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• Merge sort versus quick sort performance

  - by Giorgio

  I have implemented merge sort and quick sort using C (GCC 4.4.3 on Ubuntu 10.04 running on a 4 GB RAM laptop with an Intel DUO CPU at 2GHz) and I wanted to compare the performance of the two algorithms. The prototypes of the sorting functions are: void merge_sort(const char **lines, int start, int end); void quick_sort(const char **lines, int start, int end); i.e. both take an array of pointers to strings and sort the elements with index i : start <= i <= end. I have produced some files containing random strings with length on average 4.5 characters. The test files range from 100 lines to 10000000 lines. I was a bit surprised by the results because, even though I know that merge sort has complexity O(n log(n)) while quick sort is O(n^2), I have often read that on average quick sort should be as fast as merge sort. However, my results are the following. Up to 10000 strings, both algorithms perform equally well. For 10000 strings, both require about 0.007 seconds. For 100000 strings, merge sort is slightly faster with 0.095 s against 0.121 s. For 1000000 strings merge sort takes 1.287 s against 5.233 s of quick sort. For 5000000 strings merge sort takes 7.582 s against 118.240 s of quick sort. For 10000000 strings merge sort takes 16.305 s against 1202.918 s of quick sort. So my question is: are my results as expected, meaning that quick sort is comparable in speed to merge sort for small inputs but, as the size of the input data grows, the fact that its complexity is quadratic will become evident? Here is a sketch of what I did. In the merge sort implementation, the partitioning consists in calling merge sort recursively, i.e. merge_sort(lines, start, (start + end) / 2); merge_sort(lines, 1 + (start + end) / 2, end); Merging of the two sorted sub-array is performed by reading the data from the array lines and writing it to a global temporary array of pointers (this global array is allocate only once). After each merge the pointers are copied back to the original array. So the strings are stored once but I need twice as much memory for the pointers. For quick sort, the partition function chooses the last element of the array to sort as the pivot and scans the previous elements in one loop. After it has produced a partition of the type start ... {elements <= pivot} ... pivotIndex ... {elements > pivot} ... end it calls itself recursively: quick_sort(lines, start, pivotIndex - 1); quick_sort(lines, pivotIndex + 1, end); Note that this quick sort implementation sorts the array in-place and does not require additional memory, therefore it is more memory efficient than the merge sort implementation. So my question is: is there a better way to implement quick sort that is worthwhile trying out? If I improve the quick sort implementation and perform more tests on different data sets (computing the average of the running times on different data sets) can I expect a better performance of quick sort wrt merge sort? EDIT Thank you for your answers. My implementation is in-place and is based on the pseudo-code I have found on wikipedia in Section In-place version: function partition(array, 'left', 'right', 'pivotIndex') where I choose the last element in the range to be sorted as a pivot, i.e. pivotIndex := right. I have checked the code over and over again and it seems correct to me. In order to rule out the case that I am using the wrong implementation I have uploaded the source code on github (in case you would like to take a look at it). Your answers seem to suggest that I am using the wrong test data. I will look into it and try out different test data sets. I will report as soon as I have some results.

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• CSV Anyone?

  - by Tim Dexter

  CSV, a dead format? With today's abilities to generate Excel output (Im working on some posts for the shiny new Excel templates) and the sophistication of the eText outputs, do you really need CSV? I guess so seeing as it was added after the base product was released as an enhancement. But I'd be interested in hearing use cases? I used to think the same of text output. But now Im working in the public sector where older technologies abound I can see a use for text output. Its also used as a machine readable format, etc. BIP still does not support a text format from its RTF templates but its very doable using XSL templates. Back to CSV, I noticed an enhancement in the big list of new stuff in the 10.1.3.4.1 rollup. You can now generate CSV from structured data ie a data template or a SQL XML query. This piqued my interest so I ran off a data template to CSV. Its interesting, in a geeky kinda way, I guess Im that way inclined.Here's my data structure:<EMPLOYEES> <LIST_G_DEPT> <G_DEPT>  <DEPARTMENT_ID>10</DEPARTMENT_ID>  <DEPARTMENT_NAME>Administration</DEPARTMENT_NAME>  <LIST_G_EMP>   <G_EMP>     <EMPLOYEE_ID>200</EMPLOYEE_ID>     <EMP_NAME>Jennifer Whalen</EMP_NAME>     <EMAIL>JWHALEN</EMAIL>     <PHONE_NUMBER>515.123.4444</PHONE_NUMBER>     <HIRE_DATE>1987-09-17T00:00:00.000-06:00</HIRE_DATE>     <SALARY>4400</SALARY>    </G_EMP>   </LIST_G_EMP>  <TOTAL_EMPS>1</TOTAL_EMPS>  <TOTAL_SALARY>4400</TOTAL_SALARY>  <AVG_SALARY>4400</AVG_SALARY>  <MAX_SALARY>4400</MAX_SALARY>  <MIN_SALARY>4400</MIN_SALARY> </G_DEPT>Poor ol Jennifer, she needs some help in the Admin department :0)Pushing this to CSV and BP completely flattens the data out so you get a completely denormalized data output in the CSV.TOTAL_SALARY,DEPARTMENT_ID,DEPARTMENT_NAME,MIN_SALARY,AVG_SALARY,MAX_SALARY,EMPLOYEE_ID,SALARY,PHONE_NUMBER,HIRE_DATE,EMP_NAME,EMAIL,TOTAL_EMPS4400,10,Administration,4400,4400,4400,200,4400,515.123.4444,1987-09-17T00:00:00.000-06:00,"Jennifer Whalen",JWHALEN,119000,20,Marketing,6000,9500,13000,201,13000,515.123.5555,1996-02-17T00:00:00.000-07:00,"Michael Hartstein",MHARTSTE,219000,20,Marketing,6000,9500,13000,202,6000,603.123.6666,1997-08-17T00:00:00.000-06:00,"Pat Fay",PFAY,2Useful? Its a little confusing to start with but it is completely de-normalized so there is lots of repetition. But if it floats your boat, you got it!

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• Microsoft Silverlight 4 Business Application Development: Beginner's Guide

  Build enterprise-ready business applications with Silverlight An introduction to building enterprise-ready business applications with Silverlight quickly. Get hold of the basic tools and skills needed to get started in Silverlight application development. Integrate different media types, taking the RIA experience further with Silverlight, and much more! Rapidly manage business focused controls, data, and business logic connectivity. A suite of business applications will be built over the course of the book and all examples will be geared around real-world useful application developments, enabling .NET developers to focus on getting started in business application development using Silverlight. In Detail Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plug-in that enables features including animation, vector graphics, and audio-video playback--features that characterize Rich Internet Applications. Silverlight makes possible the development of RIA applications in familiar .NET languages such as C# and VB.NET. Silverlight is a great (and growing) Line of Business platform and is increasingly being used to build business applications. Silverlight 3 made a big step in LOB; Silverlight 4 builds upon this further. This book will enable .NET developers to feel the pulse of business application development with Silverlight quickly. This book is not a general Silverlight 3/4 overview book. It is uniquely aimed at developers who require an introduction to building business applications with Silverlight. This book will focus on building a suite of real-world, useful business applications in a practical hands-on approach. This book is for .Net developers, providing the answers to many questions that are encountered when creating business applications in Silverlight, ultimately enabling rapid development with ease! This book teaches you how to build business applications with Silverlight 3 and 4. Building a suite of applications, it begins by introducing you to the basic tools and skills needed to get started in Silverlight development. It then dives deeply into the world of business application development, covering all the required concepts needed to build sophisticated business applications and provide a rich user experience. Chapters include: building a public website, adding rich media to the website, incorporating RIA into your website, and among others. By following the practical steps in this book, you will learn what's needed to create rich business applications--from the creation of a Silverlight application, to enhancing your application with rich media and connecting your Silverlight application to various Data Sources. What you will learn from this book Learn the basic tools and skills needed to get started in Silverlight 4 business application development. Discover how to enhance your Silverlight business applications with rich data such as sound and video. Know when and how to customize your data in Silverlight using important data controls. Understand how your Silverlight business applications can connect to various Data Sources. Deliver your Silverlight business application in a variety of forms.   Interesting? Read the chapter 1 Getting Started for free!! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• InfoPath 2010 Form Design and Web Part Deployment

  - by JKenderdine

  In January I had the pleasure to speak at SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach.  I presented a session on InfoPath 2010 forms design which included some of the basics of Forms Design, description of some of the new options with InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint 2010, and other integration possibilities.  Included below is the information presented as well as the solution to create the demo: First thing you need to understand is what the difference is between an InfoPath List form and a Form Library Form?  SharePoint List Forms:  Store data directly in a SharePoint list.  Each control (e.g. text box) in the form is bound to a column in the list. SharePoint list forms are directly connected to the list, which means that you don’t have to worry about setting up the publish and submit locations. You also do not have the option for back-end code. Form Library Forms:  Store data in XML files in a SharePoint form library.  This means they are more flexible and you can do more with them.  For example, they can be configured to save drafts and submit to different locations. However, they are more complex to work with and require more decisions to be made during configuration.  You do have the option of back-end code with these type of forms. Next steps: You need to create your File Architecture Plan.  Plan the location for the saved template – both Test and Production (This is pretty much a given, but just in case - Always make sure to have a test environment) Plan for the location of the published template Then you need to document your Form Template Design Plan.  Some questions to ask to gather your requirements: What will the form be designed to do? Will it gather user information? Will it display data from a data source? Do we need to show different views to different users? What do we base this on? How will it be implemented for the users? Browser or Client based form Site collection content type – Published through Central Admin Form Library – Published directly to form library So what are the requirements for this template?  Business Card Request Form Template Design Plan Gather user information and requirements for card Pull in as much user information as possible. Use data from the user profile web services as a data source Show and hide fields as necessary for requirements Create multiple views – one for those submitting the form and another view for the executive assistants placing the orders. Browser based form integrated into SharePoint team site Published directly to form library The form was published through Central Administration and incorporated into the site as a content type. Utilizing the new InfoPath Web part, the form is integrated into the page and the users can complete the form directly from within that page. For now, if you are interested in the final form XSN, contact me using the Contact link above.   I will post soon with the details on how the form was created and how it integrated the requirements detailed above.

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• Automated SSRS deployment with the RS utility

