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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, October 31, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, October 31, 2011Popular ReleasesWindows Workflow Foundation on Codeplex: Microsoft.Activities v1.8.8: Microsoft.Activities Overview How do I install Microsoft.Activities? Updates in this release9318Technical Analysis Engine for .NET: Technical Analysis Engine 1.24: New features in the 1.24 release: - Added MFI indicatorPROFIT: 1.1.0.102: Removed Attributes from agent and extensions Updated Modules with last data Added Elite T2 and T4 modules Modified sensor strength calculation to reflect ECCM module changesBF3Rcon.NET: BF3Rcon 3.0: This release is targeted for RCON documentation based on R3. Everything should be beta stable, but it's alpha because I haven't been able to fully test it. When a stable release is ready, a proper changelog will be kept. Important Edit: There's one method that will keep this from working in Mono. GeneratePasswordHash uses void HashAlgorithm.Dispose(), which isn't in Mono. This will have to be changed to Clear() in the next release. If anyone needs a Mono version of this immediately, you can...BoxWorld: BoxWorld_2011.10.30: BoxWorld - 8.0.1110.30 This is the initial release of BoxWorld. I'd recommend downloading the installer as it contains the compiled code and everything all nicely contained. By default, you end up with this directory structure: C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld\Data C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld\Interface C:\Program Files\ViperWorks\BoxWorld\Source In the root you have the compiled EXE files, one for the main release, one for the LITE release ...VidCoder: 1.2.1: Fixed a couple regressions: video encoder was blank in queue and crashes with the High Profile preset when opening the Settings window. Fixed problem with auto-update introduced in 1.2.0. If you have 1.2.0 you will need to update manually to get this.Home Access Plus+: v7.6: This download now (31/10/11 6pm) includes the v7.6.1031.1800 patch Changes: New Download Routing Handler: Support for Pausing/Resuming Downloads Should fix OfficeOpenXML files when you download and it corrupts Update MyFiles ALPHA: Updated Layout of some elements on the tiles Details View Added with a table Update Booking System: Fixed some issues found since the v7.5 release Added support for spaces in Resource names Fixed some issues with the Booking System Admin page Added SI...Koober: Koober - The Ebook Creator 0.2: The official release of Koober as Open source. Koober is a ebook creator for Windows, and Koob Reader is the reader.patterns & practices: Enterprise Library Contrib: Enterprise Library Contrib - 5.0 (Oct 2011): This release of Enterprise Library Contrib is based on the Microsoft patterns & practices Enterprise Library 5.0 core and contains the following: Common extensionsTypeConfigurationElement<T> - A Polymorphic Configuration Element without having to be part of a PolymorphicConfigurationElementCollection. AnonymousConfigurationElement - A Configuration element that can be uniquely identified without having to define its name explicitly. Data Access Application Block extensionsMySql Provider - ...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2748: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, NetowrkMonitor_Parsers.msi continues to improve quality and fix bugs. It has included the fo...WriteableBitmapEx: WriteableBitmapEx 0.9.8.5: Added a Rotate method for arbitrary angles (RotateFree). Provided by montago. See http://writeablebitmapex.codeplex.com/workitem/15214 Added Nokola's anti-aliased line drawing implementation. http://nokola.com/blog/post/2010/10/14/Anti-aliased-Lines-And-Optimizing-Code-for-Windows-Phone-7e28093First-Look.aspx Updated the Windows Phone project to WP 7.1 Mango. Added an extension file for the Windows Phone specific extensions and added the SaveToMediaLibrary extension including support fo...Duckworth Lewis Professional Edition Calculator: DLcalc 3.0: DLcalc 3.0 can perform Duckworth/Lewis Professional Edition calculations 100% accurately. It also produces over-by-over and ball-by-ball PAR score tables.Media Companion: MC 3.420b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Movies Fixed: Fanart and poster scraping issues TV Shows (Re)Added: Rebuild single show Fixed: Issue when shows are moved from original location Ability to handle " for actor nicknames Crash when episode name contains "<" (does not scrape yet) Clears fanart when switch...patterns & practices - Unity: Unity 3.0 for .NET4.5 Preview: The Unity 3.0.1026.0 Preview enables Unity to work on .NET 4.5 with both the WinRT and desktop profiles. The major changes include: Unity projects updated to target .NET 4.5. Dynamic build plans modified to use compiled lambda expressions instead of Reflection.Emit Converting reflection to use the new TypeInfo for reflection. Projects updated to work with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2011 Preview Notes/Known Issues: The Microsoft.Practices.Unity.UnityServiceLocator class cannot be use...Managed Extensibility Framework: MEF 2 Preview 4: Detailed information on this release is available on the BCL team blog.AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.6: ?? ● AcDown??????????