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• 12.04 upgrade broke grub? (not wubi related)

  - by kaare

  I just updated from 11.10 to 12.04, with no major problems (it took a while to get past a request to restart ssh, mysql and some other services, but I did no fiddling by myself, everything was done by the installer). However, after restarting, grub can't do anything. Picking the new linux installation (first entry), I just get error: no such partition error: no such partition error: no such partition and picking the recovery-version just gives 5 lines instead of 3. I have windows 7 installed on a different drive, and can run it by booting from that drive instead. Picking it from the grub menu gives the same error as above (can't remember how many lines, though). I'll be honest and say that I don't remember if win 7 could be booted from grub before the update, though. In short, nothing on the grub menu works. any solutions? The grub menu changed appearance - before it was on a purple background, small letters, now it's white-on-black, big letters, looking very basic. The original installation was from a usb-drive, and I hadn't heard about wubi until I started googling this problem, so I doubt there's any connection. I really hope there are some grub-savvy people out there :) EDIT: ok. so, I made a bootable usb, and am running from that right now. when I ran the bootinfoscript, it warned me that "gawk" could not be found, using "busybox awk" instead. This may lead to unreliable results. just so you know. The contents of RESULTS.txt are: Boot Info Script 0.61 [1 April 2012] ============================= Boot Info Summary: =============================== => Windows is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda. => Grub2 (v1.99) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdb and looks at sector 1 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks for (,msdos3)/boot/grub on this drive. => Syslinux MBR (4.04 and higher) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdc. sda1: __________________________________________ File system: vfat Boot sector type: Dell Utility: FAT16 Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files: /DELLBIO.BIN /DELLRMK.BIN /COMMAND.COM sda2: __________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files: sda3: __________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Windows 7 Boot files: /bootmgr /Boot/BCD /Windows/System32/winload.exe sda4: __________________________________________ File system: Extended Partition Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: sda5: __________________________________________ File system: vfat Boot sector type: Windows 7: FAT32 Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Windows XP Boot files: /boot.ini /bootmgr /ntldr /NTDETECT.COM sdb1: __________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows XP: NTFS Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files: sdb2: __________________________________________ File system: swap Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: sdb3: __________________________________________ File system: ext4 Boot sector type: Grub2 (v1.99) Boot sector info: Grub2 (v1.99) is installed in the boot sector of sdb3 and looks at sector 375893584 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks for (,msdos3)/boot/grub on this drive. Operating System: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Boot files: /boot/grub/grub.cfg /etc/fstab /boot/grub/core.img sdb4: __________________________________________ File system: ext4 Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: Operating System: Boot files: sdc1: __________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: SYSLINUX 4.06 4.06-pre1 Boot sector info: Syslinux looks at sector 4649656 of /dev/sdc1 for its second stage. SYSLINUX is installed in the directory. The integrity check of the ADV area failed. No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files: /boot/grub/grub.cfg /syslinux/syslinux.cfg /ldlinux.sys ============================ Drive/Partition Info: ============================= Drive: sda _______________________________________ Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488397168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System /dev/sda1 63 240,974 240,912 de Dell Utility /dev/sda2 241,664 21,213,183 20,971,520 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda3 * 21,213,184 483,151,863 461,938,680 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda4 483,151,872 488,394,751 5,242,880 f W95 Extended (LBA) /dev/sda5 483,153,920 488,394,751 5,240,832 dd Dell Media Direct Drive: sdb _______________________________________ Disk /dev/sdb: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488397168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System /dev/sdb1 63 345,886,749 345,886,687 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sdb2 345,888,768 361,510,911 15,622,144 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sdb3 * 361,510,912 390,807,786 29,296,875 83 Linux /dev/sdb4 390,809,600 488,394,751 97,585,152 83 Linux Drive: sdc _______________________________________ Disk /dev/sdc: 8015 MB, 8015282176 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 974 cylinders, total 15654848 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System /dev/sdc1 * 2,048 15,652,863 15,650,816 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS "blkid" output: ____________________________________ Device UUID TYPE LABEL /dev/loop0 squashfs /dev/sda1 07D8-0411 vfat DellUtility /dev/sda2 E2765BBC765B9061 ntfs RECOVERY /dev/sda3 98DC5E54DC5E2D2E ntfs OS /dev/sda5 7061-9DF5 vfat MEDIADIRECT /dev/sdb1 01CBBB4C3374C3B0 ntfs Data1 /dev/sdb2 1ca45f3f-f888-43d1-8137-02699597189a swap /dev/sdb3 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e ext4 /dev/sdb4 58e2b257-8608-4b11-b20b-dc162bb80b62 ext4 /dev/sdc1 0C02B64402B63316 ntfs PENDRIVE ================================ Mount points: ================================= Device Mount_Point Type Options /dev/loop0 /rofs squashfs (ro,noatime) /dev/sdb4 /media/58e2b257-8608-4b11-b20b-dc162bb80b62 ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks) /dev/sdc1 /cdrom fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other,blksize=4096) ================================ sda5/boot.ini: ================================ [boot loader] timeout=0 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Embedded" /fastdetect /KERNEL=NTOSBOOT.EXE /maxmem=1024 =========================== sdb3/boot/grub/grub.cfg: =========================== -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE # # It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates # from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub # ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/00_header ### if [ -s $prefix/grubenv ]; then set have_grubenv=true load_env fi set default="0" if [ "${prev_saved_entry}" ]; then set saved_entry="${prev_saved_entry}" save_env saved_entry set prev_saved_entry= save_env prev_saved_entry set boot_once=true fi function savedefault { if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then saved_entry="${chosen}" save_env saved_entry fi } function recordfail { set recordfail=1 if [ -n "${have_grubenv}" ]; then if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then save_env recordfail; fi; fi } function load_video { insmod vbe insmod vga insmod video_bochs insmod video_cirrus } insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e if loadfont /usr/share/grub/unicode.pf2 ; then set gfxmode=auto load_video insmod gfxterm insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e set locale_dir=($root)/boot/grub/locale set lang=en_US insmod gettext fi terminal_output gfxterm if [ "${recordfail}" = 1 ]; then set timeout=-1 else set timeout=10 fi ### END /etc/grub.d/00_header ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### set menu_color_normal=white/black set menu_color_highlight=black/light-gray if background_color 44,0,30; then clear fi ### END /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### function gfxmode { set gfxpayload="$1" if [ "$1" = "keep" ]; then set vt_handoff=vt.handoff=7 else set vt_handoff= fi } if [ ${recordfail} != 1 ]; then if [ -e ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt ]; then if hwmatch ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt 3; then if [ ${match} = 0 ]; then set linux_gfx_mode=keep else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=keep fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi export linux_gfx_mode if [ "$linux_gfx_mode" != "text" ]; then load_video; fi menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-24-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-24-generic root=UUID=6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e ro quiet splash $vt_handoff initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-24-generic } menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-24-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e echo 'Loading Linux 3.2.0-24-generic ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-24-generic root=UUID=6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e ro recovery nomodeset echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-24-generic } submenu "Previous Linux versions" { menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-19-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-19-generic root=UUID=6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e ro quiet splash $vt_handoff initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-19-generic } menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-19-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e echo 'Loading Linux 3.0.0-19-generic ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-19-generic root=UUID=6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e ro recovery nomodeset echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-19-generic } } ### END /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### END /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin } menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin console=ttyS0,115200n8 } ### END /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### menuentry "Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda3)" --class windows --class os { insmod part_msdos insmod ntfs set root='(hd0,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 98DC5E54DC5E2D2E chainloader +1 } menuentry "Microsoft Windows XP Embedded (on /dev/sda5)" --class windows --class os { insmod part_msdos insmod fat set root='(hd0,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 7061-9DF5 drivemap -s (hd0) ${root} chainloader +1 } ### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### # This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the # menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change # the 'exec tail' line above. ### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### if [ -f $prefix/custom.cfg ]; then source $prefix/custom.cfg; fi ### END /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### =============================== sdb3/etc/fstab: ================================ # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a # device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices # that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5). # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 # / was on /dev/sdb3 during installation UUID=6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 # /home was on /dev/sdb4 during installation UUID=58e2b257-8608-4b11-b20b-dc162bb80b62 /home ext4 defaults,user_xattr 0 2 # swap was on /dev/sdb2 during installation UUID=1ca45f3f-f888-43d1-8137-02699597189a none swap sw 0 0 =================== sdb3: Location of files loaded by Grub: ==================== GiB - GB File Fragment(s) = boot/grub/core.img 1 = boot/grub/grub.cfg 1 = boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-19-generic 2 = boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-24-generic 2 = boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-19-generic 2 = boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-24-generic 1 = vmlinuz 1 = vmlinuz.old 2 =========================== sdc1/boot/grub/grub.cfg: =========================== if loadfont /boot/grub/font.pf2 ; then set gfxmode=auto insmod efi_gop insmod efi_uga insmod gfxterm terminal_output gfxterm fi set menu_color_normal=white/black set menu_color_highlight=black/light-gray menuentry "Try Ubuntu without installing" { set gfxpayload=keep linux /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper quiet splash -- initrd /casper/initrd.lz } menuentry "Install Ubuntu" { set gfxpayload=keep linux /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper only-ubiquity quiet splash -- initrd /casper/initrd.lz } menuentry "Check disc for defects" { set gfxpayload=keep linux /casper/vmlinuz boot=casper integrity-check quiet splash -- initrd /casper/initrd.lz } ========================= sdc1/syslinux/syslinux.cfg: ========================== # D-I config version 2.0 include menu.cfg default vesamenu.c32 prompt 0 timeout 50 # If you would like to use the new menu and be presented with the option to install or run from USB at startup, remove # from the following line. This line was commented out (by request of many) to allow the old menu to be presented and to enable booting straight into the Live Environment! # ui gfxboot bootlogo =================== sdc1: Location of files loaded by Grub: ==================== GiB - GB File Fragment(s) ?? = ?? boot/grub/grub.cfg 0 ================= sdc1: Location of files loaded by Syslinux: ================== GiB - GB File Fragment(s) ?? = ?? ldlinux.sys 1 ?? = ?? syslinux/chain.c32 1 ?? = ?? syslinux/gfxboot.c32 1 ?? = ?? syslinux/syslinux.cfg 0 ?? = ?? syslinux/vesamenu.c32 1 ============== sdc1: Version of COM32(R) files used by Syslinux: =============== syslinux/chain.c32 : COM32R module (v4.xx) syslinux/gfxboot.c32 : COM32R module (v4.xx) syslinux/vesamenu.c32 : COM32R module (v4.xx) =============================== StdErr Messages: =============================== xz: (stdin): Compressed data is corrupt xz: (stdin): Compressed data is corrupt awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in ./bootinfoscript: line 1646: [: 2.73495e+09: integer expression expected

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• The Art of Productivity

  - by dwahlin

  Getting things done has always been a challenge regardless of gender, age, race, skill, or job position. No matter how hard some people try, they end up procrastinating tasks until the last minute. Some people simply focus better when they know they’re out of time and can’t procrastinate any longer. How many times have you put off working on a term paper in school until the very last minute? With only a few hours left your mental energy and focus seem to kick in to high gear especially as you realize that you either get the paper done now or risk failing. It’s amazing how a little pressure can turn into a motivator and allow our minds to focus on a given task. Some people seem to specialize in procrastinating just about everything they do while others tend to be the “doers” who get a lot done and ultimately rise up the ladder at work. What’s the difference between these types of people? Is it pure laziness or are other factors at play? I think that some people are certainly more motivated than others, but I also think a lot of it is based on the process that “doers” tend to follow - whether knowingly or unknowingly. While I’ve certainly fought battles with procrastination, I’ve always had a knack for being able to get a lot done in a relatively short amount of time. I think a lot of my “get it done” attitude goes back to the the strong work ethic my parents instilled in me at a young age. I remember my dad saying, “You need to learn to work hard!” when I was around 5 years old. I remember that moment specifically because I was on a tractor with him the first time I heard it while he was trying to move some large rocks into a pile. The tractor was big but so were the rocks and my dad had to balance the tractor perfectly so that it didn’t tip forward too far. It was challenging work and somewhat tedious but my dad finished the task and taught me a few important lessons along the way including persistence, the importance of having a skill, and getting the job done right without skimping along the way. In this post I’m going to list a few of the techniques and processes I follow that I hope may be beneficial to others. I blogged about the general concept back in 2009 but thought I’d share some updated information and lessons learned since then. Most of the ideas that follow came from learning and refining my daily work process over the years. However, since most of the ideas are common sense (at least in my opinion), I suspect they can be found in other productivity processes that are out there. Let’s start off with one of the most important yet simple tips: Start Each Day with a List. Start Each Day with a List What are you planning to get done today? Do you keep track of everything in your head or rely on your calendar? While most of us think that we’re pretty good at managing “to do” lists strictly in our head you might be surprised at how affective writing out lists can be. By writing out tasks you’re forced to focus on the most important tasks to accomplish that day, commit yourself to those tasks, and have an easy way to track what was supposed to get done and what actually got done. Start every morning by making a list of specific tasks that you want to accomplish throughout the day. I’ll even go so far as to fill in times when I’d like to work on tasks if I have a lot of meetings or other events tying up my calendar on a given day. I’m not a big fan of using paper since I type a lot faster than I write (plus I write like a 3rd grader according to my wife), so I use the Sticky Notes feature available in Windows. Here’s an example of yesterday’s sticky note: What do you add to your list? That’s the subject of the next tip. Focus on Small Tasks It’s no secret that focusing on small, manageable tasks is more effective than trying to focus on large and more vague tasks. When you make your list each morning only add tasks that you can accomplish within a given time period. For example, if I only have 30 minutes blocked out to work on an article I don’t list “Write Article”. If I do that I’ll end up wasting 30 minutes stressing about how I’m going to get the article done in 30 minutes and ultimately get nothing done. Instead, I’ll list something like “Write Introductory Paragraphs for Article”. The next day I may add, “Write first section of article” or something that’s small and manageable – something I’m confident that I can get done. You’ll find that once you’ve knocked out several smaller tasks it’s easy to continue completing others since you want to keep the momentum going. In addition to keeping my tasks focused and small, I also make a conscious effort to limit my list to 4 or 5 tasks initially. I’ve found that if I list more than 5 tasks I feel a bit overwhelmed which hurts my productivity. It’s easy to add additional tasks as you complete others and you get the added benefit of that confidence boost of knowing that you’re being productive and getting things done as you remove tasks and add others. Getting Started is the Hardest (Yet Easiest) Part I’ve always found that getting started is the hardest part and one of the biggest contributors to procrastination. Getting started working on tasks is a lot like getting a large rock pushed to the bottom of a hill. It’s difficult to get the rock rolling at first, but once you manage to get it rocking some it’s really easy to get it rolling on its way to the bottom. As an example, I’ve written 100s of articles for technical magazines over the years and have really struggled with the initial introductory paragraphs. Keep in mind that these are the paragraphs that don’t really add that much value (in my opinion anyway). They introduce the reader to the subject matter and nothing more. What a waste of time for me to sit there stressing about how to start the article. On more than one occasion I’ve spent more than an hour trying to come up with 2-3 paragraphs of text.  Talk about a productivity killer! Whether you’re struggling with a writing task, some code for a project, an email, or other tasks, jumping in without thinking too much is the best way to get started I’ve found. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have an overall plan when jumping into a task, but on some occasions you’ll find that if you simply jump into the task and stop worrying about doing everything perfectly that things will flow more smoothly. For my introductory paragraph problem I give myself 5 minutes to write out some general concepts about what I know the article will cover and then spend another 10-15 minutes going back and refining that information. That way I actually have some ideas to work with rather than a blank sheet of paper. If I still find myself struggling I’ll write the rest of the article first and then circle back to the introductory paragraphs once I’m done. To sum this tip up: Jump into a task without thinking too hard about it. It’s better to to get the rock at the top of the hill rocking some than doing nothing at all. You can always go back and refine your work.   Learn a Productivity Technique and Stick to It There are a lot of different productivity programs and seminars out there being sold by companies. I’ve always laughed at how much money people spend on some of these motivational programs/seminars because I think that being productive isn’t that hard if you create a re-useable set of steps and processes to follow. That’s not to say that some of these programs/seminars aren’t worth the money of course because I know they’ve definitely benefited some people that have a hard time getting things done and staying focused. One of the best productivity techniques I’ve ever learned is called the “Pomodoro Technique” and it’s completely free. This technique is an extremely simple way to manage your time without having to remember a bunch of steps, color coding mechanisms, or other processes. The technique was originally developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 80s and can be implemented with a simple timer. In a nutshell here’s how the technique works: Pick a task to work on Set the timer to 25 minutes and work on the task Once the timer rings record your time Take a 5 minute break Repeat the process Here’s why the technique works well for me: It forces me to focus on a single task for 25 minutes. In the past I had no time goal in mind and just worked aimlessly on a task until I got interrupted or bored. 25 minutes is a small enough chunk of time for me to stay focused. Any distractions that may come up have to wait until after the timer goes off. If the distraction is really important then I stop the timer and record my time up to that point. When the timer is running I act as if I only have 25 minutes total for the task (like you’re down to the last 25 minutes before turning in your term paper….frantically working to get it done) which helps me stay focused and turns into a “beat the clock” type of game. It’s actually kind of fun if you treat it that way and really helps me focus on a the task at hand. I automatically know how much time I’m spending on a given task (more on this later) by using this technique. I know that I have 5 minutes after each pomodoro (the 25 minute sprint) to waste on anything I’d like including visiting a website, stepping away from the computer, etc. which also helps me stay focused when the 25 minute timer is counting down. I use this technique so much that I decided to build a program for Windows 8 called Pomodoro Focus (I plan to blog about how it was built in a later post). It’s a Windows Store application that allows people to track tasks, productive time spent on tasks, interruption time experienced while working on a given task, and the number of pomodoros completed. If a time estimate is given when the task is initially created, Pomodoro Focus will also show the task completion percentage. I like it because it allows me to track my tasks, time spent on tasks (very useful in the consulting world), and even how much time I wasted on tasks (pressing the pause button while working on a task starts the interruption timer). I recently added a new feature that charts productive and interruption time for tasks since I wanted to see how productive I was from week to week and month to month. A few screenshots from the Pomodoro Focus app are shown next, I had a lot of fun building it and use it myself to as I work on tasks.   There are certainly many other productivity techniques and processes out there (and a slew of books describing them), but the Pomodoro Technique has been the simplest and most effective technique I’ve ever come across for staying focused and getting things done.   Persistence is Key Getting things done is great but one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in life is that persistence is key especially when you’re trying to get something done that at times seems insurmountable. Small tasks ultimately lead to larger tasks getting accomplished, however, it’s not all roses along the way as some of the smaller tasks may come with their own share of bumps and bruises that lead to discouragement about the end goal and whether or not it is worth achieving at all. I’ve been on several long-term projects over my career as a software developer (I have one personal project going right now that fits well here) and found that repeating, “Persistence is the key!” over and over to myself really helps. Not every project turns out to be successful, but if you don’t show persistence through the hard times you’ll never know if you succeeded or not. Likewise, if you don’t persistently stick to the process of creating a daily list, follow a productivity process, etc. then the odds of consistently staying productive aren’t good.   Track Your Time How much time do you actually spend working on various tasks? If you don’t currently track time spent answering emails, on phone calls, and working on various tasks then you might be surprised to find out that a task that you thought was going to take you 30 minutes ultimately ended up taking 2 hours. If you don’t track the time you spend working on tasks how can you expect to learn from your mistakes, optimize your time better, and become more productive? That’s another reason why I like the Pomodoro Technique – it makes it easy to stay focused on tasks while also tracking how much time I’m working on a given task.   Eliminate Distractions I blogged about this final tip several years ago but wanted to bring it up again. If you want to be productive (and ultimately successful at whatever you’re doing) then you can’t waste a lot of time playing games or on Twitter, Facebook, or other time sucking websites. If you see an article you’re interested in that has no relation at all to the tasks you’re trying to accomplish then bookmark it and read it when you have some spare time (such as during a pomodoro break). Fighting the temptation to check your friends’ status updates on Facebook? Resist the urge and realize how much those types of activities are hurting your productivity and taking away from your focus. I’ll admit that eliminating distractions is still tough for me personally and something I have to constantly battle. But, I’ve made a conscious decision to cut back on my visits and updates to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other sites. Sure, my Klout score has suffered as a result lately, but does anyone actually care about those types of scores aside from your online “friends” (few of whom you’ve actually met in person)? :-) Ultimately it comes down to self-discipline and how badly you want to be productive and successful in your career, life goals, hobbies, or whatever you’re working on. Rather than having your homepage take you to a time wasting news site, game site, social site, picture site, or others, how about adding something like the following as your homepage? Every time your browser opens you’ll see a personal message which helps keep you on the right track. You can download my ubber-sophisticated homepage here if interested. Summary Is there a single set of steps that if followed can ultimately lead to productivity? I don’t think so since one size has never fit all. Every person is different, works in their own unique way, and has their own set of motivators, distractions, and more. While I certainly don’t consider myself to be an expert on the subject of productivity, I do think that if you learn what steps work best for you and gradually refine them over time that you can come up with a personal productivity process that can serve you well. Productivity is definitely an “art” that anyone can learn with a little practice and persistence. You’ve seen some of the steps that I personally like to follow and I hope you find some of them useful in boosting your productivity. If you have others you use please leave a comment. I’m always looking for ways to improve.

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• 10 Essential Tools for building ASP.NET Websites

  - by Stephen Walther

  I recently put together a simple public website created with ASP.NET for my company at Superexpert.com. I was surprised by the number of free tools that I ended up using to put together the website. Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to create a list of essential tools for building ASP.NET websites. These tools work equally well with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Performance Tools After reading Steve Souders two (very excellent) books on front-end website performance High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites, I have been super sensitive to front-end website performance. According to Souders’ Performance Golden Rule: “Optimize front-end performance first, that's where 80% or more of the end-user response time is spent” You can use the tools below to reduce the size of the images, JavaScript files, and CSS files used by an ASP.NET application. 1. Sprite and Image Optimization Framework CSS sprites were first described in an article written for A List Apart entitled CSS sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death. When you use sprites, you combine multiple images used by a website into a single image. Next, you use CSS trickery to display particular sub-images from the combined image in a webpage. The primary advantage of sprites is that they reduce the number of requests required to display a webpage. Requesting a single large image is faster than requesting multiple small images. In general, the more resources – images, JavaScript files, CSS files – that must be moved across the wire, the slower your website. However, most people avoid using sprites because they require a lot of work. You need to combine all of the images and write just the right CSS rules to display the sub-images. The Microsoft Sprite and Image Optimization Framework enables you to avoid all of this work. The framework combines the images for you automatically. Furthermore, the framework includes an ASP.NET Web Forms control and an ASP.NET MVC helper that makes it easy to display the sub-images. You can download the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework from CodePlex at http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/50869. The Sprite and Image Optimization Framework was written by Morgan McClean who worked in the office next to mine at Microsoft. Morgan was a scary smart Intern from Canada and we discussed the Framework while he was building it (I was really excited to learn that he was working on it). Morgan added some great advanced features to this framework. For example, the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework supports something called image inlining. When you use image inlining, the actual image is stored in the CSS file. Here’s an example of what image inlining looks like: .Home_StephenWalther_small-jpg { width:75px; height:100px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAEsAAABkCAIAAABB1lpeAAAAB GdBTUEAALGOfPtRkwAAACBjSFJNAACHDwAAjA8AAP1SAACBQAAAfXkAAOmLAAA85QAAGcxzPIV3AAAKL s+zNfREAAAAASUVORK5CYII=) no-repeat 0% 0%; } The actual image (in this case a picture of me that is displayed on the home page of the Superexpert.com website) is stored in the CSS file. If you visit the Superexpert.com website then very few separate images are downloaded. For example, all of the images with a red border in the screenshot below take advantage of CSS sprites: Unfortunately, there are some significant Gotchas that you need to be aware of when using the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework. There are workarounds for these Gotchas. I plan to write about these Gotchas and workarounds in a future blog entry. 2. Microsoft Ajax Minifier Whenever possible you should combine, minify, compress, and cache with a far future header all of your JavaScript and CSS files. The Microsoft Ajax Minifier makes it easy to minify JavaScript and CSS files. Don’t confuse minification and compression. You need to do both. According to Souders, you can reduce the size of a JavaScript file by an additional 20% (on average) by minifying a JavaScript file after you compress the file. When you minify a JavaScript or CSS file, you use various tricks to reduce the size of the file before you compress the file. For example, you can minify a JavaScript file by replacing long JavaScript variables names with short variables names and removing unnecessary white space and comments. You can minify a CSS file by doing such things as replacing long color names such as #ffffff with shorter equivalents such as #fff. The Microsoft Ajax Minifier was created by Microsoft employee Ron Logan. Internally, this tool was being used by several large Microsoft websites. We also used the tool heavily on the ASP.NET team. I convinced Ron to publish the tool on CodePlex so that everyone in the world could take advantage of it. You can download the tool from the ASP.NET Ajax website and read documentation for the tool here. I created the installer for the Microsoft Ajax Minifier. When creating the installer, I also created a Visual Studio build task to make it easy to minify all of your JavaScript and CSS files whenever you do a build within Visual Studio automatically. Read the Ajax Minifier Quick Start to learn how to configure the build task. 3. ySlow The ySlow tool is a free add-on for Firefox created by Yahoo that enables you to test the front-end of your website. For example, here are the current test results for the Superexpert.com website: The Superexpert.com website has an overall score of B (not perfect but not bad). The ySlow tool is not perfect. For example, the Superexpert.com website received a failing grade of F for not using a Content Delivery Network even though the website using the Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network for JavaScript files such as jQuery. Uptime After publishing a website live to the world, you want to ensure that the website does not encounter any issues and that it stays live. I use the following tools to monitor the Superexpert.com website now that it is live. 4. ELMAH ELMAH stands for Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET. ELMAH enables you to record any errors that happen at your website so you can review them in the future. You can download ELMAH for free from the ELMAH project website. ELMAH works great with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. You can configure ELMAH to store errors in a number of different stores including XML files, the Event Log, an Access database, a SQL database, an Oracle database, or in computer RAM. You also can configure ELMAH to email error messages to you when they happen. By default, you can access ELMAH by requesting the elmah.axd page from a website with ELMAH installed. Here’s what the elmah page looks like from the Superexpert.com website (this page is password-protected because secret information can be revealed in an error message): If you click on a particular error message, you can view the original Yellow Screen ASP.NET error message (even when the error message was never displayed to the actual user). I installed ELMAH by taking advantage of the new package manager for ASP.NET named NuGet (originally named NuPack). You can read the details about NuGet in the following blog entry by Scott Guthrie. You can download NuGet from CodePlex. 5. Pingdom I use Pingdom to verify that the Superexpert.com website is always up. You can sign up for Pingdom by visiting Pingdom.com. You can use Pingdom to monitor a single website for free. At the Pingdom website, you configure the frequency that your website gets pinged. I verify that the Superexpert.com website is up every 5 minutes. I have the Pingdom service verify that it can retrieve the string “Contact Us” from the website homepage. If your website goes down, you can configure Pingdom so that it sends an email, Twitter, SMS, or iPhone alert. I use the Pingdom iPhone app which looks like this: 6. Host Tracker If your website does go down then you need some way of determining whether it is a problem with your local network or if your website is down for everyone. I use a website named Host-Tracker.com to check how badly a website is down. Here’s what the Host-Tracker website displays for the Superexpert.com website when the website can be successfully pinged from everywhere in the world: Notice that Host-Tracker pinged the Superexpert.com website from 68 locations including Roubaix, France and Scranton, PA. Debugging I mean debugging in the broadest possible sense. I use the following tools when building a website to verify that I have not made a mistake. 7. HTML Spell Checker Why doesn’t Visual Studio have a built-in spell checker? Don’t know – I’ve always found this mysterious. Fortunately, however, a former member of the ASP.NET team wrote a free spell checker that you can use with your ASP.NET pages. I find a spell checker indispensible. It is easy to delude yourself that you are capable of perfect spelling. I’m always super embarrassed when I actually run the spell checking tool and discover all of my spelling mistakes. The fastest way to add the HTML Spell Checker extension to Visual Studio is to select the menu option Tools, Extension Manager within Visual Studio. Click on Online Gallery and search for HTML Spell Checker: 8. IIS SEO Toolkit If people cannot find your website through Google then you should not even bother to create it. Microsoft has a great extension for IIS named the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit that you can use to identify issue with your website that would hurt its page rank. You also can use this tool to quickly create a sitemap for your website that you can submit to Google or Bing. You can even generate the sitemap for an ASP.NET MVC website. Here’s what the report overview for the Superexpert.com website looks like: Notice that the Sueprexpert.com website had plenty of violations. For example, there are 65 cases in which a page has a broken hyperlink. You can drill into these violations to identity the exact page and location where these violations occur. 9. LinqPad If your ASP.NET website accesses a database then you should be using LINQ to Entities with the Entity Framework. Using LINQ involves some magic. LINQ queries written in C# get converted into SQL queries for you. If you are not careful about how you write your LINQ queries, you could unintentionally build a really badly performing website. LinqPad is a free tool that enables you to experiment with your LINQ queries. It even works with Microsoft SQL CE 4 and Azure. You can use LinqPad to execute a LINQ to Entities query and see the results. You also can use it to see the resulting SQL that gets executed against the database: 10. .NET Reflector I use .NET Reflector daily. The .NET Reflector tool enables you to take any assembly and disassemble the assembly into C# or VB.NET code. You can use .NET Reflector to see the “Source Code” of an assembly even when you do not have the actual source code. You can download a free version of .NET Reflector from the Redgate website. I use .NET Reflector primarily to help me understand what code is doing internally. For example, I used .NET Reflector with the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework to better understand how the MVC Image helper works. Here’s part of the disassembled code from the Image helper class: Summary In this blog entry, I’ve discussed several of the tools that I used to create the Superexpert.com website. These are tools that I use to improve the performance, improve the SEO, verify the uptime, or debug the Superexpert.com website. All of the tools discussed in this blog entry are free. Furthermore, all of these tools work with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Let me know if there are any tools that you use daily when building ASP.NET websites.