  - by Stacy Vicknair

  If you’re familiar with SSRS and development you are probably aware of the SSRS web services. The RS utility is a tool that comes with SSRS that allows for scripts to be executed against against the SSRS web service without needing to create an application to consume the service. One of the better benefits of using this format rather than writing an application is that the script can be modified by others who might be involved in the creation and addition of scripts or management of the SSRS environment.   Reporting Services Scripter Jasper Smith from http://www.sqldbatips.com created Reporting Services Scripter to assist with the created of a batch process to deploy an entire SSRS environment. The helper scripts below were created through the modification of his generated scripts. Why not just use this tool? You certainly can. For me, the volume of scripts generated seems less maintainable than just using some common methods extracted from these scripts and creating a deployment in a single script file. I would, however, recommend this as a product if you do not think that your environment will change drastically or if you do not need to deploy with a higher level of control over the deployment. If you just need to replicate, this tool works great. Executing with RS.exe Executing a script against rs.exe is fairly simple. The Script Half the battle is having a starting point. For the scripting I needed to do the below is the starter script. A few notes: This script assumes integrated security. This script assumes your reports have one data source each. Both of the above are just what made sense for my scenario and are definitely modifiable to accommodate your needs. If you are unsure how to change the scripts to your needs, I recommend Reporting Services Scripter to help you understand how the differences. The script has three main methods: CreateFolder, CreateDataSource and CreateReport. Scripting the server deployment is just a process of recreating all of the elements that you need through calls to these methods. If there are additional elements that you need to deploy that aren’t covered by these methods, again I suggest using Reporting Services Scripter to get the code you would need, convert it to a repeatable method and add it to this script! Public Sub Main() CreateFolder("/", "Data Sources") CreateFolder("/", "My Reports") CreateDataSource("/Data Sources", "myDataSource", _ "Data Source=server\instance;Initial Catalog=myDatabase") CreateReport("/My Reports", _ "MyReport", _ "C:\myreport.rdl", _ True, _ "/Data Sources", _ "myDataSource") End Sub   Public Sub CreateFolder(parent As String, name As String) Dim fullpath As String = GetFullPath(parent, name) Try RS.CreateFolder(name, parent, GetCommonProperties()) Console.WriteLine("Folder created: {0}", name) Catch e As SoapException If e.Detail.Item("ErrorCode").InnerText = "rsItemAlreadyExists" Then Console.WriteLine("Folder {0} already exists and cannot be overwritten", fullpath) Else Console.WriteLine("Error : " + e.Detail.Item("ErrorCode").InnerText + " (" + e.Detail.Item("Message").InnerText + ")") End If End Try End Sub   Public Sub CreateDataSource(parent As String, name As String, connectionString As String) Try RS.CreateDataSource(name, parent,False, GetDataSourceDefinition(connectionString), GetCommonProperties()) Console.WriteLine("DataSource {0} created successfully", name) Catch e As SoapException Console.WriteLine("Error : " + e.Detail.Item("ErrorCode").InnerText + " (" + e.Detail.Item("Message").InnerText + ")") End Try End Sub   Public Sub CreateReport(parent As String, name As String, location As String, overwrite As Boolean, dataSourcePath As String, dataSourceName As String) Dim reportContents As Byte() = Nothing Dim warnings As Warning() = Nothing Dim fullpath As String = GetFullPath(parent, name)   'Read RDL definition from disk Try Dim stream As FileStream = File.OpenRead(location) reportContents = New [Byte](stream.Length-1) {} stream.Read(reportContents, 0, CInt(stream.Length)) stream.Close()   warnings = RS.CreateReport(name, parent, overwrite, reportContents, GetCommonProperties())   If Not (warnings Is Nothing) Then Dim warning As Warning For Each warning In warnings Console.WriteLine(Warning.Message) Next warning Else Console.WriteLine("Report: {0} published successfully with no warnings", name) End If   'Set report DataSource references Dim dataSources(0) As DataSource   Dim dsr0 As New DataSourceReference dsr0.Reference = dataSourcePath Dim ds0 As New DataSource ds0.Item = CType(dsr0, DataSourceDefinitionOrReference) ds0.Name=dataSourceName dataSources(0) = ds0     RS.SetItemDataSources(fullpath, dataSources)   Console.Writeline("Report DataSources set successfully")       Catch e As IOException Console.WriteLine(e.Message) Catch e As SoapException Console.WriteLine("Error : " + e.Detail.Item("ErrorCode").InnerText + " (" + e.Detail.Item("Message").InnerText + ")") End Try End Sub     Public Function GetCommonProperties() As [Property]() 'Common CatalogItem properties Dim descprop As New [Property] descprop.Name = "Description" descprop.Value = "" Dim hiddenprop As New [Property] hiddenprop.Name = "Hidden" hiddenprop.Value = "False"   Dim props(1) As [Property] props(0) = descprop props(1) = hiddenprop Return props End Function   Public Function GetDataSourceDefinition(connectionString as String) Dim definition As New DataSourceDefinition definition.CredentialRetrieval = CredentialRetrievalEnum.Integrated definition.ConnectString = connectionString definition.Enabled = True definition.EnabledSpecified = True definition.Extension = "SQL" definition.ImpersonateUser = False definition.ImpersonateUserSpecified = True definition.Prompt = "Enter a user name and password to access the data source:" definition.WindowsCredentials = False definition.OriginalConnectStringExpressionBased = False definition.UseOriginalConnectString = False Return definition End Function   Private Function GetFullPath(parent As String, name As String) As String If parent = "/" Then Return parent + name Else Return parent + "/" + name End If End Function

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• DISA Cross Domain Enterprise Solutions on the NetBeans Platform

  - by Geertjan

  Bray 2.0 is a tool based on the NetBeans Platform that assists in creating valid Data Flow Configuration (DFC) files. The DFC Specification was developed to provide a standardized way for defining, validating, and approving data flows for use on cross-domain guarding solutions. A DFC document specifies key entities such as security domains, guards that facilitate data between security domains, data flows that describe how data travels between security domains, filters that transform and validate the data and more. Related info: http://www.disa.mil/Services/Information-Assurance/Cross-Domain-Solutions The Bray product is in development at Fulcrum IT (http://www.fulcrumco.com). The DFC Specification and Bray were developed in support of the US Department of Defense. Bray 2.0 marks the first release of Bray on the NetBeans Platform and utilizes a number of features that are core to the NetBeans Platform: Modular plugability. Bray consumers can integrate their own tools, file types, and more into the product with relative ease. Robust UI. The NetBeans Platform intuitive UI makes it easy to access and manipulate multiple aspects of a DFC. Explorer. The Explorer is a key component that makes the DFC XML easy to traverse, edit, and find errors. Context-sensitive help. JavaHelp can be readily integrated for the product as well as all the UI within. Editors. Any external file can be added to a DFC. Users can register their own editors or use the provided NetBeans editors to edit files. Printing. The NetBeans Platform Print API makes it easy to determine what should be printed and how.   A screenshot: Bray 2.0 provides a lot of key features in developing valid, robust DFC files:  XML validation. A DFC can be validated against the DFC schema specification. DFC Check List. An interactive, minimal guide for creating a complete DFC. Summary Window. The Summary Window functions like the Navigator in NetBeans IDE. The current "item of interest" is checked against various business rules and provides the ability to quickly find and fix errors. Change Log. Bray audits every change to a DFC and places them in a change log for users to peruse. Comments. Users can optionally add comments for other users to see. Digital signatures. DFC files can be digitally signed. A signature history and signature validation is provided in Bray. Pluggable security schemes. Bray ships with plain text and IC-ISM security schemes. If needed, users can integrate additional ones.  ...and more to come! New features for Bray are constantly in development including use of the NetBeans Visual Library, language support, and more. More screenshots:

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• Process Is The New App by Leon Smiers

  - by JuergenKress

  Process-on-the-Fly #2 - Process is the New App The next generation of business process management and business rules management tools is so powerful that it actually can be seen as the successor to custom-built applications. Being able to define detailed process, flows, decision trees and business helps on both the business and IT side to create powerful, differentiating solutions that would have required extensive custom coding in the past. Now much of the definition can be done ‘on the fly,’ using visual models and (semi) natural language in the nearest proximity to the business. Over the years, ERP systems have been customized to enter organization-specific functionality into the ERP application. This leads to better support for the business, but at the same time involves higher costs for maintenance, high dependency on the personnel involved in this customization, long timelines to deliver change to the system and increased risk involved in upgrading the ERP system. However, the best of both worlds can be created by bringing back the functionality to out-of-the-box usage of the ERP system and at the same time introducing change and flexibility by means of externalized 'Process Apps' in direct connection with the ERP system. The ERP system (or legacy bespoke system, for that matter) is used as originally intended and designed, resulting in more predictable behavior of the system related to usage and performance, and clearly can be maintained in a more standardized and cost-effective way. The Prrocess App externalizes the needed functionality into a highly customizable application outside the ERP for which it is supported by rules engines, task inboxes and can be delivered to different channels. The reasons for needing Process Apps may include the following: The ERP system just doesn't deliver this functionality in a specific industry; the volatility of changing certain functionality is high; or an umbrella type of functionality across (ERP) silos is needed. An example of bringing all this together is around the hiring process for a new employee at a university. Oracle PeopleSoft HCM could be used as the HR system to store all employee details. In the hiring process, an authorization scheme is involved for getting the approval to create a contract for the employee-to-be. In the university world, this authorization scheme is complex and involves faculties/colleges (with different organizational structures) and cross-faculty organizational structures. Including such an authorization scheme into PeopleSoft would require a lot of customization. By adding a handle inside PeopleSoft towards an externalized authorization Process App, the execution of the authorization of the employee is done outside the ERP: in a tool that is aimed to deliver approval schemes via a worklist-type of application. The Process App here works as an add-on to the PeopleSoft system, but can also be extended to support the full lifecycle of the end-to-end hiring process with the possibility to involve multiple applications. The actual core functionality is kept in the supporting ERP systems, while at the same time the Process App acts as an umbrella function to control the end-to-end flow and give insight into the efficiency of the end-to-end process. How to get there? Read the complete article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: Capgemini,Leon Smiers,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Indexed view deadlocking

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Deadlocks can be a really tricky thing to track down the root cause of.  There are lots of articles on the subject of tracking down deadlocks, but seldom do I find that in a production system that the cause is as straightforward.  That being said,  deadlocks are always caused by process A needs a resource that process B has locked and process B has a resource that process A needs.  There may be a longer chain of processes involved, but that is the basic premise. Here is one such (much simplified) scenario that was at first non-obvious to its cause: The system has two tables,  Products and Stock.  The Products table holds the description and prices of a product whilst Stock records the current stock level. USE tempdb GO CREATE TABLE Product ( ProductID INTEGER IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY, ProductName VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, Price MONEY NOT NULL ) GO CREATE TABLE Stock ( ProductId INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, StockLevel INTEGER NOT NULL ) GO INSERT INTO Product SELECT TOP(1000) CAST(NEWID() AS VARCHAR(255)), ABS(CAST(CAST(NEWID() AS VARBINARY(255)) AS INTEGER))%100 FROM sys.columns a CROSS JOIN sys.columns b GO INSERT INTO Stock SELECT ProductID,ABS(CAST(CAST(NEWID() AS VARBINARY(255)) AS INTEGER))%100 FROM Product There is a single stored procedure of GetStock: Create Procedure GetStock as SELECT Product.ProductID,Product.ProductName FROM dbo.Product join dbo.Stock on Stock.ProductId = Product.ProductID where Stock.StockLevel <> 0 Analysis of the system showed that this procedure was causing a performance overhead and as reads of this data was many times more than writes,  an indexed view was created to lower the overhead. CREATE VIEW vwActiveStock With schemabinding AS SELECT Product.ProductID,Product.ProductName FROM dbo.Product join dbo.Stock on Stock.ProductId = Product.ProductID where Stock.StockLevel <> 0 go CREATE UNIQUE CLUSTERED INDEX PKvwActiveStock on vwActiveStock(ProductID) This worked perfectly, performance was improved, the team name was cheered to the rafters and beers all round.  Then, after a while, something else happened… The system updating the data changed,  The update pattern of both the Stock update and the Product update used to be: BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... COMMIT BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... COMMIT BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... COMMIT It changed to: BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... UPDATE... UPDATE... COMMIT Nothing that would raise an eyebrow in even the closest of code reviews.  But after this change we saw deadlocks occuring. You can reproduce this by opening two sessions. In session 1 begin transaction Update Product set ProductName ='Test' where ProductID = 998 Then in session 2 begin transaction Update Stock set Stocklevel = 5 where ProductID = 999 Update Stock set Stocklevel = 5 where ProductID = 998 Hop back to session 1 and.. Update Product set ProductName ='Test' where ProductID = 999 Looking at the deadlock graphs we could see the contention was between two processes, one updating stock and the other updating product, but we knew that all the processes do to the tables is update them.  Period.  There are separate processes that handle the update of stock and product and never the twain shall meet, no reason why one should be requiring data from the other.  Then it struck us,  AH the indexed view. Naturally, when you make an update to any table involved in a indexed view, the view has to be updated.  When this happens, the data in all the tables have to be read, so that explains our deadlocks.  The data from stock is read when you update product and vice-versa. The fix, once you understand the problem fully, is pretty simple, the apps did not guarantee the order in which data was updated.  Luckily it was a relatively simple fix to order the updates and deadlocks went away.  Note, that there is still a *slight* risk of a deadlock occurring, if both a stock update and product update occur at *exactly* the same time.

