Figure 1 below shows that Multi-Threaded Slaves deliver ~5x higher replication performance when configured with 10 worker threads, with the load evenly distributed across our 10 x schemas. This result is compared to the current replication implementation which is based on a single SQL thread only (i.e. zero worker threads). Figure 1: 5x Higher Performance with Multi-Threaded Slaves The following figure shows more detailed results, with QPS sampled and reported as the worker threads are incremented. The raw numbers behind this graph are reported in the Appendix section of this post. Figure 2: Detailed Results As the results above show, the configuration does not scale noticably from 5 to 9 worker threads. When configured with 10 worker threads however, scalability increases significantly. The conclusion therefore is that it is desirable to configure the same number of worker threads as schemas. Other conclusions from the results: · Running with 1 worker compared to zero workers just introduces overhead without the benefit of parallel execution. · As expected, having more workers than schemas adds no visible benefit. Aside from what is shown in the results above, testing also demonstrated that the following settings had a very positive effect on slave performance: relay-log-info-repository=TABLE master-info-repository=TABLE For 5+ workers, it was up to 2.3 times as fast to run with TABLE compared to FILE. Conclusion As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves deliver significant performance increases to MySQL replication when handling multiple schemas. This, and the other replication enhancements introduced in MySQL 5.6 are fully available for you to download and evaluate now from the MySQL Developer site (select Development Release tab). You can learn more about MySQL 5.6 from the documentation  Please don’t hesitate to comment on this or other replication blogs with feedback and questions. Appendix – Detailed Results

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  • The Sensemaking Spectrum for Business Analytics: Translating from Data to Business Through Analysis