、??????，??????????????????????，???????Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、???、Tucao.cc、SF???、?????80????，???????????、?????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ?? v3.6?? ??“????”...Path Copy Copy: 8.0: New version that mostly adds lots of requested features: 11340 11339 11338 11337 This version also features a more elaborate Settings UI that has several tabs. I tried to add some notes to better explain the use and purpose of the various options. The Path Copy Copy documentation is also on the way, both to explain how to develop custom plugins and to explain how to pre-configure options if you're a network admin. Stay tuned.MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.0: Added: The new Client Blocks feaure of Views A new "move" js method for the TreeViews The NewHtmlCreated js event to the DataGrid Improved the ChoiceList structure that now allows also the selection list of a dropdown to be chosen with a lambda expression Improved the AcceptViewHintAttribute controller filter. Now a client can specify not only the name of a View or Partial View it prefers, but also to receive just the rough data in Json format. Now the the SMinimum and SMaximum par...Free SharePoint Master Pages: Buried Alive (Halloween) Theme: Release Notes *Created for Halloween, you will find theme file, custom css file and images. *Created by Al Roome @AlstarRoome Features: Custom styling for web part Custom background *Screenshot https://s3.amazonaws.com/kkhipple/post/sharepoint-showcase-halloween.pngNicAudio: NicAudio 2.0.5: Minor change to accept special DTS stereo modes (LtRt, AB,...)New ProjectsagsXMPP-facebook: This is a fork of agsXMPP library (http://www.ag-software.de/agsxmpp-sdk/) that brings support for X-FACEBOOK-PLATFORM SASL mechanism. Tags: xmpp, facebook, chat, agsxmpp, .net, C#Azure Toss: With the booming of personal devices (such as iPad and Windows 8 tablets) and cloud-based services (such as Azure and iCloud), we are entering an era of highly connected yet very loosely coupled applications and services. As ISVs and application developers, you’ll find your applications need to communicate with many other applications and services in a “non-binding” way - there are no hard commitments among the applications and services to work together. Instead, services and features are dis...Backup MS Outlook: Console program to copy all active (usage) pst files from default Microsoft Outlook to backup folder. It's stripped down and modified version of the program backupmymail.codeplex.com. Program to copy file using VSS (Volume shadow service) through hobocopy(c) program.BoxWorld: Welcome to BoxWorld. Also known as Sokoban. This application/game was designed as an experiment really! I remember playing this game on my graphing calculator many years ago. And even with this, it's not so much as the game as it was making the game.com-binbin-reader: rss reader Priority Inbox Spam Custom CssLink control for the wiki pages of a SharePoint 2010 team site: Replace the native CssLink by this custom control for removing the OOTB RTE styles in a wiki page of SharePoint 2010 Foundation. This custom control wraps the native one in order to remove the link to the OOTB corev4.css that remains in the wiki pages while using an alternate CSS. Droppoint: Drop your file to sharepointEvents&Handlers: Implementing example for events and handlers in CLR via C#KIVA AIP for C# 4: A C#4 API implementation of the KIVA API found at http://build.kiva.org/apiKKScada: KKScada is a scada projectKoober: Koober is a .NET framework based visually appealing Ebook creator for Windows. It has a pre defined format using SQLite database as book files. Lighter: Text to Braille: Lighter is an extensible and flexible Thai/English and further language translation to Braille format.Lynx Toolkit: A collection of small command line developer tools.Michael's Code: this is michael's code.Passwords Thief: Sometimes you need to see what is behind asteriks in password edit box. It will help you to resolve this problem. PET@runtime: PET@runtime provides additional components to PET, especially for supporting PET outcomes at project execution time in several tools, e.g. Word or TFS.ProduzioneWebFlora: cascascaResources Over MVC: Resources Over MVC provides extensions for ASP.Net MVC to support the typical features of a REST web service. These include support for multiple representations, encodings and a number of ways of overloading POST. Regardless of your opinion of what makes a RESTful service, these can help.Servelat Pieces: Servelat Pieces is a collection of reusable bits of code that can make you Silverlight development easier. You'll