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• Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise – Part 2

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President, Oracle  On September 13, 2012, I sat down with Altimeter Analyst Jeremiah Owyang to talk about how enterprise businesses are approaching the management of both their social media strategies and internal structures. There’s no longer any question as to whether companies are adopting social full throttle. That’s exactly the way it should be, because it’s a top online behavior across all age groups. For your consumers, it’s an ingrained, normal form of communication. And beyond connecting with friends, social users are reaching out for information and service from brands. Jeremiah tells us 29% of Twitter followers follow a brand and 58% of Facebook users have “Liked” a brand. Even on the B2B side, people act on reviews and recommendations. Just as in the early 90’s we saw companies move from static to dynamic web sites, businesses of all sizes are moving from just establishing a social presence to determining effective and efficient ways to use it. I like to say we’re in the 2nd or 3rd inning of a 9-inning game. Corporate social started out as a Facebook page, it’s multiple channels servicing customers wherever they are. Social is also moving from merely moderating to analyzing so that the signal can be separated from the noise, so that impactful influencers can be separated from other users. Organizationally, social started with the marketers. Now we’re getting into social selling, commerce, service, HR, recruiting, and collaboration. That’s Oracle’s concept of enterprise social relationship management, a framework to extend social across the entire organization real-time in as holistic a way as possible. Social requires more corporate coordination than ever before. One of my favorite statistics is that the average corporation at enterprise has 178 social accounts, according to Altimeter. Not all of them active, not all of them necessary, but 178 of them. That kind of fragmentation creates risk, so the smarter companies will look for solutions (as opposed to tools) that can organize, scale and defragment, as well as quickly integrate other networks and technologies that will come along. Our conversation goes deep into the various corporate social structures we’re seeing, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each. There are also a couple of great examples of how known brands used an integrated, holistic approach to achieve stated social goals. What’s especially exciting to me is the Oracle SRM framework for the enterprise provides companywide integration into one seamless system. This is not a dream. This is going to have substantial business impact in the next several years.

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• New spreadsheet accompanying SmartAssembly 6.0 provides statistics for prioritizing bug fixes

  - by Jason Crease

  One problem developers face is how to prioritize the many voices providing input into software bugs. If there is something wrong with a function that is the darling of a particular user, he or she tends to want action - now! The developer's dilemma is how to ascertain that the problem is major or minor, and when it should be addressed. Now there is a new spreadsheet accompanying SmartAssembly that provides exactly that information in an objective manner. This might upset those used to getting their way by being the loudest or pushiest, but ultimately it will ensure that the biggest problems get the priority they deserve. Here's how it works: Feature Usage Reporting (FUR) in SmartAssembly 6.0 provides a wealth of data about how your software is used by its end-users, but in the SmartAssembly UI the data isn't mined to its full extent. The new Excel spreadsheet for FUR extracts statistics from that data and presents them in easy-to-understand forms. I developed the spreadsheet feature in Microsoft Excel, using a fair amount of VBA. The spreadsheet connects directly to the database which stores the feature-usage data, and shows a wide variety of statistics and tables extracted from that data.  You want to know what percentage of users have used the 'Export as XML' button?  No problem.  How popular is v5.3 is compared to v5.1?  There's graphs for that. You need to know whether you have more users in Russia or Brazil? There's a big pie chart for that. I recently witnessed the spreadsheet in use here at Red Gate Software. My bug is exposed as minor While testing new features in .NET Reflector, I found a usability bug in the Refresh button and filed it in the Red Gate bug-tracking system. The bug was labelled "V.NEXT MINOR," which means it would be fixed in the next point release. Although I'm a professional tester, I'm not much different than most software users when they discover a bug that affects them personally: I wanted it fixed immediately. There was an ulterior motive at play here, of course. I would get to see my colleagues put the spreadsheet to work. The Reflector team loaded up the spreadsheet to view the feature-usage statistics that SmartAssembly collected for the refresh button. The resulting statistics showed that only 8% of users have ever pressed the Refresh button, and only 2.6% of sessions involve pressing the button. When Refresh is used, it's only pressed on average 1.6 times a session, with a maximum of 8 times during a session. This was in stark contrast to what I was doing as a conscientious tester: pressing it dozens of times per session. The spreadsheet provides evidence that my bug was a minor one. On to more serious things Based on the solid evidence uncovered by the spreadsheet, the Reflector team concluded that my experience does not represent that of the vast majority of Reflector's recorded users. The Reflector team had ample data to send me back to my desk and keep the bug classified as "V.NEXT MINOR." The team then went back to fixing more serious bugs. If I'm in the shoes of the user, I might not be thoroughly happy, but I cannot deny that the evidence clearly placed me in a very small minority. Next time I'm hoping the spreadsheet will prove that my bug is more important. Find out more about Feature-Usage Reporting here. The spreadsheet is available for free download here.

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• PASS Summit 2012: keynote and Mobile BI announcements #sqlpass

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Today at PASS Summit 2012 there have been several announcements during the keynote. Moreover, other news have not been highlighted in the keynote but are equally if not more important for the BI community. Let’s start from the big news in the keynote (other details on SQL Server Blog): Hekaton: this is the codename for in-memory OLTP technology that will appear (I suppose) in the next release of the SQL Server relational engine. The improvement in performance and scalability is impressive and it enables new scenarios. I’m curious to see whether it can be used also to improve ETL performance and how it differs from using SSD technology. Updates on Columnstore: In the next major release of SQL Server the columnstore indexes will be updatable and it will be possible to create a clustered index with Columnstore index. This is really a great news for near real-time reporting needs! Polybase: in 2013 it will debut SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), which will include the Polybase technology. By using Polybase a single T-SQL query will run queries across relational data and Hadoop data. A single query language for both. Sounds really interesting for using BigData in a more integrated way with existing relational databases. And, of course, to load a data warehouse using BigData, which is the ultimate goal that we all BI Pro have, right? SQL Server 2012 SP1: the Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2012 is available now and it enable the use of PowerPivot for SharePoint and Power View on a SharePoint 2013 installation with Excel 2013. Power View works with Multidimensional cube: the long-awaited feature of being able to use PowerPivot with Multidimensional cubes has been shown by Amir Netz in an amazing demonstration during the keynote. The interesting thing is that the data model behind was based on a many-to-many relationship (something that is not fully supported by Power View with Tabular models). Another interesting aspect is that it is Analysis Services 2012 that supports DAX queries run on a Multidimensional model, enabling the use of any future tool generating DAX queries on top of a Multidimensional model. There are still no info about availability by now, but this is *not* included in SQL Server 2012 SP1. So what about Mobile BI? Well, even if not announced during the keynote, there is a dedicated session on this topic and there are very important news in this area: iOS, Android and Microsoft mobile platforms: the commitment is to get data exploration and visualization capabilities working within June 2013. This should impact at least Power View and SharePoint/Excel Services. This is the type of UI experience we are all waiting for, in order to satisfy the requests coming from users and customers. The important news here is that native applications will be available for both iOS and Windows 8 so it seems that Android will be supported initially only through the web. Unfortunately we haven’t seen any demo, so it’s not clear what will be the offline navigation experience (and whether there will be one). But at least we know that Microsoft is working on native applications in this area. I’m not too surprised that HTML5 is not the magic bullet for all the platforms. The next PASS Business Analytics conference in 2013 seems a good place to see this in action, even if I hope we don’t have to wait other six months before seeing some demo of native BI applications on mobile platforms! Viewing Reporting Services reports on iPad is supported starting with SQL Server 2012 SP1, which has been released today. This is another good reason to install SP1 on SQL Server 2012. If you are at PASS Summit 2012, come and join me, Alberto Ferrari and Chris Webb at our book signing event tomorrow, Thursday 8 2012, at the bookstore between 12:00pm and 12:30pm, or follow one of our sessions!

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• Easy Made Easier - Networking

  - by dragonfly

      In my last post, I highlighted the feature of the Appliance Manager Configurator to auto-fill some fields based on previous field values, including host names based on System Name and sequential IP addresses from the first IP address entered. This can make configuration a little faster and a little less subject to data entry errors, particularly if you are doing the configuration on the Oracle Database Appliance itself.     The Oracle Database Appliance Appliance Manager Configurator is available for download here. But why would you download it, if it comes pre-installed on the Oracle Database Appliance? A common reason for customers interested in this new Engineered System is to get a good idea of how easy it is to configure. Beyond that, you can save the resulting configuration as a file, and use it on an Oracle Database Appliance. This allows you to verify the data entered in advance, and in the comfort of your office. In addition, the topic of this post is another strong reason to download and use the Appliance Manager Configurator prior to deploying your Oracle Database Appliance.     The most common source of hiccups in deploying an Oracle Database Appliance, based on my experiences with a variety of customers, involves the network configuration. It is during Step 11, when network validation occurs, that these come to light, which is almost half way through the 24 total steps, and can be frustrating, whether it was a typo, DNS mis-configuration or IP address already in use. This is why I recommend as a best practice taking advantage of the Appliance Manager Configurator prior to deploying an Oracle Database Appliance.     Why? Not only do you get the benefit of being able to double check your entries before you even start on the Oracle Database Appliance, you can also take advantage of the Network Validation step. This is the final step before you review all the data and can save it to a text file. It can be skipped, if you aren't ready or are not connected to the network that the Oracle Database Appliance will be on. My recommendation, though, is to run the Appliance Manager Configurator on your laptop, enter the data or re-load a previously saved file of the data, and then connect to the network that the Oracle Database Appliance will be on. Now run the Network Validation. It will check to make sure that the host names you entered are in DNS and do resolve to the IP addresses you specifiied. It will also ping the IP Addresses you specified, so that you can verify that no other machine is already using them (yes, that has happened at customer sites).     After you have completed the validation, as seen in the screen shot below, you can review the results and move on to saving your settings to a file for use on your Oracle Database Appliance, or if there are errors, you can use the Back button to return to the appropriate screen and correct the data. Once you are satisfied with the Network Validation, just check the Skip/Ignore Network Validation checkbox at the top of the screen, then click Next. Is the Network Validation in the Appliance Manager Configurator required? No, but it can save you time later. I should also note that the Network Validation screen is not part of the Appliance Manager Configurator that currently ships on the Oracle Database Appliance, so this is the easiest way to verify your network configuration.     I hope you are finding this series of posts useful. My next post will cover some aspects of the windowing environment that gets run by the 'startx' command on the Oracle Database Appliance, since this is needed to run the Appliance Manager Configurator via a direct connected monitor, keyboard and mouse, or via the ILOM. If it's been a while since you've used an OpenWindows environment, you'll want to check it out.

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• Learn Many Languages

  - by Jeff Foster

  My previous blog, Deliberate Practice, discussed the need for developers to “sharpen their pencil” continually, by setting aside time to learn how to tackle problems in different ways. However, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a contested and somewhat-controversial concept from language theory, seems to hold reasonably true when applied to programming languages. It states that: “The structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualize their world.” If you’re constrained by a single programming language, the one that dominates your day job, then you only have the tools of that language at your disposal to think about and solve a problem. For example, if you’ve only ever worked with Java, you would never think of passing a function to a method. A good developer needs to learn many languages. You may never deploy them in production, you may never ship code with them, but by learning a new language, you’ll have new ideas that will transfer to your current “day-job” language. With the abundant choices in programming languages, how does one choose which to learn? Alan Perlis sums it up best. “A language that doesn‘t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing“ With that in mind, here’s a selection of languages that I think are worth learning and that have certainly changed the way I think about tackling programming problems. Clojure Clojure is a Lisp-based language running on the Java Virtual Machine. The unique property of Lisp is homoiconicity, which means that a Lisp program is a Lisp data structure, and vice-versa. Since we can treat Lisp programs as Lisp data structures, we can write our code generation in the same style as our code. This gives Lisp a uniquely powerful macro system, and makes it ideal for implementing domain specific languages. Clojure also makes software transactional memory a first-class citizen, giving us a new approach to concurrency and dealing with the problems of shared state. Haskell Haskell is a strongly typed, functional programming language. Haskell’s type system is far richer than C# or Java, and allows us to push more of our application logic to compile-time safety. If it compiles, it usually works! Haskell is also a lazy language – we can work with infinite data structures. For example, in a board game we can generate the complete game tree, even if there are billions of possibilities, because the values are computed only as they are needed. Erlang Erlang is a functional language with a strong emphasis on reliability. Erlang’s approach to concurrency uses message passing instead of shared variables, with strong support from both the language itself and the virtual machine. Processes are extremely lightweight, and garbage collection doesn’t require all processes to be paused at the same time, making it feasible for a single program to use millions of processes at once, all without the mental overhead of managing shared state. The Benefits of Multilingualism By studying new languages, even if you won’t ever get the chance to use them in production, you will find yourself open to new ideas and ways of coding in your main language. For example, studying Haskell has taught me that you can do so much more with types and has changed my programming style in C#. A type represents some state a program should have, and a type should not be able to represent an invalid state. I often find myself refactoring methods like this… void SomeMethod(bool doThis, bool doThat) { if (!(doThis ^ doThat)) throw new ArgumentException(“At least one arg should be true”); if (doThis) DoThis(); if (doThat) DoThat(); } …into a type-based solution, like this: enum Action { DoThis, DoThat, Both }; void SomeMethod(Action action) { if (action == Action.DoThis || action == Action.Both) DoThis(); if (action == Action.DoThat || action == Action.Both) DoThat(); } At this point, I’ve removed the runtime exception in favor of a compile-time check. This is a trivial example, but is just one of many ideas that I’ve taken from one language and implemented in another.