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• SOA Suite Integration: Part 1: Building a Web Service

  - by Anthony Shorten

  Over the next few weeks I will be posting blog entries outlying the SOA Suite integration of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. This will illustrate how easy it is to integrate by providing some samples. I will use a consistent set of features as examples. The examples will be simple and while will not illustrate ALL the possibilities it will illustrate the relative ease of integration. Think of them as a foundation. You can obviously build upon them. Now, to ease a few customers minds, this series will certainly feature the latest version of SOA Suite and the latest version of Oracle Utilities Application Framework but the principles will apply to past versions of both those products. So if you have Oracle SOA Suite 10g or are a customer of Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.1 or above most of what I will show you will work with those versions. It is just easier in Oracle SOA Suite 11g and Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4.x. This first posting will not feature SOA Suite at all but concentrate on the capability for the Oracle Utilities Application Framework to create Web Services you can use for integration. The XML Application Integration (XAI) component of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework allows product objects to be exposed as XML based transactions or as Web Services (or both). XAI was written before Web Services became fashionable and has allowed customers of our products to provide a consistent interface into and out of our product line. XAI has been enhanced over the last few years to take advantages of the maturing landscape of Web Services in the market place to a point where it now easier to integrate to SOA infrastructure. There are a number of object types that can be exposed as Web Services: Maintenance Objects – These are the lowest level objects that can be exposed as Web Services. Customers of past versions of the product will be familiar with XAI services based upon Maintenance Objects as they used to be the only method of generating Web Services. These are still supported for background compatibility but are starting to become less popular as they were strict in their structure and were solely attribute based. To generate Maintenance Object based Web Services definition you need to use the XAI Schema Editor component. Business Objects – In Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.1 we introduced the concept of Business Objects. These are site or industry specific objects that are based upon Maintenance Objects. These allow sites to respecify, in configuration, the structure and elements of a Maintenance Object and other Business Objects (they are true objects with support for inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation etc.). These can be exposed as Web Services. Business Services – As with Business Objects, we introduced Business Services in Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.1 which allowed applications services and query zones to be expressed as custom services. These can then be exposed as Web Services via the Business Service definition. Service Scripts - As with Business Objects and Business Services, we introduced Service Scripts in Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.1. These allow services and/objects to be combined into complex objects or simply expose common routines as callable scripts. These can also be defined as Web Services. For the purpose of this series we will restrict ourselves to Business Objects. The techniques can apply to any of the objects discussed above. Now, lets get to the important bit of this blog post, the creation of a Web Service. To build a Business Object, you first logon to the product and navigate to the Administration Menu by selecting the Admin Menu from the Menu action on left top of the screen (next to Home). A popup menu will appear with the menu’s available. If you do not see the Admin menu then you do not have authority to use it. Here is an example: Navigate to the B menu and select the + symbol next to the Business Object menu item. This indicates that you want to ADD a new Business Object. This menu will appear if you are running Alphabetic mode in your installation (I almost forgot that point). You will be presented with the Business Object maintenance screen. You will fill out the following on the first tab (at a minimum): Business Object – The name of the Business Object. Typically you will make it descriptive and also prefix with CM to denote it as a customization (you can easily find it if you prefix it). As I running this on my personal copy of the product I will use my initials as the prefix and call the sample Web Service “AS-User”. Description – A short description of the object to tell others what it is used for. For my example, I will use “Anthony Shorten’s User Object”. Detailed Description – You can add a long description to help other developers understand your object. I am just going to specify “Anthony Shorten’s Test Object for SOA Suite Integration”. Maintenance Object – As this Business Service is going to be based upon a Maintenance Object I will specify the desired Maintenance Object. In this example, I have decided to use the Framework object USER. Now, I chose this for a number of reasons. It is meaningful, simple and is across all our product lines. I could choose ANY maintenance object I wished to expose (including any custom ones, if I had them). Parent Business Object – If I was not using a Maintenance Object but building a child Business Object against another Business Object, then I would specify the Parent Business Object here. I am not using Parent’s so I will leave this blank. You either use Parent Business Object or Maintenance Object not both. Application Service – Business Objects like other objects are subject to security. You can attach an Application Service to an object to specify which groups of users (remember services are attached to user groups not users) have appropriate access to the object. I will use a default service provided with the product, F1-DFLTS ,as this is just a demonstration so I do not have to be too sophisticated about security. Instance Control – This allows the object to create instances in its objects. You can specify a Business Object purely to hold rules. I am being simple here so I will set it to Allow New Instances to allow the Business Object to be used to create, read, update and delete user records. The rest of the tab I will leave empty as I want this to be a very simple object. Other options allow lots of flexibility. The contents should look like this: Before saving your work, you need to navigate to the Schema tab and specify the contents of your object. I will save some time. When you create an object the schema will only contain the basic root elements of the object (in fact only the schema tag is visible). When you go to the Schema Tab, on the dashboard you will see a BO Schema zone with a solitary button. This will allow you to Generate the Schema for you from our metadata. Click on the Generate button to generate a basic schema from the metadata. You will now see a Schema with the element tags and references to the metadata of the Maintenance object (in the mapField attribute). I could spend a while outlining all the ways you can change the schema with defaults, formatting, tagging etc but the online help has plenty of great examples to illustrate this. You can use the Schema Tips zone in the for more details of the available customizations. Note: The tags are generated from the language pack you have installed. The sample is English so the tags are in English (which is the base language of all installations). If you are using a language pack then the tags will be generated in the language of the user that generated the object. At this point you can save your Business Object by pressing the Save action. At this point you have a basic Business Object based on the USER maintenance object ready for use but it is not defined as a Web Service yet. To do this you need to define the newly created Business Object as an XAI Inbound Service. The easiest and quickest way is to select + off the XAI Inbound Service off the context menu on the Business Object maintenance screen. This will prepopulate the service definition with the following: Adapter – This will be set to Business Adaptor. This indicates that the service is either Business Object, Business Service or Service Script based. Schema Type – Whether the object is a Business Object, Business Service or Service Script. In this case it is a Business Object. Schema Name – The name of the object. In this case it is the Business Object AS-User. Active – Set to Yes. This means the service is available upon startup automatically. You can enable and disable services as needed. Transaction Type – A default transaction type as this is Business Object Service. More about this in later postings. In our case we use the default Read. This means that if we only specify data and not a transaction type then the product will assume you want to issue a read against the object. You need to fill in the following: XAI Inbound Service – The name of the Web Service. Usually people use the same name as the underlying object , in the case of this example, but this can match your sites interfacing standards. By the way you can define multiple XAI Inbound Services/Web Services against the same object if you want. Description and Detail Description – Documentation for your Web Service. I just supplied some basic documentation for this demonstration. You can now save the service definition. Note: There are lots of other options on this screen that allow for behavior of your service to be specified. I will leave them blank for now. When you save the service you are issued with two new pieces of information. XAI Inbound Service Id is a randomly generated identifier used internally by the XAI Servlet. WSDL URL is the WSDL standard URL used for integration. We will take advantage of that in later posts. An example of the definition is shown below: Now you have defined the service but it will only be available when the next server restart or when you flush the data cache. XAI Inbound Services are cached for performance so the cache needs to be told of this new service. To refresh the cache you can use the Admin –> X –> XAI Command menu item. From the command dropdown select Refresh Registry and press Send Command. You will see an XML of the command sent to the server (the presence of the XML means it is finished). If you have an error around the authorization, then check your default user and password settings on the XAI Options menu item. Be careful with flushing the cache as the cache is shared (unless of course you are the only Web Service user on the system – In that case it only affects you). The Web Service is NOW available to be used. To perform a simple test of your new Web Service, navigate to the Admin –> X –> XAI Submission menu item. You will see an open XML request tab. You need to type in the request XML you want to test in the Main tab. The first tag is the XAI Inbound Service Name and the elements are as per your schema (minus the schema tag itself as that is only used internally). My example is as follows (I want to return the details of user SYSUSER) – Remember to close tags. Hitting the Save button will issue the XML and return the response according to the Business Object schema. Now before you panic, you noticed that it did not ask for credentials. It propagates the online credentials to the service call on this function. You now have a Web Service you can use for integration. We will reuse this information in subsequent posts. The process I just described can be used for ANY object in the system you want to expose. This whole process at a minimum can take under a minute. Obviously I only showed the basics but you can at least get an appreciation of the ease of defining a Web Service (just by using a browser). The next posts now build upon this. Hope you enjoyed the post.

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• Continuous Integration for SQL Server Part II – Integration Testing

  - by Ben Rees

  My previous post, on setting up Continuous Integration for SQL Server databases using GitHub, Bamboo and Red Gate’s tools, covered the first two parts of a simple Database Continuous Delivery process: Putting your database in to a source control system, and, Running a continuous integration process, each time changes are checked in. However there is, of course, a lot more to to Continuous Delivery than that. Specifically, in addition to the above: Putting some actual integration tests in to the CI process (otherwise, they don’t really do much, do they!?), Deploying the database changes with a managed, automated approach, Monitoring what you’ve just put live, to make sure you haven’t broken anything. This post will detail how to set up a very simple pipeline for implementing the first of these (continuous integration testing). NB: A lot of the setup in this post is built on top of the configuration from before, so it might be difficult to implement this post without running through part I first. There’ll then be a third post on automated database deployment followed by a final post dealing with the last item – monitoring changes on the live system. In the previous post, I used a mixture of Red Gate products and other 3rd party software – GitHub and Atlassian Bamboo specifically. This was partly because I believe most people work in an heterogeneous environment, using software from different vendors to suit their purposes and I wanted to show how this could work for this process. For example, you could easily substitute Atlassian’s BitBucket or Stash for GitHub, depending on your needs, or use an alternative CI server such as TeamCity, TFS or Jenkins. However, in this, post, I’ll be mostly using Red Gate products only (other than tSQLt). I would do this, firstly because I work for Red Gate. However, I also think that in the area of Database Delivery processes, nobody else has the offerings to implement this process fully – so I didn’t have any choice!   Background on Continuous Delivery For me, a great source of information on what makes a proper Continuous Delivery process is the Jez Humble and David Farley classic: Continuous Delivery – Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation This book is not of course, primarily about databases, and the process I outline here and in the previous article is a gross simplification of what Jez and David describe (not least because it’s that much harder for databases!). However, a lot of the principles that they describe can be equally applied to database development and, I would argue, should be. As I say however, what I describe here is a very simple version of what would be required for a full production process. A couple of useful resources on handling some of these complexities can be found in the following two references: Refactoring Databases – Evolutionary Database Design, by Scott J Ambler and Pramod J. Sadalage Versioning Databases – Branching and Merging, by Scott Allen In particular, I don’t deal at all with the issues of multiple branches and merging of those branches, an issue made particularly acute by the use of GitHub. The other point worth making is that, in the words of Martin Fowler: Continuous Delivery is about keeping your application in a state where it is always able to deploy into production.   I.e. we are not talking about continuously delivery updates to the production database every time someone checks in an amendment to a stored procedure. That is possible (and what Martin calls Continuous Deployment). However, again, that’s more than I describe in this article. And I doubt I need to remind DBAs or Developers to Proceed with Caution!   Integration Testing Back to something practical. The next stage, building on our set up from the previous article, is to add in some integration tests to the process. As I say, the CI process, though interesting, isn’t enormously useful without some sort of test process running. For this we’ll use the tSQLt framework, an open source framework designed specifically for running SQL Server tests. tSQLt is part of Red Gate’s SQL Test found on http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-test/ or can be downloaded separately from www.tsqlt.org - though I’ll provide a step-by-step guide below for setting this up. Getting tSQLt set up via SQL Test Click on the link http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-test/ and click on the blue Download button to download the Red Gate SQL Test product, if not already installed. Follow the install process for SQL Test to install the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) plugin on to your machine, if not already installed. Open SSMS. You should now see SQL Test under the Tools menu:   Clicking this link will give you the basic SQL Test dialogue: As yet, though we’ve installed the SQL Test product we haven’t yet installed the tSQLt test framework on to any particular database. To do this, we need to add our RedGateApp database using this dialogue, by clicking on the + Add Database to SQL Test… link, selecting the RedGateApp database and clicking the Add Database link:   In the next screen, SQL Test describes what will be installed on the database for the tSQLt framework. Also in this dialogue, uncheck the “Add SQL Cop tests” option (shown below). SQL Cop is a great set of pre-defined tests that work within the tSQLt framework to check the general health of your SQL Server database. However, we won’t be using them in this particular simple example: Once you’ve clicked on the OK button, the changes described in the dialogue will be made to your database. Some of these are shown in the left-hand-side below: We’ve now installed the framework. However, we haven’t actually created any tests, so this will be the next step. But, before we proceed, we’ve made an update to our database so should, again check this in to source control, adding comments as required:   Also worth a quick check that your build still runs with the new additions!: (And a quick check of the RedGateAppCI database shows that the changes have been made).   Creating and Testing a Unit Test There are, of course, a lot of very interesting unit tests that you could and should set up for a database. The great thing about the tSQLt framework is that you can write these in SQL. The example I’m going to use here is pretty Mickey Mouse – our database table is going to include some email addresses as reference data and I want to check whether these are all in a correct email format. Nothing clever but it illustrates the process and hopefully shows the method by which more interesting tests could be set up. Adding Reference Data to our Database To start, I want to add some reference data to my database, and have this source controlled (as well as the schema). First of all I need to add some data in to my solitary table – this can be done a number of ways, but I’ll do this in SSMS for simplicity: I then add some reference data to my table: Currently this reference data just exists in the database. For proper integration testing, this needs to form part of the source-controlled version of the database – and so needs to be added to the Git repository. This can be done via SQL Source Control, though first a Primary Key needs to be added to the table. Right click the table, select Design, then right-click on the first “id” row. Then click on “Set Primary Key”: NB: once this change is made, click Save to save the change to the table. Then, to source control this reference data, right click on the table (dbo.Email) and selecting the following option:   In the next screen, link the data in the Email table, by selecting it from the list and clicking “save and close”: We should at this point re-commit the changes (both the addition of the Primary Key, and the data) to the Git repo. NB: From here on, I won’t show screenshots for the GitHub side of things – it’s the same each time: whenever a change is made in SQL Source Control and committed to your local folder, you then need to sync this in the GitHub Windows client (as this is where the build server, Bamboo is taking it from). An interesting point to note here, when these changes are committed in SQL Source Control (right-click database and select “Commit Changes to Source Control..”): The display gives a warning about possibly needing a migration script for the “Add Primary Key” step of the changes. This isn’t actually necessary in this case, but this mechanism would allow you to create override scripts to replace the default change scripts created by the SQL Compare engine (which runs underneath SQL Source Control). Ignoring this message (!), we add a comment and commit the changes to Git. I then sync these, run a build (or the build gets run automatically), and check that the data is being deployed over to the target RedGateAppCI database:   Creating and Running the Test As I mention, the test I’m going to use here is a very simple one - are the email addresses in my reference table valid? This isn’t of course, a full test of email validation (I expect the email addresses I’ve chosen here aren’t really the those of the Fab Four) – but just a very basic check of format used. I’ve taken the relevant SQL from this Stack Overflow article. In SSMS select “SQL Test” from the Tools menu, then click on + New Test: In the next screen, give your new test a name, and also enter a name in the Test Class box (test classes are schemas that help you keep things organised). Also check that the database in which the test is going to be created is correct – RedGateApp in this example: Click “Create Test”. After closing a couple of subsequent dialogues, you’ll see a dummy script for the test, that needs filling in:   We now need to define the SQL for our test. As mentioned before, tSQLt allows you to write your unit tests in T-SQL, and the code I’m going to use here is as below. This needs to be copied and pasted in to the query window, to replace the default given by tSQLt: –  Basic email check test ALTER PROCEDURE [MyChecks].[test Check Email Addresses] AS BEGIN SET NOCOUNT ON         Declare @Output VarChar(max)     Set @Output = ”       SELECT  @Output = @Output + Email +Char(13) + Char(10) FROM dbo.Email WHERE email NOT LIKE ‘%_@__%.__%’       If @Output > ”         Begin             Set @Output = Char(13) + Char(10)                           + @Output             EXEC tSQLt.Fail@Output         End   END;   Once this script is entered, hit execute to add the Stored Procedure to the database. Before committing the test to source control,  it’s worth just checking that it works! For a positive test, click on “SQL Test” from the Tools menu, then click Run Tests. You should see output like the following: - a green tick to indicate success! But of course, what we also need to do is test that this is actually doing something by showing a failed test. Edit one of the email addresses in your table to an incorrect format: Now, re-run the same SQL Test as before and you’ll see the following: Great – we now know that our test is really doing something! You’ll also see a useful error message at the bottom of SSMS: (leave the email address as invalid for now, for the next steps). The next stage is to check this new test in to source control again, by right-clicking on the database and checking in the changes with a commit message (and not forgetting to sync in the GitHub client):   Checking that the Tests are Running as Integration Tests After the changes above are made, and after a build has run on Bamboo (manual or automatic), looking at the Stored Procedures for the RedGateAppCI, the SPROC for the new test has been moved over to the database. However this is not exactly what we were after. We didn’t want to just copy objects from one database to another, but actually run the tests as part of the build/integration test process. I.e. we’re continuously checking any changes we make (in this case, to the reference data emails), to ensure we’re not breaking a test that we’ve set up. The behaviour we want to see is that, if we check in static data that is incorrect (as we did in step 9 above) and we have the tSQLt test set up, then our build in Bamboo should fail. However, re-running the build shows the following: - sadly, a successful build! To make sure the tSQLt tests are run as part of the integration test, we need to amend a switch in the Red Gate CI config file. First, navigate to file sqlCI.targets in your working folder: Edit this document, make the following change, save the document, then commit and sync this change in the GitHub client: <!-- tSQLt tests --> <!-- Optional --> <!-- To run tSQLt tests in source control for the database, enter true. --> <enableTsqlt>true</enableTsqlt> Now, if we re-run the build in Bamboo (NB: I’ve moved to a new server here, hence different address and build number): - superb, a broken build!! The error message isn’t great here, so to get more detailed info, click on the full build log link on this page (below the fold). The interesting part of the log shown is towards the bottom. Pulling out this part:   21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 Build FAILED. 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 "C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj" (default target) (1) -> 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 (sqlCI target) -> 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: RedGate.Deploy.SqlServerDbPackage.Shared.Exceptions.InvalidSqlException: Test Case Summary: 1 test case(s) executed, 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 errored. [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: [MyChecks].[test Check Email Addresses] failed: [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: ringo.starr@beatles [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: +----------------------+ [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: |Test Execution Summary| [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj]   As a final check, we should make sure that, if we now fix this error, the build succeeds. So in SSMS, I’m going to correct the invalid email address, then check this change in to SQL Source Control (with a comment), commit to GitHub, and re-run the build:   This should have fixed the build: It worked! Summary This has been a very quick run through the implementation of CI for databases, including tSQLt tests to test whether your database updates are working. The next post in this series will focus on automated deployment – we’ve tested our database changes, how can we now deploy these to target sites?  

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• NoSQL with RavenDB and ASP.NET MVC - Part 2

  - by shiju

  In my previous post, we have discussed on how to work with RavenDB document database in an ASP.NET MVC application. We have setup RavenDB for our ASP.NET MVC application and did basic CRUD operations against a simple domain entity. In this post, let’s discuss on domain entity with deep object graph and how to query against RavenDB documents using Indexes.Let's create two domain entities for our demo ASP.NET MVC appplication  public class Category {       public string Id { get; set; }     [Required(ErrorMessage = "Name Required")]     [StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Must be less than 25 characters")]     public string Name { get; set;}     public string Description { get; set; }     public List<Expense> Expenses { get; set; }       public Category()     {         Expenses = new List<Expense>();     } }    public class Expense {       public string Id { get; set; }     public Category Category { get; set; }     public string  Transaction { get; set; }     public DateTime Date { get; set; }     public double Amount { get; set; }   }  We have two domain entities - Category and Expense. A single category contains a list of expense transactions and every expense transaction should have a Category.Let's create  ASP.NET MVC view model  for Expense transaction public class ExpenseViewModel {     public string Id { get; set; }       public string CategoryId { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Transaction Required")]            public string Transaction { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Date Required")]            public DateTime Date { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Amount Required")]     public double Amount { get; set; }       public IEnumerable<SelectListItem> Category { get; set; } } Let's create a contract type for Expense Repository  public interface IExpenseRepository {     Expense Load(string id);     IEnumerable<Expense> GetExpenseTransactions(DateTime startDate,DateTime endDate);     void Save(Expense expense,string categoryId);     void Delete(string id);  } Let's create a concrete type for Expense Repository for handling CRUD operations. public class ExpenseRepository : IExpenseRepository {   private IDocumentSession session; public ExpenseRepository() {         session = MvcApplication.CurrentSession; } public Expense Load(string id) {     return session.Load<Expense>(id); } public IEnumerable<Expense> GetExpenseTransactions(DateTime startDate, DateTime endDate) {             //Querying using the Index name "ExpenseTransactions"     //filtering with dates     var expenses = session.LuceneQuery<Expense>("ExpenseTransactions")         .WaitForNonStaleResults()         .Where(exp => exp.Date >= startDate && exp.Date <= endDate)         .ToArray();     return expenses; } public void Save(Expense expense,string categoryId) {     var category = session.Load<Category>(categoryId);     if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(expense.Id))     {         //new expense transaction         expense.Category = category;         session.Store(expense);     }     else     {         //modifying an existing expense transaction         var expenseToEdit = Load(expense.Id);         //Copy values to  expenseToEdit         ModelCopier.CopyModel(expense, expenseToEdit);         //set category object         expenseToEdit.Category = category;       }     //save changes     session.SaveChanges(); } public void Delete(string id) {     var expense = Load(id);     session.Delete<Expense>(expense);     session.SaveChanges(); }   }  Insert/Update Expense Transaction The Save method is used for both insert a new expense record and modifying an existing expense transaction. For a new expense transaction, we store the expense object with associated category into document session object and load the existing expense object and assign values to it for editing a existing record.  public void Save(Expense expense,string categoryId) {     var category = session.Load<Category>(categoryId);     if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(expense.Id))     {         //new expense transaction         expense.Category = category;         session.Store(expense);     }     else     {         //modifying an existing expense transaction         var expenseToEdit = Load(expense.Id);         //Copy values to  expenseToEdit         ModelCopier.CopyModel(expense, expenseToEdit);         //set category object         expenseToEdit.Category = category;       }     //save changes     session.SaveChanges(); } Querying Expense transactions   public IEnumerable<Expense> GetExpenseTransactions(DateTime startDate, DateTime endDate) {             //Querying using the Index name "ExpenseTransactions"     //filtering with dates     var expenses = session.LuceneQuery<Expense>("ExpenseTransactions")         .WaitForNonStaleResults()         .Where(exp => exp.Date >= startDate && exp.Date <= endDate)         .ToArray();     return expenses; }  The GetExpenseTransactions method returns expense transactions using a LINQ query expression with a Date comparison filter. The Lucene Query is using a index named "ExpenseTransactions" for getting the result set. In RavenDB, Indexes are LINQ queries stored in the RavenDB server and would be  executed on the background and will perform query against the JSON documents. Indexes will be working with a lucene query expression or a set operation. Indexes are composed using a Map and Reduce function. Check out Ayende's blog post on Map/Reduce We can create index using RavenDB web admin tool as well as programmitically using its Client API. The below shows the screen shot of creating index using web admin tool. We can also create Indexes using Raven Cleint API as shown in the following code documentStore.DatabaseCommands.PutIndex("ExpenseTransactions",     new IndexDefinition<Expense,Expense>() {     Map = Expenses => from exp in Expenses                     select new { exp.Date } });  In the Map function, we used a Linq expression as shown in the following from exp in docs.Expensesselect new { exp.Date };We have not used a Reduce function for the above index. A Reduce function is useful while performing aggregate functions based on the results from the Map function. Indexes can be use with set operations of RavenDB.SET OperationsUnlike other document databases, RavenDB supports set based operations that lets you to perform updates, deletes and inserts to the bulk_docs endpoint of RavenDB. For doing this, you just pass a query to a Index as shown in the following commandDELETE http://localhost:8080/bulk_docs/ExpenseTransactions?query=Date:20100531The above command using the Index named "ExpenseTransactions" for querying the documents with Date filter and  will delete all the documents that match the query criteria. The above command is equivalent of the following queryDELETE FROM ExpensesWHERE Date='2010-05-31' Controller & ActionsWe have created Expense Repository class for performing CRUD operations for the Expense transactions. Let's create a controller class for handling expense transactions.   public class ExpenseController : Controller { private ICategoryRepository categoyRepository; private IExpenseRepository expenseRepository; public ExpenseController(ICategoryRepository categoyRepository, IExpenseRepository expenseRepository) {     this.categoyRepository = categoyRepository;     this.expenseRepository = expenseRepository; } //Get Expense transactions based on dates public ActionResult Index(DateTime? StartDate, DateTime? EndDate) {     //If date is not passed, take current month's first and last dte     DateTime dtNow;     dtNow = DateTime.Today;     if (!StartDate.HasValue)     {         StartDate = new DateTime(dtNow.Year, dtNow.Month, 1);         EndDate = StartDate.Value.AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1);     }     //take last date of startdate's month, if endate is not passed     if (StartDate.HasValue && !EndDate.HasValue)     {         EndDate = (new DateTime(StartDate.Value.Year, StartDate.Value.Month, 1)).AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1);     }       var expenses = expenseRepository.GetExpenseTransactions(StartDate.Value, EndDate.Value);     if (Request.IsAjaxRequest())     {           return PartialView("ExpenseList", expenses);     }     ViewData.Add("StartDate", StartDate.Value.ToShortDateString());     ViewData.Add("EndDate", EndDate.Value.ToShortDateString());             return View(expenses);            }   // GET: /Expense/Edit public ActionResult Edit(string id) {       var expenseModel = new ExpenseViewModel();     var expense = expenseRepository.Load(id);     ModelCopier.CopyModel(expense, expenseModel);     var categories = categoyRepository.GetCategories();     expenseModel.Category = categories.ToSelectListItems(expense.Category.Id.ToString());                    return View("Save", expenseModel);          }   // // GET: /Expense/Create   public ActionResult Create() {     var expenseModel = new ExpenseViewModel();               var categories = categoyRepository.GetCategories();     expenseModel.Category = categories.ToSelectListItems("-1");     expenseModel.Date = DateTime.Today;     return View("Save", expenseModel); }   // // POST: /Expense/Save // Insert/Update Expense Tansaction [HttpPost] public ActionResult Save(ExpenseViewModel expenseViewModel) {     try     {         if (!ModelState.IsValid)         {               var categories = categoyRepository.GetCategories();                 expenseViewModel.Category = categories.ToSelectListItems(expenseViewModel.CategoryId);                               return View("Save", expenseViewModel);         }           var expense=new Expense();         ModelCopier.CopyModel(expenseViewModel, expense);          expenseRepository.Save(expense, expenseViewModel.CategoryId);                       return RedirectToAction("Index");     }     catch     {         return View();     } } //Delete a Expense Transaction public ActionResult Delete(string id) {     expenseRepository.Delete(id);     return RedirectToAction("Index");     }     }     Download the Source - You can download the source code from http://ravenmvc.codeplex.com

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• Injection of banners in my webbrowsers possible malware

  - by Skadlig

  Recently I have started to suspect that I have some kind of virus on my computer. There are 3 symptoms: Banners are being displayed on pages that doesn't use commercials, for instance when viewing screen-shots on Steam. It is only displayed after the rest of the page has been loaded and seems to be injected into it. The whole page is replaced with a commercial with the option to skip the commercial. The page is replaced with a search window claiming that the page could not be found. I have tried to scan my computer with Antivir and Adaware but only found a couple of tracking cookies. I have run HijackThis but since this isn't really my area I haven't been able to discern what shouldn't be there except the line about zonealarm since I have uninstalled it. Is there anyone out there who is able to see if there is anything suspicious in the log-file at the end or has suggestions regarding programs that might be better to find the virus than Antivir and Adaware? Here is the whole (long) log: Logfile of Trend Micro HijackThis v2.0.2 Scan saved at 21:44:07, on 2010-04-15 Platform: Unknown Windows (WinNT 6.01.3504) MSIE: Internet Explorer v8.00 (8.00.7600.16385) Boot mode: Normal Running processes: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\HsMgr.exe C:\Program Files (x86)\Personal\bin\Personal.exe F:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin\ApacheMonitor.exe C:\Program Files (x86)\Avira\AntiVir Desktop\avgnt.exe F:\Program Files (x86)\PowerISO\PWRISOVM.EXE C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin\jusched.exe C:\Program Files\ASUS Xonar DX Audio\Customapp\ASUSAUDIOCENTER.EXE F:\Program Files (x86)\Voddler\service\VNetManager.exe C:\Program Files (x86)\Emotum\Mobile Broadband\Mobile.exe F:\Program Files\Logitech\SetPoint\x86\SetPoint32.exe C:\Program Files (x86)\Lavasoft\Ad-Aware\AAWTray.exe F:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe F:\Program Files (x86)\Trend Micro\HijackThis\HijackThis.exe R1 - HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Search Page = http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=54896 R0 - HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Start Page = http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=69157 R1 - HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Default_Page_URL = http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=69157 R1 - HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Default_Search_URL = http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=54896 R1 - HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Search Page = http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=54896 R0 - HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Start Page = http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=69157 R0 - HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Search,SearchAssistant = R0 - HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Search,CustomizeSearch = R0 - HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Local Page = C:\Windows\SysWOW64\blank.htm R0 - HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar,LinksFolderName = F2 - REG:system.ini: UserInit=userinit.exe O2 - BHO: AcroIEHelperStub - {18DF081C-E8AD-4283-A596-FA578C2EBDC3} - C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\Acrobat\ActiveX\AcroIEHelperShim.dll O2 - BHO: gwprimawega - {83bb5261-81ec-25ae-4adf-e88936738525} - C:\Windows\SysWow64\aZfJupUw.dll O2 - BHO: ZoneAlarm Toolbar Registrar - {8A4A36C2-0535-4D2C-BD3D-496CB7EED6E3} - C:\Program Files\CheckPoint\ZAForceField\WOW64\TrustChecker\bin\TrustCheckerIEPlugin.dll (file missing) O2 - BHO: Windows Live inloggningshjälpen - {9030D464-4C02-4ABF-8ECC-5164760863C6} - C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Windows Live\WindowsLiveLogin.dll O2 - BHO: Java(tm) Plug-In 2 SSV Helper - {DBC80044-A445-435b-BC74-9C25C1C588A9} - C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin\jp2ssv.dll O3 - Toolbar: ZoneAlarm Toolbar - {EE2AC4E5-B0B0-4EC6-88A9-BCA1A32AB107} - C:\Program Files\CheckPoint\ZAForceField\WOW64\TrustChecker\bin\TrustCheckerIEPlugin.dll (file missing) O4 - HKLM..\Run: [avgnt] "C:\Program Files (x86)\Avira\AntiVir Desktop\avgnt.exe" /min O4 - HKLM..\Run: [PWRISOVM.EXE] f:\Program Files (x86)\PowerISO\PWRISOVM.EXE O4 - HKLM..\Run: [SunJavaUpdateSched] "C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin\jusched.exe" O4 - HKLM..\Run: [QuickTime Task] "F:\Program Files (x86)\QuickTime\QTTask.exe" -atboottime O4 - HKLM..\Run: [Adobe Reader Speed Launcher] "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\Reader_sl.exe" O4 - HKLM..\Run: [VoddlerNet Manager] f:\Program Files (x86)\Voddler\service\VNetManager.exe O4 - HKCU..\Run: [Steam] "f:\program files (x86)\steam\steam.exe" -silent O4 - HKCU..\Run: [msnmsgr] "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Live\Messenger\msnmsgr.exe" /background O4 - Global Startup: BankID Security Application.lnk = C:\Program Files (x86)\Personal\bin\Personal.exe O4 - Global Startup: Logitech SetPoint.lnk = ? O4 - Global Startup: Monitor Apache Servers.lnk = F:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin\ApacheMonitor.exe O13 - Gopher Prefix: O16 - DPF: {1E54D648-B804-468d-BC78-4AFFED8E262F} (System Requirements Lab) - http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload/srl/3.0.0.4/srl_bin/sysreqlab_nvd.cab O16 - DPF: {4871A87A-BFDD-4106-8153-FFDE2BAC2967} (DLM Control) - http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/misc/dlm-activex-2.2.5.0.cab O16 - DPF: {D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000} (Shockwave Flash Object) - http://fpdownload2.macromedia.com/get/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab O17 - HKLM\System\CCS\Services\Tcpip..{5F7DB2E1-29C4-4299-A483-B68B19E9F015}: NameServer = 195.54.122.221 195.54.122.211 O17 - HKLM\System\CS1\Services\Tcpip..{5F7DB2E1-29C4-4299-A483-B68B19E9F015}: NameServer = 195.54.122.221 195.54.122.211 O17 - HKLM\System\CS2\Services\Tcpip..{5F7DB2E1-29C4-4299-A483-B68B19E9F015}: NameServer = 195.54.122.221 195.54.122.211 O23 - Service: @%SystemRoot%\system32\Alg.exe,-112 (ALG) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\System32\alg.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: Avira AntiVir Scheduler (AntiVirSchedulerService) - Avira GmbH - C:\Program Files (x86)\Avira\AntiVir Desktop\sched.exe O23 - Service: Avira AntiVir Guard (AntiVirService) - Avira GmbH - C:\Program Files (x86)\Avira\AntiVir Desktop\avguard.exe O23 - Service: Apache2.2 - Apache Software Foundation - F:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin\httpd.exe O23 - Service: Dragon Age: Origins - Content Updater (DAUpdaterSvc) - BioWare - F:\Program Files (x86)\Dragon Age\bin_ship\DAUpdaterSvc.Service.exe O23 - Service: Device Error Recovery Service (dgdersvc) - Devguru Co., Ltd. - C:\Windows\system32\dgdersvc.exe O23 - Service: @%SystemRoot%\system32\efssvc.dll,-100 (EFS) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\System32\lsass.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: @%systemroot%\system32\fxsresm.dll,-118 (Fax) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\system32\fxssvc.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: @keyiso.dll,-100 (KeyIso) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\system32\lsass.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: SAMSUNG KiesAllShare Service (KiesAllShare) - Unknown owner - F:\Program Files (x86)\Samsung\Kies\WiselinkPro\WiselinkPro.exe O23 - Service: Lavasoft Ad-Aware Service - Lavasoft - C:\Program Files (x86)\Lavasoft\Ad-Aware\AAWService.exe O23 - Service: Logitech Bluetooth Service (LBTServ) - Logitech, Inc. - C:\Program Files\Common Files\Logishrd\Bluetooth\LBTServ.exe O23 - Service: @comres.dll,-2797 (MSDTC) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\System32\msdtc.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: MySQL - Unknown owner - F:\Program.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: @%SystemRoot%\System32\netlogon.dll,-102 (Netlogon) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\system32\lsass.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: NVIDIA Display Driver Service (nvsvc) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\system32\nvvsvc.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: Sony Ericsson OMSI download service (OMSI download service) - Unknown owner - f:\Program Files (x86)\Sony Ericsson\Sony Ericsson PC Suite\SupServ.exe O23 - Service: @%systemroot%\system32\psbase.dll,-300 (ProtectedStorage) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\system32\lsass.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: @%systemroot%\system32\Locator.exe,-2 (RpcLocator) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\system32\locator.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: @%SystemRoot%\system32\samsrv.dll,-1 (SamSs) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\system32\lsass.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: ServiceLayer - Nokia. - C:\Program Files (x86)\PC Connectivity Solution\ServiceLayer.exe O23 - Service: @%SystemRoot%\system32\snmptrap.exe,-3 (SNMPTRAP) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\System32\snmptrap.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: @%systemroot%\system32\spoolsv.exe,-1 (Spooler) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\System32\spoolsv.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: @%SystemRoot%\system32\sppsvc.exe,-101 (sppsvc) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\system32\sppsvc.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: Steam Client Service - Valve Corporation - C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Steam\SteamService.exe O23 - Service: @%SystemRoot%\system32\ui0detect.exe,-101 (UI0Detect) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\system32\UI0Detect.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: @%SystemRoot%\system32\vaultsvc.dll,-1003 (VaultSvc) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\system32\lsass.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: @%SystemRoot%\system32\vds.exe,-100 (vds) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\System32\vds.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: VoddlerNet - Voddler - f:\Program Files (x86)\Voddler\service\voddler.exe O23 - Service: @%systemroot%\system32\vssvc.exe,-102 (VSS) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\system32\vssvc.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: @%systemroot%\system32\wbengine.exe,-104 (wbengine) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\system32\wbengine.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: @%Systemroot%\system32\wbem\wmiapsrv.exe,-110 (wmiApSrv) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\system32\wbem\WmiApSrv.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: @%PROGRAMFILES%\Windows Media Player\wmpnetwk.exe,-101 (WMPNetworkSvc) - Unknown owner - C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Media Player\wmpnetwk.exe (file missing) -- End of file - 8958 bytes