be able to simplify the code which consumed server-side WCF services. It may greatly simplify your Sillverlight unit testing experience.Silverlight Sphere Control: This is a Silverlight spherical selection control that I built that uses the projection transformations in Silverlight. It includes several modes (including random, rows, columns, vertical carousel, horizontal carousel, and checkered) and events. Upon selecting one of the elements (which are arranged in a spherical pattern, hence the name), the sphere rotates until the control is at the front face of the sphere. Events are available to hook into (on element selected, rotation finished,...WinRT File Based Database: This database is based on a file system in Windows 8 and is using WinRT (Windows Runtime) in Windows 8 environment and thus can be used for Metro style applications. It includes simple, yet effective API that allows you to create tables based on classes. xianshihai--nothing to display: nothing to display

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• Developing a Cost Model for Cloud Applications

  - by BuckWoody

  Note - please pay attention to the date of this post. As much as I attempt to make the information below accurate, the nature of distributed computing means that components, units and pricing will change over time. The definitive costs for Microsoft Windows Azure and SQL Azure are located here, and are more accurate than anything you will see in this post: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/  When writing software that is run on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering like Windows Azure / SQL Azure, one of the questions you must answer is how much the system will cost. I will not discuss the comparisons between on-premise costs (which are nigh impossible to calculate accurately) versus cloud costs, but instead focus on creating a general model for estimating costs for a given application. You should be aware that there are (at this writing) two billing mechanisms for Windows and SQL Azure: “Pay-as-you-go” or consumption, and “Subscription” or commitment. Conceptually, you can consider the former a pay-as-you-go cell phone plan, where you pay by the unit used (at a slightly higher rate) and the latter as a standard cell phone plan where you commit to a contract and thus pay lower rates. In this post I’ll stick with the pay-as-you-go mechanism for simplicity, which should be the maximum cost you would pay. From there you may be able to get a lower cost if you use the other mechanism. In any case, the model you create should hold. Developing a good cost model is essential. As a developer or architect, you’ll most certainly be asked how much something will cost, and you need to have a reliable way to estimate that. Businesses and Organizations have been used to paying for servers, software licenses, and other infrastructure as an up-front cost, and power, people to the systems and so on as an ongoing (and sometimes not factored) cost. When presented with a new paradigm like distributed computing, they may not understand the true cost/value proposition, and that’s where the architect and developer can guide the conversation to make a choice based on features of the application versus the true costs. The two big buckets of use-types for these applications are customer-based and steady-state. In the customer-based use type, each successful use of the program results in a sale or income for your organization. Perhaps you’ve written an application that provides the spot-price of foo, and your customer pays for the use of that application. In that case, once you’ve estimated your cost for a successful traversal of the application, you can build that into the price you charge the user. It’s a standard restaurant model, where the price of the meal is determined by the cost of making it, plus any profit you can make. In the second use-type, the application will be used by a more-or-less constant number of processes or users and no direct revenue is attached to the system. A typical example is a customer-tracking system used by the employees within your company. In this case, the cost model is often created “in reverse” - meaning that you pilot the application, monitor the use (and costs) and that cost is held steady. This is where the comparison with an on-premise system becomes necessary, even though it is more difficult to estimate those on-premise true costs. For instance, do you know exactly how much cost the air conditioning is because you have a team of system administrators? This may sound trivial, but that, along with the insurance for the building, the wiring, and every other part of the system is in fact a cost to the business. There are three primary methods that I’ve been successful with in estimating the cost. None are perfect, all are demand-driven. The general process is to lay out a matrix of: components units cost per unit and then multiply that times the usage of the system, based on which