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• How change LOD in geometry?

  - by ChaosDev

  Im looking for simple algorithm of LOD, for change geometry vertexes and decrease frame time. Im created octree, but now I want model or terrain vertex modify algorithm,not for increase(looking on tessellation later) but for decrease. I want something like this Questions: Is same algorithm can apply either to model and terrain correctly? Indexes need to be modified ? I must use octree or simple check distance between camera and object for desired effect ? New value of indexcount for DrawIndexed function needed ? Code: //m_LOD == 10 in the beginning //m_RawVerts - array of 3d Vector filled with values from vertex buffer. void DecreaseLOD() { m_LOD--; if(m_LOD<1)m_LOD=1; RebuildGeometry(); } void IncreaseLOD() { m_LOD++; if(m_LOD>10)m_LOD=10; RebuildGeometry(); } void RebuildGeometry() { void* vertexRawData = new byte[m_VertexBufferSize]; void* indexRawData = new DWORD[m_IndexCount]; auto context = mp_D3D->mp_Context; D3D11_MAPPED_SUBRESOURCE data; ZeroMemory(&data,sizeof(D3D11_MAPPED_SUBRESOURCE)); context->Map(mp_VertexBuffer->mp_buffer,0,D3D11_MAP_READ,0,&data); memcpy(vertexRawData,data.pData,m_VertexBufferSize); context->Unmap(mp_VertexBuffer->mp_buffer,0); context->Map(mp_IndexBuffer->mp_buffer,0,D3D11_MAP_READ,0,&data); memcpy(indexRawData,data.pData,m_IndexBufferSize); context->Unmap(mp_IndexBuffer->mp_buffer,0); DWORD* dwI = (DWORD*)indexRawData; int sz = (m_VertexStride/sizeof(float));//size of vertex element //algorithm must be here. std::vector<Vector3d> vertices; int i = 0; for(int j = 0; j < m_VertexCount; j++) { float x1 = (((float*)vertexRawData)[0+i]); float y1 = (((float*)vertexRawData)[1+i]); float z1 = (((float*)vertexRawData)[2+i]); Vector3d lv = Vector3d(x1,y1,z1); //my useless attempts if(j+m_LOD+1<m_RawVerts.size()) { float v1 = VECTORHELPER::Distance(m_RawVerts[dwI[j]],m_RawVerts[dwI[j+m_LOD]]); float v2 = VECTORHELPER::Distance(m_RawVerts[dwI[j]],m_RawVerts[dwI[j+m_LOD+1]]); if(v1>v2) lv = m_RawVerts[dwI[j+1]]; else if(v2<v1) lv = m_RawVerts[dwI[j+2]]; } (((float*)vertexRawData)[0+i]) = lv.x; (((float*)vertexRawData)[1+i]) = lv.y; (((float*)vertexRawData)[2+i]) = lv.z; i+=sz;//pass others vertex format values without change } for(int j = 0; j < m_IndexCount; j++) { //indices ? } //set vertexes to device UpdateVertexes(vertexRawData,mp_VertexBuffer->getSize()); delete[] vertexRawData; delete[] indexRawData; }

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• Investigating on xVelocity (VertiPaq) column size

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

    In January I published an article about how to optimize high cardinality columns in VertiPaq. In the meantime, VertiPaq has been rebranded to xVelocity: the official name is now “xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (VertiPaq)” but using xVelocity and VertiPaq when we talk about Analysis Services has the same meaning. In this post I’ll show how to investigate on columns size of an existing Tabular database so that you can find the most important columns to be optimized. A first approach can be looking in the DataDir of Analysis Services and look for the folder containing the database. Then, look for the biggest files in all subfolders and you will find the name of a file that contains the name of the most expensive column. However, this heuristic process is not very optimized. A better approach is using a DMV that provides the exact information. For example, by using the following query (open SSMS, open an MDX query on the database you are interested to and execute it) you will see all database objects sorted by used size in a descending way. SELECT * FROM $SYSTEM.DISCOVER_STORAGE_TABLE_COLUMN_SEGMENTS ORDER BY used_size DESC You can look at the first rows in order to understand what are the most expensive columns in your tabular model. The interesting data provided are: TABLE_ID: it is the name of the object – it can be also a dictionary or an index COLUMN_ID: it is the column name the object belongs to – you can also see ID_TO_POS and POS_TO_ID in case they refer to internal indexes RECORDS_COUNT: it is the number of rows in the column USED_SIZE: it is the used memory for the object By looking at the ration between USED_SIZE and RECORDS_COUNT you can understand what you can do in order to optimize your tabular model. Your options are: Remove the column. Yes, if it contains data you will never use in a query, simply remove the column from the tabular model Change granularity. If you are tracking time and you included milliseconds but seconds would be enough, round the data source column to the nearest second. If you have a floating point number but two decimals are good enough (i.e. the temperature), round the number to the nearest decimal is relevant to you. Split the column. Create two or more columns that have to be combined together in order to produce the original value. This technique is described in VertiPaq optimization article. Sort the table by that column. When you read the data source, you might consider sorting data by this column, so that the compression will be more efficient. However, this technique works better on columns that don’t have too many distinct values and you will probably move the problem to another column. Sorting data starting from the lower density columns (those with a few number of distinct values) and going to higher density columns (those with high cardinality) is the technique that provides the best compression ratio. After the optimization you should be able to reduce the used size and improve the count/size ration you measured before. If you are interested in a longer discussion about internal storage in VertiPaq and you want understand why this approach can save you space (and time), you can attend my 24 Hours of PASS session “VertiPaq Under the Hood” on March 21 at 08:00 GMT.

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• BizTalk 2009 - The Community ODBC Adapter: Schema Generation

  - by Stuart Brierley

  Having previously detailed the installation of the Community ODBC Adapter for BizTalk 2009, the next thing I will be looking at is the generation of schemas using this ODBC adapter. Within your BizTalk 2009 project, right click the project and select Add Generated Items.  In the resultant window choose Add Adapter Metadata and click Add to open the Add Adapter Wizard. Check that the BizTalk Server and Database names are correct, select the ODBC adapter and click next. You must now set the connection string. To start with choose set, then new DSN (data source name). You now need to define the Data Source you will be connecting to.  On the User DSN tab select Add add then driver you want to use. In this case I am going to use the MySQL ODBC Driver.  A User DSN will only be visible on the current machine with you as a user. * Although I initially set up a User DSN and this was fine for creating schemas with, I later realised that you actually need a system DSN as the BizTalk host service needs this to be able connect to the database on a receive or send port. You will then be asked to Set up the MySQL ODBC Data Source.  In my case this is a local database making use of named pipes, so I had to make sure that I ticked the "Force use of named pipes" check box and removed the "# The Pipe the MySQL Server will use socket=mysql" line from the mysql.ini; with this is place the connection would fail as there is no apparent way to specify the pipe name in the ODBC driver configuration. This will then update the User DSN tab with the new Data Source.  Make sure that you select it and press OK. Select it again in the Choose Data Source window and press OK.  On the ODBC transport window select next. You will now be presented with the Schema Information window, where you must supply the namespace, type and root element names for your schema. Next choose the type of statement that you will be using to create your schema - in this case I am using a stored procedure. *I later discovered that this option is fine for MySQL stored procedures without input parameters, but failed for MySQL stored procedures with input parameters.  (I will be posting on the way to handle input parameters soon) Next you will need to specify the name of the stored procedure.  In this case I have a simple stored procedure to return all the data held by my TestTable in MySQL. Select * from TestTable; The table itself has three columns: Name, Sex and Married. Selecting finish should now hopefully create your schemas based on the input and output from your stored procedure. In my case I have:   An empty schema for the request; after all I have no parameters for the stored procedure.  A response schema comprised of a Table Record with Name, Sex and Married children. Next I will be looking at the use of the ODBC adpater with: Receive ports Send ports

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• Government Mandates and Programming Languages

  A recent SEC proposal (which, at over 600 pages, I havent read in any detail) includes the following: We are proposing to require the filing of a computer program (the waterfall computer program, as defined in the proposed rule) of the contractual cash flow provisions of the securities in the form of downloadable source code in Python, a commonly used computer programming language that is open source and interpretive. The computer program would be tagged in XML and required to be filed with the Commission as an exhibit. Under our proposal, the filed source code for the computer program, when downloaded and run (by loading it into an open Python session on the investors computer), would be required to allow the user to programmatically input information from the asset data file that we are proposing to require as described above. We believe that, with the waterfall computer program and the asset data file, investors would be better able to conduct their own evaluations of ABS and may be less likely to be dependent on the opinions of credit rating agencies. With respect to any registration statement on Form SF-1 (Section 239.44) or Form SF-3 (Section 239.45) relating to an offering of an asset-backed security that is required to comply with Item 1113(h) of Regulation AB, the Waterfall Computer Program (as defined in Item 1113(h)(1) of Regulation AB) must be written in the Python programming language and able to be downloaded and run on a local computer properly configured with a Python interpreter. The Waterfall Computer Program should be filed in the manner specified in the EDGAR Filer Manual. I dont see how it can be in investors best interests that the SEC demand a particular programming language be used for software related to investment data.  I have a feeling that investors who use computers at all already have software with which they are familiar, and that the vast majority of them are not running an open source scripting language on their machines to do their financial analysis.  In fact, I would wager that most of them are using tools like Excel, and if they really need to script anything, its being done with VBA in Excel. Now, Im not proposing that the SEC should require that the data be provided in Excel format with VBA scripts included so everyone can easily access the data (despite the fact that this would actually be pretty useful generally).  Rather, I think it is ill-advised for a government agency to make recommendations of this nature, period.  If the goal of the recommendation is to ensure that the way things work is codified in a transparent manner, than I can certainly respect that.  It seems to me that this could be accomplished without dictating the technology to use.  To wit: An Excel document could contain all of the data as well as the formulae necessary, and most likely would not require the end-user to install anything on their machine The SEC could simply create a calculator in the cloud such that any/all investors could use a single canonical web-based (or web service based) tool Millions of Java and .NET developers could write their own implementations You can read more about this issue, including the favorable position on it, on Jayanth Varmas blog. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Investigating on xVelocity (VertiPaq) column size