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, December 07, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, December 07, 2010Popular ReleasesMy Web Pages Starter Kit: 1.3.1 Production Release (Security HOTFIX): Due to a critical security issue, it's strongly advised to update the My Web Pages Starter Kit to this version. Possible attackers could misuse the image upload to transmit any type of file to the website. If you already have a running version of My Web Pages Starter Kit 1.3.0, you can just replace the ftb.imagegallery.aspx file in the root directory with the one attached to this release.ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.4: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: popup WhiteSpaceFilterAttribute tested on mozilla, safari, chrome, opera, ie 9b/8/7/6nopCommerce. ASP.NET open source shopping cart: nopCommerce 1.90: To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).Aura: Aura Preview 1: Rewritten from scratch. This release supports getting color only from icon of foreground window.myCollections: Version 1.2: New in version 1.2: Big performance improvement. New Design (Added Outlook style View, New detail view, New Groub By...) Added Sort by Media Added Manage Movie Studio Zoom preference is now saved. Media name are now editable. Added Portuguese version You can now Hide details panel Add support for FLAC tags You can now imports books from BibTex Xml file BugFixingmytrip.mvc (CMS & e-Commerce): mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta: mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta web Web for install hosting System Requirements: NET 4.0, MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src System Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 or Web Deweloper 2010 MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) Connector/Net 6.3.4, MVC3 RC WARNING For run and debug mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src download and ...Menu and Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0: Silverlight Menu and Context Menu v2.3 Beta: - Added keyboard navigation support with access keys - Shortcuts like Ctrl-Alt-A are now supported(where the browser permits it) - The PopupMenuSeparator is now completely based on the PopupMenuItem class - Moved item manipulation code to a partial class in PopupMenuItemsControl.cs - Moved menu management and keyboard navigation code to the new PopupMenuManager class - Simplified the layout by removing the RootGrid element(all content is now placed in OverlayCanvas and is accessed by the new ...SubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.0: First public releaseMiniTwitter: 1.62: MiniTwitter 1.62 ???? ?? ??????????????????????????????????????? 140 ?????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????? ?? ??????????????????????????????????Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (December 2010): The release is targetted for stable daily use. With improved performance and enhanced compatibility with several latest PHP open source applications; it makes this release perfect replacement of your old PHP runtime. Changes made within this release include following and much more: Performance improvements based on real-world applications experience. We determined biggest bottlenecks and we found and removed overheads causing performance problems in many PHP applications. Reimplemented nat...Chronos WPF: Chronos v2.0 Beta 3: Release notes: Updated introduction document. Updated Visual Studio 2010 Extension (vsix) package. Added horizontal scrolling to the main window TaskBar. Added new styles for ListView, ListViewItem, GridViewColumnHeader, ... Added a new WindowViewModel class (allowing to fetch data). Added a new Navigate method (with several overloads) to the NavigationViewModel class (protected). Reimplemented Task usage for the WorkspaceViewModel.OnDelete method. Removed the reflection effect...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.26.7024: Fixed updater; Fixed MegauploadDJ - jQuery WebControls for ASP.NET: DJ 1.2: What is new? Update to support jQuery 1.4.2 Update to support jQuery ui 1.8.6 Update to Visual Studio 2010 New WebControls with samples added Autocomplete WebControl Button WebControl ToggleButt WebControl The example web site is including in source code project.LateBindingApi.Excel: LateBindingApi.Excel Release 0.7g: Unterschiede zur Vorgängerversion: - Zusätzliche Interior Properties - Group / Ungroup Methoden für Range - Bugfix COM Reference Handling für Application Objekt in einigen Klassen Release+Samples V0.7g: - Enthält Laufzeit DLL und Beispielprojekte Beispielprojekte: COMAddinExample - Demonstriert ein versionslos angebundenes COMAddin Example01 - Background Colors und Borders für Cells Example02 - Font Attributes undAlignment für Cells Example03 - Numberformats Example04 - Shapes, WordArts, P...ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit: November 2010 - v2.1: ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit v2.1 Added Windows Phone 7 build. New controls added: InfoWindow ChildPage (Windows Phone 7 only) See what's new here full details for : http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapi/silverlight/help/#/What_s_new_in_2_1/016600000025000000/ Note: Requires Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0.ASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.1.1: Atomic CMS 2.1.1 release notes Atomic CMS installation guide Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.5 beta Released: Hi, Today we are releasing Visifire 3.6.5 beta with the following new feature: New property AutoFitToPlotArea has been introduced in DataSeries. AutoFitToPlotArea will bring bubbles inside the PlotArea in order to avoid clipping of bubbles in bubble chart. Also this release includes few bug fixes: AxisXLabel label were getting clipped if angle was set for AxisLabels and ScrollingEnabled was not set in Chart. If LabelStyle property was set as 'Inside', size of the Pie was not proper. Yo...AI: Initial 0.0.1: It’s simply just one code file; it simulates AI and machine in a simulated world. The AI has a little understanding of its body machine and parts, and able to use its feet to do actions just start and stop walking. The world is all of white with nothing but just the machine on a white planet. Colors, odors and position information make no sense. I’m previous C# programmer and I’m learning F# during this project, although I’m still not a good F# programmer, in this project I learning to prog...NKinect: NKinect Preview: Build features: Accelerometer reading Motor serial number property Realtime image update Realtime depth calculation Export to PLY (On demand) Control motor LED Control Kinect tiltMicrosoft - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.0 App Sample (Microsoft Spain): V1.0 - N-Layer DDD Sample App .NET 4.0: Required Software (Microsoft Base Software needed for Development environment) Visual Studio 2010 RTM & .NET 4.0 RTM (Final Versions) Expression Blend 4 SQL Server 2008 R2 Express/Standard/Enterprise Unity Application Block 2.0 - Published May 5th 2010 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2D24F179-E0A6-49D7-89C4-5B67D939F91B&displaylang=en http://unity.codeplex.com/releases/view/31277 PEX & MOLES 0.94.51023.0, 29/Oct/2010 - Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools http://re...New ProjectsAcorn: Little acorns lead to mighty oaks.Algorithmia: Algorithm and data-structure library for .NET 3.5 and up. Algorithmia contains sophisticated algorithms and data-structures like graphs, priority queues, command, undo-redo and more. Base Station Verification system: Base Station Verification systemBase Station Verification systemBase Station Verification systemBase Station Verification systemBase Station Verification systemBase Station Verification systemBase Station Verification systemBase Station Verification systemBase Station VerificatioBlueAd: Simple app to broadcast messages to bluetooth enabled devicesBuiltWith Fiddler Integration: Project Description BuiltWithFiddler adds BuildWith functionality to the HTTP Debugging Proxy Fiddler. It helps to determine the underlying technologies used in HTTP responses. www.builtwith.com www.fiddler2.com It is written in C# by Andy at Bare Web BVCMS.app: The Bellevue Church Management System is a complete Web-based application for managing your church. This iPhone app provides tools to connect to bvcms so that users can search, check-in members, and other actions.coffeeGreet: CoffeeGreet is a WordPress plug-in that will greet your visitors with coffee depending on the hour of the day, by displaying images using the Flickr API.DCEL data structure: Doubly-connected edge list data structure implementation in C#.El Bruno ClickOnce Demo: Demo de ClickOnce en CodePlexFiren's Laboratory: NothingFunCam: A fun application for playing with your webcam. Experiment with different overlays and exciting effects. Save the images when you want, or on a timer. Great fun for parties! (WPF/C#) Uses WPF Media Kit for webcam integration, and Shazzam for the great shader effects.GammaJul LgLcd: A .NET wrapper around the Logitech SDK for G15/G19 keyboard screens. Supports raw byte sending, GDI+ drawing and rendering WPF elements onto the screen.Getting Started CodePlex: This is a demo for using TFS in CodePlexGPUG (Dynamics GP User Group): The location for GPUG members to share code.HPMC: DemoImageOfMeLocator: Team Boarders Platform: WordPress Objectives: 1. Create a plugin for WordPress. 2. Create a plugin that allows users to browse images uploaded on their Flickr Account and use them as overlays for store locations on a large map. 3. Create a plugjDepot: jQuery ajax, jquery UI and ASP.NET MVC based online store application. This software will let a user manage their product inventory by exposiing CRUD operations through the UI. Customers can buy these products and track each shipment separately. It is developed in C#.JQuery Cycle Carousel for DotNetNuke®: DNN Module JQuery Cycle Carousel This module will show images as a carousel using the cycle JQuery plugin. You can easyly change Cycle effect and other settings in the module.Local Movie DB in C#: C# WPF project. Will create local movie database where users can create their own DB of the movies they own/seen/liked ... etcLocation Framework for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure: A framework to build location based applications with Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure.OraLibs: Collection of useful PL/SQL procedures, which contain methods for working with arrays, strings, numbers, dates.Phyo: License managementRepositório de Monografias: O Repositório de Monografias terá como função: - Salvar em um repositório todas as monografias postadas no período pelos os alunos da FACISA/FCM/ESAC. - O administrador do sistema, fará uma avaliação de acordo com ABNT e retornará para o aluno as nescessárias correções.Secure SharePoint Silverlight Web Part - Silverlight Security & Auditing: The Secure Silverlight WebPart provides both builtin security using default SharePoint security mechanisms as well as site collection specific auditing to record an event a Silverlight file is newly hosted in the SharePoint environment. SilverlightColorPicker: Photoshop like ColorPicker built in silverlight from scratchSparrow.Net Connect: This is a passport system.Sparrow.NET TaskMe: TaskMe is a project management web application.Written using Sparrow.Net frameworkSQLiteWrapper: A light c# wrapper around the sqlite library's functionsSuperMarioBros.Net: A .Net Super Mario Bros clon.Virtualizing Tree View: Tree View for large amount of itemsWindows Forms GUI based Trace Listener: Gives a simple UI based Trace Listener to debug / Trace information . No need to look at EventLog / Xml file etc. This code Library helps you View the Trace and debug entries. Can plug in to your WinForms App as well.WP Socially Related: Automatically include related posts from Twitter, WordPress.com and Bing Search into each of your blog posts

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• The Windows Store... why did I sign up with this mess again?

  - by FransBouma

  Yesterday, Microsoft revealed that the Windows Store is now open to all developers in a wide range of countries and locations. For the people who think "wtf is the 'Windows Store'?", it's the central place where Windows 8 users will be able to find, download and purchase applications (or as we now have to say to not look like a computer illiterate: <accent style="Kentucky">aaaaappss</accent>) for Windows 8. As this is the store which is integrated into Windows 8, it's an interesting place for ISVs, as potential customers might very well look there first. This of course isn't true for all kinds of software, and developer tools in general aren't the kind of applications most users will download from the Windows store, but a presence there can't hurt. Now, this Windows Store hosts two kinds of applications: 'Metro-style' applications and 'Desktop' applications. The 'Metro-style' applications are applications created for the new 'Metro' UI which is present on Windows 8 desktop and Windows RT (the single color/big font fingerpaint-oriented UI). 'Desktop' applications are the applications we all run and use on Windows today. Our software are desktop applications. The Windows Store hosts all Metro-style applications locally in the store and handles the payment for these applications. This means you upload your application (sorry, 'app') to the store, jump through a lot of hoops, Microsoft verifies that your application is not violating a tremendous long list of rules and after everything is OK, it's published and hopefully you get customers and thus earn money. Money which Microsoft will pay you on a regular basis after customers buy your application. Desktop applications are not following this path however. Desktop applications aren't hosted by the Windows Store. Instead, the Windows Store more or less hosts a page with the application's information and where to get the goods. I.o.w.: it's nothing more than a product's Facebook page. Microsoft will simply redirect a visitor of the Windows Store to your website and the visitor will then use your site's system to purchase and download the application. This last bit of information is very important. So, this morning I started with fresh energy to register our company 'Solutions Design bv' at the Windows Store and our two applications, LLBLGen Pro and ORM Profiler. First I went to the Windows Store dashboard page. If you don't have an account, you have to log in or sign up if you don't have a live account. I signed in with my live account. After that, it greeted me with a page where I had to fill in a code which was mailed to me. My local mail server polls every several minutes for email so I had to kick it to get it immediately. I grabbed the code from the email and I was presented with a multi-step process to register myself as a company or as an individual. In red I was warned that this choice was permanent and not changeable. I chuckled: Microsoft apparently stores its data on paper, not in digital form. I chose 'company' and was presented with a lengthy form to fill out. On the form there were two strange remarks: Per company there can just be 1 (one, uno, not zero, not two or more) registered developer, and only that developer is able to upload stuff to the store. I have no idea how this works with large companies, oh the overhead nightmares... "Sorry, but John, our registered developer with the Windows Store is on holiday for 3 months, backpacking through Australia, no, he's not reachable at this point. M'yeah, sorry bud. Hey, did you fill in those TPS reports yesterday?" A separate Approver has to be specified, which has to be a different person than the registered developer. Apparently to Microsoft a company with just 1 person is not a company. Luckily we're with two people! *pfew*, dodged that one, otherwise I would be stuck forever: the choice I already made was not reversible! After I had filled out the form and it was all well and good and accepted by the Microsoft lackey who had to write it all down in some paper notebook ("Hey, be warned! It's a permanent choice! Written down in ink, can't be changed!"), I was presented with the question how I wanted to pay for all this. "Pay for what?" I wondered. Must be the paper they were scribbling the information on, I concluded. After all, there's a financial crisis going on! How could I forget! Silly me. "Ok fair enough". The price was 75 Euros, not the end of the world. I could only pay by credit card, so it was accepted quickly. Or so I thought. You see, Microsoft has a different idea about CC payments. In the normal world, you type in your CC number, some date, a name and a security code and that's it. But Microsoft wants to verify this even more. They want to make a verification purchase of a very small amount and are doing that with a special code in the description. You then have to type in that code in a special form in the Windows Store dashboard and after that you're verified. Of course they'll refund the small amount they pull from your card. Sounds simple, right? Well... no. The problem starts with the fact that I can't see the CC activity on some website: I have a bank issued CC card. I get the CC activity once a month on a piece of paper sent to me. The bank's online website doesn't show them. So it's possible I have to wait for this code till October 12th. One month. "So what, I'm not going to use it anyway, Desktop applications don't use the payment system", I thought. "Haha, you're so naive, dear developer!" Microsoft won't allow you to publish any applications till this verification is done. So no application publishing for a month. Wouldn't it be nice if things were, you know, digital, so things got done instantly? But of course, that lackey who scribbled everything in the Big Windows Store Registration Book isn't that quick. Can't blame him though. He's just doing his job. Now, after the payment was done, I was presented with a page which tells me Microsoft is going to use a third party company called 'Symantec', which will verify my identity again. The page explains to me that this could be done through email or phone and that they'll contact the Approver to verify my identity. "Phone?", I thought... that's a little drastic for a developer account to publish a single page of information about an external hosted software product, isn't it? On Facebook I just added a page, done. And paying you, Microsoft, took less information: you were happy to take my money before my identity was even 'verified' by this 3rd party's minions! "Double standards!", I roared. No-one cared. But it's the thought of getting it off your chest, you know. Luckily for me, everyone at Symantec was asleep when I was registering so they went for the fallback option in case phone calls were not possible: my Approver received an email. Imagine you have to explain the idiot web of security theater I was caught in to someone else who then has to reply a random person over the internet that I indeed was who I said I was. As she's a true sweetheart, she gave me the benefit of the doubt and assured that for now, I was who I said I was. Remember, this is for a desktop application, which is only a link to a website, some pictures and a piece of text. No file hosting, no payment processing, nothing, just a single page. Yeah, I also thought I was crazy. But we're not at the end of this quest yet. I clicked around in the confusing menus of the Windows Store dashboard and found the 'Desktop' section. I get a helpful screen with a warning in red that it can't find any certified 'apps'. True, I'm just getting started, buddy. I see a link: "Check the Windows apps you submitted for certification". Well, I haven't submitted anything, but let's see where it brings me. Oh the thrill of adventure! I click the link and I end up on this site: the hardware/desktop dashboard account registration. "Erm... but I just registered...", I mumbled to no-one in particular. Apparently for desktop registration / verification I have to register again, it tells me. But not only that, the desktop application has to be signed with a certificate. And not just some random el-cheapo certificate you can get at any mall's discount store. No, this certificate is special. It's precious. This certificate, the 'Microsoft Authenticode' Digital Certificate, is the only certificate that's acceptable, and jolly, it can be purchased from VeriSign for the price of only ... $99.-, but be quick, because this is a limited time offer! After that it's, I kid you not, $499.-. 500 dollars for a certificate to sign an executable. But, I do feel special, I got a special price. Only for me! I'm glowing. Not for long though. Here I started to wonder, what the benefit of it all was. I now again had to pay money for a shiny certificate which will add 'Solutions Design bv' to our installer as the publisher instead of 'unknown', while our customers download the file from our website. Not only that, but this was all about a Desktop application, which wasn't hosted by Microsoft. They only link to it. And make no mistake. These prices aren't single payments. Every year these have to be renewed. Like a membership of an exclusive club: you're special and privileged, but only if you cough up the dough. To give you an example how silly this all is: I added LLBLGen Pro and ORM Profiler to the Visual Studio Gallery some time ago. It's the same thing: it's a central place where one can find software which adds to / extends / works with Visual Studio. I could simply create the pages, add the information and they show up inside Visual Studio. No files are hosted at Microsoft, they're downloaded from our website. Exactly the same system. As I have to wait for the CC transcripts to arrive anyway, I can't proceed with publishing in this new shiny store. After the verification is complete I have to wait for verification of my software by Microsoft. Even Desktop applications need to be verified using a long list of rules which are mainly focused on Metro-style applications. Even while they're not hosted by Microsoft. I wonder what they'll find. "Your application wasn't approved. It violates rule 14 X sub D: it provides more value than our own competing framework". While I was writing this post, I tried to check something in the Windows Store Dashboard, to see whether I remembered it correctly. I was presented again with the question, after logging in with my live account, to enter the code that was just mailed to me. Not the previous code, a brand new one. Again I had to kick my mail server to pull the email to proceed. This was it. This 'experience' is so beyond miserable, I'm afraid I have to say goodbye for now to the 'Windows Store'. It's simply not worth my time. Now, about live accounts. You might know this: live accounts are tied to everything you do with Microsoft. So if you have an MSDN subscription, e.g. the one which costs over $5000.-, it's tied to this same live account. But the fun thing is, you can login with your live account to the MSDN subscriptions with just the account id and password. No additional code is mailed to you. While it gives you access to all Microsoft software available, including your licenses. Why the draconian security theater with this Windows Store, while all I want is to publish some desktop applications while on other Microsoft sites it's OK to simply sign in with your live account: no codes needed, no verification and no certificates? Microsoft, one thing you need with this store and that's: apps. Apps, apps, apps, apps, aaaaaaaaapps. Sorry, my bad, got carried away. I just can't stand the word 'app'. This store's shelves have to be filled to the brim with goods. But instead of being welcomed into the store with open arms, I have to fight an uphill battle with an endless list of rules and bullshit to earn the privilege to publish in this shiny store. As if I have to be thrilled to be one of the exclusive club called 'Windows Store Publishers'. As if Microsoft doesn't want it to succeed. Craig Stuntz sent me a link to an old blog post of his regarding code signing and uploading to Microsoft's old mobile store from back in the WinMo5 days: http://blogs.teamb.com/craigstuntz/2006/10/11/28357/. Good read and good background info about how little things changed over the years. I hope this helps Microsoft make things more clearer and smoother and also helps ISVs with their decision whether to go with the Windows Store scheme or ignore it. For now, I don't see the advantage of publishing there, especially not with the nonsense rules Microsoft cooked up. Perhaps it changes in the future, who knows.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 25, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, May 25, 2010New ProjectsBibleNames: BibleNames BibleNames BibleNames BibleNames BibleNamesBing Search for PHP Developers: This is the Bing SDK for PHP, a toolkit that allows you to easily use Bing's API to fetch search results and use in your own application. The Bin...Fading Clock: Fading Clock is a normal clock that has the ability to fade in out. It's developed in C# as a Windows App in .net 2.0.Fuzzy string matching algorithm in C# and LINQ: Fuzzy matching strings. Find out how similar two string is, and find the best fuzzy matching string from a string table. Given a string (strA) and...HexTile editor: Testing hexagonal tile editorhgcheck12: hgcheck12Metaverse Router: Metaverse Router makes it easier for MIIS, ILM, FIM Sync engine administrators to manage multiple provisioning modules, turn on/off provisioning wi...MyVocabulary: Use MyVocabulary to structure and test the words you want to learn in a foreign language. This is a .net 3.5 windows forms application developed in...phpxw: Phpxw 是一个简易的PHP框架。以我自己的姓名命名的。 Phpxw is a simple PHP framework. Take my name named.Plop: Social networking wrappers and projects.PST Data Structure View Tool: PST Data Structure View Tool (PSTViewTool) is a tool supporting the PST file format documentation effort. It allows the user to browse the internal...PST File Format SDK: PST File Format SDK (pstsdk) is a cross platform header only C++ library for reading PST files.QWine: QWine is Queue Machine ApplicationSharePoint Cross Site Collection Security Trimmed Navigation: This SP2010 project will show security trimmed navigation that works across site collections. The project is written for SP2010, but can be easily ...SharePoint List Field Manager: The SharePoint List Field Manager allows users to manage the Boolean properties of a list such as Read Only, Hidden, Show in New Form etc... It sup...Silverlight Toolbar for DataGrid working with RIA Services or local data: DataGridToolbar contains two controls for Silverlight DataGrid designed for RIA Services and local data. It can be used to filter or remove a data,...SilverShader - Silverlight Pixel Shader Demos: SilverShader is an extensible Silverlight application that is used to demonstrate the effect of different pixel shaders. The shaders can be applied...SNCFT Gadget: Ce gadget permet de consulter les horaires des trains et de chercher des informations sur le site de la société nationale des chemins de fer tunisi...Software Transaction Memory: Software Transaction Memory for .NETStreamInsight Samples: This project contains sample code for StreamInsight, Microsoft's platform for complex event processing. The purpose of the samples is to provide a ...StyleAnalizer: A CSS parserSudoku (Multiplayer in RnD): Sudoku project was to practice on C# by making a desktop application using some algorithm Before this, I had worked on http://shaktisaran.tech.o...Tiplican: A small website built for the purpose of learning .Net 4 and MVC 2TPager: Mercurial pager with color support on Windowsunirca: UNIRCA projectWcfTrace: The WcfTrace is a easy way to collect information about WCF-service call order, processing time and etc. It's developed in C#.New ReleasesASP.NET TimePicker Control: 12 24 Hour Bug Fix: 12 24 Hour Bug FixASP.NET TimePicker Control: ASP.NET TimePicker Control: This release fixes a focus bug that manifests itself when switching focus between two different timepicker controls on the same page, and make chan...ASP.NET TimePicker Control: ASP.NET TimePicker Control - colon CSS Fix: Fixes ":" seperator placement issues being too hi and too low in IE and FireFox, respectively.ASP.NET TimePicker Control: Release fixes 24 Hour Mode Bug: Release fixes 24 Hour Mode BugBFBC2 PRoCon: PRoCon 0.5.1.1: Visit http://phogue.net/?p=604 for release notes.BFBC2 PRoCon: PRoCon 0.5.1.2: Release notes can be found at http://phogue.net/?p=604BFBC2 PRoCon: PRoCon 0.5.1.4: Ha.. choosing the "stable" option at the moment is a bit of a joke =\ Release notes at http://phogue.net/?p=604BFBC2 PRoCon: PRoCon 0.5.1.5: BWHAHAHA stable.. ha. Actually this ones looking pretty good now. http://phogue.net/?p=604Bojinx: Bojinx Core V4.5.14: Issues fixed in this release: Fixed an issue that caused referencePropertyName when used through a property configuration in the context to not wo...Bojinx: Bojinx Debugger V0.9B: Output trace and filtering that works with the Bojinx logger.CassiniDev - Cassini 3.5/4.0 Developers Edition: CassiniDev 3.5.1.5 and 4.0.1.5 beta3: Fixed fairly serious bug #13290 http://cassinidev.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=13290Content Rendering: Content Rendering API 1.0.0 Revision 46406: Initial releaseDeploy Workflow Manager: Deploy Workflow Manager Web Part v2: Recommend you test in your development environment first BEFORE using in production.dotSpatial: System.Spatial.Projections Zip May 24, 2010: Adds a new spherical projection.eComic: eComic 2010.0.0.2: Quick release to fix a couple of bugs found in the previous version. Version 2010.0.0.2 Fixed crash error when accessing the "Go To Page" dialog ...Exchange 2010 RBAC Editor (RBAC GUI) - updated on 5/24/2010: RBAC Editor 0.9.4.1: Some bugs fixed; support for unscopoedtoplevel (adding script is not working yet) Please use email address in About menu of the tool for any feedb...Facebook Graph Toolkit: Preview 1 Binaries: The first preview release of the toolkit. Not recommended for use in production, but enought to get started developing your app.Fading Clock: Clock.zip: Clock.zip is a zip file that contains the application Clock.exe.hgcheck12: Rel8082: Rel8082hgcheck12: scsc: scasMetaverse Router: Metaverse Router v1.0: Initial stable release (v.1.0.0.0) of Metaverse Router Working with: FIM 2010 Synchronization Engine ILM 2007 MIIS 2003MSTestGlider: MSTestGlider 1.5: What MSTestGlider 1.5.zip unzips to: http://i49.tinypic.com/2lcv4eg.png If you compile MSTestGlider from its source you will need to change the ou...MyVocabulary: Version 1.0: First releaseNLog - Advanced .NET Logging: Nightly Build 2010.05.24.001: Changes since the last build:2010-05-23 20:45:37 Jarek Kowalski fixed whitespace in NLog.wxs 2010-05-23 12:01:48 Jarek Kowalski BufferingTargetWra...NoteExpress User Tools (NEUT) - Do it by ourselves!: NoteExpress User Tools 2.0.0: 测试版本：NoteExpress 2.5.0.1154 +调整了Tab页的排列方式 注：2.0未做大的改动，仅仅是运行环境由原来的.net 3.5升级到4.0。openrs: Beta Release (Revision 1): This is the beta release of the openrs framework. Please make sure you submit issues in the issue tracker tab. As this is beta, extreme, flawless ...openrs: Revision 2: Revision 2 of the framework. Basic worker example as well as minor improvements on the auth packet.phpxw: Phpxw: Phpxw 1.0 phpxw 是一个简易的PHP框架。以我自己的姓名命名的。 Phpxw is a simple PHP framework. Take my name named. 支持基本的业务逻辑流程，功能模块化，实现了简易的模板技术，同时也可以支持外接模板引擎。 Support...sELedit: sELedit v1.1a: Fixed: clean file before overwriting Fixed: list57 will only created when eLC.Lists.length > 57sGSHOPedit: sGSHOPedit v1.0a: Fixed: bug with wrong item array re-size when adding items after deleting items Added: link to project page pwdatabase.com version is now selec...SharePoint Cross Site Collection Security Trimmed Navigation: Release 1.0.0.0: If you want just the .wsp, and start using this, you can grab it here. Just stsadm add/deploy to your website, and activate the feature as describ...Silverlight 4.0 Popup Menu: Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0 v1.24 Beta: - Updated the demo and added clipboard cut/copy and paste functionality. - Added delay on hover events for both parent and child menus. - Parent me...Silverlight Toolbar for DataGrid working with RIA Services or local data: DataGridToolBar Beta: For Silverlight 4.0sMAPtool: sMAPtool v0.7d (without Maps): Added: link to project pagesMODfix: sMODfix v1.0a: Added: Support for ECM v52 modelssNPCedit: sNPCedit v0.9a: browse source commits for all changes...SocialScapes: SocialScapes TwitterWidget 1.0.0: The SocialScapes TwitterWidget is a DotNetNuke Widget for displaying Twitter searches. This widget will be used to replace the twitter functionali...SQL Server 2005 and 2008 - Backup, Integrity Check and Index Optimization: 23 May 2010: This is the latest version of my solution for Backup, Integrity Check and Index Optimization in SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 200...sqwarea: Sqwarea 0.0.280.0 (alpha): This release brings a lot of improvements. We strongly recommend you to upgrade to this version.sTASKedit: sTASKedit v0.7c: Minor Changes in GUI & BehaviourSudoku (Multiplayer in RnD): Sudoku (Multiplayer in RnD) 1.0.0.0 source: Sudoku project was to practice on C# by making a desktop application using some algorithm Idea: The basic idea of algorithm is from http://www.ac...Sudoku (Multiplayer in RnD): Sudoku (Multiplayer in RnD) 1.0.0.1 source: Worked on user-interface, would improve it Sudoku project was to practice on C# by making a desktop application using some algorithm Idea: The b...TFS WorkItem Watcher: TFS WorkItem Watcher Version 1.0: This version contains the following new features: Added support to autodetect whether to start as a service or to start in console mode. The "-c" ...TfsPolicyPack: TfsPolicyPack 0.1: This is the first release of the TfsPolicyPack. This release includes the following policies: CustomRegexPathPolicythinktecture Starter STS (Community Edition): StarterSTS v1.1 CTP: Added ActAs / identity delegation support.TPager: TPager-20100524: TPager 2010-05-24 releaseTrance Layer: TranceLayer Transformer: Transformer is a Beta version 2, morphing from "Digger" to "Transformer" release cycle. It is intended to be used as a demonstration of muscles wh...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v1.0.0.0: Changes in v1.0.0Added 100% public code comments Bug fixes based on feedback from the Release Candidate Changes to handle Twitter schema additi...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30524.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWCF Client Generator: Version 0.9.2.33468: Version 0.9.2.33468 Fixed: Nested enum types names are not handled correctly. Can't close Visual Studio if generated files are open when the code...Word 2007 Redaction Tool: Version 1.2: A minor update to the Word 2007 Redaction Tool. This version can be installed directly over any existing version. Updates to Version 1.2Fixed bugs:...xPollinate - Windows Live Writer Cross Post Plugin: 1.0.0.5 for WLW 14.0.8117.416: This version works with WLW 14.0.8117.416. This release includes a fix to enable publishing posts that have been opened directly from a blog, but ...Yet another developer blog - Examples: jQuery Autocomplete in ASP.NET MVC: This sample application shows how to use jQuery Autocomplete plugin in ASP.NET MVC. This application is accompanied by the following entry on Yet a...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrpatterns & practices: Windows Azure Security GuidanceSqlServerExtensionsGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationMono.AddinsCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightBlogEngine.NETIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterSQL Server PowerShell Extensions