components you use in the program. That sounds a bit simplistic, but using those metrics in a calculation becomes more detailed. In all of the methods that follow, you need to know your application. The components for a PaaS include computing instances, storage, transactions, bandwidth and in the case of SQL Azure, database size. In most cases, architects start with the first model and progress through the other methods to gain accuracy. Simple Estimation The simplest way to calculate costs is to architect the application (even UML or on-paper, no coding involved) and then estimate which of the components you’ll use, and how much of each will be used. Microsoft provides two tools to do this - one is a simple slider-application located here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing-calculator/  The other is a tool you download to create an “Return on Investment” (ROI) spreadsheet, which has the advantage of leading you through various questions to estimate what you plan to use, located here: https://roianalyst.alinean.com/msft/AutoLogin.do?d=176318219048082115  You can also just create a spreadsheet yourself with a structure like this: Program Element Azure Component Unit of Measure Cost Per Unit Estimated Use of Component Total Cost Per Component Cumulative Cost               Of course, the consideration with this model is that it is difficult to predict a system that is not running or hasn’t even been developed. Which brings us to the next model type. Measure and Project A more accurate model is to actually write the code for the application, using the Software Development Kit (SDK) which can run entirely disconnected from Azure. The code should be instrumented to estimate the use of the application components, logging to a local file on the development system. A series of unit and integration tests should be run, which will create load on the test system. You can use standard development concepts to track this usage, and even use Windows Performance Monitor counters. The best place to start with this method is to use the Windows Azure Diagnostics subsystem in your code, which you can read more about here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sumitm/archive/2009/11/18/introducing-windows-azure-diagnostics.aspx This set of API’s greatly simplifies tracking the application, and in fact you can use this information for more than just a cost model. After you have the tracking logs, you can plug the numbers into ay of the tools above, which should give a representative cost or in some cases a unit cost. The consideration with this model is that the SDK fabric is not a one-to-one comparison with performance on the actual Windows Azure fabric. Those differences are usually smaller, but they do need to be considered. Also, you may not be able to accurately predict the load on the system, which might lead to an architectural change, which changes the model. This leads us to the next, most accurate method for a cost model. Sample and Estimate Using standard statistical and other predictive math, once the application is deployed you will get a bill each month from Microsoft for your Azure usage. The bill is quite detailed, and you can export the data from it to do analysis, and using methods like regression and so on project out into the future what the costs will be. I normally advise that the architect also extrapolate a unit cost from those metrics as well. This is the information that should be reported back to the executives that pay the bills: the past cost, future projected costs, and unit cost “per click” or “per transaction”, as your case warrants. The challenge here is in the model itself - statistical methods are not foolproof, and the larger the sample (in this case I recommend the entire population, not a smaller sample) is key. References and Tools Articles: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/patrick_butler_monterde/archive/2010/02/10/windows-azure-billing-overview.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg213848.aspx http://blog.codingoutloud.com/2011/06/05/azure-faq-how-much-will-it-cost-me-to-run-my-application-on-windows-azure/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnalioto/archive/2010/08/25/10054193.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/archive/2010/02/08/qampa-how-can-i-calculate-the-tco-and-roi-when.aspx   Other Tools: http://cloud-assessment.com/ http://communities.quest.com/community/cloud_tools

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• C# UDP decoding datagrams fails randomly

  - by Tom Frey