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

    In January I published an article about how to optimize high cardinality columns in VertiPaq. In the meantime, VertiPaq has been rebranded to xVelocity: the official name is now “xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (VertiPaq)” but using xVelocity and VertiPaq when we talk about Analysis Services has the same meaning. In this post I’ll show how to investigate on columns size of an existing Tabular database so that you can find the most important columns to be optimized. A first approach can be looking in the DataDir of Analysis Services and look for the folder containing the database. Then, look for the biggest files in all subfolders and you will find the name of a file that contains the name of the most expensive column. However, this heuristic process is not very optimized. A better approach is using a DMV that provides the exact information. For example, by using the following query (open SSMS, open an MDX query on the database you are interested to and execute it) you will see all database objects sorted by used size in a descending way. SELECT * FROM $SYSTEM.DISCOVER_STORAGE_TABLE_COLUMN_SEGMENTS ORDER BY used_size DESC You can look at the first rows in order to understand what are the most expensive columns in your tabular model. The interesting data provided are: TABLE_ID: it is the name of the object – it can be also a dictionary or an index COLUMN_ID: it is the column name the object belongs to – you can also see ID_TO_POS and POS_TO_ID in case they refer to internal indexes RECORDS_COUNT: it is the number of rows in the column USED_SIZE: it is the used memory for the object By looking at the ration between USED_SIZE and RECORDS_COUNT you can understand what you can do in order to optimize your tabular model. Your options are: Remove the column. Yes, if it contains data you will never use in a query, simply remove the column from the tabular model Change granularity. If you are tracking time and you included milliseconds but seconds would be enough, round the data source column to the nearest second. If you have a floating point number but two decimals are good enough (i.e. the temperature), round the number to the nearest decimal is relevant to you. Split the column. Create two or more columns that have to be combined together in order to produce the original value. This technique is described in VertiPaq optimization article. Sort the table by that column. When you read the data source, you might consider sorting data by this column, so that the compression will be more efficient. However, this technique works better on columns that don’t have too many distinct values and you will probably move the problem to another column. Sorting data starting from the lower density columns (those with a few number of distinct values) and going to higher density columns (those with high cardinality) is the technique that provides the best compression ratio. After the optimization you should be able to reduce the used size and improve the count/size ration you measured before. If you are interested in a longer discussion about internal storage in VertiPaq and you want understand why this approach can save you space (and time), you can attend my 24 Hours of PASS session “VertiPaq Under the Hood” on March 21 at 08:00 GMT.

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• MySQL for Excel new features (1.2.0): Save and restore Edit sessions

  - by Javier Rivera

  Today we are going to talk about another new feature included in the latest MySQL for Excel release to date (1.2.0) which can be Installed directly from our MySQL Installer downloads page.Since the first release you were allowed to open a session to directly edit data from a MySQL table at Excel on a worksheet and see those changes reflected immediately on the database. You were also capable of opening multiple sessions to work with different tables at the same time (when they belong to the same schema). The problem was that if for any reason you were forced to close Excel or the Workbook you were working on, you had no way to save the state of those open sessions and to continue where you left off you needed to reopen them one by one. Well, that's no longer a problem since we are now introducing a new feature to save and restore active Edit sessions. All you need to do is in click the options button from the main MySQL for Excel panel:  And make sure the Edit Session Options (highlighted in yellow) are set correctly, specially that Restore saved Edit sessions is checked: Then just begin an Edit session like you would normally do, select the connection and schema on the main panel and then select table you want to edit data from and click over Edit MySQL Data. and just import the MySQL data into Excel:You can edit data like you always did with the previous version. To test the save and restore saved sessions functionality, first we need to save the workbook while at least one Edit session is opened and close the file.Then reopen the workbook. Depending on your version of Excel is where the next steps are going to differ:Excel 2013 extra step (first): In Excel 2013 you first need to open the workbook with saved edit sessions, then click the MySQL for Excel Icon on the the Data menu (notice how in this version, every time you open or create a new file the MySQL for Excel panel is closed in the new window). Please note that if you work on Excel 2013 with several workbooks with open edit sessions each at the same time, you'll need to repeat this step each time you open one of them: Following steps:  In Excel 2010 or previous, you just need to make sure the MySQL for Excel panel is already open at this point, if its not, please do the previous step specified above (Excel 2013 extra step). For Excel 2010 or older versions you will only need to do this previous step once.  When saved sessions are detected, you will be prompted what to do with those sessions, you can click Restore to continue working where you left off, click Discard to delete the saved sessions (All edit session information for this file will be deleted from your computer, so you will no longer be prompted the next time you open this same file) or click Nothing to continue without opening saved sessions (This will keep the saved edit sessions intact, to be prompted again about them the next time you open this workbook): And there you have it, now you will be able to save your Edit sessions, close your workbook or turn off your computer and you will still be able to reopen them in the future, to continue working right where you were. Today we talked about how you can save your active Edit sessions and restore them later, this is another feature included in the latest MySQL for Excel release (1.2.0). Please remember you can try this product and many others for free downloading the installer directly from our MySQL Installer downloads page.Happy editing !

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• Webcast On-Demand: Building Java EE Apps That Scale

  - by jeckels

  With some awesome work by one of our architects, Randy Stafford, we recently completed a webcast on scaling Java EE apps efficiently. Did you miss it? No problem. We have a replay available on-demand for you. Just hit the '+' sign drop-down for access.Topics include: Domain object caching Service response caching Session state caching JSR-107 HotCache and more! Further, we had several interesting questions asked by our audience, and we thought we'd share a sampling of those here for you - just in case you had the same queries yourself. Enjoy! What is the largest Coherence deployment out there? We have seen deployments with over 500 JVMs in the Coherence cluster, and deployments with over 1000 JVMs using the Coherence jar file, in one system. On the management side there is an ecosystem of monitoring tools from Oracle and third parties with dashboards graphing values from Coherence's JMX instrumentation. For lifecycle management we have seen a lot of custom scripting over the years, but we've also integrated closely with WebLogic to leverage its management ecosystem for deploying Coherence-based applications and managing process life cycles. That integration introduces a new Java EE archive type, the Grid Archive or GAR, which embeds in an EAR and can be seen by a WAR in WebLogic. That integration also doesn't require any extra WebLogic licensing if Coherence is licensed. How is Coherence different from a NoSQL Database like MongoDB? Coherence can be considered a NoSQL technology. It pre-dates the NoSQL movement, having been first released in 2001 whereas the term "NoSQL" was coined in 2009. Coherence has a key-value data model primarily but can also be used for document data models. Coherence manages data in memory currently, though disk persistence is in a future release currently in beta testing. Where the data is managed yields a few differences from the most well-known NoSQL products: access latency is faster with Coherence, though well-known NoSQL databases can manage more data. Coherence also has features that well-known NoSQL database lack, such as grid computing, eventing, and data source integration. Finally Coherence has had 15 years of maturation and hardening from usage in mission-critical systems across a variety of industries, particularly financial services. Can I use Coherence for local caching? Yes, you get additional features beyond just a java.util.Map: you get expiration capabilities, size-limitation capabilities, eventing capabilites, etc. Are there APIs available for GoldenGate HotCache? It's mostly a black box. You configure it, and it just puts objects into your caches. However you can treat it as a glass box, and use Coherence event interceptors to enhance its behavior - and there are use cases for that. Are Coherence caches updated transactionally? Coherence provides several mechanisms for concurrency control. If a project insists on full-blown JTA / XA distributed transactions, Coherence caches can participate as resources. But nobody does that because it's a performance and scalability anti-pattern. At finer granularity, Coherence guarantees strict ordering of all operations (reads and writes) against a single cache key if the operations are done using Coherence's "EntryProcessor" feature. And Coherence has a unique feature called "partition-level transactions" which guarantees atomic writes of multiple cache entries (even in different caches) without requiring JTA / XA distributed transaction semantics.

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• Class member functions instantiated by traits [policies, actually]

  - by Jive Dadson

  I am reluctant to say I can't figure this out, but I can't figure this out. I've googled and searched Stack Overflow, and come up empty. The abstract, and possibly overly vague form of the question is, how can I use the traits-pattern to instantiate member functions? [Update: I used the wrong term here. It should be "policies" rather than "traits." Traits describe existing classes. Policies prescribe synthetic classes.] The question came up while modernizing a set of multivariate function optimizers that I wrote more than 10 years ago. The optimizers all operate by selecting a straight-line path through the parameter space away from the current best point (the "update"), then finding a better point on that line (the "line search"), then testing for the "done" condition, and if not done, iterating. There are different methods for doing the update, the line-search, and conceivably for the done test, and other things. Mix and match. Different update formulae require different state-variable data. For example, the LMQN update requires a vector, and the BFGS update requires a matrix. If evaluating gradients is cheap, the line-search should do so. If not, it should use function evaluations only. Some methods require more accurate line-searches than others. Those are just some examples. The original version instantiates several of the combinations by means of virtual functions. Some traits are selected by setting mode bits that are tested at runtime. Yuck. It would be trivial to define the traits with #define's and the member functions with #ifdef's and macros. But that's so twenty years ago. It bugs me that I cannot figure out a whiz-bang modern way. If there were only one trait that varied, I could use the curiously recurring template pattern. But I see no way to extend that to arbitrary combinations of traits. I tried doing it using boost::enable_if, etc.. The specialized state information was easy. I managed to get the functions done, but only by resorting to non-friend external functions that have the this-pointer as a parameter. I never even figured out how to make the functions friends, much less member functions. The compiler (VC++ 2008) always complained that things didn't match. I would yell, "SFINAE, you moron!" but the moron is probably me. Perhaps tag-dispatch is the key. I haven't gotten very deeply into that. Surely it's possible, right? If so, what is best practice? UPDATE: Here's another try at explaining it. I want the user to be able to fill out an order (manifest) for a custom optimizer, something like ordering off of a Chinese menu - one from column A, one from column B, etc.. Waiter, from column A (updaters), I'll have the BFGS update with Cholesky-decompositon sauce. From column B (line-searchers), I'll have the cubic interpolation line-search with an eta of 0.4 and a rho of 1e-4, please. Etc... UPDATE: Okay, okay. Here's the playing-around that I've done. I offer it reluctantly, because I suspect it's a completely wrong-headed approach. It runs okay under vc++ 2008. #include <boost/utility.hpp> #include <boost/type_traits/integral_constant.hpp> namespace dj { struct CBFGS { void bar() {printf("CBFGS::bar %d\n", data);} CBFGS(): data(1234){} int data; }; template<class T> struct is_CBFGS: boost::false_type{}; template<> struct is_CBFGS<CBFGS>: boost::true_type{}; struct LMQN {LMQN(): data(54.321){} void bar() {printf("LMQN::bar %lf\n", data);} double data; }; template<class T> struct is_LMQN: boost::false_type{}; template<> struct is_LMQN<LMQN> : boost::true_type{}; // "Order form" struct default_optimizer_traits { typedef CBFGS update_type; // Selection from column A - updaters }; template<class traits> class Optimizer; template<class traits> void foo(typename boost::enable_if<is_LMQN<typename traits::update_type>, Optimizer<traits> >::type& self) { printf(" LMQN %lf\n", self.data); } template<class traits> void foo(typename boost::enable_if<is_CBFGS<typename traits::update_type>, Optimizer<traits> >::type& self) { printf("CBFGS %d\n", self.data); } template<class traits = default_optimizer_traits> class Optimizer{ friend typename traits::update_type; //friend void dj::foo<traits>(typename Optimizer<traits> & self); // How? public: //void foo(void); // How??? void foo() { dj::foo<traits>(*this); } void bar() { data.bar(); } //protected: // How? typedef typename traits::update_type update_type; update_type data; }; } // namespace dj int main() { dj::Optimizer<> opt; opt.foo(); opt.bar(); std::getchar(); return 0; }

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• Why is UITableView not reloading (even on the main thread)?