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

  - by Mark Rackley

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

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 13, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 13, 2010Popular ReleasesRequest Tracker Data Access: 1.0.0.0: First releaseMicrosoft All-In-One Code Framework: All-In-One Code Framework 2010-12-13: Improved and Newly Added Examples:For an up-to-date code sample index, please refer to All-In-One Code Framework Sample Catalog. NEW Samples for ASP.NET Name Description Owner CSASPNETCMD Run batch/cmd from ASP.NET (C#) YiXiang VBASPNETCMD Run batch/cmd from ASP.NET (VB) YiXiang VBASPNETAJAXWebChat Ajax web chat application (VB) JerryWeng CSASPNETAJAXWebChat Ajax web chat application (C#) JerryWeng CSASPNETCurrentOnlineUserList Get current online u...Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 0.9 Beta: - Aqua or brushed metal style for Mac OS X - Shows selection count beside ID - Game list selection mode via settings - Compare Files <-> WBFS game lists - Verify game images/DVD/WBFS - WIT command line for log (via settings) - Cancel possibility for loading games process - Progress infos while loading games - Localization for dates - UTF-8 support - Shortcuts added - View game infos in browser - Transfer infos for log - All transfer routines rewritten - Extract image from image/WBFS - Support....NETTER Code Starter Pack: v1.0.beta: '.NETTER Code Starter Pack ' contains a gallery of Visual Studio 2010 solutions leveraging latest and new technologies and frameworks based on Microsoft .NET Framework. Each Visual Studio solution included here is focused to provide a very simple starting point for cutting edge development technologies and framework, using well known Northwind database (for database driven scenarios). The current release of this project includes starter samples for the following technologies: ASP.NET Dynamic...WPF Multiple Document Interface (MDI): Beta Release v1.1: WPF.MDI is a library to imitate the traditional Windows Forms Multiple Document Interface (MDI) features in WPF. This is Beta release, means there's still work to do. Please provide feedback, so next release will be better. Features: Position dependency property MdiLayout dependency property Menu dependency property Ctrl + F4, Ctrl + Tab shortcuts should work Behavior: don’t allow negative values for MdiChild position minimized windows: remember position, tile multiple windows, ...SQL Server PowerShell Extensions: 2.3.1 Production: Release 2.3.1 implements SQLPSX as PowersShell version 2.0 modules. SQLPSX consists of 12 modules with 155 advanced functions, 2 cmdlets and 7 scripts for working with ADO.NET, SMO, Agent, RMO, SSIS, SQL script files, PBM, Performance Counters, SQLProfiler and using Powershell ISE as a SQL and Oracle query tool. In addition optional backend databases and SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 reports are provided with SQLServer and PBM modules. See readme file for details.EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.1 ALPHA: 2.2.1 ALPHAThis release adds in the changes for 4.03a. at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Updated th...NuGet (formerly NuPack): NuGet 1.0 Release Candidate: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. This new build targets the newer feed (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669) and package format. See http://nupack.codeplex.com/documentation?title=Nuspe...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire Silverlight, WPF Charts v3.6.5 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing final version of Visifire, v3.6.5 with the following new feature: * New property AutoFitToPlotArea has been introduced in DataSeries. AutoFitToPlotArea will bring bubbles inside the PlotArea in order to avoid clipping of bubbles in bubble chart. You can visit Visifire documentation to know more. http://www.visifire.com/visifirechartsdocumentation.php Also this release includes few bug fixes: * Chart threw exception while adding new Axis in Chart using Vi...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.5 Production: DonationsDonate via PayPal via PayPal. If you want to, we can also add your name / company on our Donation Acknowledgements page. PEAR channelWe now also have a full PEAR channel! Here's how to use it: New installation: pear channel-discover pear.pearplex.net pear install pearplex/PHPExcel Or if you've already installed PHPExcel before: pear upgrade pearplex/PHPExcel The official page can be found at http://pearplex.net. Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page.??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2010-12-10: ?????All-In-One Code Framework（??） 2010?12??????！！http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ?????release?，???????ASP.NET, WinForm, Silverlight????12?Sample Code。???，??????????sample code。 ?????：http://blog.csdn.net/sjb5201/archive/2010/12/13/6072675.aspx ??，??????MSDN????????????。 http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/zh-CN/codezhchs/threads ?????????????????，??Email ????DNN Simple Article: DNNSimpleArticle Module V00.00.03: The initial release of the DNNSimpleArticle module (labelled V00.00.03) There are C# and VB versions of this module for this initial release. No promises that going forward there will be packages for both languages provided for future releases. This module provides the following functionality Create and display articles Display a paged list of articles Articles get created as DNN ContentItems Categorization provided through DNN Taxonomy SEO functionality for article display providi...UOB & ME: UOB_ME 2.5: latest versionAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.4.3: AutoLoL now supports importing the build pages from Mobafire.com as well! Just insert the url to the build and voila. (For example: http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/build/unforgivens-guide-how-to-build-a-successful-mordekaiser-24061) Stable release of AutoChat (It is still recommended to use with caution and to read the documentation) It is now possible to associate *.lolm files with AutoLoL to quickly open them The selected spells are now displayed in the masteries tab for qu...PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7: This is a final stable release of PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7. This is a minor incremental release that contains all the functionality available in 53121 plus additional features listed below: Improved detection logic for existing PHP installations. Now PHP Manager detects the location to php.ini file in accordance to the PHP specifications Configuring date.timezone. PHP Manager can automatically set the date.timezone directive which is required to be set starting from PHP 5.3 Ability to ...Algorithmia: Algorithmia 1.1: Algorithmia v1.1, released on December 8th, 2010.My Web Pages Starter Kit: 1.3.1 Production Release (Security HOTFIX): Due to a critical security issue, it's strongly advised to update the My Web Pages Starter Kit to this version. Possible attackers could misuse the image upload to transmit any type of file to the website. If you already have a running version of My Web Pages Starter Kit 1.3.0, you can just replace the ftb.imagegallery.aspx file in the root directory with the one attached to this release.ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.4: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: popup WhiteSpaceFilterAttribute tested on mozilla, safari, chrome, opera, ie 9b/8/7/6nopCommerce. ASP.NET open source shopping cart: nopCommerce 1.90: To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 4: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 4 ChangesReintroduced fluent interface support via satellite assembly Added entities support, entity segmentation, and ITweetable/ITweeter interfaces for client development Numerous fixes reported by preview users Preview 3 ChangesNumerous fixes and improvements to core engine Twitter API coverage: a...New Projects.NET Tips Repository: This project is the source code repository for all the projects, samples, and tutorials posted at vahidnasiri.blogspot.com. Its main focus is on .NET programming.a hash implement by basic array and link list: a hash implement by basic array and link listApplication Essentials for WPF, Silverlight, and Windows Phone 7: Application essentials is a simplified, small footprint redux of the Structured MVVM and Color Blending projects and is used to build WPF, Silverlight, and Windows Phone 7 applications with an MVVM architecture.Bit.ly Button: Bit.ly Button lets you use the power of Bit.ly bookmarklet to shorten any webpage (especially on sites like Facebook and Twitter). It's like a sharing button, except it will shorten the link before you share on Facebook or Twitter.Check Dependency: Check Dependency is designed to identify the dependency problems in assemblies. It is a valuable assistant to a project hat has complex dependency in many assemblies.Circo: A product oriented towards the need of having a powerful tool improving the construction process of applications. User interface for creating Entity Dictionary, generating .Net classes and also SQL model. It provides a strong productivity oriented.CoralCubeDB: This is the db for coralcube.Dotnet.Samples: Microsoft® .NET™ sample projects Created by Nano Taboada under a MIT License All projects have been coded using Microsoft(R) Visual Studio(R) 2010 mostly targeting framework version 4.0 Get a free copy of Visual C# 2010 Express at http://tinyurl.com/visualstudio2010expressElasticity: An library implementation of the Scheduler-Agent-Supervisor pattern. http://vasters.com/clemensv/2010/09/28/Cloud+Architecture+The+SchedulerAgentSupervisor+Pattern.aspxFacebook Graph Toolkit: get Graph API in ASP.NET.Grabbers: An object relational library and code generator designed to assist agile development teams generate data aware objects. InSimSniffer: InSimSniffer is a InSim packet sniffer for the racing simulator Live for Speed. It allows programmers to view and debug packets sent by the game.Irrlicht Wrapper for D: A D wrapper for the Irrlicht game engine generated by SWIG.Linq to LDAP: Linq provider built on top of System.DirectoryServices.Protocols for querying LDAP servers.ME Video Player: ME Video Player makes it easier for web developers to present medis on web pages. It's developed in C# and Silverlight by Mahyar Esteki.Mladi.com.hr: CMS system for croatian youth portalMouse Practise: A small project that creates a game to train a beginner to use mouse. Developer's Blog : http://shekhar-pro.blogspot.com Follow on Twitter : http://twitter.com/samajshekharMVVMKit: MVVMKit makes it easier to create WPF applications using the MVVM pattern.mygully-searcher: MyGully-Searcher makes it easier for Mygully-Forum-Users to search the forums for downloads. You'll no longer have to click to all forums. It's developed in VB.Net.NBooks Accounting: A simple clone to Quickbooks.Projeto Teste do curso de Pós graduação em Engenharia de Software.: Projeto teste do curso de pós graduação em Engenharia de Software. Códigos exemplos em Javascript e outros. Nayanne Araújo Bonifácio.Razor Reports - a Visualizer for the DotNetNuke Reports Module: Razor Reports is a Visualizer for the DotNetNuke Reports ModuleSiteGrabber: Groepsopdracht 2Supermarket: Hat: tTheSharePage: Project contains the core library for use in my website that i am developing for my NIIT project work. (The website will integrate facebook and twitter in a single website) The library features full custom developed facebook and twitter sdk library that can even be reused.Tip Of Day SharePoint WebPart: Tip Of Day webpartTranslit Hebrew to Russian: Application, which can translit Hebrew text into Russian.WP7 Thai Text Input: WP7 Thai text input makes it possible to enter Thai characters in WP7. It's developed in C# and were used in some of the CoreSharp's WP7 apps.

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• Mysql server crashes Innodb

  - by martin

  Today we got some DB crash. The DB is InnoDB. At firstin log: 120404 10:57:40 InnoDB: ERROR: the age of the last checkpoint is 9433732, InnoDB: which exceeds the log group capacity 9433498. InnoDB: If you are using big BLOB or TEXT rows, you must set the InnoDB: combined size of log files at least 10 times bigger than the InnoDB: largest such row. 120404 10:58:48 InnoDB: ERROR: the age of the last checkpoint is 9825579, InnoDB: which exceeds the log group capacity 9433498. InnoDB: If you are using big BLOB or TEXT rows, you must set the InnoDB: combined size of log files at least 10 times bigger than the InnoDB: largest such row. 120404 10:59:04 InnoDB: ERROR: the age of the last checkpoint is 13992586, InnoDB: which exceeds the log group capacity 9433498. InnoDB: If you are using big BLOB or TEXT rows, you must set the InnoDB: combined size of log files at least 10 times bigger than the InnoDB: largest such row. 120404 10:59:20 InnoDB: ERROR: the age of the last checkpoint is 18059881, InnoDB: which exceeds the log group capacity 9433498. InnoDB: If you are using big BLOB or TEXT rows, you must set the InnoDB: combined size of log files at least 10 times bigger than the InnoDB: largest such row. after manual service stop and normal PC restart : 120404 11:12:35 InnoDB: Error: page 3473451 log sequence number 105 802365904 InnoDB: is in the future! Current system log sequence number 105 796344770. InnoDB: Your database may be corrupt or you may have copied the InnoDB InnoDB: tablespace but not the InnoDB log files. See InnoDB: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/forcing-recovery.html InnoDB: for more information. InnoDB: 1 transaction(s) which must be rolled back or cleaned up InnoDB: in total 1 row operations to undo InnoDB: Trx id counter is 0 1103869440 120404 11:12:37 InnoDB: Error: page 0 log sequence number 105 834817616 InnoDB: is in the future! Current system log sequence number 105 796344770. InnoDB: Your database may be corrupt or you may have copied the InnoDB InnoDB: tablespace but not the InnoDB log files. See InnoDB: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/forcing-recovery.html InnoDB: for more information. InnoDB: Last MySQL binlog file position 0 3710603, file name .\mysql-bin.000336 InnoDB: Starting in background the rollback of uncommitted transactions 120404 11:12:38 InnoDB: Rolling back trx with id 0 1103866646, 1 rows to undo 120404 11:12:38 InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 105 796344770 120404 11:12:38 InnoDB: Error: page 2097163 log sequence number 105 803249754 InnoDB: is in the future! Current system log sequence number 105 796344770. InnoDB: Your database may be corrupt or you may have copied the InnoDB InnoDB: tablespace but not the InnoDB log files. See InnoDB: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/forcing-recovery.html InnoDB: for more information. InnoDB: Rolling back of trx id 0 1103866646 completed 120404 11:12:39 InnoDB: Rollback of non-prepared transactions completed 120404 11:12:39 [Note] Event Scheduler: Loaded 0 events 120404 11:12:39 [Note] wampmysqld: ready for connections. Version: '5.1.53-community' socket: '' port: 3306 MySQL Community Server (GPL) 120404 11:12:40 InnoDB: Error: page 2097162 log sequence number 105 803215859 InnoDB: is in the future! Current system log sequence number 105 796345097. InnoDB: Your database may be corrupt or you may have copied the InnoDB InnoDB: tablespace but not the InnoDB log files. See InnoDB: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/forcing-recovery.html InnoDB: for more information. 120404 11:12:40 InnoDB: Error: page 2097156 log sequence number 105 803181181 InnoDB: is in the future! Current system log sequence number 105 796345097. InnoDB: Your database may be corrupt or you may have copied the InnoDB InnoDB: tablespace but not the InnoDB log files. See InnoDB: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/forcing-recovery.html InnoDB: for more information. 120404 11:12:40 InnoDB: Error: page 2097157 log sequence number 105 803193066 InnoDB: is in the future! Current system log sequence number 105 796345097. InnoDB: Your database may be corrupt or you may have copied the InnoDB InnoDB: tablespace but not the InnoDB log files. See InnoDB: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/forcing-recovery.html InnoDB: for more information. when tried to recover data get : key_buffer_size=16777216 read_buffer_size=262144 max_used_connections=0 max_threads=151 threads_connected=0 It is possible that mysqld could use up to key_buffer_size + (read_buffer_size + sort_buffer_size)*max_threads = 133725 K bytes of memory Hope that's ok; if not, decrease some variables in the equation. thd: 0x0 Attempting backtrace. You can use the following information to find out where mysqld died. If you see no messages after this, something went terribly wrong... 0000000140262AFC mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 00000001402AAFA1 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 00000001402AB33A mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 0000000140268219 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 000000014027DB13 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 00000001402A909F mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 00000001402A91B6 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 000000014025B9B0 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 000000014022F9C6 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 0000000140219979 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 000000014009ABCF mysqld.exe!?ha_initialize_handlerton@@YAHPEAUst_plugin_int@@@Z() 000000014003308C mysqld.exe!?plugin_lock_by_name@@YAPEAUst_plugin_int@@PEAVTHD@@PEBUst_mysql_lex_string@@H@Z() 00000001400375A9 mysqld.exe!?plugin_init@@YAHPEAHPEAPEADH@Z() 000000014001DACE mysqld.exe!handle_shutdown() 000000014001E285 mysqld.exe!?win_main@@YAHHPEAPEAD@Z() 000000014001E632 mysqld.exe!?mysql_service@@YAHPEAX@Z() 00000001402EA477 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 00000001402EA545 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 000000007712652D kernel32.dll!BaseThreadInitThunk() 000000007725C521 ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart() The manual page at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/crashing.html contains information that should help you find out what is causing the crash. 120404 14:17:49 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. 120404 14:17:49 [Warning] option 'innodb-force-recovery': signed value 8 adjusted to 6 InnoDB: The user has set SRV_FORCE_NO_LOG_REDO on InnoDB: Skipping log redo InnoDB: Error: trying to access page number 4290979199 in space 0, InnoDB: space name .\ibdata1, InnoDB: which is outside the tablespace bounds. InnoDB: Byte offset 0, len 16384, i/o type 10. InnoDB: If you get this error at mysqld startup, please check that InnoDB: your my.cnf matches the ibdata files that you have in the InnoDB: MySQL server. 120404 14:17:52 InnoDB: Assertion failure in thread 3928 in file .\fil\fil0fil.c lin23 InnoDB: We intentionally generate a memory trap. InnoDB: Submit a detailed bug report to http://bugs.mysql.com. InnoDB: If you get repeated assertion failures or crashes, even InnoDB: immediately after the mysqld startup, there may be InnoDB: corruption in the InnoDB tablespace. Please refer to InnoDB: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/forcing-recovery.html InnoDB: about forcing recovery. 120404 14:17:52 - mysqld got exception 0xc0000005 ; This could be because you hit a bug. It is also possible that this binary or one of the libraries it was linked against is corrupt, improperly built, or misconfigured. This error can also be caused by malfunctioning hardware. We will try our best to scrape up some info that will hopefully help diagnose the problem, but since we have already crashed, something is definitely wrong and this may fail. key_buffer_size=16777216 read_buffer_size=262144 max_used_connections=0 max_threads=151 threads_connected=0 It is possible that mysqld could use up to key_buffer_size + (read_buffer_size + sort_buffer_size)*max_threads = 133725 K bytes of memory Hope that's ok; if not, decrease some variables in the equation. thd: 0x0 Attempting backtrace. You can use the following information to find out where mysqld died. If you see no messages after this, something went terribly wrong... 0000000140262AFC mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 00000001402AAFA1 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 00000001402AB33A mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 0000000140268219 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 000000014027DB13 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 00000001402A909F mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 00000001402A91B6 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 000000014025B9B0 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 000000014022F9C6 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 0000000140219979 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 000000014009ABCF mysqld.exe!?ha_initialize_handlerton@@YAHPEAUst_plugin_int@@@Z() 000000014003308C mysqld.exe!?plugin_lock_by_name@@YAPEAUst_plugin_int@@PEAVTHD@@PEBUst_mysql_lex_string@@H@Z() 00000001400375A9 mysqld.exe!?plugin_init@@YAHPEAHPEAPEADH@Z() 000000014001DACE mysqld.exe!handle_shutdown() 000000014001E285 mysqld.exe!?win_main@@YAHHPEAPEAD@Z() 000000014001E632 mysqld.exe!?mysql_service@@YAHPEAX@Z() 00000001402EA477 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 00000001402EA545 mysqld.exe!?check_next_symbol@Gis_read_stream@@QEAA_ND@Z() 000000007712652D kernel32.dll!BaseThreadInitThunk() 000000007725C521 ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart() The manual page at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/crashing.html contains information that should help you find out what is causing the crash. Any suggestion how to get DB working ????

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• Is Social Media The Vital Skill You Aren’t Tracking?

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Mark Bennett - Originally featured in Talent Management Excellence The ever-increasing presence of the workforce on social media presents opportunities as well as risks for organizations. While on the one hand, we read about social media embarrassments happening to organizations, on the other we see that social media activities by workers and candidates can enhance a company’s brand and provide insight into what individuals are, or can become, influencers in the social media sphere. HR can play a key role in helping organizations make the most value out of the activities and presence of workers and candidates, while at the same time also helping to manage the risks that come with the permanence and viral nature of social media. What is Missing from Understanding Our Workforce? “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three-times more productive.”  Lew Platt, Former Chairman, President, CEO, Hewlett-Packard  What Lew Platt recognized was that organizations only have a partial understanding of what their workforce is capable of. This lack of understanding impacts the company in several negative ways: 1. A particular skill that the company needs to access in one part of the organization might exist somewhere else, but there is no record that the skill exists, so the need is unfulfilled. 2. As market conditions change rapidly, the company needs to know strategic options, but some options are missed entirely because the company doesn’t know that sufficient capability already exists to enable those options. 3. Employees may miss out on opportunities to demonstrate how their hidden skills could create new value to the company. Why don’t companies have that more complete picture of their workforce capabilities – that is, not know what they know? One very good explanation is that companies put most of their efforts into rating their workforce according to the jobs and roles they are filling today. This is the essence of two important talent management processes: recruiting and performance appraisals.  In recruiting, a set of requirements is put together for a job, either explicitly or indirectly through a job description. During the recruiting process, much of the attention is paid towards whether the candidate has the qualifications, the skills, the experience and the cultural fit to be successful in the role. This makes a lot of sense.  In the performance appraisal process, an employee is measured on how well they performed the functions of their role and in an effort to help the employee do even better next time, they are also measured on proficiency in the competencies that are deemed to be key in doing that job. Again, the logic is impeccable.  But in both these cases, two adages come to mind: 1. What gets measured is what gets managed. 2. You only see what you are looking for. In other words, the fact that the current roles the workforce are performing are the basis for measuring which capabilities the workforce has, makes them the only capabilities to be measured. What was initially meant to be a positive, i.e. identify what is needed to perform well and measure it, in order that it can be managed, comes with the unintended negative consequence of overshadowing the other capabilities the workforce has. This also comes with an employee engagement price, for the measurements and management of workforce capabilities is to typically focus on where the workforce comes up short. Again, it makes sense to do this, since improving a capability that appears to result in improved performance benefits, both the individual through improved performance ratings and the company through improved productivity. But this is based on the assumption that the capabilities identified and their required proficiencies are the only attributes of the individual that matter. Anything else the individual brings that results in high performance, while resulting in a desired performance outcome, often goes unrecognized or underappreciated at best. As social media begins to occupy a more important part in current and future roles in organizations, businesses must incorporate social media savvy and innovation into job descriptions and expectations. These new measures could provide insight into how well someone can use social media tools to influence communities and decision makers; keep abreast of trends in fast-moving industries; present a positive brand image for the organization around thought leadership, customer focus, social responsibility; and coordinate and collaborate with partners. These measures should demonstrate the “social capital” the individual has invested in and developed over time. Without this dimension, “short cut” methods may generate a narrow set of positive metrics that do not have real, long-lasting benefits to the organization. How Workforce Reputation Management Helps HR Harness Social Media With hundreds of petabytes of social media data flowing across Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, businesses are tapping technology solutions to effectively leverage social for HR. Workforce reputation management technology helps organizations discover, mobilize and retain talent by providing insight into the social reputation and influence of the workforce while also helping organizations monitor employee social media policy compliance and mitigate social media risk.  There are three major ways that workforce reputation management technology can play a strategic role to support HR: 1. Improve Awareness and Decisions on Talent Many organizations measure the skills and competencies that they know they need today, but are unaware of what other skills and competencies their workforce has that could be essential tomorrow. How about whether your workforce has the reputation and influence to make their skills and competencies more effective? Many organizations don’t have insight into the social media “reach” their workforce has, which is becoming more critical to business performance. These features help organizations, managers, and employees improve many talent processes and decision making, including the following: Hiring and Assignments. People and teams with higher reputations are considered more valuable and effective workers. Someone with high reputation who refers a candidate also can have high credibility as a source for hires.   Training and Development. Reputation trend analysis can impact program decisions regarding training offerings by showing how reputation and influence across the workforce changes in concert with training. Worker reputation impacts development plans and goal choices by helping the individual see which development efforts result in improved reputation and influence.   Finding Hidden Talent. Managers can discover hidden talent and skills amongst employees based on a combination of social profile information and social media reputation. Employees can improve their personal brand and accelerate their career development.  2. Talent Search and Discovery The right technology helps organizations find information on people that might otherwise be hidden. By leveraging access to candidate and worker social profiles as well as their social relationships, workforce reputation management provides companies with a more complete picture of what their knowledge, skills, and attributes are and what they can in turn access. This more complete information helps to find the right talent both outside the organization as well as the right, perhaps previously hidden talent, within the organization to fill roles and staff projects, particularly those roles and projects that are required in reaction to fast-changing opportunities and circumstances. 3. Reputation Brings Credibility Workforce reputation management technology provides a clearer picture of how candidates and workers are viewed by their peers and communities across a wide range of social reputation and influence metrics. This information is less subject to individual bias and can impact critical decision-making. Knowing the individual’s reputation and influence enables the organization to predict how well their capabilities and behaviors will have a positive effect on desired business outcomes. Many roles that have the highest impact on overall business performance are dependent on the individual’s influence and reputation. In addition, reputation and influence measures offer a very tangible source of feedback for workers, providing them with insight that helps them develop themselves and their careers and see the effectiveness of those efforts by tracking changes over time in their reputation and influence. The following are some examples of the different reputation and influence measures of the workforce that Workforce Reputation Management could gather and analyze: Generosity – How often the user reposts other’s posts. Influence – How often the user’s material is reposted by others.  Engagement – The ratio of recent posts with references (e.g. links to other posts) to the total number of posts.  Activity – How frequently the user posts. (e.g. number per day)  Impact – The size of the users’ social networks, which indicates their ability to reach unique followers, friends, or users.   Clout – The number of references and citations of the user’s material in others’ posts.  The Vital Ingredient of Workforce Reputation Management: Employee Participation “Nothing about me, without me.” Valerie Billingham, “Through the Patient’s Eyes”, Salzburg Seminar Session 356, 1998 Since data resides primarily in social media, a question arises: what manner is used to collect that data? While much of social media activity is publicly accessible (as many who wished otherwise have learned to their chagrin), the social norms of social media have developed to put some restrictions on what is acceptable behavior and by whom. Disregarding these norms risks a repercussion firestorm. One of the more recognized norms is that while individuals can follow and engage with other individual’s public social activity (e.g. Twitter updates) fairly freely, the more an organization does this unprompted and without getting permission from the individual beforehand, the more likely the organization risks a totally opposite outcome from the one desired. Instead, the organization must look for permission from the individual, which can be met with resistance. That resistance comes from not knowing how the information will be used, how it will be shared with others, and not receiving enough benefit in return for granting permission. As the quote above about patient concerns and rights succinctly states, no one likes not feeling in control of the information about themselves, or the uncertainty about where it will be used. This is well understood in consumer social media (i.e. permission-based marketing) and is applicable to workforce reputation management. However, asking permission leaves open the very real possibility that no one, or so few, will grant permission, resulting in a small set of data with little usefulness for the company. Connecting Individual Motivation to Organization Needs So what is it that makes an individual decide to grant an organization access to the data it wants? It is when the individual’s own motivations are in alignment with the organization’s objectives. In the case of workforce reputation management, when the individual is motivated by a desire for increased visibility and career growth opportunities to advertise their skills and level of influence and reputation, they are aligned with the organizations’ objectives; to fill resource needs or strategically build better awareness of what skills are present in the workforce, as well as levels of influence and reputation. Individuals can see the benefit of granting access permission to the company through multiple means. One is through simple social awareness; they begin to discover that peers who are getting more career opportunities are those who are signed up for workforce reputation management. Another is where companies take the message directly to the individual; we think you would benefit from signing up with our workforce reputation management solution. Another, more strategic approach is to make reputation management part of a larger Career Development effort by the company; providing a wide set of tools to help the workforce find ways to plan and take action to achieve their career aspirations in the organization. An effective mechanism, that facilitates connecting the visibility and career growth motivations of the workforce with the larger context of the organization’s business objectives, is to use game mechanics to help individuals transform their career goals into concrete, actionable steps, such as signing up for reputation management. This works in favor of companies looking to use workforce reputation because the workforce is more apt to see how it fits into achieving their overall career goals, as well as seeing how other participation brings additional benefits.  Once an individual has signed up with reputation management, not only have they made themselves more visible within the organization and increased their career growth opportunities, they have also enabled a tool that they can use to better understand how their actions and behaviors impact their influence and reputation. Since they will be able to see their reputation and influence measurements change over time, they will gain better insight into how reputation and influence impacts their effectiveness in a role, as well as how their behaviors and skill levels in turn affect their influence and reputation. This insight can trigger much more directed, and effective, efforts by the individual to improve their ability to perform at a higher level and become more productive. The increased sense of autonomy the individual experiences, in linking the insight they gain to the actions and behavior changes they make, greatly enhances their engagement with their role as well as their career prospects within the company. Workforce reputation management takes the wide range of disparate data about the workforce being produced across various social media platforms and transforms it into accessible, relevant, and actionable information that helps the organization achieve its desired business objectives. Social media holds untapped insights about your talent, brand and business, and workforce reputation management can help unlock them. Imagine - if you could find the hidden secrets of your businesses, how much more productive and efficient would your organization be? Mark Bennett is a Director of Product Strategy at Oracle. Mark focuses on setting the strategic vision and direction for tools that help organizations understand, shape, and leverage the capabilities of their workforce to achieve business objectives, as well as help individuals work effectively to achieve their goals and navigate their own growth. His combination of a deep technical background in software design and development, coupled with a broad knowledge of business challenges and thinking in today’s globalized, rapidly changing, technology accelerated economy, has enabled him to identify and incorporate key innovations that are central to Oracle Fusion’s unique value proposition. Mark has over the course of his career been in charge of the design, development, and strategy of Talent Management products and the design and development of cutting edge software that is better equipped to handle the increasingly complex demands of users while also remaining easy to use. Follow him @mpbennett