  Hi, I'm experiencing an issue in a multi threaded application and have been debugging it for the last 3 days but for the life of it can not figure it out. I'm writing this, hoping that I either have a DUH moment when typing this or somebody sees something obvious in the code snippets I provide. Here's what's going on: I've been working on a new UDP networking library and have a data producer that multicasts UDP datagrams to several receiver applications. The sender sends on two different sockets that are bound to separate UDP multicast addresses and separate ports. The receiver application also creates two sockets and binds each one to one of the sender's multicast address/port. When the receiver receives the datagram, it copies it from the the buffer in a MemoryStream which is then put onto a thread safe queue, where another thread reads from it and decodes the data out of the MemoryStream. Both sockets have their own queues. What happens now is really weird, it happens randomly, non-reproducible and when I run multiple receiver applications, it only happens randomly on one of them every now and then. Basically, the thread that reads the MemoryStream out of the queue, reads it via a BinaryReader like ReadInt32(), etc. and thereby decodes the data. Every now and then however when it reads the data, the data it reads from it is incorrect, e.g. a negative integer number which the sender never would encode. However, as mentioned before, the decoding only fails in one of the receiver applications, in the other ones the datagram decodes fine. Now you might be saying, well, probably the UDP datagram has a byte corruption or something but I've logged every single datagram that's coming in and compared them on all receivers and the datagrams every application receives are absolutely identical. Now it gets even weirder, when I dump the datagram that failed to decode to disk and write a unit test that reads it and runs it through the decoder, it decodes just fine. Also when I wrap a try/catch around the decoder, reset the MemoryStream position in the catch and run it through the decoder again, it decodes just fine. To make it even weirder, this also only happens when I bind both sockets to read data from the sender, if I only bind one, it doesn't happen or at least I wasn't able to reproduce it. Here are is some corresponding code to what's going on: This is the receive callback for the socket: private void ReceiveCompleted(object sender, SocketAsyncEventArgs args) { if (args.SocketError != SocketError.Success) { InternalShutdown(args.SocketError); return; } if (args.BytesTransferred > SequencedUnitHeader.UNIT_HEADER_SIZE) { DataChunk chunk = new DataChunk(args.BytesTransferred); Buffer.BlockCopy(args.Buffer, 0, chunk.Buffer, 0, args.BytesTransferred); chunk.MemoryStream = new MemoryStream(chunk.Buffer); chunk.BinaryReader = new BinaryReader(chunk.MemoryStream); chunk.SequencedUnitHeader.SequenceID = chunk.BinaryReader.ReadUInt32(); chunk.SequencedUnitHeader.Count = chunk.BinaryReader.ReadByte(); if (prevSequenceID + 1 != chunk.SequencedUnitHeader.SequenceID) { log.Error("UdpDatagramGap\tName:{0}\tExpected:{1}\tReceived:{2}", unitName, prevSequenceID + 1, chunk.SequencedUnitHeader.SequenceID); } else if (chunk.SequencedUnitHeader.SequenceID < prevSequenceID) { log.Error("UdpOutOfSequence\tName:{0}\tExpected:{1}\tReceived:{2}", unitName, prevSequenceID + 1, chunk.SequencedUnitHeader.SequenceID); } prevSequenceID = chunk.SequencedUnitHeader.SequenceID; messagePump.Produce(chunk); } else UdpStatistics.FramesRxDiscarded++; Socket.InvokeAsyncMethod(Socket.ReceiveAsync, ReceiveCompleted, asyncReceiveArgs); } Here's some stub code that decodes the data: public static void OnDataChunk(DataChunk dataChunk) { try { for (int i = 0; i < dataChunk.SequencedUnitHeader.Count; i++) { int val = dataChunk.BinaryReader.ReadInt32(); if(val < 0) throw new Exception("EncodingException"); // do something with that value } } catch (Exception ex) { writer.WriteLine("ID:" + dataChunk.SequencedUnitHeader.SequenceID + " Count:" + dataChunk.SequencedUnitHeader.Count + " " + BitConverter.ToString(dataChunk.Buffer, 0, dataChunk.Size)); writer.Flush(); log.ErrorException("OnDataChunk", ex); log.Info("RETRY FRAME:{0} Data:{1}", dataChunk.SequencedUnitHeader.SequenceID, BitConverter.ToString(dataChunk.Buffer, 0, dataChunk.Size)); dataChunk.MemoryStream.Position = 0; dataChunk.SequencedUnitHeader.SequenceID = dataChunk.BinaryReader.ReadUInt32(); dataChunk.SequencedUnitHeader.Count = dataChunk.BinaryReader.ReadByte(); OnDataChunk(dataChunk); } } You see in the catch{} part I simply reset the MemoryStream.Position to 0 and call the same method again and it works just fine that next time? I'm really out of ideas at this point and unfortunately had no DUH moment writing this. Anybody have any kind of idea what might be going on or what else I could do to troubleshoot this? Thanks, Tom

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• Neo4J and Azure and VS2012 and Windows 8

  - by Chris Skardon