  - by radesix

  I have two programs that basically do the same thing. They read an XML feed and parse the elements. The design of both programs is to use an asynchronous NSURLConnection to get the data then to spawn a new thread to handle the parsing. As batches of 5 items are parsed it calls back to the main thread to reload the UITableView. My issue is it works fine in one program, but not the other. I know that the parsing is actually occuring on the background thread and I know that [tableView reloadData] is executing on the main thread; however, it doesn't reload the table until all parsing is complete. I'm stumped. As far as I can tell... both programs are structured exactly the same way. Here is some code from the app that isn't working correctly. - (void)startConnectionWithURL:(NSString *)feedURL feedList:(NSMutableArray *)list { self.feedList = list; // Use NSURLConnection to asynchronously download the data. This means the main thread will not be blocked - the // application will remain responsive to the user. // // IMPORTANT! The main thread of the application should never be blocked! Also, avoid synchronous network access on any thread. // NSURLRequest *feedURLRequest = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:feedURL]]; self.bloggerFeedConnection = [[[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:feedURLRequest delegate:self] autorelease]; // Test the validity of the connection object. The most likely reason for the connection object to be nil is a malformed // URL, which is a programmatic error easily detected during development. If the URL is more dynamic, then you should // implement a more flexible validation technique, and be able to both recover from errors and communicate problems // to the user in an unobtrusive manner. NSAssert(self.bloggerFeedConnection != nil, @"Failure to create URL connection."); // Start the status bar network activity indicator. We'll turn it off when the connection finishes or experiences an error. [UIApplication sharedApplication].networkActivityIndicatorVisible = YES; } - (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveResponse:(NSURLResponse *)response { self.bloggerData = [NSMutableData data]; } - (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSData *)data { [bloggerData appendData:data]; } - (void)connectionDidFinishLoading:(NSURLConnection *)connection { self.bloggerFeedConnection = nil; [UIApplication sharedApplication].networkActivityIndicatorVisible = NO; // Spawn a thread to fetch the link data so that the UI is not blocked while the application parses the XML data. // // IMPORTANT! - Don't access UIKit objects on secondary threads. // [NSThread detachNewThreadSelector:@selector(parseFeedData:) toTarget:self withObject:bloggerData]; // farkData will be retained by the thread until parseFarkData: has finished executing, so we no longer need // a reference to it in the main thread. self.bloggerData = nil; } If you read this from the top down you can see when the NSURLConnection is finished I detach a new thread and call parseFeedData. - (void)parseFeedData:(NSData *)data { // You must create a autorelease pool for all secondary threads. NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init]; self.currentParseBatch = [NSMutableArray array]; self.currentParsedCharacterData = [NSMutableString string]; self.feedList = [NSMutableArray array]; // // It's also possible to have NSXMLParser download the data, by passing it a URL, but this is not desirable // because it gives less control over the network, particularly in responding to connection errors. // NSXMLParser *parser = [[NSXMLParser alloc] initWithData:data]; [parser setDelegate:self]; [parser parse]; // depending on the total number of links parsed, the last batch might not have been a "full" batch, and thus // not been part of the regular batch transfer. So, we check the count of the array and, if necessary, send it to the main thread. if ([self.currentParseBatch count] > 0) { [self performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(addLinksToList:) withObject:self.currentParseBatch waitUntilDone:NO]; } self.currentParseBatch = nil; self.currentParsedCharacterData = nil; [parser release]; [pool release]; } In the did end element delegate I check to see that 5 items have been parsed before calling the main thread to perform the update. - (void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didEndElement:(NSString *)elementName namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString *)qName { if ([elementName isEqualToString:kItemElementName]) { [self.currentParseBatch addObject:self.currentItem]; parsedItemsCounter++; if (parsedItemsCounter % kSizeOfItemBatch == 0) { [self performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(addLinksToList:) withObject:self.currentParseBatch waitUntilDone:NO]; self.currentParseBatch = [NSMutableArray array]; } } // Stop accumulating parsed character data. We won't start again until specific elements begin. accumulatingParsedCharacterData = NO; } - (void)addLinksToList:(NSMutableArray *)links { [self.feedList addObjectsFromArray:links]; // The table needs to be reloaded to reflect the new content of the list. if (self.viewDelegate != nil && [self.viewDelegate respondsToSelector:@selector(parser:didParseBatch:)]) { [self.viewDelegate parser:self didParseBatch:links]; } } Finally, the UIViewController delegate: - (void)parser:(XMLFeedParser *)parser didParseBatch:(NSMutableArray *)parsedBatch { NSLog(@"parser:didParseBatch:"); [self.selectedBlogger.feedList addObjectsFromArray:parsedBatch]; [self.tableView reloadData]; } If I write to the log when my view controller delegate fires to reload the table and when cellForRowAtIndexPath fires as it's rebuilding the table then the log looks something like this: parser:didParseBatch: parser:didParseBatch: tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath parser:didParseBatch: parser:didParseBatch: parser:didParseBatch: tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath parser:didParseBatch: tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath parser:didParseBatch: parser:didParseBatch: parser:didParseBatch: parser:didParseBatch: tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath Clearly, the tableView is not reloading when I tell it to every time. The log from the app that works correctly looks like this: parser:didParseBatch: tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath parser:didParseBatch: tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath parser:didParseBatch: tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath parser:didParseBatch: tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath parser:didParseBatch: tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath

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• is this correct use of jquery's document.ready?

  - by Haroldo

  The below file contains all the javascript for a page. Performance is the highest priority. Is this the most efficient way? Do all click/hover events need to to be inside the doc.ready? //DOCUMENT.READY EVENTS //--------------------------------------------------------------------------- $(function(){ // mark events as not loaded $('.event').data({ t1_loaded: false, t2_loaded: false, t3_loaded: false, art_req: false }); //mark no events have been clicked $('#wrap_right').data('first_click_made', false); // cal-block event click $('#cal_blocks div.event, #main_search div.event').live('click', function(){ var id = $(this).attr('id').split('e')[1]; event_click(id); }); // jq history $.historyInit(function(hash){ if(hash) { event_click(hash); } }); // search $('#search_input').typeWatch ({ callback: function(){ var q = $('#search_input').attr('value'); search(q); }, wait : 350, highlight : false, captureLength : 2 }); $('#search_input, #main_search div.close').live('click',function(){ $(this).attr("value",""); reset_srch_res(); }); $('#main_search').easydrag(); $('a.dialog').colorbox(); //TAB CLICK -> AJAX LOAD TAB $('#wrap_right .rs_tabs li').live('click', function(){ $this = $(this); var id = $('#wrap_right').data('curr_event'); var tab = parseInt($this.attr('rel')); //hide other tabs $('#rs_'+id+' .tab_body').hide(); //mark current(clicked) tab $('#rs_'+id+' .rs_tabs li').removeClass('curr_tab'); $this.addClass('curr_tab'); //is the tab already loaded and hidden? var loaded = $('#e'+id).data('t'+tab+'_loaded'); //console.log('id: '+id+', tab: '+tab+', loaded: '+loaded); if(loaded === true) { $('#rs_'+id+' .tab'+tab).show(); if (tab == 2) { art_requested(id); } } else { //ajax load in the tab $('#rs_'+id+' .tab'+tab).load('index_files/tab'+tab+'.php?id='+id, function(){ //after load callback if (tab == 1) { $('#rs_' + id + ' .frame').delay(600).fadeIn(600) }; if (tab == 2) { art_requested(id); } }); //mark tab as loaded $('#e'+id).data('t'+tab+'_loaded', true); //fade in current tab $('#rs_'+id+' .tab'+tab).show(); } }) }); // LOAD RS FUNCTIONS //--------------------------------------------------------------------------- function event_click(id){ window.location.hash = id; //mark current event $('#wrap_right').data('curr_event', id); //hide any other events if($('#wrap_right').data('first_click_made') === true) { $('#wrap_right .event_rs').hide(); } //frame loaded before? var loaded = $('#e'+id).data('t1_loaded'); if(loaded === true) { $('#rs_'+id).show(); } else { create_frame(id); } //open/load the first tab $('#rs_'+id+' .t1').click(); $('#wrap_right').data('first_click_made', true); $('#cal_blocks').scrollTo('#e'+id, 1000, {offset: {top:-220, left:0}}); } function create_frame(id){ var art = ents[id].art; var ven = ents[id].ven; var type = ents[id].gig_club; //select colours for tabs if(type == 1){ var label = 'gig';} else if(type == 2){ var label = 'club';} else if(type == 0){ var label = 'other';} //create rs container for this event var frame = '<div id="rs_'+id+'" class="event_rs">'; frame += '<div class="title_strip"></div>'; frame += '<div class="rs_tabs"><ul class="'+label+'"><li class="t1 nav_tab1 curr_tab hand" rel="1"></li>'; if(art == 1){frame += '<li class="t2 nav_tab2 hand" rel="2"></li>';} if(ven == 1){frame += '<li class="t3 nav_tab2 hand" rel="3"></li>';} frame += '</ul></div>'; frame += '<div id="rs_content"><div class="tab_body tab1" ></div>'; if(art == 1){frame += '<div class="tab_body tab2"></div>';} if(ven == 1){frame += '<div class="tab_body tab3"></div>';} frame += '</div>'; frame += '</div>'; $('#wrap_right').append(frame); //mark current event in cal-blocks $('#cal_blocks .event_sel').removeClass('event_sel'); $('#e'+id).addClass('event_sel'); if($('#wrap_right').data('first_click_made') === false) { $('#wrap_right').delay(500).slideDown(); $('#rs_'+id+' .rs_tabs').delay(800).fadeIn(); } }; // FUNCTIONS //--------------------------------------------------------------------------- //check to see if an artist has been requested function art_requested(id){ var art_req = $('#e'+id).data('art_req'); if(art_req !== false) { //alert(art_req); $('#art_'+art_req).click(); } } //scroll artist panes smoothly (scroll bars cause glitches otherwise) function before (){ if(!IE){$('#art_scrollable .bio_etc').css('overflow','-moz-scrollbars-none');} } function after (){ if(!IE){$('#art_scrollable .bio_etc').css('overflow','auto');} } function prep_media_carousel(){ //youtube and soundcloud player $("#rs_content .yt_scrollable a.yt, #rs_content .yt_scrollable a.sc").colorbox({ overlayClose : false, opacity : 0 }); $("#colorbox").easydrag(true); $('#cboxOverlay').remove(); } function make_carousel_scrollable(unique_id){ $('#scroll_'+unique_id).scrollable({ size:1, clickable:false, nextPage:'#r_'+unique_id, prevPage:'#l_'+unique_id }); } function check_l_r_arrows(total, counter, art_id){ //left arrow if(counter > 0) { $('#l_'+art_id).show(); $('#l_'+art_id+'_inactive').hide(); } else { $('#l_'+art_id).hide(); $('#l_'+art_id+'_inactive').show(); } //right arrow if(counter < total-3) { $('#r_'+art_id).show(); $('#r_'+art_id+'_inactive').hide(); } else { $('#r_'+art_id).hide(); $('#r_'+art_id+'_inactive').show(); } } function reset_srch_res(){ $('#main_search').fadeOut(400).children().remove(); } function search(q){ $.ajax({ type: 'GET', url: 'index_files/srch/search.php?q='+q, success: function(e) { $('#main_search').html(e).show(); } }); }

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• ASP.NET exception gives irrelevant stack trace on YSOD, very challenging!