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 02, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 02, 2010New ProjectsBackupCleaner.Net: A C#.Net-based tool for automatically removing old backups selectively. It can be used when you already make daily backups on disk, and want to cle...C# Dotnetnuke Module development Template for Visual Studio 2010: C# DNN Module Development template for Visual Studio 2010 Get a head-start on DNN Module development. Whether you're a pro or just starting with D...Christoc's DotNetNuke C# Module Development Template: A quick and easy to use C# Module development template for DotNetNuke 5, Visual Studio 2008.Client per la digitalizzazione di documenti integrato con DotNetNuke: Questo applicativo in ambiente windows 32bit consente di digitalizzare documenti con piu scanner contemporaneamente, processare OCR in 17 Lingue (p...ContainerOne - C# application server: An application server completely written in c# (.net 4.0).Drop7 Silverlight: It's a clone of the original Drop7 written in Silverlight (C#). Echo.Net: Echo.Net is an embedded task manager for web and windows apps. It allows for simple management of background tasks at specific times. It's develope...energy: Smartgrid Demand Response ImplementationGenerate Twitter Message for Live Writer: This is a plug-in for Windows Live Writer that generates a twitter message with your blog post name and a TinyUrl link to the blog post. It will d...HomingCMS.Net: A lightweight cms.Information Système & Shell à distance: Un web service qui permet d'avoir des informations sur le système et de lancer de commande (terminal) à distance.Javascript And Jquery: gqq's javascript and jquery examplesMemory++: "Tweak the memory to speed up your computer" Memory ++ is basically an application that will speed up your computer ensuring comfort in their norma...Microformat Parsers for .NET: Microformat's Parsers for .NET helps you to collect information you run into on the web, that is stored by means of microformats. It's written in C...MoneyManager: Trying to make Personal Finances management System for my needs. Microsoft stopped to support MSMoney - it makes me so sad, so I wanna to make my ...Open source software for running a financial markets trading business: The core conceptual model will support running a business in the financial markets, for example running a trading exchange business.Ovik: Open Video Converter with simple and intuitive interface for converting video files to the open formats.Oxygen Smil Player: The <project name> is a open a-smil player implementation that is meaned to be connected to a Digital Signage CMS like Oxygen media platform ( www....Protect The Carrot: Protect The Carrot is a small fastpaced XNA game. You are a farmer whose single carrot is under attack by ravenous rabbits. You have to shoot the r...Race Day Commander: The core project is designed to support coaches of "long distance" or "endurance" sporting events coach their athletes during a race. The idea bein...Raygun Diplomacy: Raygun Diplomacy is an action shooter sandbox game set in a futuristic world. It will use procedural generation for the world, weapons, and vehicle...Resx-Translator-Bot: Resx-Translator-Bot uses Google Tanslate to automatically translate the .resx-files in your .NET and ASP.NET applications.Sistema de Expedición del Permiso Único de Siembra: Sistema de Expedición del Permiso Único de Siembra.SiteOA: 一个基于asp.net mvc2的OAStraighce: This is a low-featured, cyclic (log files reside in appname\1.txt to at mose 31.txt), thread-safe and non-blocking TraceListener with some extensio...Touch Mice: Touch Mice turns multiple mice on a computer into individual touch devices. This allows you to create multi-touch applications using the new touch...TStringValidator: A project helper to validate strings. Use this class to hold your regex strings for use with any project's string validation.Ultimate Dotnetnuke Skin Object: Ultimate Skin Object is a Dotnetnuke 5.4.2+ extension that will allow you to easily change your skins doc type, remove unneeded css files, inject e...Ventosus: Ventosus is an upcoming partially text-based game. No further information is available at this time.vit: vit based on asp.net mvcW7 Auto Playlist Generator: Purpose: This application is designed to create W7MC playlist automatically whenever you want. You can select if you want the playlist sorted Alpha...W7 Video Playlist Creator: Purpose: This program allows you to quickly create wvx video play list for Windows Media Center. This functionality is not included in WMC and is u...New ReleasesBCryptTool: BCryptTool v0.2.1: The Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 is needed to run this program.BFBC2 PRoCon: PRoCon 0.5.2.0: Notes available on phogue.netC# Dotnetnuke Module development Template for Visual Studio 2010: DNNModule 1.0: This is the initial release of DNNModule as was available for download from http://www.subodh.com/Projects/DNNModule In this release: Contains one...Client per la digitalizzazione di documenti integrato con DotNetNuke: Versione 3.0.1: Versione 3.0.1CommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.4 - Final Release: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 3.5 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars,...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V20: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V21: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...DirectQ: Release 1.8.4: Significant bug fixes and improvments over 1.8.3c; there may be some bugs that I haven't caught here as development became a little disjointed towa...DotNetNuke 5 Thai Language Pack: 1.0.1: Fixed Installation Problem. Version 1.0 -> 1.0.1 Type : Character encoding. Change : ().dnn description file to "ไทย (ไทย)".dnnEcho.Net: Echo.Net 1.0: Initial release of Echo.Net.Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.018: ShapeMaker, Program Window, Timer, and many threading errors fixedExtend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.019: Added Rectangles to shapemaker, and the bubble quizGenerate Twitter Message for Live Writer: Final Source Code Plus Binaries: Compete C# source code available below. I have also included the binary for those that just want to run it.GoogleMap Control: GoogleMap Control 4.5: Map and map events are only functional. New state, persistence and event implementation in progress. Javascript classes are implemented as MS AJAX ...Industrial Dashboard: ID 3.1: -Added new widget IndustrialSlickGrid. -Added example with IndustrialChart.LongBar: LongBar 2.1 Build 310: - Library: Double-clicking on tile will install it - Feedback: Now you can type your e-mail and comment for errorMavention: Mavention Insert Lorem ipsum: A Sandbox Solution for SharePoint 2010 that allows you to easily insert Lorem ipsum text into RTE. More information and screenshots available @ htt...Memory++: Memory ++: Tweak the memory to speed up your computer Memory is basically an application that will speed up your computer ensuring comfort in their normal ac...MyVocabulary: Version 2.0: Improvements over version 1.0: Several bug fixes New shortcuts added to increase usability A new section for testing verbs was addednopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.: nopCommerce 1.60: You can also install nopCommerce using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. Simply click the button below: nopCommerce To see the full list of f...Nuntio Content: Nuntio Content 4.2.1: Patch release that fixes a couple of minor issues with version numbers and priority settings for role content. The release one package for DNN 4 an...Ovik: Ovik v0.0.1 (Preview Release): This is a very early preview release of Ovik. It contains only the pure processes of selecting files and launching a conversion process. Preview r...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.3c Production: This is a patch release for 26477. Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page. DonationsDonate via PayPal. If you want to, we can also a...PowerShell Admin Modules: PAM 0.2: Version 0.2 contains the PAMShare module with Get-Share Get-ShareAccessMask Get-ShareSecurity New-Share Remove-Share Set-Share and the PAMath modu...Professional MRDS: RDS 2008 R3 Release: This is an updated version of the code to work with RDS 2008 R3 (version 2.2.76.0). IMPORTANT NOTE These samples are supplied as a ZIP file. Unzip...Protect The Carrot: First release: We provide two ways to install the game. The first is PTC 1.0.0.0 Zip which contains a Click-Once installer (the DVD type since codeplex does not...PST File Format SDK: PST File Format SDK v0.2.0: Updated version of pstsdk with several bug fixes, including: Improved compiler support (several changes, including two patches from hub) Fixed Do...Race Day Commander: Race Day Commander v1: First release. The exact code that was written on the day in 6 hours.Resx-Translator-Bot: Release 1.0: Initial releaseSalient.StackApps: JavaScript API Wrapper beta 2: This is the first draft of the generated JS wrapper. Added basic test coverage for each route that can also serve as basic usage examples. More i...SharePoint 2010 PowerShell Scripts & Utilities: PSSP2010 Utils 0.2: Added Install-SPIFilter script cmdlet More information can be found at http://www.ravichaganti.com/blog/?p=1439SharePoint Tools from China Community: ECB菜单控制器: ECB菜单控制器Shopping Cart .NET: 1.5: Shopping Cart .NET 1.5 has received an upgrade to .NET 4.0 along with SQL Server 2005/8. There is a new AJAX Based inventory system that helps you ...sMODfix: sMODfix v1.0b: Added: provisional support for ecm_v54 Added: provisional support for gfx_v88SNCFT Gadget: SNCFT gadget v1: cette version est la version 1 de ma gadgetSnippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.3: Change logChanges for Visual Studio 2010Fixed bug where "Export as Snippet" was failing in a website project Changed Snippet Explorer search to u...sNPCedit: sNPCedit v0.9b: + Fixed: structure of resources + Changed: some labels in GUISoftware Is Hardwork: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+05: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+05SQL Server PowerShell Extensions: 2.2.3 Beta: Release 2.2 re-implements SQLPSX as PowersShell version 2.0 modules. SQLPSX consists of 9 modules with 133 advanced functions, 2 cmdlets and 7 scri...StackOverflow.Net: Preview Beta: Goes with the Stack Apps API version 0.8Ultimate Dotnetnuke Skin Object: Ultimate Skin Object V1.00.00: Ultimate Skin Object is a Dotnetnuke 5.4.2+ extension that will allow you to easily change your skins doc type, remove unneeded css files, inject e...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30601.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVelocity Shop: JUNE 2010: Source code aligned to .NET Framework 4.0, ASP.NET 4.0 and Windows Server AppFabric Caching RC.ViperWorks Ignition: ViperWorks_5.0.1005.31: ViperWorks Ignition Source, version 5.0.1005.31.Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 VM Factory: Session Recordings: This release contains the "raw" and undedited session recordings and slides delivered by the team. 2010-06-01 Create package and add two session r...W7 Auto Playlist Generator: Source Code plus Binaries: Compete C# and WinForm source code available below. I have also included the binary for those that just want to run it.W7 Video Playlist Creator: Source Code plus Binaries: Compete C# and WPF source code available below. I have also included the binary for those that just want to run it.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationBlogEngine.NETIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterMirror Testing SystemRawrCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightPHPExcelCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 03, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 03, 2012Popular ReleasesLiveChat Starter Kit: LCSK v1.5.2: New features: Visitor location (City - Country) from geo-location Pass configuration via javascript for the chat box New visitor identification (no more using the IP address as visitor identification) To update from 1.5.1 Run the /src/1.5.2-sql-updates.txt SQL script to update your database tables. If you have it installed via NuGet, simply update your package and the file will be included so you can run the update script. New installation The easiest way to add LCSK to your app is by...Prime Factorization: Prime Factorization V2: Download the installation package and run it, to install prime factorization on your computer.DNN Content Localization Tools: CLTools v0.4 (Beta4): 3th Beta release for DNN 6.1 and obove Bug corrections : - Copy module work againNTemplates: NTemplates full source code and examples: This release includes the following changes: - NTemplates code. More enhacements and bug fixing. Nested scans seems to be working ok now. New event: ScanStart. Very usuful for calculating totals (see the example) - Examples. 2 new examples on nested scans. One of them very simple I did just for debugging. The other one is a report of invoices grouped by vendor, including totals calculations. Planned Roadmap: - Work on fixing performance bottlenecek: Try to compile the expression...ZXMAK2: Version 2.6.2.3: - add support for ZIP files created on UNIX system; - improve WAV support (fixed PCM24, FLOAT32; added PCM32, FLOAT64); - fix drag-n-drop on modal dialogs; - tape AutoPlay feature (thanks to Woody for algorithm).Net Code Samples: Full WCF Duplex Service Example: Full WCF Duplex Service ExampleKendo UI ASP.NET Sample Applications: Sample Applications (2012-06-01): Sample application(s) demonstrating the use of Kendo UI in ASP.NET applications.Better Explorer: Better Explorer Beta 1: Finally, the first Beta is here! There were a lot of changes, including: Translations into 10 different languages (the translations are not complete and will be updated soon) Conditional Select new tools for managing archives Folder Tools tab new search bar and Search Tab new image editing tools update function many bug fixes, stability fixes, and memory leak fixes other new features as well! Please check it out and if there are any problems, let us know. :) Also, do not forge...myManga: myManga v1.0.0.3: Will include MangaPanda as a default option. ChangeLog Updating from Previous Version: Extract contents of Release - myManga v1.0.0.3.zip to previous version's folder. Replaces: myManga.exe BakaBox.dll CoreMangaClasses.dll Manga.dll Plugins/MangaReader.manga.dll Plugins/MangaFox.manga.dll Plugins/MangaHere.manga.dll Plugins/MangaPanda.manga.dllPlayer Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 Metro (Preview 3): Player Framework for HTML/JavaScript and XAML/C# Metro Style Applications. Additional DownloadsIIS Smooth Streaming Client SDK for Windows 8 Microsoft PlayReady Client SDK for Metro Style Apps Release notes:Support for Windows 8 Release Preview (released 5/31/12) Advertising support (VAST, MAST, VPAID, & clips) Miscellaneous improvements and bug fixesMicrosoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.54: Fix for issue #18161: pretty-printing CSS @media rule throws an exception due to mismatched Indent/Unindent pair.Silverlight Toolkit: Silverlight 5 Toolkit Source - May 2012: Source code for December 2011 Silverlight 5 Toolkit release.Windows 8 Metro RSS Reader: RSS Reader release 6: Changed background and foreground colors Used VariableSizeGrid layout to wrap blog posts with images Sort items with Images first, text-only last Enabled Caching to improve navigation between framesJson.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 6: New feature - Added IgnoreDataMemberAttribute support New feature - Added GetResolvedPropertyName to DefaultContractResolver New feature - Added CheckAdditionalContent to JsonSerializer Change - Metro build now always uses late bound reflection Change - JsonTextReader no longer returns no content after consecutive underlying content read failures Fix - Fixed bad JSON in an array with error handling creating an infinite loop Fix - Fixed deserializing objects with a non-default cons...DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.00: Major Highlights Fixed issue in the Site Settings when single quotes were being treated as escape characters Fixed issue loading the Mobile Premium Data after upgrading from CE to PE Fixed errors logged when updating folder provider settings Fixed the order of the mobile device capabilities in the Site Redirection Management UI The User Profile page was completely rebuilt. We needed User Profiles to have multiple child pages. This would allow for the most flexibility by still f...????: ????2.0.1: 1、?????。WiX Toolset: WiX v3.6 RC: WiX v3.6 RC (3.6.2928.0) provides feature complete Burn with VS11 support. For more information see Rob's blog post about the release: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/5/28/WiX-v3.6-Release-Candidate-availableJavascript .NET: Javascript .NET v0.7: SetParameter() reverts to its old behaviour of allowing JavaScript code to add new properties to wrapped C# objects. The behavior added briefly in 0.6 (throws an exception) can be had via the new SetParameterOptions.RejectUnknownProperties. TerminateExecution now uses its isolate to terminate the correct context automatically. Added support for converting all C# integral types, decimal and enums to JavaScript numbers. (Previously only the common types were handled properly.) Bug fixe...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0 (May 2012): Fixes: unserialize() of negative float numbers fix pcre possesive quantifiers and character class containing ()[] array deserilization when the array contains a reference to ISerializable parsing lambda function fix round() reimplemented as it is in PHP to avoid .NET rounding errors filesize bypass for FileInfo.Length bug in Mono New features: Time zones reimplemented, uses Windows/Linux databaseSharePoint Euro 2012 - UEFA European Football Predictor: havivi.euro2012.wsp (1.1): New fetures:Admin enable / disable match Hide/Show Euro 2012 SharePoint lists (3 lists) Installing SharePoint Euro 2012 PredictorSharePoint Euro 2012 Predictor has been developed as a SharePoint Sandbox solution to support SharePoint Online (Office 365) Download the solution havivi.euro2012.wsp from the download page: Downloads Upload this solution to your Site Collection via the solutions area. Click on Activate to make the web parts in the solution available for use in the Site C...New ProjectsAFS.PhonePusherConnectorVX: pusher for phone vxApache: this is the Apache project.Apple: this is the Apple project.CUARTOAZZJL: HURRA!!Designing Windows 8 Applications with C# and XAML: This project hosts the source code used in the example projects for the book, Designing Windows 8 Metro Applications with C# and XAML.Easy Internet: CyberWeb ist ein einfacher Webbrowser für PC Neulinge. Ideal für Leute, die noch keine PC-Erfahrung haben.Easy Outlook Backup: Beschreibung: Easy Outlook Backup ist ein Programm das alle Daten von Outlook sichert. Ideal für Leute, die noch keine PC-Erfahrung haben. Easy Realtime Start: Beschreibung: Easy Realtime Start ist ein Programm das einen Prozess in höchster Priorität startet. Und das ganz bequem Per drag & drop. Ideal für Leute, die aufwendige Programme starten müssen. (zB.: “Blender” Free 3D Designer)eStock: eStock ist ein Verwaltungstool für Elektroniker um Bauteile im "Lager" sowie Projekte zu verwalten. Es bietet eine Möglichkeit festzulegen, um welche Art von Bauteil es sich handelt und wo sich dieses im Lager bzw. Regal befindet. Die Projektverwaltung ermöglicht es, Bauteile einem Projekt hinzuzufügen und eine Bestellliste / Einkaufsliste von Bauteilen, die nicht mehr im Lager vorhanden sind, zu erstellen. FuTTY: FireEgl's PuTTY -- FuTTY! FuTTY is a fork of PuTTY and PuTTYTray.GeometryWorld: To Do...Google: this is the Google project.Google Advance Search: An easy way to create documents search at Google and read your emails and Much moregoogle maps viewer for dynamics crm 2011: Easy google maps viewer for dynamics CRM 2011GPS Status - (GPS tool für GPS-Dongles und Mäuse) - GPS-Empfänger: Mein Programm verbindet sich mit dem externen GPS über einen Com-Port und bietet verschiedene Tools.Harmony Text Editor: Harmony is a ridiculously simple text editor for code and poetry.Hi! Football: .Goal / Objective -> To help friends gather for enjoying watching football together. .How it works -> To basically choose your favorite team, choose one of the matches fetched for his team, our app will generate a list of popular restraunts, cafes where he can watch the chosen match, the user can select one of the generated locations around his area, and create an event inviting his friends to join him and he can also join other friends' events.Java: this is the Java project.LevelUp Serializer: LevelUp Serializer is a small and simple serialize library.It can help developer to serialize and deserialize data more convenient. Feature: - Ease of use - Supports almost all serializer, like Binary、Xml、Soap、Json、DataContract. - Support serialize to file、serialize to stream、deserialize from file、deserialize from stream. - Support Xml encryption. - Support accelerated through the XML the serialization assemble.LFormatConvert: ????Linux???????????????????????，??ffmpeg????Machine QA Manager: Machine QA Manager is intended to save and help trend results from radiation therapy equipment testing. The program will be made as generic as possible from a initial setup to enable it's use for other types of routine testing activities (for example factory equipment) but preconfigured templates for radiation therapy will be supplied for the convenience of people working in that domain.maven-asbuild-plugin: maven-asbuild-plugin incorporates the adobe flash/flex based artifacts like swc or swf into the maven methology.Midnight Peach - C# framework generator for LINQ: C# framework generator for LINQMiku???????: ????????，????????！?????????????，??????????。?????????????????！MIKU????????????，??！????????????、????。 This program used to detect music beat.You can listen to music while press button,and it can display the BPM of the song.Miku will wave to you.MyTestingStudy: my personal testing studyNameless Sprite Editor: Nameless Sprite Editor is a tool used to thoroughly edit the graphics in ALL Game Boy Advance games. [ UNDER CONSTRUCTION ]NeoModulus Business Rules Builder: A windows form application that allows non-programmers to build strict definitions of a business domain. Once the definition is complete the program will build out object oriented C# files and a .net DLL. My test business domain is the open SRD, basically Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition.NodeJs: this is the NodeJs projectNoSQL: this is the Nosql project.OmniKassa for NopCommerce: OmniKassa payment module plugin for nopCommerceOn-Line Therapy: testOpen School: This project is about to create an open platform for all the academic institutions, so that they can manage all of their work. Our efforts will be for every kind of institution who are currently struggling with different kind of systems in place which are not collaborating with each other. This project will provide a common platform to all these kind of systems and provide them a better solution which actually works. Oracle: this is the Oracle project.Orchard Web Services: RESTful web services to expose interaction with Orchard content management.Personal Social Network using asp.net mvc and mongodb: FirstRooster is a network platform that let user create their own social network of interest to connect and share with like minded people anywhere.peshop: E-Commerce application , separated by DAl,BLL and Presentation layersPHP: this is the PHP project.Prime Factorization: Factoring trinomials using the ac method can be made easier through the use of Prime Factorization. Prime Factorization is a program that can assist you in the factoring of numbers in Algebra, namely trinomials using the AC Method. It can also find all the factors of any number.PromedioNotas: El programa trata de promediar 3 nostas y mostrar y si pasaba de año o no por medio de un mensajeProyecto Tarea: Este proyecto esta hecho con el objetivo de aprender sobre TFSProyectotarea1: Sotfware de terminal aéreo de Guayaquil, donde se encuentran el nombre de las aerolíneas y las rutas de vuelo a nivel nacional.Python: this is the Python project.Ruby: this is the Ruby project.tedplay: tedplay is your media player of choice for playing Commodore 264 music format files similar to SIDplay. It is basically a stripped down Commodore plus/4 emulator without video output and peripherals based on the SDL build of the Commodore 264 family emulator YAPE. tedplay is released under version 2 of the GNU Generic Public License and can be built for both Windows and Unix or actually any platform that has a C++ compiler and SDL support.test1: This is a test projectwin-x264: A port of the x264-codebase into a VisualStudio-project. Compilation requires Intel-compiler and Yasm.XDA ROM Hub: Xperia 2011 line toolkit.znvicente_cuartoc: Poyecto Vicente Eduardo Zambrano Navarrete??Win7?????: ??????? *.theme ???????（??，??，??，???）。????VSB???*.msstyles??，????????，????????????????????????！????????????，?????????????。???，????????！ ?????????，?????????，????????，??????！?????????????，?????????????????，?????????，???Aero??，??????~?????????????！??，?????????theme??，?????????，??????，????，??????。 This program used to create .theme file and the relevant documents (wallpaper, pointer, ICONS, sounds, etc.). As long as you use VSB ready . msstyles files, chosen the icon wallpaper, etc, an...

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• Syncing Data with a Server using Silverlight and HTTP Polling Duplex

  - by dwahlin

  Many applications have the need to stay in-sync with data provided by a service. Although web applications typically rely on standard polling techniques to check if data has changed, Silverlight provides several interesting options for keeping an application in-sync that rely on server “push” technologies. A few years back I wrote several blog posts covering different “push” technologies available in Silverlight that rely on sockets or HTTP Polling Duplex. We recently had a project that looked like it could benefit from pushing data from a server to one or more clients so I thought I’d revisit the subject and provide some updates to the original code posted. If you’ve worked with AJAX before in Web applications then you know that until browsers fully support web sockets or other duplex (bi-directional communication) technologies that it’s difficult to keep applications in-sync with a server without relying on polling. The problem with polling is that you have to check for changes on the server on a timed-basis which can often be wasteful and take up unnecessary resources. With server “push” technologies, data can be pushed from the server to the client as it changes. Once the data is received, the client can update the user interface as appropriate. Using “push” technologies allows the client to listen for changes from the data but stay 100% focused on client activities as opposed to worrying about polling and asking the server if anything has changed. Silverlight provides several options for pushing data from a server to a client including sockets, TCP bindings and HTTP Polling Duplex.  Each has its own strengths and weaknesses as far as performance and setup work with HTTP Polling Duplex arguably being the easiest to setup and get going.  In this article I’ll demonstrate how HTTP Polling Duplex can be used in Silverlight 4 applications to push data and show how you can create a WCF server that provides an HTTP Polling Duplex binding that a Silverlight client can consume.   What is HTTP Polling Duplex? Technologies that allow data to be pushed from a server to a client rely on duplex functionality. Duplex (or bi-directional) communication allows data to be passed in both directions.  A client can call a service and the server can call the client. HTTP Polling Duplex (as its name implies) allows a server to communicate with a client without forcing the client to constantly poll the server. It has the benefit of being able to run on port 80 making setup a breeze compared to the other options which require specific ports to be used and cross-domain policy files to be exposed on port 943 (as with sockets and TCP bindings). Having said that, if you’re looking for the best speed possible then sockets and TCP bindings are the way to go. But, they’re not the only game in town when it comes to duplex communication. The first time I heard about HTTP Polling Duplex (initially available in Silverlight 2) I wasn’t exactly sure how it was any better than standard polling used in AJAX applications. I read the Silverlight SDK, looked at various resources and generally found the following definition unhelpful as far as understanding the actual benefits that HTTP Polling Duplex provided: "The Silverlight client periodically polls the service on the network layer, and checks for any new messages that the service wants to send on the callback channel. The service queues all messages sent on the client callback channel and delivers them to the client when the client polls the service." Although the previous definition explained the overall process, it sounded as if standard polling was used. Fortunately, Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie provided me with a more clear definition several years back that explains the benefits provided by HTTP Polling Duplex quite well (used with his permission): "The [HTTP Polling Duplex] duplex support does use polling in the background to implement notifications – although the way it does it is different than manual polling. It initiates a network request, and then the request is effectively “put to sleep” waiting for the server to respond (it doesn’t come back immediately). The server then keeps the connection open but not active until it has something to send back (or the connection times out after 90 seconds – at which point the duplex client will connect again and wait). This way you are avoiding hitting the server repeatedly – but still get an immediate response when there is data to send." After hearing Scott’s definition the light bulb went on and it all made sense. A client makes a request to a server to check for changes, but instead of the request returning immediately, it parks itself on the server and waits for data. It’s kind of like waiting to pick up a pizza at the store. Instead of calling the store over and over to check the status, you sit in the store and wait until the pizza (the request data) is ready. Once it’s ready you take it back home (to the client). This technique provides a lot of efficiency gains over standard polling techniques even though it does use some polling of its own as a request is initially made from a client to a server. So how do you implement HTTP Polling Duplex in your Silverlight applications? Let’s take a look at the process by starting with the server. Creating an HTTP Polling Duplex WCF Service Creating a WCF service that exposes an HTTP Polling Duplex binding is straightforward as far as coding goes. Add some one way operations into an interface, create a client callback interface and you’re ready to go. The most challenging part comes into play when configuring the service to properly support the necessary binding and that’s more of a cut and paste operation once you know the configuration code to use. To create an HTTP Polling Duplex service you’ll need to expose server-side and client-side interfaces and reference the System.ServiceModel.PollingDuplex assembly (located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v4.0\Libraries\Server on my machine) in the server project. For the demo application I upgraded a basketball simulation service to support the latest polling duplex assemblies. The service simulates a simple basketball game using a Game class and pushes information about the game such as score, fouls, shots and more to the client as the game changes over time. Before jumping too far into the game push service, it’s important to discuss two interfaces used by the service to communicate in a bi-directional manner. The first is called IGameStreamService and defines the methods/operations that the client can call on the server (see Listing 1). The second is IGameStreamClient which defines the callback methods that a server can use to communicate with a client (see Listing 2).   [ServiceContract(Namespace = "Silverlight", CallbackContract = typeof(IGameStreamClient))] public interface IGameStreamService { [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)] void GetTeamData(); } Listing 1. The IGameStreamService interface defines server operations that can be called on the server.   [ServiceContract] public interface IGameStreamClient { [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)] void ReceiveTeamData(List<Team> teamData); [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true, AsyncPattern=true)] IAsyncResult BeginReceiveGameData(GameData gameData, AsyncCallback callback, object state); void EndReceiveGameData(IAsyncResult result); } Listing 2. The IGameStreamClient interfaces defines client operations that a server can call.   The IGameStreamService interface is decorated with the standard ServiceContract attribute but also contains a value for the CallbackContract property.  This property is used to define the interface that the client will expose (IGameStreamClient in this example) and use to receive data pushed from the service. Notice that each OperationContract attribute in both interfaces sets the IsOneWay property to true. This means that the operation can be called and passed data as appropriate, however, no data will be passed back. Instead, data will be pushed back to the client as it’s available.  Looking through the IGameStreamService interface you can see that the client can request team data whereas the IGameStreamClient interface allows team and game data to be received by the client. One interesting point about the IGameStreamClient interface is the inclusion of the AsyncPattern property on the BeginReceiveGameData operation. I initially created this operation as a standard one way operation and it worked most of the time. However, as I disconnected clients and reconnected new ones game data wasn’t being passed properly. After researching the problem more I realized that because the service could take up to 7 seconds to return game data, things were getting hung up. By setting the AsyncPattern property to true on the BeginReceivedGameData operation and providing a corresponding EndReceiveGameData operation I was able to get around this problem and get everything running properly. I’ll provide more details on the implementation of these two methods later in this post. Once the interfaces were created I moved on to the game service class. The first order of business was to create a class that implemented the IGameStreamService interface. Since the service can be used by multiple clients wanting game data I added the ServiceBehavior attribute to the class definition so that I could set its InstanceContextMode to InstanceContextMode.Single (in effect creating a Singleton service object). Listing 3 shows the game service class as well as its fields and constructor.   [ServiceBehavior(ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple, InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single)] public class GameStreamService : IGameStreamService { object _Key = new object(); Game _Game = null; Timer _Timer = null; Random _Random = null; Dictionary<string, IGameStreamClient> _ClientCallbacks = new Dictionary<string, IGameStreamClient>(); static AsyncCallback _ReceiveGameDataCompleted = new AsyncCallback(ReceiveGameDataCompleted); public GameStreamService() { _Game = new Game(); _Timer = new Timer { Enabled = false, Interval = 2000, AutoReset = true }; _Timer.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(_Timer_Elapsed); _Timer.Start(); _Random = new Random(); }} Listing 3. The GameStreamService implements the IGameStreamService interface which defines a callback contract that allows the service class to push data back to the client. By implementing the IGameStreamService interface, GameStreamService must supply a GetTeamData() method which is responsible for supplying information about the teams that are playing as well as individual players.  GetTeamData() also acts as a client subscription method that tracks clients wanting to receive game data.  Listing 4 shows the GetTeamData() method. public void GetTeamData() { //Get client callback channel var context = OperationContext.Current; var sessionID = context.SessionId; var currClient = context.GetCallbackChannel<IGameStreamClient>(); context.Channel.Faulted += Disconnect; context.Channel.Closed += Disconnect; IGameStreamClient client; if (!_ClientCallbacks.TryGetValue(sessionID, out client)) { lock (_Key) { _ClientCallbacks[sessionID] = currClient; } } currClient.ReceiveTeamData(_Game.GetTeamData()); //Start timer which when fired sends updated score information to client if (!_Timer.Enabled) { _Timer.Enabled = true; } } Listing 4. The GetTeamData() method subscribes a given client to the game service and returns. The key the line of code in the GetTeamData() method is the call to GetCallbackChannel<IGameStreamClient>().  This method is responsible for accessing the calling client’s callback channel. The callback channel is defined by the IGameStreamClient interface shown earlier in Listing 2 and used by the server to communicate with the client. Before passing team data back to the client, GetTeamData() grabs the client’s session ID and checks if it already exists in the _ClientCallbacks dictionary object used to track clients wanting callbacks from the server. If the client doesn’t exist it adds it into the collection. It then pushes team data from the Game class back to the client by calling ReceiveTeamData().  Since the service simulates a basketball game, a timer is then started if it’s not already enabled which is then used to randomly send data to the client. When the timer fires, game data is pushed down to the client. Listing 5 shows the _Timer_Elapsed() method that is called when the timer fires as well as the SendGameData() method used to send data to the client. void _Timer_Elapsed(object sender, ElapsedEventArgs e) { int interval = _Random.Next(3000, 7000); lock (_Key) { _Timer.Interval = interval; _Timer.Enabled = false; } SendGameData(_Game.GetGameData()); } private void SendGameData(GameData gameData) { var cbs = _ClientCallbacks.Where(cb => ((IContextChannel)cb.Value).State == CommunicationState.Opened); for (int i = 0; i < cbs.Count(); i++) { var cb = cbs.ElementAt(i).Value; try { cb.BeginReceiveGameData(gameData, _ReceiveGameDataCompleted, cb); } catch (TimeoutException texp) { //Log timeout error } catch (CommunicationException cexp) { //Log communication error } } lock (_Key) _Timer.Enabled = true; } private static void ReceiveGameDataCompleted(IAsyncResult result) { try { ((IGameStreamClient)(result.AsyncState)).EndReceiveGameData(result); } catch (CommunicationException) { // empty } catch (TimeoutException) { // empty } } LIsting 5. _Timer_Elapsed is used to simulate time in a basketball game. When _Timer_Elapsed() fires the SendGameData() method is called which iterates through the clients wanting to be notified of changes. As each client is identified, their respective BeginReceiveGameData() method is called which ultimately pushes game data down to the client. Recall that this method was defined in the client callback interface named IGameStreamClient shown earlier in Listing 2. Notice that BeginReceiveGameData() accepts _ReceiveGameDataCompleted as its second parameter (an AsyncCallback delegate defined in the service class) and passes the client callback as the third parameter. The initial version of the sample application had a standard ReceiveGameData() method in the client callback interface. However, sometimes the client callbacks would work properly and sometimes they wouldn’t which was a little baffling at first glance. After some investigation I realized that I needed to implement an asynchronous pattern for client callbacks to work properly since 3 – 7 second delays are occurring as a result of the timer. Once I added the BeginReceiveGameData() and ReceiveGameDataCompleted() methods everything worked properly since each call was handled in an asynchronous manner. The final task that had to be completed to get the server working properly with HTTP Polling Duplex was adding configuration code into web.config. In the interest of brevity I won’t post all of the code here since the sample application includes everything you need. However, Listing 6 shows the key configuration code to handle creating a custom binding named pollingDuplexBinding and associate it with the service’s endpoint.   <bindings> <customBinding> <binding name="pollingDuplexBinding"> <binaryMessageEncoding /> <pollingDuplex maxPendingSessions="2147483647" maxPendingMessagesPerSession="2147483647" inactivityTimeout="02:00:00" serverPollTimeout="00:05:00"/> <httpTransport /> </binding> </customBinding> </bindings> <services> <service name="GameService.GameStreamService" behaviorConfiguration="GameStreamServiceBehavior"> <endpoint address="" binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="pollingDuplexBinding" contract="GameService.IGameStreamService"/> <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" /> </service> </services>   Listing 6. Configuring an HTTP Polling Duplex binding in web.config and associating an endpoint with it. Calling the Service and Receiving “Pushed” Data Calling the service and handling data that is pushed from the server is a simple and straightforward process in Silverlight. Since the service is configured with a MEX endpoint and exposes a WSDL file, you can right-click on the Silverlight project and select the standard Add Service Reference item. After the web service proxy is created you may notice that the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file only contains an empty configuration element instead of the normal configuration elements created when creating a standard WCF proxy. You can certainly update the file if you want to read from it at runtime but for the sample application I fed the service URI directly to the service proxy as shown next: var address = new EndpointAddress("http://localhost.:5661/GameStreamService.svc"); var binding = new PollingDuplexHttpBinding(); _Proxy = new GameStreamServiceClient(binding, address); _Proxy.ReceiveTeamDataReceived += _Proxy_ReceiveTeamDataReceived; _Proxy.ReceiveGameDataReceived += _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived; _Proxy.GetTeamDataAsync(); This code creates the proxy and passes the endpoint address and binding to use to its constructor. It then wires the different receive events to callback methods and calls GetTeamDataAsync().  Calling GetTeamDataAsync() causes the server to store the client in the server-side dictionary collection mentioned earlier so that it can receive data that is pushed.  As the server-side timer fires and game data is pushed to the client, the user interface is updated as shown in Listing 7. Listing 8 shows the _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived() method responsible for handling the data and calling UpdateGameData() to process it.   Listing 7. The Silverlight interface. Game data is pushed from the server to the client using HTTP Polling Duplex. void _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived(object sender, ReceiveGameDataReceivedEventArgs e) { UpdateGameData(e.gameData); } private void UpdateGameData(GameData gameData) { //Update Score this.tbTeam1Score.Text = gameData.Team1Score.ToString(); this.tbTeam2Score.Text = gameData.Team2Score.ToString(); //Update ball visibility if (gameData.Action != ActionsEnum.Foul) { if (tbTeam1.Text == gameData.TeamOnOffense) { AnimateBall(this.BB1, this.BB2); } else //Team 2 { AnimateBall(this.BB2, this.BB1); } } if (this.lbActions.Items.Count > 9) this.lbActions.Items.Clear(); this.lbActions.Items.Add(gameData.LastAction); if (this.lbActions.Visibility == Visibility.Collapsed) this.lbActions.Visibility = Visibility.Visible; } private void AnimateBall(Image onBall, Image offBall) { this.FadeIn.Stop(); Storyboard.SetTarget(this.FadeInAnimation, onBall); Storyboard.SetTarget(this.FadeOutAnimation, offBall); this.FadeIn.Begin(); } Listing 8. As the server pushes game data, the client’s _Proxy_ReceiveGameDataReceived() method is called to process the data. In a real-life application I’d go with a ViewModel class to handle retrieving team data, setup data bindings and handle data that is pushed from the server. However, for the sample application I wanted to focus on HTTP Polling Duplex and keep things as simple as possible.   Summary Silverlight supports three options when duplex communication is required in an application including TCP bindins, sockets and HTTP Polling Duplex. In this post you’ve seen how HTTP Polling Duplex interfaces can be created and implemented on the server as well as how they can be consumed by a Silverlight client. HTTP Polling Duplex provides a nice way to “push” data from a server while still allowing the data to flow over port 80 or another port of your choice.   Sample Application Download