  Now, I know that this has been written about, but both of the main places (http://www.richard-banks.org/2011/02/running-neo4j-on-azure.html and http://blog.neo4j.org/2011/02/announcing-neo4j-on-windows-azure.html) utilise VS2010, and well, I’m on VS2012 and Windows 8. Not that I think Win 8 had anything to do with it really, anyhews! I’m going to begin from the beginning, this is my first foray into running something on Azure, so it’s been a bit of a learning curve. But luckily the Neo4J guys have got us started, so let’s download the VS2010 solution: http://neo4j.org/get?file=Neo4j.Azure.Server.zip OK, the other thing we’ll need is the VS2012 Azure SDK, so let’s get that as well: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/downloads/ (I just did the full install). Now, unzip the VS2010 solution and let’s open it in VS2012: <your location>\Neo4j.Azure.Server\Neo4j.Azure.Server.sln One-way-upgrade? Yer! Ignore the migration report – we don’t care! Let’s build that sucker… Ahhh 14 errors… WindowsAzure does not exist in the namespace ‘Microsoft’ Not a problem right? We’ve installed the SDK, just need to update the references: We can ignore the Test projects, they don’t use Azure, we’re interested in the other projects, so what we’ll do is remove the broken references, and add the correct ones, so expand the references bit of each project: hunt out those yellow exclamation marks, and delete them! You’ll need to add the right ones back in (listed below), when you go to the ‘Add Reference’ dialog make sure you have ‘Assemblies’ and ‘Framework’ selected before you seach (and search for ‘microsoft.win’ to narrow it down) So the references you need for each project are: CollectDiagnosticsData Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient Diversify.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime Microsoft.WindowsAzure.CloudDrive Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient Right, so let’s build again… Sweet! No errors.   Now we need to setup our Blobs, I’m assuming you are using the most up-to-date Java you happened to have downloaded :) in my case that’s JRE7, and that is located in: C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre7 So, zip up that folder into whatever you want to call it, I went with jre7.zip, and stuck it in a temp folder for now. In that same temp folder I also copied the neo4j zip I was using: neo4j-community-1.7.2-windows.zip OK, now, we need to get these into our Blob storage, this is where a lot of stuff becomes unstuck - I didn’t find any applications that helped me use the blob storage, one would crash (because my internet speed is so slow) and the other just didn’t work – sure it looked like it had worked, but when push came to shove it didn’t. So this is how I got my files into Blob (local first): 1. Run the ‘Storage Emulator’ (just search for that in the start menu) 2. That takes a little while to start up so fire up another instance of Visual Studio in the mean time, and create a new Console Application. 3. Manage Nuget Packages for that solution and add ‘Windows Azure Storage’ Now you’re set up to add the code: public static void Main() { CloudStorageAccount cloudStorageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.DevelopmentStorageAccount; CloudBlobClient client = cloudStorageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); client.Timeout = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(30); CloudBlobContainer container = client.GetContainerReference("neo4j"); //This will create it as well   UploadBlob(container, "jre7.zip", "c:\\temp\\jre7.zip"); UploadBlob(container, "neo4j-community-1.7.2-windows.zip", "c:\\temp\\neo4j-community-1.7.2-windows.zip"); }   private static void UploadBlob(CloudBlobContainer container, string blobName, string filename) { CloudBlob blob = container.GetBlobReference(blobName);   using (FileStream fileStream = File.OpenRead(filename)) blob.UploadFromStream(fileStream); } This will upload the files to your local storage account (to switch to an Azure one, you’ll need to create a storage account, and use those credentials when you make your CloudStorageAccount above) To test you’ve got them uploaded correctly, go to: http://localhost:10000/devstoreaccount1/neo4j/jre7.zip and you will hopefully download the zip file you just uploaded. Now that those files are there, we are ready for some final configuration… Right click on the Neo4jServerHost role in the Neo4j.Azure.Server cloud project: Click on the ‘Settings’ tab and we’ll need to do some changes – by default, the 1.7.2 edition of neo4J unzips to: neo4j-community-1.7.2 So, we need to update all the ‘neo4j-1.3.M02’ directories to be ‘neo4j-community-1.7.2’, we also need to update the Java runtime location, so we start with this: and end with this: Now, I also changed the Endpoints settings, to be HTTP (from TCP) and to have a port of 7410 (mainly because that’s straight down on the numpad) The last ‘gotcha’ is some hard coded consts, which had me looking for ages, they are in the ‘ConfigSettings’ class of the ‘Neo4jServerHost’ project, and the ones we’re interested in are: Neo4jFileName JavaZipFileName Change those both to what that should be. OK Nearly there (I promise)! Run the ‘Compute Emulator’ (same deal with the Start menu), in your system tray you should have an Azure icon, when the compute emulator is up and running, right click on the icon