  - by pootow

  Here is the YSOD: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. Source Error: An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below. Stack Trace: [SqlException (0x80131904): Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.] System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionPool.GetConnection(DbConnection owningObject) +428 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionFactory.GetConnection(DbConnection owningConnection) +65 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionClosed.OpenConnection(DbConnection outerConnection, DbConnectionFactory connectionFactory) +117 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.Open() +122 ECommerce.PMethod.Sql.SqlConns.Open() +78 ECommerce.PMethod.Sql.SqlConns..ctor() +120 ECommerce.login.DatasInfo.Proc.UserCenter.IsLogin(String UserGUID, Int32 UserID) +49 ECommerce.login.Rules.Users.UserLogin.isLogin() +44 Config.isUserLogined() +5 Shopping_Shopping.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) +10 System.Web.Util.CalliHelper.EventArgFunctionCaller(IntPtr fp, Object o, Object t, EventArgs e) +14 System.Web.Util.CalliEventHandlerDelegateProxy.Callback(Object sender, EventArgs e) +35 System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +99 System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +50 System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +627 [TypeInitializationException: The type initializer for 'ECommerce.ERP.DAL.DBConn' threw an exception.] ECommerce.ERP.DAL.DBConn.get_ConnString() +0 [ObjectDefinitionStoreException: Factory method 'System.String get_ConnString()' threw an Exception.] Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.SimpleInstantiationStrategy.Instantiate(RootObjectDefinition definition, String name, IObjectFactory factory, MethodInfo factoryMethod, Object[] arguments) +257 Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.ConstructorResolver.InstantiateUsingFactoryMethod(String name, RootObjectDefinition definition, Object[] arguments) +624 Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.AbstractAutowireCapableObjectFactory.InstantiateUsingFactoryMethod(String name, RootObjectDefinition definition, Object[] arguments) +60 Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.AbstractAutowireCapableObjectFactory.CreateObjectInstance(String objectName, RootObjectDefinition objectDefinition, Object[] arguments) +56 Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.AbstractAutowireCapableObjectFactory.InstantiateObject(String name, RootObjectDefinition definition, Object[] arguments, Boolean allowEagerCaching, Boolean suppressConfigure) +436 [ObjectCreationException: Error thrown by a dependency of object 'styleService' defined in 'assembly [ECommerce.Services.Impl, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null], resource [ECommerce.Services.Impl.AppContext.xml] line 56' : Initialization of object failed : Factory method 'System.String get_ConnString()' threw an Exception. while resolving 'constructor argument with name promotionservice' to 'promotionService' defined in 'assembly [ECommerce.Services.Impl, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null], resource [ECommerce.Services.Impl.AppContext.xml] line 31' while resolving 'constructor argument with name domainservice' to 'promotionDomainService' defined in 'assembly [ECommerce.Domain, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null], resource [ECommerce.Domain.AppContext.xml] line 20' while resolving 'constructor argument with name promotionrepos' to 'promotionRepos' defined in 'assembly [ECommerce.Data.AdoNet, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null], resource [ECommerce.Data.AdoNet.AppContext.xml] line 34' while resolving 'constructor argument with name connstr' to 'ECommerce.ERP.DAL.DBConn#389F399' defined in 'assembly [ECommerce.Data.AdoNet, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null], resource [ECommerce.Data.AdoNet.AppContext.xml] line 34'] Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.ObjectDefinitionValueResolver.ResolveReference(IObjectDefinition definition, String name, String argumentName, RuntimeObjectReference reference) +394 Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.ObjectDefinitionValueResolver.ResolvePropertyValue(String name, IObjectDefinition definition, String argumentName, Object argumentValue) +312 Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.ObjectDefinitionValueResolver.ResolveValueIfNecessary(String name, IObjectDefinition definition, String argumentName, Object argumentValue) +17 Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.ConstructorResolver.ResolveConstructorArguments(String objectName, RootObjectDefinition definition, ObjectWrapper wrapper, ConstructorArgumentValues cargs, ConstructorArgumentValues resolvedValues) +993 Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.ConstructorResolver.AutowireConstructor(String objectName, RootObjectDefinition rod, ConstructorInfo[] chosenCtors, Object[] explicitArgs) +171 Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.AbstractAutowireCapableObjectFactory.AutowireConstructor(String name, RootObjectDefinition definition, ConstructorInfo[] ctors, Object[] explicitArgs) +65 Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.AbstractAutowireCapableObjectFactory.CreateObjectInstance(String objectName, RootObjectDefinition objectDefinition, Object[] arguments) +161 Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.AbstractAutowireCapableObjectFactory.InstantiateObject(String name, RootObjectDefinition definition, Object[] arguments, Boolean allowEagerCaching, Boolean suppressConfigure) +636 Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.AbstractObjectFactory.CreateAndCacheSingletonInstance(String objectName, RootObjectDefinition objectDefinition, Object[] arguments) +174 Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.WebObjectFactory.CreateAndCacheSingletonInstance(String objectName, RootObjectDefinition objectDefinition, Object[] arguments) +150 Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.AbstractObjectFactory.GetObjectInternal(String name, Type requiredType, Object[] arguments, Boolean suppressConfigure) +990 Spring.Objects.Factory.Support.AbstractObjectFactory.GetObject(String name) +10 Spring.Context.Support.AbstractApplicationContext.GetObject(String name) +20 ECommerce.Common.ServiceLocator.GetService() +334 ECommerce.Mvc.Controllers.StylesController..ctor() +72 [TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.] System.RuntimeTypeHandle.CreateInstance(RuntimeType type, Boolean publicOnly, Boolean noCheck, Boolean& canBeCached, RuntimeMethodHandle& ctor, Boolean& bNeedSecurityCheck) +0 System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceSlow(Boolean publicOnly, Boolean fillCache) +86 System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceImpl(Boolean publicOnly, Boolean skipVisibilityChecks, Boolean fillCache) +230 System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, Boolean nonPublic) +67 System.Web.Mvc.DefaultControllerFactory.GetControllerInstance(RequestContext requestContext, Type controllerType) +80 [InvalidOperationException: An error occurred when trying to create a controller of type 'ECommerce.Mvc.Controllers.StylesController'. Make sure that the controller has a parameterless public constructor.] System.Web.Mvc.DefaultControllerFactory.GetControllerInstance(RequestContext requestContext, Type controllerType) +190 System.Web.Mvc.DefaultControllerFactory.CreateController(RequestContext requestContext, String controllerName) +68 System.Web.Mvc.MvcHandler.ProcessRequestInit(HttpContextBase httpContext, IController& controller, IControllerFactory& factory) +118 System.Web.Mvc.MvcHandler.BeginProcessRequest(HttpContextBase httpContext, AsyncCallback callback, Object state) +46 System.Web.Mvc.MvcHandler.BeginProcessRequest(HttpContext httpContext, AsyncCallback callback, Object state) +63 System.Web.Mvc.MvcHandler.System.Web.IHttpAsyncHandler.BeginProcessRequest(HttpContext context, AsyncCallback cb, Object extraData) +13 System.Web.CallHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute() +8677954 System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously) +155 Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.3082; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.3082 Question is: the first stack trace is irrelevant to others, what happened? Any ideas? Let me make this more clear: a MVC page uses the spring part trying to load a lazy-init service which constructor wants a connection string through a static property like this: <object id="promotionRepos" type="ECommerce.Data.AdoNet.Promotions.PromotionRepos, ECommerce.Data.AdoNet" lazy-init="true"> <constructor-arg name="provider"> <null /> </constructor-arg> <constructor-arg name="connStr"> <object type="ECommerce.ERP.DAL.DBConn, ECommerce.ERP.DAL" factory-method="get_ConnString" /> </constructor-arg> <property name="RefreshInterval" value="00:00:10" /> </object> the timeout part is some what irrelevent to all others. see this in the first exception: Shopping_Shopping.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) +10 it's another page at all. And also, ECommerce.PMethod.Sql.SqlConns.Open() uses its own connection string, not the one loaded by spring, it's different module from diffrent team. And I am sure the connection string is correct. And, this ysod cames up randomly. Sometimes nothing is wrong, and sometimes, it appears. I thought there could be something wrong with my database or the network/firewall, I will check it later, but now I want understand this tricky stack trace.

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• Using FiddlerCore to capture HTTP Requests with .NET