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• Metro Walkthrough: Creating a Task List with a ListView and IndexedDB

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to describe how you can work with data in a Metro style application written with JavaScript. In particular, we create a super simple Task List application which enables you to create and delete tasks. Here’s a video which demonstrates how the Task List application works: In order to build this application, I had to take advantage of several features of the WinJS library and technologies including: IndexedDB – The Task List application stores data in an IndexedDB database. HTML5 Form Validation – The Task List application uses HTML5 validation to ensure that a required field has a value. ListView Control – The Task List application displays the tasks retrieved from the IndexedDB database in a WinJS ListView control. Creating the IndexedDB Database The Task List application stores all of its data in an IndexedDB database named TasksDB. This database is opened/created with the following code: var db; var req = window.msIndexedDB.open("TasksDB", 1); req.onerror = function () { console.log("Could not open database"); }; req.onupgradeneeded = function (evt) { var newDB = evt.target.result; newDB.createObjectStore("tasks", { keyPath: "id", autoIncrement:true }); }; The msIndexedDB.open() method accepts two parameters: the name of the database to open and the version of the database to open. If a database with a matching version already exists, then calling the msIndexedDB.open() method opens a connection to the existing database. If the database does not exist then the upgradeneeded event is raised. You handle the upgradeneeded event to create a new database. In the code above, the upgradeneeded event handler creates an object store named “tasks” (An object store roughly corresponds to a database table). When you add items to the tasks object store then each item gets an id property with an auto-incremented value automatically. The code above also includes an error event handler. If the IndexedDB database cannot be opened or created, for whatever reason, then an error message is written to the Visual Studio JavaScript Console window. Displaying a List of Tasks The TaskList application retrieves its list of tasks from the tasks object store, which we created above, and displays the list of tasks in a ListView control. Here is how the ListView control is declared: <div id="tasksListView" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: TaskList.tasks.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#taskTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'toggleSelect', selectionMode: 'multi', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div> The ListView control is bound to the TaskList.tasks.dataSource data source. The TaskList.tasks.dataSource is created with the following code: // Create the data source var tasks = new WinJS.Binding.List(); // Open the database var db; var req = window.msIndexedDB.open("TasksDB", 1); req.onerror = function () { console.log("Could not open database"); }; req.onupgradeneeded = function (evt) { var newDB = evt.target.result; newDB.createObjectStore("tasks", { keyPath: "id", autoIncrement:true }); }; // Load the data source with data from the database req.onsuccess = function () { db = req.result; var tran = db.transaction("tasks"); tran.objectStore("tasks").openCursor().onsuccess = function(event) { var cursor = event.target.result; if (cursor) { tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, cursor.value); cursor.continue(); }; }; }; // Expose the data source and functions WinJS.Namespace.define("TaskList", { tasks: tasks }); Notice the success event handler. This handler is called when a database is successfully opened/created. In the code above, all of the items from the tasks object store are retrieved into a cursor and added to a WinJS.Binding.List object named tasks. Because the ListView control is bound to the WinJS.Binding.List object, copying the tasks from the object store into the WinJS.Binding.List object causes the tasks to appear in the ListView: Adding a New Task You add a new task in the Task List application by entering the title of a new task into an HTML form and clicking the Add button. Here’s the markup for creating the form: <form id="addTaskForm"> <input id="newTaskTitle" title="New Task" required /> <button>Add</button> </form> Notice that the INPUT element includes a required attribute. In a Metro application, you can take advantage of HTML5 Validation to validate form fields. If you don’t enter a value for the newTaskTitle field then the following validation error message is displayed: For a brief introduction to HTML5 validation, see my previous blog entry: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/03/13/html5-form-validation.aspx When you click the Add button, the form is submitted and the form submit event is raised. The following code is executed in the default.js file: // Handle Add Task document.getElementById("addTaskForm").addEventListener("submit", function (evt) { evt.preventDefault(); var newTaskTitle = document.getElementById("newTaskTitle"); TaskList.addTask({ title: newTaskTitle.value }); newTaskTitle.value = ""; }); The code above retrieves the title of the new task and calls the addTask() method in the tasks.js file. Here’s the code for the addTask() method which is responsible for actually adding the new task to the IndexedDB database: // Add a new task function addTask(taskToAdd) { var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", "readwrite"); var addRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").add(taskToAdd); addRequest.onsuccess = function (evt) { taskToAdd.id = evt.target.result; tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, taskToAdd); } } The code above does two things. First, it adds the new task to the tasks object store in the IndexedDB database. Second, it adds the new task to the data source bound to the ListView. The dataSource.insertAtEnd() method is called to add the new task to the data source so the new task will appear in the ListView (with a nice little animation). Deleting Existing Tasks The Task List application enables you to select one or more tasks by clicking or tapping on one or more tasks in the ListView. When you click the Delete button, the selected tasks are removed from both the IndexedDB database and the ListView. For example, in the following screenshot, two tasks are selected. The selected tasks appear with a teal background and a checkmark: When you click the Delete button, the following code in the default.js file is executed: // Handle Delete Tasks document.getElementById("btnDeleteTasks").addEventListener("click", function (evt) { tasksListView.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function(items) { items.forEach(function (item) { TaskList.deleteTask(item); }); }); }); The selected tasks are retrieved with the TaskList selection.getItem() method. In the code above, the deleteTask() method is called for each of the selected tasks. Here’s the code for the deleteTask() method: // Delete an existing task function deleteTask(listViewItem) { // Database key != ListView key var dbKey = listViewItem.data.id; var listViewKey = listViewItem.key; // Remove item from db and, if success, remove item from ListView var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", “readwrite”); var deleteRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").delete(dbKey); deleteRequest.onsuccess = function () { tasks.dataSource.remove(listViewKey); } } This code does two things: it deletes the existing task from the database and removes the existing task from the ListView. In both cases, the right task is removed by using the key associated with the task. However, the task key is different in the case of the database and in the case of the ListView. In the case of the database, the task key is the value of the task id property. In the case of the ListView, on the other hand, the task key is auto-generated by the ListView. When the task is removed from the ListView, an animation is used to collapse the tasks which appear above and below the task which was removed. The Complete Code Above, I did a lot of jumping around between different files in the application and I left out sections of code. For the sake of completeness, I want to include the entire code here: the default.html, default.js, and tasks.js files. Here are the contents of the default.html file. This file contains the UI for the Task List application: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Task List</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- TaskList references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/tasks.js"></script> <style type="text/css"> body { font-size: x-large; } form { display: inline; } #appContainer { margin: 20px; width: 600px; } .win-container { padding: 10px; } </style> </head> <body> <div> <!-- Templates --> <div id="taskTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> </div> <h1>Super Task List</h1> <div id="appContainer"> <form id="addTaskForm"> <input id="newTaskTitle" title="New Task" required /> <button>Add</button> </form> <button id="btnDeleteTasks">Delete</button> <div id="tasksListView" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: TaskList.tasks.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#taskTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'toggleSelect', selectionMode: 'multi', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div> </div> </div> </body> </html> Here is the code for the default.js file. This code wires up the Add Task form and Delete button: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { WinJS.UI.processAll().then(function () { // Get reference to Tasks ListView var tasksListView = document.getElementById("tasksListView"); // Handle Add Task document.getElementById("addTaskForm").addEventListener("submit", function (evt) { evt.preventDefault(); var newTaskTitle = document.getElementById("newTaskTitle"); TaskList.addTask({ title: newTaskTitle.value }); newTaskTitle.value = ""; }); // Handle Delete Tasks document.getElementById("btnDeleteTasks").addEventListener("click", function (evt) { tasksListView.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function(items) { items.forEach(function (item) { TaskList.deleteTask(item); }); }); }); }); } }; app.start(); })(); Finally, here is the tasks.js file. This file contains all of the code for opening, creating, and interacting with IndexedDB: (function () { "use strict"; // Create the data source var tasks = new WinJS.Binding.List(); // Open the database var db; var req = window.msIndexedDB.open("TasksDB", 1); req.onerror = function () { console.log("Could not open database"); }; req.onupgradeneeded = function (evt) { var newDB = evt.target.result; newDB.createObjectStore("tasks", { keyPath: "id", autoIncrement:true }); }; // Load the data source with data from the database req.onsuccess = function () { db = req.result; var tran = db.transaction("tasks"); tran.objectStore("tasks").openCursor().onsuccess = function(event) { var cursor = event.target.result; if (cursor) { tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, cursor.value); cursor.continue(); }; }; }; // Add a new task function addTask(taskToAdd) { var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", "readwrite"); var addRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").add(taskToAdd); addRequest.onsuccess = function (evt) { taskToAdd.id = evt.target.result; tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, taskToAdd); } } // Delete an existing task function deleteTask(listViewItem) { // Database key != ListView key var dbKey = listViewItem.data.id; var listViewKey = listViewItem.key; // Remove item from db and, if success, remove item from ListView var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", "readwrite"); var deleteRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").delete(dbKey); deleteRequest.onsuccess = function () { tasks.dataSource.remove(listViewKey); } } // Expose the data source and functions WinJS.Namespace.define("TaskList", { tasks: tasks, addTask: addTask, deleteTask: deleteTask }); })(); Summary I wrote this blog entry because I wanted to create a walkthrough of building a simple database-driven application. In particular, I wanted to demonstrate how you can use a ListView control with an IndexedDB database to store and retrieve database data.

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• Synchronize Data between a Silverlight ListBox and a User Control

  - by psheriff

  One of the great things about XAML is the powerful data-binding capabilities. If you load up a list box with a collection of objects, you can display detail data about each object without writing any C# or VB.NET code. Take a look at Figure 1 that shows a collection of Product objects in a list box. When you click on a list box you bind the current Product object selected in the list box to a set of controls in a user control with just a very simple Binding statement in XAML.  Figure 1: Synchronizing a ListBox to a User Control is easy with Data Binding Product and Products Classes To illustrate this data binding feature I am going to just create some local data instead of using a WCF service. The code below shows a Product class that has three properties, namely, ProductId, ProductName and Price. This class also has a constructor that takes 3 parameters and allows us to set the 3 properties in an instance of our Product class. C#public class Product{  public Product(int productId, string productName, decimal price)  {    ProductId = productId;    ProductName = productName;    Price = price;  }   public int ProductId { get; set; }  public string ProductName { get; set; }  public decimal Price { get; set; }} VBPublic Class Product  Public Sub New(ByVal _productId As Integer, _                 ByVal _productName As String, _                 ByVal _price As Decimal)    ProductId = _productId    ProductName = _productName    Price = _price  End Sub   Private mProductId As Integer  Private mProductName As String  Private mPrice As Decimal   Public Property ProductId() As Integer    Get      Return mProductId    End Get    Set(ByVal value As Integer)      mProductId = value    End Set  End Property   Public Property ProductName() As String    Get      Return mProductName    End Get    Set(ByVal value As String)      mProductName = value    End Set  End Property   Public Property Price() As Decimal    Get      Return mPrice    End Get    Set(ByVal value As Decimal)      mPrice = value    End Set  End PropertyEnd Class To fill up a list box you need a collection class of Product objects. The code below creates a generic collection class of Product objects. In the constructor of the Products class I have hard-coded five product objects and added them to the collection. In a real-world application you would get your data through a call to service to fill the list box, but for simplicity and just to illustrate the data binding, I am going to just hard code the data. C#public class Products : List<Product>{  public Products()  {    this.Add(new Product(1, "Microsoft VS.NET 2008", 1000));    this.Add(new Product(2, "Microsoft VS.NET 2010", 1000));    this.Add(new Product(3, "Microsoft Silverlight 4", 1000));    this.Add(new Product(4, "Fundamentals of N-Tier eBook", 20));    this.Add(new Product(5, "ASP.NET Security eBook", 20));  }} VBPublic Class Products  Inherits List(Of Product)   Public Sub New()    Me.Add(New Product(1, "Microsoft VS.NET 2008", 1000))    Me.Add(New Product(2, "Microsoft VS.NET 2010", 1000))    Me.Add(New Product(3, "Microsoft Silverlight 4", 1000))    Me.Add(New Product(4, "Fundamentals of N-Tier eBook", 20))    Me.Add(New Product(5, "ASP.NET Security eBook", 20))  End SubEnd Class The Product Detail User Control Below is a user control (named ucProduct) that is used to display the product detail information seen in the bottom portion of Figure 1. This is very basic XAML that just creates a text block and a text box control for each of the three properties in the Product class. Notice the {Binding Path=[PropertyName]} on each of the text box controls. This means that if the DataContext property of this user control is set to an instance of a Product class, then the data in the properties of that Product object will be displayed in each of the text boxes. <UserControl x:Class="SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS.ucProduct"  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"  HorizontalAlignment="Left"  VerticalAlignment="Top">  <Grid Margin="4">    <Grid.RowDefinitions>      <RowDefinition Height="Auto" />      <RowDefinition Height="Auto" />      <RowDefinition Height="Auto" />    </Grid.RowDefinitions>    <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>      <ColumnDefinition MinWidth="120" />      <ColumnDefinition />    </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>    <TextBlock Grid.Row="0"               Grid.Column="0"               Text="Product Id" />    <TextBox Grid.Row="0"             Grid.Column="1"             Text="{Binding Path=ProductId}" />    <TextBlock Grid.Row="1"               Grid.Column="0"               Text="Product Name" />    <TextBox Grid.Row="1"             Grid.Column="1"             Text="{Binding Path=ProductName}" />    <TextBlock Grid.Row="2"               Grid.Column="0"               Text="Price" />    <TextBox Grid.Row="2"             Grid.Column="1"             Text="{Binding Path=Price}" />  </Grid></UserControl> Synchronize ListBox with User Control You are now ready to fill the list box with the collection class of Product objects and then bind the SelectedItem of the list box to the Product detail user control. The XAML below is the complete code for Figure 1. <UserControl x:Class="SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS.MainPage"  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"  xmlns:src="clr-namespace:SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS"  VerticalAlignment="Top"  HorizontalAlignment="Left">  <UserControl.Resources>    <src:Products x:Key="productCollection" />  </UserControl.Resources>  <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot"        Margin="4"        Background="White">    <Grid.RowDefinitions>      <RowDefinition Height="Auto" />      <RowDefinition Height="*" />    </Grid.RowDefinitions>    <ListBox x:Name="lstData"             Grid.Row="0"             BorderBrush="Black"             BorderThickness="1"             ItemsSource="{Binding                   Source={StaticResource productCollection}}"             DisplayMemberPath="ProductName" />    <src:ucProduct x:Name="prodDetail"                   Grid.Row="1"                   DataContext="{Binding ElementName=lstData,                                          Path=SelectedItem}" />  </Grid></UserControl> The first step to making this happen is to reference the Silverlight project (SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS) where the Product and Products classes are located. I added this namespace and assigned it a namespace prefix of “src” as shown in the line below: xmlns:src="clr-namespace:SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS" Next, to use the data from an instance of the Products collection, you create a UserControl.Resources section in the XAML and add a tag that creates an instance of the Products class and assigns it a key of “productCollection”.   <UserControl.Resources>    <src:Products x:Key="productCollection" />  </UserControl.Resources> Next, you bind the list box to this productCollection object using the ItemsSource property. You bind the ItemsSource of the list box to the static resource named productCollection. You can then set the DisplayMemberPath attribute of the list box to any property of the Product class that you want. In the XAML below I used the ProductName property. <ListBox x:Name="lstData"         ItemsSource="{Binding             Source={StaticResource productCollection}}"         DisplayMemberPath="ProductName" /> You now need to create an instance of the ucProduct user contol below the list box. You do this by once again referencing the “src” namespace and typing in the name of the user control. You then set the DataContext property on this user control to a binding. The binding uses the ElementName attribute to bind to the list box name, in this case “lstData”. The Path of the data is SelectedItem. These two attributes together tell Silverlight to bind the DataContext to the selected item of the list box. That selected item is a Product object. So, once this is bound, the bindings on each text box in the user control are updated and display the current product information. <src:ucProduct x:Name="prodDetail"               DataContext="{Binding ElementName=lstData,                                      Path=SelectedItem}" /> Summary Once you understand the basics of data binding in XAML, you eliminate a lot code that is otherwise needed to move data into controls and out of controls back into an object. Connecting two controls together is easy by just binding using the ElementName and Path properties of the Binding markup extension. Another good tip out of this blog is use user controls and set the DataContext of the user control to have all of the data on the user control update through the bindings. NOTE: You can download the complete sample code (in both VB and C#) at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Choose Tips & Tricks, then "SL – Synchronize List Box Data with User Control" from the drop-down. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free eBook on "Fundamentals of N-Tier".

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• Stop Spinning Your Wheels&hellip; Sage Advice for Aspiring Developers

  - by Mark Rackley

  So… lately I’ve been tasked with helping bring some non-developers over the hump and become full-fledged, all around, SharePoint developers. Well, only time will tell if I’m successful or a complete failure. Good thing about failures though, you know what NOT to do next time! Anyway, I’ve been writing some sort of code since I was about 10 years old; so I sometimes take for granted the effort some people have to go through to learn a new technology. I guess if I had to say I was an “expert” in one thing it would be learning (and getting “stuff” done) in new technologies. Maybe that’s why I’ve embraced SharePoint and the SharePoint community. SharePoint is the first technology I haven’t been able to master or get everything done without help from other people. I KNOW I’ll never know it all and I learn something new every day.  It keeps it interesting, it keeps me motivated, and keeps me involved. So, what some people may consider a downside of SharePoint, I definitely consider a plus. Crap.. I’m rambling. Where was I? Oh yeah… me trying to be helpful. Like I said, I am able to quickly and effectively pick up new languages, technology, etc. and put it to good use. Am I just brilliant? Well, my mom thinks so.. but maybe not. Maybe I’ve just been doing it for a long time…. 25 years in some form or fashion… wow I’m old… Anyway, what I lack in depth I make up for in breadth and being the “go-to” guy wherever I work when someone needs to “get stuff done”.  Let’s see if I can take some of that experience and put it to practical use to help new people get up to speed faster, learn things more effectively, and become that go-to guy. First off…  make sure you… Know The Basics I don’t have the time to teach new developers the basics, but you gotta know them. I’ve only been “taught” two languages.. Fortran 77 and C… everything else I’ve picked up from “doing”. I HAD to know the basics though, and all new developers need to understand the very basics of development.  97.23% of all languages will have the following: Variables Functions Arrays If statements For loops / While loops If you think about it, most development is “if this, do this… or while this, do this…”.  “This” may be some unique method to your language or something you develop, but the basics are the basics. YES there are MANY other development topics you need to understand, but you shouldn’t be scratching your head trying to figure out what a ”for loop” is… (Also learn about classes and hashtables as quickly as possible). Once you have the basics down it makes it much easier to… Learn By Doing This may just apply to me and my warped brain.  I don’t learn a new technology by reading or hearing someone speak about it. I learn by doing. It does me no good to try and learn all of the intricacies of a new language or technology inside-and-out before getting my hands dirty. Just show me how to do one thing… let me get that working… then show me how to do the next thing.. let me get that working… Now, let’s see what I can figure out on my own. Okay.. now it starts to make sense. I see how the language works, I can step through the code, and before you know it.. I’m productive in a new technology. Be careful here though…. make sure you… Don’t Reinvent The Wheel People have been writing code for what… 50+ years now? So, why are you trying to tackle ANYTHING without first Googling it with Bing to see what others have done first? When I was first learning C# (I had come from a Java background) I had to call a web service.  Sure! No problem! I’d done this many times in Java. So, I proceeded to write an HTTP Handler, called the Web Service and it worked like a charm!!!  Probably about 2.3 seconds after I got it working completely someone says to me “Why didn’t you just add a Web Reference?” Really? You can do that?  oops… I just wasted a lot of time. Before undertaking the development of any sort of utility method in a new language, make sure it’s not already handled for you… Okay… you are starting to write some code and are curious about the possibilities? Well… don’t just sit there… Try It And See What Happens This is actually one of my biggest pet peeves. “So… ‘x++’ works in C#, but does it also work in JavaScript?”   Really? Did you just ask me that? In the time it spent for you to type that email, press the send button, me receive the email, get around to reading it, and replying with “yes” you could have tested it 47 times and know the answer! Just TRY it! See what happens! You aren’t doing brain surgery. You aren’t going to kill anyone, and you BETTER not be developing in production. So, you are not going to crash any production systems!! Seriously! Get off your butt and just try it yourself. The extra added benefit is that it doesn’t work, the absolute best way to learn is to… Learn From Your Failures I don’t know about you… but if I screw up and something doesn’t work, I learn A LOT more debugging my problem than if everything magically worked. It’s okay that you aren’t perfect! Not everyone can be me? In the same vein… don’t ask someone else to debug your problem until you have made a valiant attempt to do so yourself. There’s nothing quite like stepping through code line by line to see what it’s REALLY doing… and you’ll never feel more stupid sometimes than when you realize WHY it’s not working.. but you realize... you learn... and you remember. There is nothing wrong with failure as long as you learn from it. As you start writing more and more and more code make sure that you ALWAYS… Develop for Production You will soon learn that the “prototype” you wrote last week to show as a “proof of concept” is going to go directly into production no matter how much you beg and plead and try to explain it’s not ready to go into production… it’s going to go straight there.. and it’s like herpes.. it doesn’t go away and there’s no fixing it once it’s in there.  So, why not write ALL your code like it will be put in production? It MIGHT take a little longer, but in the long run it will be easier to maintain, get help on, and you won’t be embarrassed that it’s sitting on a production server for everyone to use and see. So, now that you are getting comfortable and writing code for production it is important to to remember the… KISS Principle… Learn It… Love It… Keep It Simple Stupid Seriously.. don’t try to show how smart you are by writing the most complicated code in history. Break your problem up into discrete steps and write each step. If it turns out you have some redundancy, you can always go back and tweak your code later.  How bad is it when you write code that LOOKS cocky? I’ve seen it before… some of the most abstract and complicated classes when a class wasn’t even needed! Or the most elaborate unreadable code jammed into one really long line when it could have been written in three lines, performed just as well, and been SOOO much easier to maintain. Keep it clear and simple.. baby steps people. This will help you learn the technology, debug problems, AND it will help others help you find your problems if they don’t have to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls just to figure out what you are trying to do…. Really.. don’t be that guy… try to curb your ego and… Keep an Open Mind No matter how smart you are… how fast you type… or how much you get paid, don’t let your ego get in the way. There is probably a better way to do everything you’ve ever done. Don’t become so cocky that you can’t think someone knows more than you. There’s a lot of brilliant, helpful people out there willing to show you tricks if you just give them a chance. A very super-awesome developer once told me “So what if you’ve been writing code for 10 years or more! Does your code look basically the same? Are you not growing as a developer?” Those 10 years become pretty meaningless if you just “know” that you are right and have not picked up new tips, tricks, methods, and patterns along the way. Learn from others and find out what’s new in development land (you know you don’t have to specifically use pointers anymore??). Along those same lines… If it’s not working, first assume you are doing something wrong. You have no idea how much it annoys people who are trying to help you when you first assume that the help they are trying to give you is wrong. Just MAYBE… you… the person learning is making some small mistake? Maybe you didn’t describe your problem correctly? Maybe you are using the wrong terminology? “I did exactly what you said and it didn’t work.”  Oh really? Are you SURE about that? “Your solution doesn’t work.”  Well… I’m pretty sure it works, I’ve used it 200 times… What are you doing differently? First try some humility and appreciation.. it will go much further, especially when it turns out YOU are the one that is wrong. When all else fails…. Try Professional Training Some people just don’t have the mindset to go and figure stuff out. It’s a gift and not everyone has it. If everyone could do it I wouldn’t have a job and there wouldn’t be professional training available.  So, if you’ve tried everything else and no light bulbs are coming on, contact the experts who specialize in training. Be careful though, there is bad training out there. Want to know the names of some good places? Just shoot me a message and I’ll let you know. I’m boycotting endorsing Andrew Connell anymore until I get that free course dangit!! So… that’s it.. that’s all I got right now. Maybe you thought all of this is common sense, maybe you think I’m smoking crack. If so, don’t just sit there, there’s a comments section for a reason. Finally, what about you? What tips do you have to help this aspiring to learn the dark arts??