    - by Joe Lamantia
    One of the most compelling outcomes of our strategic research efforts over the past several years is a growing vocabulary that articulates our cumulative understanding of the deep structure of the domains of discovery and business analytics. Modes are one example of the deep structure we’ve found.  After looking at discovery activities across a very wide range of industries, question types, business needs, and problem solving approaches, we've identified distinct and recurring kinds of sensemaking activity, independent of context.  We label these activities Modes: Explore, compare, and comprehend are three of the nine recognizable modes.  Modes describe *how* people go about realizing insights.  (Read more about the programmatic research and formal academic grounding and discussion of the modes here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235971352_A_Taxonomy_of_Enterprise_Search_and_Discovery) By analogy to languages, modes are the 'verbs' of discovery activity.  When applied to the practical questions of product strategy and development, the modes of discovery allow one to identify what kinds of analytical activity a product, platform, or solution needs to support across a spread of usage scenarios, and then make concrete and well-informed decisions about every aspect of the solution, from high-level capabilities, to which specific types of information visualizations better enable these scenarios for the types of data users will analyze. The modes are a powerful generative tool for product making, but if you've spent time with young children, or had a really bad hangover (or both at the same time...), you understand the difficult of communicating using only verbs.  So I'm happy to share that we've found traction on another facet of the deep structure of discovery and business analytics.  Continuing the language analogy, we've identified some of the ‘nouns’ in the language of discovery: specifically, the consistently recurring aspects of a business that people are looking for insight into.  We call these discovery Subjects, since they identify *what* people focus on during discovery efforts, rather than *how* they go about discovery as with the Modes. Defining the collection of Subjects people repeatedly focus on allows us to understand and articulate sense making needs and activity in more specific, consistent, and complete fashion.  In combination with the Modes, we can use Subjects to concretely identify and define scenarios that describe people’s analytical needs and goals.  For example, a scenario such as ‘Explore [a Mode] the attrition rates [a Measure, one type of Subject] of our largest customers [Entities, another type of Subject] clearly captures the nature of the activity — exploration of trends vs. deep analysis of underlying factors — and the central focus — attrition rates for customers above a certain set of size criteria — from which follow many of the specifics needed to address this scenario in terms of data, analytical tools, and methods. We can also use Subjects to translate effectively between the different perspectives that shape discovery efforts, reducing ambiguity and increasing impact on both sides the perspective divide.  For example, from the language of business, which often motivates analytical work by asking questions in business terms, to the perspective of analysis.  The question posed to a Data Scientist or analyst may be something like “Why are sales of our new kinds of potato chips to our largest customers fluctuating unexpectedly this year?” or “Where can innovate, by expanding our product portfolio to meet unmet needs?”.  Analysts translate questions and beliefs like these into one or more empirical discovery efforts that more formally and granularly indicate the plan, methods, tools, and desired outcomes of analysis.  From the perspective of analysis this second question might become, “Which customer needs of type ‘A', identified and measured in terms of ‘B’, that are not directly or indirectly addressed by any of our current products, offer 'X' potential for ‘Y' positive return on the investment ‘Z' required to launch a new offering, in time frame ‘W’?  And how do these compare to each other?”.  Translation also happens from the perspective of analysis to the perspective of data; in terms of availability, quality, completeness, format, volume, etc. By implication, we are proposing that most working organizations — small and large, for profit and non-profit, domestic and international, and in the majority of industries — can be described for analytical purposes using this collection of Subjects.  This is a bold claim, but simplified articulation of complexity is one of the primary goals of sensemaking frameworks such as this one.  (And, yes, this is in fact a framework for making sense of sensemaking as a category of activity - but we’re not considering the recursive aspects of this exercise at the moment.) Compellingly, we can place the collection of subjects on a single continuum — we call it the Sensemaking Spectrum — that simply and coherently illustrates some of the most important relationships between the different types of Subjects, and also illuminates several of the fundamental dynamics shaping business analytics as a domain.  As a corollary, the Sensemaking Spectrum also suggests innovation opportunities for products and services related to business analytics. The first illustration below shows Subjects arrayed along the Sensemaking Spectrum; the second illustration presents examples of each kind of Subject.  Subjects appear in colors ranging from blue to reddish-orange, reflecting their place along the Spectrum, which indicates whether a Subject addresses more the viewpoint of systems and data (Data centric and blue), or people (User centric and orange).  This axis is shown explicitly above the Spectrum.  Annotations suggest how Subjects align with the three significant perspectives of Data, Analysis, and Business that shape business analytics activity.  This rendering makes explicit the translation and bridging function of Analysts as a role, and analysis as an activity. Subjects are best understood as fuzzy categories [http://georgelakoff.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/hedges-a-study-in-meaning-criteria-and-the-logic-of-fuzzy-concepts-journal-of-philosophical-logic-2-lakoff-19731.pdf], rather than tightly defined buckets.  For each Subject, we suggest some of the most common examples: Entities may be physical things such as named products, or locations (a building, or a city); they could be Concepts, such as satisfaction; or they could be Relationships between entities, such as the variety of possible connections that define linkage in social networks.  Likewise, Events may indicate a time and place in the dictionary sense; or they may be Transactions involving named entities; or take the form of Signals, such as ‘some Measure had some value at some time’ - what many enterprises understand as alerts.   The central story of the Spectrum is that though consumers of analytical insights (represented here by the Business perspective) need to work in terms of Subjects that are directly meaningful to their perspective — such as Themes, Plans, and Goals — the working realities of data (condition, structure, availability, completeness, cost) and the changing nature of most discovery efforts make direct engagement with source data in this fashion impossible.  Accordingly, business analytics as a domain is structured around the fundamental assumption that sense making depends on analytical transformation of data.  Analytical activity incrementally synthesizes more complex and larger scope Subjects from data in its starting condition, accumulating insight (and value) by moving through a progression of stages in which increasingly meaningful Subjects are iteratively synthesized from the data, and recombined with other Subjects.  The end goal of  ‘laddering’ successive transformations is to enable sense making from the business perspective, rather than the analytical perspective.Synthesis through laddering is typically accomplished by specialized Analysts using dedicated tools and methods. Beginning with some motivating question such as seeking opportunities to increase the efficiency (a Theme) of fulfillment processes to reach some level of profitability by the end of the year (Plan), Analysts will iteratively wrangle and transform source data Records, Values and Attributes into recognizable Entities, such as Products, that can be combined with Measures or other data into the Events (shipment of orders) that indicate the workings of the business.  More complex Subjects (to the right of the Spectrum) are composed of or make reference to less complex Subjects: a business Process such as Fulfillment will include Activities such as confirming, packing, and then shipping orders.  These Activities occur within or are conducted by organizational units such as teams of staff or partner firms (Networks), composed of Entities which are structured via Relationships, such as supplier and buyer.  The fulfillment process will involve other types of Entities, such as the products or services the business provides.  The success of the fulfillment process overall may be judged according to a sophisticated operating efficiency Model, which includes tiered Measures of business activity and health for the transactions and activities included.  All of this may be interpreted through an understanding of the operational domain of the businesses supply chain (a Domain).   We'll discuss the Spectrum in more depth in succeeding posts.

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