  - by Rick Strahl

  Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on my Web load testing utility West Wind WebSurge. One of the key components of a load testing tool is the ability to capture URLs effectively so that you can play them back later under load. One of the options in WebSurge for capturing URLs is to use its built-in capture tool which acts as an HTTP proxy to capture any HTTP and HTTPS traffic from most Windows HTTP clients, including Web Browsers as well as standalone Windows applications and services. To make this happen, I used Eric Lawrence’s awesome FiddlerCore library, which provides most of the functionality of his desktop Fiddler application, all rolled into an easy to use library that you can plug into your own applications. FiddlerCore makes it almost too easy to capture HTTP content! For WebSurge I needed to capture all HTTP traffic in order to capture the full HTTP request – URL, headers and any content posted by the client. The result of what I ended up creating is this semi-generic capture form: In this post I’m going to demonstrate how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to build this HTTP Capture Form.  If you want to jump right in here are the links to get Telerik’s Fiddler Core and the code for the demo provided here. FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore on NuGet Show me the Code (WebSurge Integration code from GitHub) Download the WinForms Sample Form West Wind Web Surge (example implementation in live app) Note that FiddlerCore is bound by a license for commercial usage – see license.txt in the FiddlerCore distribution for details. Integrating FiddlerCore FiddlerCore is a library that simply plugs into your application. You can download it from the Telerik site and manually add the assemblies to your project, or you can simply install the NuGet package via:       PM> Install-Package FiddlerCore The library consists of the FiddlerCore.dll as well as a couple of support libraries (CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll) that are used for installing SSL certificates. I’ll have more on SSL captures and certificate installation later in this post. But first let’s see how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to capture HTTP content by looking at how to build the above capture form. Capturing HTTP Content Once the library is installed it’s super easy to hook up Fiddler functionality. Fiddler includes a number of static class methods on the FiddlerApplication object that can be called to hook up callback events as well as actual start monitoring HTTP URLs. In the following code directly lifted from WebSurge, I configure a few filter options on Form level object, from the user inputs shown on the form by assigning it to a capture options object. In the live application these settings are persisted configuration values, but in the demo they are one time values initialized and set on the form. Once these options are set, I hook up the AfterSessionComplete event to capture every URL that passes through the proxy after the request is completed and start up the Proxy service:void Start() { if (tbIgnoreResources.Checked) CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = true; else CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = false; string strProcId = txtProcessId.Text; if (strProcId.Contains('-')) strProcId = strProcId.Substring(strProcId.IndexOf('-') + 1).Trim(); strProcId = strProcId.Trim(); int procId = 0; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(strProcId)) { if (!int.TryParse(strProcId, out procId)) procId = 0; } CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId = procId; CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain = txtCaptureDomain.Text; FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete += FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; FiddlerApplication.Startup(8888, true, true, true); } The key lines for FiddlerCore are just the last two lines of code that include the event hookup code as well as the Startup() method call. Here I only hook up to the AfterSessionComplete event but there are a number of other events that hook various stages of the HTTP request cycle you can also hook into. Other events include BeforeRequest, BeforeResponse, RequestHeadersAvailable, ResponseHeadersAvailable and so on. In my case I want to capture the request data and I actually have several options to capture this data. AfterSessionComplete is the last event that fires in the request sequence and it’s the most common choice to capture all request and response data. I could have used several other events, but AfterSessionComplete is one place where you can look both at the request and response data, so this will be the most common place to hook into if you’re capturing content. The implementation of AfterSessionComplete is responsible for capturing all HTTP request headers and it looks something like this:private void FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete(Session sess) { // Ignore HTTPS connect requests if (sess.RequestMethod == "CONNECT") return; if (CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId > 0) { if (sess.LocalProcessID != 0 && sess.LocalProcessID != CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId) return; } if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain)) { if (sess.hostname.ToLower() != CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain.Trim().ToLower()) return; } if (CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources) { string url = sess.fullUrl.ToLower(); var extensions = CaptureConfiguration.ExtensionFilterExclusions; foreach (var ext in extensions) { if (url.Contains(ext)) return; } var filters = CaptureConfiguration.UrlFilterExclusions; foreach (var urlFilter in filters) { if (url.Contains(urlFilter)) return; } } if (sess == null || sess.oRequest == null || sess.oRequest.headers == null) return; string headers = sess.oRequest.headers.ToString(); var reqBody = sess.GetRequestBodyAsString(); // if you wanted to capture the response //string respHeaders = session.oResponse.headers.ToString(); //var respBody = session.GetResponseBodyAsString(); // replace the HTTP line to inject full URL string firstLine = sess.RequestMethod + " " + sess.fullUrl + " " + sess.oRequest.headers.HTTPVersion; int at = headers.IndexOf("\r\n"); if (at < 0) return; headers = firstLine + "\r\n" + headers.Substring(at + 1); string output = headers + "\r\n" + (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(reqBody) ? reqBody + "\r\n" : string.Empty) + Separator + "\r\n\r\n"; BeginInvoke(new Action<string>((text) => { txtCapture.AppendText(text); UpdateButtonStatus(); }), output); } The code starts by filtering out some requests based on the CaptureOptions I set before the capture is started. These options/filters are applied when requests actually come in. This is very useful to help narrow down the requests that are captured for playback based on options the user picked. I find it useful to limit requests to a certain domain for captures, as well as filtering out some request types like static resources – images, css, scripts etc. This is of course optional, but I think it’s a common scenario and WebSurge makes good use of this feature. AfterSessionComplete like other FiddlerCore events, provides a Session object parameter which contains all the request and response details. There are oRequest and oResponse objects to hold their respective data. In my case I’m interested in the raw request headers and body only, as you can see in the commented code you can also retrieve the response headers and body. Here the code captures the request headers and body and simply appends the output to the textbox on the screen. Note that the Fiddler events are asynchronous, so in order to display the content in the UI they have to be marshaled back the UI thread with BeginInvoke, which here simply takes the generated headers and appends it to the existing textbox test on the form. As each request is processed, the headers are captured and appended to the bottom of the textbox resulting in a Session HTTP capture in the format that Web Surge internally supports, which is basically raw request headers with a customized 1st HTTP Header line that includes the full URL rather than a server relative URL. When the capture is done the user can either copy the raw HTTP session to the clipboard, or directly save it to file. This raw capture format is the same format WebSurge and also Fiddler use to import/export request data. While this code is application specific, it demonstrates the kind of logic that you can easily apply to the request capture process, which is one of the reasonsof why FiddlerCore is so powerful. You get to choose what content you want to look up as part of your own application logic and you can then decide how to capture or use that data as part of your application. The actual captured data in this case is only a string. The user can edit the data by hand or in the the case of WebSurge, save it to disk and automatically open the captured session as a new load test. Stopping the FiddlerCore Proxy Finally to stop capturing requests you simply disconnect the event handler and call the FiddlerApplication.ShutDown() method:void Stop() { FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete -= FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; if (FiddlerApplication.IsStarted()) FiddlerApplication.Shutdown(); } As you can see, adding HTTP capture functionality to an application is very straight forward. FiddlerCore offers tons of features I’m not even touching on here – I suspect basic captures are the most common scenario, but a lot of different things can be done with FiddlerCore’s simple API interface. Sky’s the limit! The source code for this sample capture form (WinForms) is provided as part of this article. Adding Fiddler Certificates with FiddlerCore One of the sticking points in West Wind WebSurge has been that if you wanted to capture HTTPS/SSL traffic, you needed to have the full version of Fiddler and have HTTPS decryption enabled. Essentially you had to use Fiddler to configure HTTPS decryption and the associated installation of the Fiddler local client certificate that is used for local decryption of incoming SSL traffic. While this works just fine, requiring to have Fiddler installed and then using a separate application to configure the SSL functionality isn’t ideal. Fortunately FiddlerCore actually includes the tools to register the Fiddler Certificate directly using FiddlerCore. Why does Fiddler need a Certificate in the first Place? Fiddler and FiddlerCore are essentially HTTP proxies which means they inject themselves into the HTTP conversation by re-routing HTTP traffic to a special HTTP port (8888 by default for Fiddler) and then forward the HTTP data to the original client. Fiddler injects itself as the system proxy in using the WinInet Windows settings  which are the same settings that Internet Explorer uses and that are configured in the Windows and Internet Explorer Internet Settings dialog. Most HTTP clients running on Windows pick up and apply these system level Proxy settings before establishing new HTTP connections and that’s why most clients automatically work once Fiddler – or FiddlerCore/WebSurge are running. For plain HTTP requests this just works – Fiddler intercepts the HTTP requests on the proxy port and then forwards them to the original port (80 for HTTP and 443 for SSL typically but it could be any port). For SSL however, this is not quite as simple – Fiddler can easily act as an HTTPS/SSL client to capture inbound requests from the server, but when it forwards the request to the client it has to also act as an SSL server and provide a certificate that the client trusts. This won’t be the original certificate from the remote site, but rather a custom local certificate that effectively simulates an SSL connection between the proxy and the client. If there is no custom certificate configured for Fiddler the SSL request fails with a certificate validation error. The key for this to work is that a custom certificate has to be installed that the HTTPS client trusts on the local machine. For a much more detailed description of the process you can check out Eric Lawrence’s blog post on Certificates. If you’re using the desktop version of Fiddler you can install a local certificate into the Windows certificate store. Fiddler proper does this from the Options menu: This operation does several things: It installs the Fiddler Root Certificate It sets trust to this Root Certificate A new client certificate is generated for each HTTPS site monitored Certificate Installation with FiddlerCore You can also provide this same functionality using FiddlerCore which includes a CertMaker class. Using CertMaker is straight forward to use and it provides an easy way to create some simple helpers that can install and uninstall a Fiddler Root certificate:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } return true; } InstallCertificate() works by first checking whether the root certificate is already installed and if it isn’t goes ahead and creates a new one. The process of creating the certificate is a two step process – first the actual certificate is created and then it’s moved into the certificate store to become trusted. I’m not sure why you’d ever split these operations up since a cert created without trust isn’t going to be of much value, but there are two distinct steps. When you trigger the trustRootCert() method, a message box will pop up on the desktop that lets you know that you’re about to trust a local private certificate. This is a security feature to ensure that you really want to trust the Fiddler root since you are essentially installing a man in the middle certificate. It’s quite safe to use this generated root certificate, because it’s been specifically generated for your machine and thus is not usable from external sources, the only way to use this certificate in a trusted way is from the local machine. IOW, unless somebody has physical access to your machine, there’s no useful way to hijack this certificate and use it for nefarious purposes (see Eric’s post for more details). Once the Root certificate has been installed, FiddlerCore/Fiddler create new certificates for each site that is connected to with HTTPS. You can end up with quite a few temporary certificates in your certificate store. To uninstall you can either use Fiddler and simply uncheck the Decrypt HTTPS traffic option followed by the remove Fiddler certificates button, or you can use FiddlerCore’s CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts() which removes the root cert and any of the intermediary certificates Fiddler created. Keep in mind that when you uninstall you uninstall the certificate for both FiddlerCore and Fiddler, so use UninstallCertificate() with care and realize that you might affect the Fiddler application’s operation by doing so as well. When to check for an installed Certificate Note that the check to see if the root certificate exists is pretty fast, while the actual process of installing the certificate is a relatively slow operation that even on a fast machine takes a few seconds. Further the trust operation pops up a message box so you probably don’t want to install the certificate repeatedly. Since the check for the root certificate is fast, you can easily put a call to InstallCertificate() in any capture startup code – in which case the certificate installation only triggers when a certificate is in fact not installed. Personally I like to make certificate installation explicit – just like Fiddler does, so in WebSurge I use a small drop down option on the menu to install or uninstall the SSL certificate:   This code calls the InstallCertificate and UnInstallCertificate functions respectively – the experience with this is similar to what you get in Fiddler with the extra dialog box popping up to prompt confirmation for installation of the root certificate. Once the cert is installed you can then capture SSL requests. There’s a gotcha however… Gotcha: FiddlerCore Certificates don’t stick by Default When I originally tried to use the Fiddler certificate installation I ran into an odd problem. I was able to install the certificate and immediately after installation was able to capture HTTPS requests. Then I would exit the application and come back in and try the same HTTPS capture again and it would fail due to a missing certificate. CertMaker.rootCertExists() would return false after every restart and if re-installed the certificate a new certificate would get added to the certificate store resulting in a bunch of duplicated root certificates with different keys. What the heck? CertMaker and BcMakeCert create non-sticky CertificatesI turns out that FiddlerCore by default uses different components from what the full version of Fiddler uses. Fiddler uses a Windows utility called MakeCert.exe to create the Fiddler Root certificate. FiddlerCore however installs the CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll assemblies, which use a different crypto library (Bouncy Castle) for certificate creation than MakeCert.exe which uses the Windows Crypto API. The assemblies provide support for non-windows operation for Fiddler under Mono, as well as support for some non-Windows certificate platforms like iOS and Android for decryption. The bottom line is that the FiddlerCore provided bouncy castle assemblies are not sticky by default as the certificates created with them are not cached as they are in Fiddler proper. To get certificates to ‘stick’ you have to explicitly cache the certificates in Fiddler’s internal preferences. A cache aware version of InstallCertificate looks something like this:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", null); App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", null); } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = null; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = null; return true; } In this code I store the Fiddler cert and private key in an application configuration settings that’s stored with the application settings (App.Configuration.UrlCapture object). These settings automatically persist when WebSurge is shut down. The values are read out of Fiddler’s internal preferences store which is set after a new certificate has been created. Likewise I clear out the configuration settings when the certificate is uninstalled. In order for these setting to be used you have to also load the configuration settings into the Fiddler preferences *before* a call to rootCertExists() is made. I do this in the capture form’s constructor:public FiddlerCapture(StressTestForm form) { InitializeComponent(); CaptureConfiguration = App.Configuration.UrlCapture; MainForm = form; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert)) { FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key); FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert); }} This is kind of a drag to do and not documented anywhere that I could find, so hopefully this will save you some grief if you want to work with the stock certificate logic that installs with FiddlerCore. MakeCert provides sticky Certificates and the same functionality as Fiddler But there’s actually an easier way. If you want to skip the above Fiddler preference configuration code in your application you can choose to distribute MakeCert.exe instead of certmaker.dll and bcmakecert.dll. When you use MakeCert.exe, the certificates settings are stored in Windows so they are available without any custom configuration inside of your application. It’s easier to integrate and as long as you run on Windows and you don’t need to support iOS or Android devices is simply easier to deal with. To integrate into your project, you can remove the reference to CertMaker.dll (and the BcMakeCert.dll assembly) from your project. Instead copy MakeCert.exe into your output folder. To make sure MakeCert.exe gets pushed out, include MakeCert.exe in your project and set the Build Action to None, and Copy to Output Directory to Copy if newer. Note that the CertMaker.dll reference in the project has been removed and on disk the files for Certmaker.dll, as well as the BCMakeCert.dll files on disk. Keep in mind that these DLLs are resources of the FiddlerCore NuGet package, so updating the package may end up pushing those files back into your project. Once MakeCert.exe is distributed FiddlerCore checks for it first before using the assemblies so as long as MakeCert.exe exists it’ll be used for certificate creation (at least on Windows). Summary FiddlerCore is a pretty sweet tool, and it’s absolutely awesome that we get to plug in most of the functionality of Fiddler right into our own applications. A few years back I tried to build this sort of functionality myself for an app and ended up giving up because it’s a big job to get HTTP right – especially if you need to support SSL. FiddlerCore now provides that functionality as a turnkey solution that can be plugged into your own apps easily. The only downside is FiddlerCore’s documentation for more advanced features like certificate installation which is pretty sketchy. While for the most part FiddlerCore’s feature set is easy to work with without any documentation, advanced features are often not intuitive to gleam by just using Intellisense or the FiddlerCore help file reference (which is not terribly useful). While Eric Lawrence is very responsive on his forum and on Twitter, there simply isn’t much useful documentation on Fiddler/FiddlerCore available online. If you run into trouble the forum is probably the first place to look and then ask a question if you can’t find the answer. The best documentation you can find is Eric’s Fiddler Book which covers a ton of functionality of Fiddler and FiddlerCore. The book is a great reference to Fiddler’s feature set as well as providing great insights into the HTTP protocol. The second half of the book that gets into the innards of HTTP is an excellent read for anybody who wants to know more about some of the more arcane aspects and special behaviors of HTTP – it’s well worth the read. While the book has tons of information in a very readable format, it’s unfortunately not a great reference as it’s hard to find things in the book and because it’s not available online you can’t electronically search for the great content in it. But it’s hard to complain about any of this given the obvious effort and love that’s gone into this awesome product for all of these years. A mighty big thanks to Eric Lawrence  for having created this useful tool that so many of us use all the time, and also to Telerik for picking up Fiddler/FiddlerCore and providing Eric the resources to support and improve this wonderful tool full time and keeping it free for all. Kudos! Resources FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore NuGet Fiddler Capture Sample Form Fiddler Capture Form in West Wind WebSurge (GitHub) Eric Lawrence’s Fiddler Book© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in .NET  HTTP   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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