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 29, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 29, 2011Popular ReleasesCandescent NUI: Candescent NUI (8263): This is the binary version of the source code in change set 8263.Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.4.4: Fix for http://coding4fun.codeplex.com/workitem/6869 was incomplete. Back button wouldn't return app bar. Corrected now. High impact bugSiteMap Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: SiteMap Editor (1.0.528.279): Added keyboard shortcuts: - Cut (CTRL+X) - Copy (CTRL+C) - Paste (CTRL+V) - Delete (CTRL+D) - Move up (CTRL+UP ARROW) - Move down (CTRL+DOWN ARROW) Added ability to save/load SiteMap from/to a Xml file on disk Bug fix: - Connect to a server through the status bar was throwing error "Object Reference not set to an instance of an object" - Rename TreeNode.Name after changing TreeNode.TextMicrosoft - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.0 App Sample: V2.01 ALPHA N-Layered SampleApp .NET 4.0 and EF4.1: V2.0.01 - ALPHARequired Software (Microsoft Base Software needed for Development environment) Visual Studio 2010 RTM & .NET 4.0 RTM (Final Versions) Expression Blend 4 SQL Server 2008 R2 Express/Standard/Enterprise Unity Application Block 2.0 - Published May 5th 2010 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2D24F179-E0A6-49D7-89C4-5B67D939F91B&displaylang=en http://unity.codeplex.com/releases/view/31277 PEX & MOLES 0.94.51023.0, 29/Oct/2010 - Visual Studio 2010 Power ...Mosaic Project: Mosaic Alpha build 261: - Fixed crash when pinning applications in x64 OS - Added Hub to video widget. It shows videos from Video library (only .wmv and .avi). Can work slow if there are too much files. - Fixed some issues with scrolling - Fixed bug with html widgets - Fixed bug in Gmail widget - Added html today widget missed in previous release - Now Mosaic saves running widgets if you restarting from optionsEnhSim: EnhSim 2.4.9 BETA: 2.4.9 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.2 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Added in some of th....NET Reflector Add-Ins: Reflector V7 Add-Ins: All the add-ins compiled for Reflector V7TerrariViewer: TerrariViewer v4.1 [4.0 Bug Fixes]: Version 4.1 ChangelogChanged how users will Open Player files (This change makes it much easier) This allowed me to remove the "Current player file" labels that were present Changed file control icons Added submit bug button Various Bug Fixes Fixed crashes related to clicking on buffs before a character is loaded Fixed crashes related to selecting "No Buff" when choosing a new buff Fixed crashes related to clicking on a "Max" button on the buff tab before a character is loaded Cor...AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta8: ??AcDown???????????????，?????????????????????。????????????????????，??Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、?????，???????????、???????。 AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 AcDown???????C#??，?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ??v3.0 Beta8 ?? ??????????????? ???????????????(??????????) ???????...BlogEngine.NET: BlogEngine.NET 2.5: Get DotNetBlogEngine for 3 Months Free! Click Here for More Info 3 Months FREE – BlogEngine.NET Hosting – Click Here! If you want to set up and start using BlogEngine.NET right away, you should download the Web project. If you want to extend or modify BlogEngine.NET, you should download the source code. If you are upgrading from a previous version of BlogEngine.NET, please take a look at the Upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.5 instructions. To get started, be sure to check out our installatio...PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.2 for IIS 7: This release contains all the functionality available in 62183 plus the following additions: Command Line Support via PowerShell - now it is possible to manage and script PHP installations on IIS by using Windows PowerShell. More information is available at Managing PHP installations with PHP Manager command line. Detection and alert when using local PHP handler - if a web site or a directory has a local copy of PHP handler mapping then the configuration changes made on upper configuration ...MiniTwitter: 1.71: MiniTwitter 1.71 ???? ?? OAuth ???????????? ????????、??????????????????? ???????????????????????SizeOnDisk: 1.0.10.0: Fix: issue 327: size format error when save settings Fix: some UI bindings trouble (sorting, refresh) Fix: user settings file deletion when corrupted Feature: TreeView virtualization (better speed with many folders) Feature: New file type DataGrid column Feature: In KByte view, show size of file < 1024B and > 0 with 3 decimal Feature: New language: Italian Task: Cleanup for speedRawr: Rawr 4.2.0: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr AddonWe now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including bag and bank items) like Char...N2 CMS: 2.2: * Web platform installer support available ** Nuget support available What's newDinamico Templates (beta) - an MVC3 & Razor based template pack using the template-first! development paradigm Boilerplate CSS & HTML5 Advanced theming with css comipilation (concrete, dark, roadwork, terracotta) Template-first! development style Content, news, listing, slider, image sizes, search, sitemap, globalization, youtube, google map Display Tokens - replaces text tokens with rendered content (usag...KinectNUI: Jun 25 Alpha Release: Initial public version. No installer needed, just run the EXE.Terraria World Viewer: Version 1.5: Update June 24th Made compatible with the new tiles found in Terraria 1.0.5Kinect Earth Move: KinectEarthMove sample code: Sample code releasedThis is a sample code for Kinect for Windows SDK beta, which was demonstrated on Channel 9 Kinect for Windows SKD beta launch event on June 17 2011. Using color image and skeleton data from Kinect and user in front of Kinect can manipulate the earth between his/her hands.NetOffice - The easiest way to use Office in .NET: NetOffice Release 0.9b: Changes: - fix critical issue 262334 (AccessViolationException while using events in a COMAddin) - remove x64 Assemblies (not necessary) Includes: - Runtime Binaries and Source Code for .NET Framework:......v2.0, v3.0, v3.5, v4.0 - Tutorials in C# and VB.Net:..............................................................COM Proxy Management, Events, etc. - Examples in C# and VB.Net:............................................................Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access - COMAddi...patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 12 - June 22, 2011: Changes from previous drop: Minor code changes. New "Introduction" chapter. New "Modularity" chapter. Updated "Architecture" chapter. Updated "Server-Side Implementation" chapter. Updated "Client Data Management and Caching" chapter. Guidance Chapters Ready for Review The Word documents for the chapters are included with the source code in addition to the CHM to help you provide feedback. The PDF is provided as a separate download for your convenience. Installation Overview To ins...New ProjectsA web interface for data search and download to CUAHSI HIS: Hydroweb is an innovative user interface (GUI) created for web driven hydrology data search and download from CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS). The project has been developed in c#/Silverlight programming environment by leveraging the Bing map Silverlight tools.AcesUp: It's a desktop game developed using Windows Forms. The Game can currently run only if the screen resolution is 1024 x 786. It's a modern implementation of the classic cards game Aces Up. The version that is currently available is called AcesUp Ultimate. Enjoy!AES Encryptor: AES Encryptor (AES.E) is an simple, user-friendly text file encryption program using the Advanced Encryption System (AES). Encryption keys are based on the password that is registered with the program. AES.E is written in Visual Basic.AML Studio: AML Studio makes it easier for developers who are extending Aras Innovator to develop AML queries. Queries can be developed and run using a smart editor with syntax highlighting, code folding, and Intellisense. It's developed in C#.Arca4: Arca4 is a chat server for the Ares Galaxy File Sharing Network. It's developed in C# 4.0.Basic SharePoint-Google-Maps-WebPart for SharePoint-Lists: This JavaScript-Solution improves the standard-functionality of SharePoint-Lists. It displays a new Menu-Link in the standard Menu-Toolbar of a SharePoint-List (which contains addresses / coordinates). By clicking this link Google-Maps will be displayed under the SharePoint-List.BikeBouncer, bike protection for all: Bike registration and protection for free! BikeBouncer helps cyclists keeping their bikes away from thieves. Website: http://bikebouncer.com. The source is now open so people can contribute with new ideas.Cli: General purpose commandline interface for c# projects. Inherit this class and get cli for free. Plan for other languages in the future.CLIRES-3 Clinical Study/Trial Research (MVC3 - Web Application) by Tateeda.com: Clinical Study/trials research application to track subjects and their medication, visits. Dynamically create questioners/survey forms, visits, manage medications, sites, visit schedules and so on. Application is pre loaded with forms for Bipolar disorder study and 2500 related medications. Full administrative functionality HIPPA and CFR part 11 implementation. Easy to adopt for any other type of clinical study research. Technology: MVC3, C3 4.0, EF 4.0, jQuery 1.6, MS SQL 2008 R2CloudShot: CloudShot is a simple application to create screenshots and automatically upload it to your dropbox.CodingWheels.DataTypes: DataTypes tries to make it easier for developers to have concrete typesafe objects for working with many common forms of data. Many times these data objects are just doubles or ints floating through your code with abbreviations on them describing what they represent.CommonLibrary.NET Extensions: Highly re-usable code and components that are extensions to CommonLibrary.NET.CommonLibrary.NET Web: Highly re-usable web based code and components that are extensions to the CommonLibrary.NET.CRM 2011 Maintenance Job Editor: This utility is to be used for editing the CRM 2011 maintenance jobs which are automatically scheduled by the installation of CRM. This utility provides similar functionality to CRM 4.0's Scale Group Job Editor [url:http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/ScaleGroupJobEditor]. Due to the changes in CRM 2011 many modifications had to be made and the functionality has been altered slightly. I look forward to your thoughts and comments on the changes. Excel add-in for BLAS routines: summaryExcel add-in for floating point numbers: Excel add-in for floating point number routines and utilities.Excel add-in for LAPACK routines: LAPACKExcel add-in for market aware date and time routines.: Date and time functions for Excel that know about market conventions such as day count and roll conventions.F# Math Visualizer: MathVisualizer, scirtto in F#, permette di visualizzare espressioni matematiche. Le espressioni devo essere scritte dall'utente seguendo una determinata sintassi. In particolare un espressione puo' essere scritta in maniera estesa, contratta o ibrida.FSharp Toolkit: Contents for build applications on F#.HiFreamWork: Hi,FreamWork C# Custom Library Used Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary. ruiyuxing MSN/Mail:ryx1984ryx#hotmail.com QQ:120897051 http://www.cnfield.comhozoroghiab: hozoroghiab is absent o present systemHtml Parametric Web Part: A Web Part to build html with parameters taken from the context of SharePoint 2007ios-framework: ios framework projectITextSharp Sample: ????IText Sharp????，????????PDF??，????flash,????LinGoRoom: Language lab technology-based "thin client". NAudio used for audio capture and playback. The project was developed in C #.Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Customization Editor: Visual Studio 2010 and stand-alone tool that will allow the Customizations.xml to be viewed in a tree structure, with custom editors for each component. Initially editors for the supported Ribbon Editor, Sitemap and ISV.config will be included, with Read-only views for Forms.Modbus for .NET: C# implementation of Modbus communication protocol.Multi-Server MVC Elmah Log Viewer: An Elmah Log viewer for multiple elmah logs.MVC Scaffolding for WCF Data Services: This project contains a set of custom templates for MVC Scaffolding that will allow you to scaffold against a WCF Data Service (oData). Using these templates you can scaffold your client side DataServiceContext, Controller and Views using MVC Scaffolding, allowing you to quickly get a milti tiered MVC application up and running. You can use pretty much any oData feed as long as you have the entities for your ADO .NET Data Service defined in your solution these templates should work. OABValidate: This tool is for tracking down unresolvable DNs on directory objects when you have an Exchange server where Offline Address List generation (oabgen) is failing with event 9339 and error code 8004010e.onForms: Weekly fresh this is deletedOpenNETCF Calendar Controls: OpenNETCF Calendar Controls provide a Month View, Week View and Agenda View similar to what is used in the Pocket Outlook Calendar application. Pedal Architecture: Pedal Architecture allows you to quickly build enteprise applications. It currently supports building and hosting composable Windows Communication Foundation services using MEF.powerdown: ?????。rl: rlRooBooks: RooBooks - Books management tool for students and such. (circa 2004)SciFun: simple playground..SIGPRO Desktop: FUNCERNSistema De Tallet: Vehicles tallerSiteMap Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: SiteMap Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 helps developer and customizers to configure the Site Map in a graphical way. You'll no longer have to create solution, add component, export, update Xml and reimport the solution to update the SiteMap.The Electrolytes Website: The Electrolytes Band WebsiteThe Professions: The Professions work items are generalised for professional use. The professions are for highly skilled professionals who have earned their place in society through education, dedication, and specialization in some cases. The associations for particular professions are encouragedUpdateTool: A tool used to update client This project is for personal use. Please do not download in now.WcfFront: Automatic publisher of WCF ServicesWolfpack.Contrib: Contrib project for WolfPack monitoring

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• Metro Walkthrough: Creating a Task List with a ListView and IndexedDB

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to describe how you can work with data in a Metro style application written with JavaScript. In particular, we create a super simple Task List application which enables you to create and delete tasks. Here’s a video which demonstrates how the Task List application works: In order to build this application, I had to take advantage of several features of the WinJS library and technologies including: IndexedDB – The Task List application stores data in an IndexedDB database. HTML5 Form Validation – The Task List application uses HTML5 validation to ensure that a required field has a value. ListView Control – The Task List application displays the tasks retrieved from the IndexedDB database in a WinJS ListView control. Creating the IndexedDB Database The Task List application stores all of its data in an IndexedDB database named TasksDB. This database is opened/created with the following code: var db; var req = window.msIndexedDB.open("TasksDB", 1); req.onerror = function () { console.log("Could not open database"); }; req.onupgradeneeded = function (evt) { var newDB = evt.target.result; newDB.createObjectStore("tasks", { keyPath: "id", autoIncrement:true }); }; The msIndexedDB.open() method accepts two parameters: the name of the database to open and the version of the database to open. If a database with a matching version already exists, then calling the msIndexedDB.open() method opens a connection to the existing database. If the database does not exist then the upgradeneeded event is raised. You handle the upgradeneeded event to create a new database. In the code above, the upgradeneeded event handler creates an object store named “tasks” (An object store roughly corresponds to a database table). When you add items to the tasks object store then each item gets an id property with an auto-incremented value automatically. The code above also includes an error event handler. If the IndexedDB database cannot be opened or created, for whatever reason, then an error message is written to the Visual Studio JavaScript Console window. Displaying a List of Tasks The TaskList application retrieves its list of tasks from the tasks object store, which we created above, and displays the list of tasks in a ListView control. Here is how the ListView control is declared: <div id="tasksListView" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: TaskList.tasks.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#taskTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'toggleSelect', selectionMode: 'multi', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div> The ListView control is bound to the TaskList.tasks.dataSource data source. The TaskList.tasks.dataSource is created with the following code: // Create the data source var tasks = new WinJS.Binding.List(); // Open the database var db; var req = window.msIndexedDB.open("TasksDB", 1); req.onerror = function () { console.log("Could not open database"); }; req.onupgradeneeded = function (evt) { var newDB = evt.target.result; newDB.createObjectStore("tasks", { keyPath: "id", autoIncrement:true }); }; // Load the data source with data from the database req.onsuccess = function () { db = req.result; var tran = db.transaction("tasks"); tran.objectStore("tasks").openCursor().onsuccess = function(event) { var cursor = event.target.result; tasks.dataSource.beginEdits(); if (cursor) { tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, cursor.value); cursor.continue(); } else { tasks.dataSource.endEdits(); }; }; }; // Expose the data source and functions WinJS.Namespace.define("TaskList", { tasks: tasks }); Notice the success event handler. This handler is called when a database is successfully opened/created. In the code above, all of the items from the tasks object store are retrieved into a cursor and added to a WinJS.Binding.List object named tasks. Because the ListView control is bound to the WinJS.Binding.List object, copying the tasks from the object store into the WinJS.Binding.List object causes the tasks to appear in the ListView: Adding a New Task You add a new task in the Task List application by entering the title of a new task into an HTML form and clicking the Add button. Here’s the markup for creating the form: <form id="addTaskForm"> <input id="newTaskTitle" title="New Task" required /> <button>Add</button> </form> Notice that the INPUT element includes a required attribute. In a Metro application, you can take advantage of HTML5 Validation to validate form fields. If you don’t enter a value for the newTaskTitle field then the following validation error message is displayed: For a brief introduction to HTML5 validation, see my previous blog entry: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/03/13/html5-form-validation.aspx When you click the Add button, the form is submitted and the form submit event is raised. The following code is executed in the default.js file: // Handle Add Task document.getElementById("addTaskForm").addEventListener("submit", function (evt) { evt.preventDefault(); var newTaskTitle = document.getElementById("newTaskTitle"); TaskList.addTask({ title: newTaskTitle.value }); newTaskTitle.value = ""; }); The code above retrieves the title of the new task and calls the addTask() method in the tasks.js file. Here’s the code for the addTask() method which is responsible for actually adding the new task to the IndexedDB database: // Add a new task function addTask(taskToAdd) { var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", IDBTransaction.READ_WRITE); var addRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").add(taskToAdd); addRequest.onsuccess = function (evt) { taskToAdd.id = evt.target.result; tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, taskToAdd); } } The code above does two things. First, it adds the new task to the tasks object store in the IndexedDB database. Second, it adds the new task to the data source bound to the ListView. The dataSource.insertAtEnd() method is called to add the new task to the data source so the new task will appear in the ListView (with a nice little animation). Deleting Existing Tasks The Task List application enables you to select one or more tasks by clicking or tapping on one or more tasks in the ListView. When you click the Delete button, the selected tasks are removed from both the IndexedDB database and the ListView. For example, in the following screenshot, two tasks are selected. The selected tasks appear with a teal background and a checkmark: When you click the Delete button, the following code in the default.js file is executed: // Handle Delete Tasks document.getElementById("btnDeleteTasks").addEventListener("click", function (evt) { tasksListView.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function(items) { items.forEach(function (item) { TaskList.deleteTask(item); }); }); }); The selected tasks are retrieved with the TaskList selection.getItem() method. In the code above, the deleteTask() method is called for each of the selected tasks. Here’s the code for the deleteTask() method: // Delete an existing task function deleteTask(listViewItem) { // Database key != ListView key var dbKey = listViewItem.data.id; var listViewKey = listViewItem.key; // Remove item from db and, if success, remove item from ListView var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", IDBTransaction.READ_WRITE); var deleteRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").delete(dbKey); deleteRequest.onsuccess = function () { tasks.dataSource.remove(listViewKey); } } This code does two things: it deletes the existing task from the database and removes the existing task from the ListView. In both cases, the right task is removed by using the key associated with the task. However, the task key is different in the case of the database and in the case of the ListView. In the case of the database, the task key is the value of the task id property. In the case of the ListView, on the other hand, the task key is auto-generated by the ListView. When the task is removed from the ListView, an animation is used to collapse the tasks which appear above and below the task which was removed. The Complete Code Above, I did a lot of jumping around between different files in the application and I left out sections of code. For the sake of completeness, I want to include the entire code here: the default.html, default.js, and tasks.js files. Here are the contents of the default.html file. This file contains the UI for the Task List application: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Task List</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- TaskList references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/tasks.js"></script> <style type="text/css"> body { font-size: x-large; } form { display: inline; } #appContainer { margin: 20px; width: 600px; } .win-container { padding: 10px; } </style> </head> <body> <div> <!-- Templates --> <div id="taskTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> </div> </div> <h1>Super Task List</h1> <div id="appContainer"> <form id="addTaskForm"> <input id="newTaskTitle" title="New Task" required /> <button>Add</button> </form> <button id="btnDeleteTasks">Delete</button> <div id="tasksListView" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource: TaskList.tasks.dataSource, itemTemplate: select('#taskTemplate'), tapBehavior: 'toggleSelect', selectionMode: 'multi', layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout } }"> </div> </div> </div> </body> </html> Here is the code for the default.js file. This code wires up the Add Task form and Delete button: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { WinJS.UI.processAll().then(function () { // Get reference to Tasks ListView var tasksListView = document.getElementById("tasksListView"); // Handle Add Task document.getElementById("addTaskForm").addEventListener("submit", function (evt) { evt.preventDefault(); var newTaskTitle = document.getElementById("newTaskTitle"); TaskList.addTask({ title: newTaskTitle.value }); newTaskTitle.value = ""; }); // Handle Delete Tasks document.getElementById("btnDeleteTasks").addEventListener("click", function (evt) { tasksListView.winControl.selection.getItems().then(function(items) { items.forEach(function (item) { TaskList.deleteTask(item); }); }); }); }); } }; app.start(); })(); Finally, here is the tasks.js file. This file contains all of the code for opening, creating, and interacting with IndexedDB: (function () { "use strict"; // Create the data source var tasks = new WinJS.Binding.List(); // Open the database var db; var req = window.msIndexedDB.open("TasksDB", 1); req.onerror = function () { console.log("Could not open database"); }; req.onupgradeneeded = function (evt) { var newDB = evt.target.result; newDB.createObjectStore("tasks", { keyPath: "id", autoIncrement:true }); }; // Load the data source with data from the database req.onsuccess = function () { db = req.result; var tran = db.transaction("tasks"); tran.objectStore("tasks").openCursor().onsuccess = function(event) { var cursor = event.target.result; tasks.dataSource.beginEdits(); if (cursor) { tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, cursor.value); cursor.continue(); } else { tasks.dataSource.endEdits(); }; }; }; // Add a new task function addTask(taskToAdd) { var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", IDBTransaction.READ_WRITE); var addRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").add(taskToAdd); addRequest.onsuccess = function (evt) { taskToAdd.id = evt.target.result; tasks.dataSource.insertAtEnd(null, taskToAdd); } } // Delete an existing task function deleteTask(listViewItem) { // Database key != ListView key var dbKey = listViewItem.data.id; var listViewKey = listViewItem.key; // Remove item from db and, if success, remove item from ListView var transaction = db.transaction("tasks", IDBTransaction.READ_WRITE); var deleteRequest = transaction.objectStore("tasks").delete(dbKey); deleteRequest.onsuccess = function () { tasks.dataSource.remove(listViewKey); } } // Expose the data source and functions WinJS.Namespace.define("TaskList", { tasks: tasks, addTask: addTask, deleteTask: deleteTask }); })(); Summary I wrote this blog entry because I wanted to create a walkthrough of building a simple database-driven application. In particular, I wanted to demonstrate how you can use a ListView control with an IndexedDB database to store and retrieve database data.

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• Too many connections to 212.192.255.240

  - by Castor

  Recently, my Internet slowed down drastically. I downloaded a tool to see the TCP/IP connections from my Vista computer. I found out that a lot TCP/IP connections are being connected to 212.192.255.240 through SVCHost. It seems that it is trying to connect to different ports. I think that my computer is being infected with some kind of malware etc. But I am not sure how to get rid of it. I did a little bit of research on this IP but found nothing. Any suggestions are highly appreciated. UPDATE: This is the HiJackThis log file and I can't find any thing weird. Also, the program is also trying to create connections to 91.205.127.63, which is also from Russia. Logfile of Trend Micro HijackThis v2.0.4 Scan saved at 18:20:54 PM, on 4/29/2010 Platform: Windows Vista SP2 (WinNT 6.00.1906) MSIE: Internet Explorer v8.00 (8.00.6001.18882) Boot mode: Normal Running processes: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\taskeng.exe C:\Windows\system32\Dwm.exe C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\Taskmgr.exe C:\Windows\explorer.exe C:\Windows\System32\igfxpers.exe C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\ashDisp.exe C:\Program Files\Software602\Print2PDF\Print2PDF.exe C:\Windows\system32\igfxsrvc.exe C:\Program Files\VertrigoServ\Vertrigo.exe C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\jusched.exe C:\Program Files\Google\GoogleToolbarNotifier\GoogleToolbarNotifier.exe C:\Windows\system32\wbem\unsecapp.exe C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmpnscfg.exe C:\Program Files\X-NetStat Professional\xns5.exe C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe C:\Program Files\HP\Digital Imaging\smart web printing\hpswp_clipbook.exe C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe C:\Program Files\Trend Micro\HiJackThis\HiJackThis.exe R0 - HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Start Page = about:blank R1 - HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Default_Search_URL = http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=54896 R1 - HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main,Search Page = http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=54896 R0 - HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Search,CustomizeSearch = R1 - HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings,ProxyServer = 10.0.0.30:8118 R0 - HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar,LinksFolderName = R3 - URLSearchHook: Yahoo! Toolbar - {EF99BD32-C1FB-11D2-892F-0090271D4F88} - C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Companion\Installs\cpn0\yt.dll F2 - REG:system.ini: Shell=explorer.exe rundll32.exe O2 - BHO: &Yahoo! Toolbar Helper - {02478D38-C3F9-4efb-9B51-7695ECA05670} - C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Companion\Installs\cpn0\yt.dll O2 - BHO: HP Print Enhancer - {0347C33E-8762-4905-BF09-768834316C61} - C:\Program Files\HP\Digital Imaging\Smart Web Printing\hpswp_printenhancer.dll O2 - BHO: AcroIEHelperStub - {18DF081C-E8AD-4283-A596-FA578C2EBDC3} - C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Acrobat\ActiveX\AcroIEHelperShim.dll O2 - BHO: RoboForm BHO - {724d43a9-0d85-11d4-9908-00400523e39a} - C:\Program Files\Siber Systems\AI RoboForm\roboform.dll O2 - BHO: Groove GFS Browser Helper - {72853161-30C5-4D22-B7F9-0BBC1D38A37E} - C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~3\Office12\GRA8E1~1.DLL O2 - BHO: Google Toolbar Helper - {AA58ED58-01DD-4d91-8333-CF10577473F7} - C:\Program Files\Google\Google Toolbar\GoogleToolbar_32.dll O2 - BHO: Google Toolbar Notifier BHO - {AF69DE43-7D58-4638-B6FA-CE66B5AD205D} - C:\Program Files\Google\GoogleToolbarNotifier\5.5.4723.1820\swg.dll O2 - BHO: Java(tm) Plug-In 2 SSV Helper - {DBC80044-A445-435b-BC74-9C25C1C588A9} - C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\jp2ssv.dll O2 - BHO: Google Gears Helper - {E0FEFE40-FBF9-42AE-BA58-794CA7E3FB53} - C:\Program Files\Google\Google Gears\Internet Explorer\0.5.36.0\gears.dll O2 - BHO: SingleInstance Class - {FDAD4DA1-61A2-4FD8-9C17-86F7AC245081} - C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Companion\Installs\cpn0\YTSingleInstance.dll O2 - BHO: HP Smart BHO Class - {FFFFFFFF-CF4E-4F2B-BDC2-0E72E116A856} - C:\Program Files\HP\Digital Imaging\Smart Web Printing\hpswp_BHO.dll O3 - Toolbar: Yahoo! Toolbar - {EF99BD32-C1FB-11D2-892F-0090271D4F88} - C:\Program Files\Yahoo!\Companion\Installs\cpn0\yt.dll O3 - Toolbar: &RoboForm - {724d43a0-0d85-11d4-9908-00400523e39a} - C:\Program Files\Siber Systems\AI RoboForm\roboform.dll O3 - Toolbar: Google Toolbar - {2318C2B1-4965-11d4-9B18-009027A5CD4F} - C:\Program Files\Google\Google Toolbar\GoogleToolbar_32.dll O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [RtHDVCpl] C:\Program Files\Realtek\Audio\HDA\RtHDVCpl.exe -s O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [IgfxTray] C:\Windows\system32\igfxtray.exe O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [Persistence] C:\Windows\system32\igfxpers.exe O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [avast!] C:\PROGRA~1\ALWILS~1\Avast4\ashDisp.exe O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [Print2PDF Print Monitor] "C:\Program Files\Software602\Print2PDF\Print2PDF.exe" /server O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [VertrigoServ] "C:\Program Files\VertrigoServ\Vertrigo.exe" O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [SunJavaUpdateSched] "C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\jusched.exe" O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [Adobe Reader Speed Launcher] "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\Reader_sl.exe" O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [Adobe ARM] "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\ARM\1.0\AdobeARM.exe" O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [Google Quick Search Box] "C:\Program Files\Google\Quick Search Box\GoogleQuickSearchBox.exe" /autorun O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [iTunesHelper] "C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunesHelper.exe" O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [QuickTime Task] "C:\Program Files\QuickTime\QTTask.exe" -atboottime O4 - HKCU\..\Run: [swg] "C:\Program Files\Google\GoogleToolbarNotifier\GoogleToolbarNotifier.exe" O4 - HKCU\..\Run: [CCProxy] C:\CCProxy\CCProxy.exe O4 - HKCU\..\Run: [AlcoholAutomount] "C:\Program Files\Alcohol Soft\Alcohol 120\axcmd.exe" /automount O4 - HKCU\..\Run: [RoboForm] "C:\Program Files\Siber Systems\AI RoboForm\RoboTaskBarIcon.exe" O4 - HKCU\..\Run: [FileHippo.com] "C:\Program Files\filehippo.com\UpdateChecker.exe" /background O4 - HKUS\S-1-5-19\..\Run: [Sidebar] %ProgramFiles%\Windows Sidebar\Sidebar.exe /detectMem (User 'LOCAL SERVICE') O4 - HKUS\S-1-5-19\..\Run: [WindowsWelcomeCenter] rundll32.exe oobefldr.dll,ShowWelcomeCenter (User 'LOCAL SERVICE') O4 - HKUS\S-1-5-20\..\Run: [Sidebar] %ProgramFiles%\Windows Sidebar\Sidebar.exe /detectMem (User 'NETWORK SERVICE') O4 - Startup: AutorunsDisabled O4 - Startup: Locate32 Autorun.lnk = C:\Program Files\Locate\Locate32.exe O4 - Startup: OneNote Table Of Contents.onetoc2 O8 - Extra context menu item: Add to Google Photos Screensa&ver - res://C:\Windows\system32\GPhotos.scr/200 O8 - Extra context menu item: Customize Menu - file://C:\Program Files\Siber Systems\AI RoboForm\RoboFormComCustomizeIEMenu.html O8 - Extra context menu item: E&xport to Microsoft Excel - res://C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~3\Office14\EXCEL.EXE/3000 O8 - Extra context menu item: Fill Forms - file://C:\Program Files\Siber Systems\AI RoboForm\RoboFormComFillForms.html O8 - Extra context menu item: Google Sidewiki... - res://C:\Program Files\Google\Google Toolbar\Component\GoogleToolbarDynamic_mui_en_96D6FF0C6D236BF8.dll/cmsidewiki.html O8 - Extra context menu item: RoboForm Toolbar - file://C:\Program Files\Siber Systems\AI RoboForm\RoboFormComShowToolbar.html O8 - Extra context menu item: S&end to OneNote - res://C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~3\Office14\ONBttnIE.dll/105 O8 - Extra context menu item: Save Forms - file://C:\Program Files\Siber Systems\AI RoboForm\RoboFormComSavePass.html O9 - Extra button: (no name) - {09C04DA7-5B76-4EBC-BBEE-B25EAC5965F5} - C:\Program Files\Google\Google Gears\Internet Explorer\0.5.36.0\gears.dll O9 - Extra 'Tools' menuitem: &Gears Settings - {09C04DA7-5B76-4EBC-BBEE-B25EAC5965F5} - C:\Program Files\Google\Google Gears\Internet Explorer\0.5.36.0\gears.dll O9 - Extra button: Send to OneNote - {2670000A-7350-4f3c-8081-5663EE0C6C49} - C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~3\Office12\ONBttnIE.dll O9 - Extra 'Tools' menuitem: S&end to OneNote - {2670000A-7350-4f3c-8081-5663EE0C6C49} - C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~3\Office12\ONBttnIE.dll O9 - Extra button: Fill Forms - {320AF880-6646-11D3-ABEE-C5DBF3571F46} - file://C:\Program Files\Siber Systems\AI RoboForm\RoboFormComFillForms.html O9 - Extra 'Tools' menuitem: Fill Forms - {320AF880-6646-11D3-ABEE-C5DBF3571F46} - file://C:\Program Files\Siber Systems\AI RoboForm\RoboFormComFillForms.html O9 - Extra button: Save - {320AF880-6646-11D3-ABEE-C5DBF3571F49} - file://C:\Program Files\Siber Systems\AI RoboForm\RoboFormComSavePass.html O9 - Extra 'Tools' menuitem: Save Forms - {320AF880-6646-11D3-ABEE-C5DBF3571F49} - file://C:\Program Files\Siber Systems\AI RoboForm\RoboFormComSavePass.html O9 - Extra button: Print2PDF - {5B7027AD-AA6D-40df-8F56-9560F277D2A5} - C:\Program Files\Software602\Print2PDF\Print602.dll O9 - Extra 'Tools' menuitem: Print2PDF - {5B7027AD-AA6D-40df-8F56-9560F277D2A5} - C:\Program Files\Software602\Print2PDF\Print602.dll O9 - Extra button: RoboForm - {724d43aa-0d85-11d4-9908-00400523e39a} - file://C:\Program Files\Siber Systems\AI RoboForm\RoboFormComShowToolbar.html O9 - Extra 'Tools' menuitem: RoboForm Toolbar - {724d43aa-0d85-11d4-9908-00400523e39a} - file://C:\Program Files\Siber Systems\AI RoboForm\RoboFormComShowToolbar.html O9 - Extra button: Research - {92780B25-18CC-41C8-B9BE-3C9C571A8263} - C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~3\Office12\REFIEBAR.DLL O9 - Extra button: Show or hide HP Smart Web Printing - {DDE87865-83C5-48c4-8357-2F5B1AA84522} - C:\Program Files\HP\Digital Imaging\Smart Web Printing\hpswp_BHO.dll O17 - HKLM\System\CCS\Services\Tcpip\..\{A80AB385-7767-4B5C-AF97-DBD65B29D8D1}: NameServer = 218.248.255.146 218.248.255.212 O17 - HKLM\System\CCS\Services\Tcpip\..\{D10402C1-9CDE-4582-A6B7-6C0D33B0E7BC}: NameServer = 218.248.255.146,218.248.255.212 O18 - Protocol: grooveLocalGWS - {88FED34C-F0CA-4636-A375-3CB6248B04CD} - C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~3\Office12\GR99D3~1.DLL O22 - SharedTaskScheduler: Component Categories cache daemon - {8C7461EF-2B13-11d2-BE35-3078302C2030} - C:\Windows\system32\browseui.dll O23 - Service: Apple Mobile Device - Apple Inc. - C:\Program Files\Common Files\Apple\Mobile Device Support\bin\AppleMobileDeviceService.exe O23 - Service: avast! iAVS4 Control Service (aswUpdSv) - ALWIL Software - C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\aswUpdSv.exe O23 - Service: avast! Antivirus - ALWIL Software - C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\ashServ.exe O23 - Service: avast! Mail Scanner - ALWIL Software - C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\ashMaiSv.exe O23 - Service: avast! Web Scanner - ALWIL Software - C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast4\ashWebSv.exe O23 - Service: Bonjour Service - Apple Inc. - C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe O23 - Service: CCProxy - Youngzsoft - C:\CCProxy\CCProxy.exe O23 - Service: Google Update Service (gupdate1c9c328490dac0) (gupdate1c9c328490dac0) - Google Inc. - C:\Program Files\Google\Update\GoogleUpdate.exe O23 - Service: Google Software Updater (gusvc) - Google - C:\Program Files\Google\Common\Google Updater\GoogleUpdaterService.exe O23 - Service: Distributed Transaction Coordinator MSDTCwercplsupport (MSDTCwercplsupport) - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\system32\acluiz.exe O23 - Service: Realtek Audio Service (RtkAudioService) - Realtek Semiconductor - C:\Windows\RtkAudioService.exe O23 - Service: StarWind AE Service (StarWindServiceAE) - Rocket Division Software - C:\Program Files\Alcohol Soft\Alcohol 120\StarWind\StarWindServiceAE.exe O23 - Service: SuperProServer - Unknown owner - C:\Windows\spnsrvnt.exe (file missing) O23 - Service: Vertrigo_Apache - Apache Software Foundation - C:\Program Files\VertrigoServ\apache\bin\v_apache.exe O23 - Service: Vertrigo_MySQL - Unknown owner - C:\Program Files\VertrigoServ\mysql\bin\v_mysqld.exe -- End of file - 10965 bytes enter code here enter code here

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• Designing for the future

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  User interfaces and user experience design is a fast moving field. It’s something that changes pretty quick: what feels fresh today will look outdated tomorrow. I remember the day I first got a beta version of Windows 95 and I felt swept away by the user interface of the OS. It felt so modern! If I look back now, it feels old. Well, it should: the design is 17 years old which is an eternity in our field. Of course, this is not limited to UI. Same goes for many industries. I want you to think back of the cars that amazed you when you were in your teens (if you are in your teens then this may not apply to you). Didn’t they feel like part of the future? Didn’t you think that this was the ultimate in designs? And aren’t those designs hopelessly outdated today (again, depending on your age, it may just be me)? Let’s review the Win95 design: And let’s compare that to Windows 7: There are so many differences here, I wouldn’t even know where to start explaining them. The general feeling however is one of more usability: studies have shown Windows 7 is much easier to understand for new users than the older versions of Windows did. Of course, experienced Windows users didn’t like it: people are usually afraid of changes and like to stick to what they know. But for new users this was a huge improvement. And that is what UX design is all about: make a product easier to use, with less training required and make users feel more productive. Still, there are areas where this doesn’t hold up. There are plenty examples of designs from the past that are still fresh today. But if you look closely at them, you’ll notice some subtle differences. This differences are what keep the designs fresh. A good example is the signs you’ll find on the road. They haven’t changed much over the years (otherwise people wouldn’t recognize them anymore) but they have been changing gradually to reflect changes in traffic. The same goes for computer interfaces. With each new product or version of a product, the UI and UX is changed gradually. Every now and then however, a bigger change is needed. Just think about the introduction of the Ribbon in Microsoft Office 2007: the whole UI was redesigned. A lot of old users (not in age, but in times of using older versions) didn’t like it a bit, but new users or casual users seem to be more efficient using the product. Which, of course, is exactly the reason behind the changes. I believe that a big engine behind the changes in User Experience design has been the web. In the old days (i.e. before the explosion of the internet) user interface design in Windows applications was limited to choosing the margins between your battleship gray buttons. When the web came along, and especially the web 2.0 where the browsers started to act more and more as application platforms, designers stepped in and made a huge impact. In the browser, they could do whatever they wanted. In the beginning this was limited to the darn blink tag but gradually people really started to think about UX. Even more so: the design of the UI and the whole experience was taken away from the developers and put into the hands of people who knew what they were doing: UX designers. This caused some problems. Everyone who has done a web project in the early 2000’s must have had the same experience: the designers give you a set of Photoshop files and tell you to translate it to HTML. Which, of course, is very hard to do. However, with new tooling and new standards this became much easier. The latest version of HTML and CSS has taken the responsibility for the design away from the developers and placed them in the capable hands of the designers. And that’s where that responsibility belongs, after all, I don’t want a designer to muck around in my c# code just as much as he or she doesn’t want me to poke in the sites style definitions. This change in responsibilities resulted in good looking but more important: better thought out user interfaces in websites. And when websites became more and more interactive, people started to expect the same sort of look and feel from their desktop applications. But that didn’t really happen. Most business applications still have that battleship gray look and feel. Ok, they may use a different color but we’re not talking colors here but usability. Now, you may not be able to read the Dutch captions, but even if you did you wouldn’t understand what was going on. At least, not when you first see it. You have to scan the screen, read all the labels, see how they are related to the other elements on the screen and then figure out what they do. If you’re an experienced user of this application however, this might be a good thing: you know what to do and you get all the information you need in one single screen. But for most applications this isn’t the case. A lot of people only use their computer for a limited time a day (a weird concept for me, but it happens) and need it to get something done and then get on with their lives. For them, a user interface experience like the above isn’t working. (disclaimer: I just picked a screenshot, I am not saying this is bad software but it is an example of about 95% of the Windows applications out there). For the knowledge worker, this isn’t a problem. They use one or two systems and they know exactly what they need to do to achieve their goal. They don’t want any clutter on their screen that distracts them from their task, they just want to be as efficient as possible. When they know the systems they are very productive. The point is, how long does it take to become productive? And: could they be even more productive if the UX was better? Are there things missing that they don’t know about? Are there better ways to achieve what they want to achieve? Also: could a system be designed in such a way that it is not only much more easy to work with but also less tiring? in the example above you need to switch between the keyboard and mouse a lot, something that we now know can be very tiring. The goal of most applications (being client apps or websites on any kind of device) is to provide information. Information is data that when given to the right people, on the right time, in the right place and when it is correct adds value for that person (please, remember that definition: I still hear the statement “the information was wrong” which doesn’t make sense: data can be wrong, information cannot be). So if a system provides data, how can we make sure the chances of becoming information is as high as possible? A good example of a well thought-out system that attempts this is the Zune client. It is a very good application, and I think the UX is much better than it’s main competitor iTunes. Have a look at both: On the left you see the iTunes screenshot, on the right the Zune. As you notice, the Zune screen has more images but less chrome (chrome being visuals not part of the data you want to show, i.e. edges around buttons). The whole thing is text oriented or image oriented, where that text or image is part of the information you need. What is important is big, what’s less important is smaller. Yet, everything you need to know at that point is present and your attention is drawn immediately to what you’re trying to achieve: information about music. You can easily switch between the content on your machine and content on your Zune player but clicking on the image of the player. But if you didn’t know that, you’d find out soon enough: the whole UX is designed in such a way that it invites you to play around. So sooner or later (probably sooner) you’d click on that image and you would see what it does. In the iTunes version it’s harder to find: the discoverability is a lot lower. For inexperienced people the Zune player feels much more natural than the iTunes player, and they get up to speed a lot faster. How does this all work? Why is this UX better? The answer lies in a project from Microsoft with the codename (it seems to be becoming the official name though) “Metro”. Metro is a design language, based on certain principles. When they thought about UX they took a good long look around them and went out in search of metaphors. And they found them. The team noticed that signage in streets, airports, roads, buildings and so on are usually very clear and very precise. These signs give you the information you need and nothing more. It’s simple, clearly understood and fast to understand. A good example are airport signs. Airports can be intimidating places, especially for the non-experienced traveler. In the early 1990’s Amsterdam Airport Schiphol decided to redesign all the signage to make the traveller feel less disoriented. They developed a set of guidelines for signs and implemented those. Soon, most airports around the world adopted these ideas and you see variations of the Dutch signs everywhere on the globe. The signs are text-oriented. Yes, there are icons explaining what it all means for the people who can’t read or don’t understand the language, but the basic sign language is text. It’s clear, it’s high-contrast and it’s easy to understand. One look at the sign and you know where to go. The only thing I don’t like is the green sign pointing to the emergency exit, but since this is the default style for emergency exits I understand why they did this. If you look at the Zune UI again, you’ll notice the similarities. Text oriented, little or no icons, clear usage of fonts and all the information you need. This design language has a set of principles: Clean, light, open and fast Content, not chrome Soulful and alive These are just a couple of the principles, you can read the whole philosophy behind Metro for Windows Phone 7 here. These ideas seem to work. I love my Windows Phone 7. It’s easy to use, it’s clear, there’s no clutter that I do not need. It works for me. And I noticed it works for a lot of other people as well, especially people who aren’t as proficient with computers as I am. You see these ideas in a lot other places. Corning, a manufacturer of glass, has made a video of possible usages of their products. It’s their glimpse into the future. You’ll notice that a lot of the UI in the screens look a lot like what Microsoft is doing with Metro (not coincidentally Corning is the supplier for the Gorilla glass display surface on the new SUR40 device (or Surface v2.0 as a lot of people call it)). The idea behind this vision is that data should be available everywhere where you it. Systems should be available at all times and data is presented in a clear and light manner so that you can turn that data into information. You don’t need a lot of fancy animations that only distract from the data. You want the data and you want it fast. Have a look at this truly inspiring video that made: This is what I believe the future will look like. Of course, not everything is possible, or even desirable. But it is a nice way to think about the future . I feel very strongly about designing applications in such a way that they add value to the user. Designing applications that turn data into information. Applications that make the user feel happy to use them. So… when are you going to drop the battleship-gray designs? Tags van Technorati: surface,design,windows phone 7,wp7,metro

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• SQL Server &ndash; Undelete a Table and Restore a Single Table from Backup

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  This post is part of the monthly community event called T-SQL Tuesday started by Adam Machanic (blog|twitter) and hosted by someone else each month. This month the host is Sankar Reddy (blog|twitter) and the topic is Misconceptions in SQL Server. You can follow posts for this theme on Twitter by looking at #TSQL2sDay hashtag. Let me start by saying: This code is a crazy hack that is to never be used unless you really, really have to. Really! And I don’t think there’s a time when you would really have to use it for real. Because it’s a hack there are number of things that can go wrong so play with it knowing that. I’ve managed to totally corrupt one database. :) Oh… and for those saying: yeah yeah.. you have a single table in a file group and you’re restoring that, I say “nay nay” to you. As we all know SQL Server can’t do single table restores from backup. This is kind of a obvious thing due to different relational integrity (RI) concerns. Since we have to maintain that we have to restore all tables represented in a RI graph. For this exercise i say BAH! to those concerns. Note that this method “works” only for simple tables that don’t have LOB and off rows data. The code can be expanded to include those but I’ve tried to leave things “simple”. Note that for this to work our table needs to be relatively static data-wise. This doesn’t work for OLTP table. Products are a perfect example of static data. They don’t change much between backups, pretty much everything depends on them and their table is one of those tables that are relatively easy to accidentally delete everything from. This only works if the database is in Full or Bulk-Logged recovery mode for tables where the contents have been deleted or truncated but NOT when a table was dropped. Everything we’ll talk about has to be done before the data pages are reused for other purposes. After deletion or truncation the pages are marked as reusable so you have to act fast. The best thing probably is to put the database into single user mode ASAP while you’re performing this procedure and return it to multi user after you’re done. How do we do it? We will be using an undocumented but known DBCC commands: DBCC PAGE, an undocumented function sys.fn_dblog and a little known DATABASE RESTORE PAGE option. All tests will be on a copy of Production.Product table in AdventureWorks database called Production.Product1 because the original table has FK constraints that prevent us from truncating it for testing. -- create a duplicate table. This doesn't preserve indexes!SELECT *INTO AdventureWorks.Production.Product1FROM AdventureWorks.Production.Product   After we run this code take a full back to perform further testing.   First let’s see what the difference between DELETE and TRUNCATE is when it comes to logging. With DELETE every row deletion is logged in the transaction log. With TRUNCATE only whole data page deallocations are logged in the transaction log. Getting deleted data pages is simple. All we have to look for is row delete entry in the sys.fn_dblog output. But getting data pages that were truncated from the transaction log presents a bit of an interesting problem. I will not go into depths of IAM(Index Allocation Map) and PFS (Page Free Space) pages but suffice to say that every IAM page has intervals that tell us which data pages are allocated for a table and which aren’t. If we deep dive into the sys.fn_dblog output we can see that once you truncate a table all the pages in all the intervals are deallocated and this is shown in the PFS page transaction log entry as deallocation of pages. For every 8 pages in the same extent there is one PFS page row in the transaction log. This row holds information about all 8 pages in CSV format which means we can get to this data with some parsing. A great help for parsing this stuff is Peter Debetta’s handy function dbo.HexStrToVarBin that converts hexadecimal string into a varbinary value that can be easily converted to integer tus giving us a readable page number. The shortened (columns removed) sys.fn_dblog output for a PFS page with CSV data for 1 extent (8 data pages) looks like this: -- [Page ID] is displayed in hex format. -- To convert it to readable int we'll use dbo.HexStrToVarBin function found at -- http://sqlblog.com/blogs/peter_debetta/archive/2007/03/09/t-sql-convert-hex-string-to-varbinary.aspx -- This function must be installed in the master databaseSELECT Context, AllocUnitName, [Page ID], DescriptionFROM sys.fn_dblog(NULL, NULL)WHERE [Current LSN] = '00000031:00000a46:007d' The pages at the end marked with 0x00—> are pages that are allocated in the extent but are not part of a table. We can inspect the raw content of each data page with a DBCC PAGE command: -- we need this trace flag to redirect output to the query window.DBCC TRACEON (3604); -- WITH TABLERESULTS gives us data in table format instead of message format-- we use format option 3 because it's the easiest to read and manipulate further onDBCC PAGE (AdventureWorks, 1, 613, 3) WITH TABLERESULTS   Since the DBACC PAGE output can be quite extensive I won’t put it here. You can see an example of it in the link at the beginning of this section. Getting deleted data back When we run a delete statement every row to be deleted is marked as a ghost record. A background process periodically cleans up those rows. A huge misconception is that the data is actually removed. It’s not. Only the pointers to the rows are removed while the data itself is still on the data page. We just can’t access it with normal means. To get those pointers back we need to restore every deleted page using the RESTORE PAGE option mentioned above. This restore must be done from a full backup, followed by any differential and log backups that you may have. This is necessary to bring the pages up to the same point in time as the rest of the data.  However the restore doesn’t magically connect the restored page back to the original table. It simply replaces the current page with the one from the backup. After the restore we use the DBCC PAGE to read data directly from all data pages and insert that data into a temporary table. To finish the RESTORE PAGE  procedure we finally have to take a tail log backup (simple backup of the transaction log) and restore it back. We can now insert data from the temporary table to our original table by hand. Getting truncated data back When we run a truncate the truncated data pages aren’t touched at all. Even the pointers to rows stay unchanged. Because of this getting data back from truncated table is simple. we just have to find out which pages belonged to our table and use DBCC PAGE to read data off of them. No restore is necessary. Turns out that the problems we had with finding the data pages is alleviated by not having to do a RESTORE PAGE procedure. Stop stalling… show me The Code! This is the code for getting back deleted and truncated data back. It’s commented in all the right places so don’t be afraid to take a closer look. Make sure you have a full backup before trying this out. Also I suggest that the last step of backing and restoring the tail log is performed by hand. USE masterGOIF OBJECT_ID('dbo.HexStrToVarBin') IS NULL RAISERROR ('No dbo.HexStrToVarBin installed. Go to http://sqlblog.com/blogs/peter_debetta/archive/2007/03/09/t-sql-convert-hex-string-to-varbinary.aspx and install it in master database' , 18, 1) SET NOCOUNT ONBEGIN TRY DECLARE @dbName VARCHAR(1000), @schemaName VARCHAR(1000), @tableName VARCHAR(1000), @fullBackupName VARCHAR(1000), @undeletedTableName VARCHAR(1000), @sql VARCHAR(MAX), @tableWasTruncated bit; /* THE FIRST LINE ARE OUR INPUT PARAMETERS In this case we're trying to recover Production.Product1 table in AdventureWorks database. My full backup of AdventureWorks database is at e:\AW.bak */ SELECT @dbName = 'AdventureWorks', @schemaName = 'Production', @tableName = 'Product1', @fullBackupName = 'e:\AW.bak', @undeletedTableName = '##' + @tableName + '_Undeleted', @tableWasTruncated = 0, -- copy the structure from original table to a temp table that we'll fill with restored data @sql = 'IF OBJECT_ID(''tempdb..' + @undeletedTableName + ''') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE ' + @undeletedTableName + ' SELECT *' + ' INTO ' + @undeletedTableName + ' FROM [' + @dbName + '].[' + @schemaName + '].[' + @tableName + ']' + ' WHERE 1 = 0' EXEC (@sql) IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#PagesToRestore') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #PagesToRestore /* FIND DATA PAGES WE NEED TO RESTORE*/ CREATE TABLE #PagesToRestore ([ID] INT IDENTITY(1,1), [FileID] INT, [PageID] INT, [SQLtoExec] VARCHAR(1000)) -- DBCC PACE statement to run later RAISERROR ('Looking for deleted pages...', 10, 1) -- use T-LOG direct read to get deleted data pages INSERT INTO #PagesToRestore([FileID], [PageID], [SQLtoExec]) EXEC('USE [' + @dbName + '];SELECT FileID, PageID, ''DBCC TRACEON (3604); DBCC PAGE ([' + @dbName + '], '' + FileID + '', '' + PageID + '', 3) WITH TABLERESULTS'' as SQLToExecFROM (SELECT DISTINCT LEFT([Page ID], 4) AS FileID, CONVERT(VARCHAR(100), ' + 'CONVERT(INT, master.dbo.HexStrToVarBin(SUBSTRING([Page ID], 6, 20)))) AS PageIDFROM sys.fn_dblog(NULL, NULL)WHERE AllocUnitName LIKE ''%' + @schemaName + '.' + @tableName + '%'' ' + 'AND Context IN (''LCX_MARK_AS_GHOST'', ''LCX_HEAP'') AND Operation in (''LOP_DELETE_ROWS''))t');SELECT *FROM #PagesToRestore -- if upper EXEC returns 0 rows it means the table was truncated so find truncated pages IF (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM #PagesToRestore) = 0 BEGIN RAISERROR ('No deleted pages found. Looking for truncated pages...', 10, 1) -- use T-LOG read to get truncated data pages INSERT INTO #PagesToRestore([FileID], [PageID], [SQLtoExec]) -- dark magic happens here -- because truncation simply deallocates pages we have to find out which pages were deallocated. -- we can find this out by looking at the PFS page row's Description column. -- for every deallocated extent the Description has a CSV of 8 pages in that extent. -- then it's just a matter of parsing it. -- we also remove the pages in the extent that weren't allocated to the table itself -- marked with '0x00-->00' EXEC ('USE [' + @dbName + '];DECLARE @truncatedPages TABLE(DeallocatedPages VARCHAR(8000), IsMultipleDeallocs BIT);INSERT INTO @truncatedPagesSELECT REPLACE(REPLACE(Description, ''Deallocated '', ''Y''), ''0x00-->00 '', ''N'') + '';'' AS DeallocatedPages, CHARINDEX('';'', Description) AS IsMultipleDeallocsFROM (SELECT DISTINCT LEFT([Page ID], 4) AS FileID, CONVERT(VARCHAR(100), CONVERT(INT, master.dbo.HexStrToVarBin(SUBSTRING([Page ID], 6, 20)))) AS PageID, DescriptionFROM sys.fn_dblog(NULL, NULL)WHERE Context IN (''LCX_PFS'') AND Description LIKE ''Deallocated%'' AND AllocUnitName LIKE ''%' + @schemaName + '.' + @tableName + '%'') t;SELECT FileID, PageID , ''DBCC TRACEON (3604); DBCC PAGE ([' + @dbName + '], '' + FileID + '', '' + PageID + '', 3) WITH TABLERESULTS'' as SQLToExecFROM (SELECT LEFT(PageAndFile, 1) as WasPageAllocatedToTable , SUBSTRING(PageAndFile, 2, CHARINDEX('':'', PageAndFile) - 2 ) as FileID , CONVERT(VARCHAR(100), CONVERT(INT, master.dbo.HexStrToVarBin(SUBSTRING(PageAndFile, CHARINDEX('':'', PageAndFile) + 1, LEN(PageAndFile))))) as PageIDFROM ( SELECT SUBSTRING(DeallocatedPages, delimPosStart, delimPosEnd - delimPosStart) as PageAndFile, IsMultipleDeallocs FROM ( SELECT *, CHARINDEX('';'', DeallocatedPages)*(N-1) + 1 AS delimPosStart, CHARINDEX('';'', DeallocatedPages)*N AS delimPosEnd FROM @truncatedPages t1 CROSS APPLY (SELECT TOP (case when t1.IsMultipleDeallocs = 1 then 8 else 1 end) ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY number) as N FROM master..spt_values) t2 )t)t)tWHERE WasPageAllocatedToTable = ''Y''') SELECT @tableWasTruncated = 1 END DECLARE @lastID INT, @pagesCount INT SELECT @lastID = 1, @pagesCount = COUNT(*) FROM #PagesToRestore SELECT @sql = 'Number of pages to restore: ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), @pagesCount) IF @pagesCount = 0 RAISERROR ('No data pages to restore.', 18, 1) ELSE RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) -- If the table was truncated we'll read the data directly from data pages without restoring from backup IF @tableWasTruncated = 0 BEGIN -- RESTORE DATA PAGES FROM FULL BACKUP IN BATCHES OF 200 WHILE @lastID <= @pagesCount BEGIN -- create CSV string of pages to restore SELECT @sql = STUFF((SELECT ',' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(100), FileID) + ':' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(100), PageID) FROM #PagesToRestore WHERE ID BETWEEN @lastID AND @lastID + 200 ORDER BY ID FOR XML PATH('')), 1, 1, '') SELECT @sql = 'RESTORE DATABASE [' + @dbName + '] PAGE = ''' + @sql + ''' FROM DISK = ''' + @fullBackupName + '''' RAISERROR ('Starting RESTORE command:' , 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; RAISERROR (@sql , 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; EXEC(@sql); RAISERROR ('Restore DONE' , 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; SELECT @lastID = @lastID + 200 END /* If you have any differential or transaction log backups you should restore them here to bring the previously restored data pages up to date */ END DECLARE @dbccSinglePage TABLE ( [ParentObject] NVARCHAR(500), [Object] NVARCHAR(500), [Field] NVARCHAR(500), [VALUE] NVARCHAR(MAX) ) DECLARE @cols NVARCHAR(MAX), @paramDefinition NVARCHAR(500), @SQLtoExec VARCHAR(1000), @FileID VARCHAR(100), @PageID VARCHAR(100), @i INT = 1 -- Get deleted table columns from information_schema view -- Need sp_executeSQL because database name can't be passed in as variable SELECT @cols = 'select @cols = STUFF((SELECT '', ['' + COLUMN_NAME + '']''FROM ' + @dbName + '.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNSWHERE TABLE_NAME = ''' + @tableName + ''' AND TABLE_SCHEMA = ''' + @schemaName + '''ORDER BY ORDINAL_POSITIONFOR XML PATH('''')), 1, 2, '''')', @paramDefinition = N'@cols nvarchar(max) OUTPUT' EXECUTE sp_executesql @cols, @paramDefinition, @cols = @cols OUTPUT -- Loop through all the restored data pages, -- read data from them and insert them into temp table -- which you can then insert into the orignial deleted table DECLARE dbccPageCursor CURSOR GLOBAL FORWARD_ONLY FOR SELECT [FileID], [PageID], [SQLtoExec] FROM #PagesToRestore ORDER BY [FileID], [PageID] OPEN dbccPageCursor; FETCH NEXT FROM dbccPageCursor INTO @FileID, @PageID, @SQLtoExec; WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0 BEGIN RAISERROR ('---------------------------------------------', 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; SELECT @sql = 'Loop iteration: ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), @i); RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; SELECT @sql = 'Running: ' + @SQLtoExec RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; -- if something goes wrong with DBCC execution or data gathering, skip it but print error BEGIN TRY INSERT INTO @dbccSinglePage EXEC (@SQLtoExec) -- make the data insert magic happen here IF (SELECT CONVERT(BIGINT, [VALUE]) FROM @dbccSinglePage WHERE [Field] LIKE '%Metadata: ObjectId%') = OBJECT_ID('['+@dbName+'].['+@schemaName +'].['+@tableName+']') BEGIN DELETE @dbccSinglePage WHERE NOT ([ParentObject] LIKE 'Slot % Offset %' AND [Object] LIKE 'Slot % Column %') SELECT @sql = 'USE tempdb; ' + 'IF (OBJECTPROPERTY(object_id(''' + @undeletedTableName + '''), ''TableHasIdentity'') = 1) ' + 'SET IDENTITY_INSERT ' + @undeletedTableName + ' ON; ' + 'INSERT INTO ' + @undeletedTableName + '(' + @cols + ') ' + STUFF((SELECT ' UNION ALL SELECT ' + STUFF((SELECT ', ' + CASE WHEN VALUE = '[NULL]' THEN 'NULL' ELSE '''' + [VALUE] + '''' END FROM ( -- the unicorn help here to correctly set ordinal numbers of columns in a data page -- it's turning STRING order into INT order (1,10,11,2,21 into 1,2,..10,11...21) SELECT [ParentObject], [Object], Field, VALUE, RIGHT('00000' + O1, 6) AS ParentObjectOrder, RIGHT('00000' + REVERSE(LEFT(O2, CHARINDEX(' ', O2)-1)), 6) AS ObjectOrder FROM ( SELECT [ParentObject], [Object], Field, VALUE, REPLACE(LEFT([ParentObject], CHARINDEX('Offset', [ParentObject])-1), 'Slot ', '') AS O1, REVERSE(LEFT([Object], CHARINDEX('Offset ', [Object])-2)) AS O2 FROM @dbccSinglePage WHERE t.ParentObject = ParentObject )t)t ORDER BY ParentObjectOrder, ObjectOrder FOR XML PATH('')), 1, 2, '') FROM @dbccSinglePage t GROUP BY ParentObject FOR XML PATH('') ), 1, 11, '') + ';' RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; EXEC (@sql) END END TRY BEGIN CATCH SELECT @sql = 'ERROR!!!' + CHAR(10) + CHAR(13) + 'ErrorNumber: ' + ERROR_NUMBER() + '; ErrorMessage' + ERROR_MESSAGE() + CHAR(10) + CHAR(13) + 'FileID: ' + @FileID + '; PageID: ' + @PageID RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; END CATCH DELETE @dbccSinglePage SELECT @sql = 'Pages left to process: ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), @pagesCount - @i) + CHAR(10) + CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) + CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) + CHAR(13), @i = @i+1 RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; FETCH NEXT FROM dbccPageCursor INTO @FileID, @PageID, @SQLtoExec; END CLOSE dbccPageCursor; DEALLOCATE dbccPageCursor; EXEC ('SELECT ''' + @undeletedTableName + ''' as TableName; SELECT * FROM ' + @undeletedTableName)END TRYBEGIN CATCH SELECT ERROR_NUMBER() AS ErrorNumber, ERROR_MESSAGE() AS ErrorMessage IF CURSOR_STATUS ('global', 'dbccPageCursor') >= 0 BEGIN CLOSE dbccPageCursor; DEALLOCATE dbccPageCursor; ENDEND CATCH-- if the table was deleted we need to finish the restore page sequenceIF @tableWasTruncated = 0BEGIN -- take a log tail backup and then restore it to complete page restore process DECLARE @currentDate VARCHAR(30) SELECT @currentDate = CONVERT(VARCHAR(30), GETDATE(), 112) RAISERROR ('Starting Log Tail backup to c:\Temp ...', 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; PRINT ('BACKUP LOG [' + @dbName + '] TO DISK = ''c:\Temp\' + @dbName + '_TailLogBackup_' + @currentDate + '.trn''') EXEC ('BACKUP LOG [' + @dbName + '] TO DISK = ''c:\Temp\' + @dbName + '_TailLogBackup_' + @currentDate + '.trn''') RAISERROR ('Log Tail backup done.', 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; RAISERROR ('Starting Log Tail restore from c:\Temp ...', 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; PRINT ('RESTORE LOG [' + @dbName + '] FROM DISK = ''c:\Temp\' + @dbName + '_TailLogBackup_' + @currentDate + '.trn''') EXEC ('RESTORE LOG [' + @dbName + '] FROM DISK = ''c:\Temp\' + @dbName + '_TailLogBackup_' + @currentDate + '.trn''') RAISERROR ('Log Tail restore done.', 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT;END-- The last step is manual. Insert data from our temporary table to the original deleted table The misconception here is that you can do a single table restore properly in SQL Server. You can't. But with little experimentation you can get pretty close to it. One way to possible remove a dependency on a backup to retrieve deleted pages is to quickly run a similar script to the upper one that gets data directly from data pages while the rows are still marked as ghost records. It could be done if we could beat the ghost record cleanup task.

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