and select ‘Show Compute Emulator UI’ The last steps! Make sure the ‘Neo4j.Azure.Server’ cloud project is set up as the start project and let’s hit F5 tension mounts, the build takes place (you need to accept the UAC warning) and VS does it’s stuff. If you look at the Compute Emulator UI you’ll see some log stuff (which you’ll need if this goes awry – but it won’t don’t worry!) In a bit, the console and a Java window will pop up: Then the console will bog off, leaving just the Java one, and if we switch back to the Compute Emulator UI and scroll up we should be able to see a line telling us the port number we’ve been assigned (in my case 7411): (If you can’t see it, don’t worry.. press CTRL+A on the emulator, then CTRL+C, copy all the text and paste it into something like Notepad, then just do a Find for ‘port’ you’ll soon see it) Go to your favourite browser, and head to: http://localhost:YOURPORT/ and you should see the WebAdmin! See you on the cloud side hopefully! Chris PS Other gotchas! OK, I’ve been caught out a couple of times: I had an instance of Neo4J running as a service on my machine, the Azure instance wanted to run the https version of the server on the same port as the Service was running on, and so Java would complain that the port was already in use.. The first time I converted the project, it didn’t update the version of the Azure library to load, in the App.Config of the Neo4jServerHost project, and VS would throw an exception saying it couldn’t find the Azure dll version 1.0.0.0.

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• Oracle Tutor: Top 10 to Implement Sustainable Policies and Procedures

  - by emily.chorba(at)oracle.com

  Overview Your organization (executives, managers, and employees) understands the value of having written business process documents (process maps, procedures, instructions, reference documents, and form abstracts). Policies and procedures should be documented because they help to reduce the range of individual decisions and encourage management by exception: the manager only needs to give special attention to unusual problems, not covered by a specific policy or procedure. As more and more procedures are written to cover recurring situations, managers will begin to make decisions which will be consistent from one functional area to the next.Companies should take a project management approach when implementing an environment for a sustainable documentation program and do the following:1. Identify an Executive Champion2. Put together a winning team3. Assign ownership4. Centralize publishing5. Establish the Document Maintenance Process Up Front6. Document critical activities only7. Document actual practice8. Minimize documentation9. Support continuous improvement10. Keep it simple 1. Identify an Executive ChampionAppoint a top down driver. Select one key individual to be a mentor for the procedure planning team. The individual should be a senior manager, such as your company president, CIO, CFO, the vice-president of quality, manufacturing, or engineering. Written policies and procedures can be important supportive aids when known to express the thinking for the chief executive officer and / or the president and to have his or her full support. 2. Put Together a Winning TeamChoose a strong Project Management Leader and staff the procedure planning team with management members from cross functional groups. Make sure team members have the responsibility - and the authority - to make things happen.The winning team should consist of the Documentation Project Manager, Document Owners (one for each functional area), a Document Controller, and Document Specialists (as needed). The Tutor Implementation Guide has complete job descriptions for these roles. 3. Assign Ownership It is virtually impossible to keep process documentation simple and meaningful if employees who are far removed from the activity itself create it. It is impossible to keep documentation up-to-date when responsibility for the document is not clearly understood.Key to the Tutor methodology, therefore, is the concept of ownership. Each document has a single owner, who is responsible for ensuring that the document is necessary and that it reflects actual practice. The owner must be a person who is knowledgeable about the activity and who has the authority to build consensus among the persons who participate in the activity as well as the authority to define or change the way an activity is performed. The owner must be an advocate of the performers and negotiate, not dictate practices.In the Tutor environment, a document's owner is the only person with the authority to approve an update to that document. 4. Centralize Publishing Although it is tempting (especially in a networked environment and with document management software solutions) to decentralize the control of all documents -- with each owner updating and distributing his own -- Tutor promotes centralized publishing by assigning the Document Administrator (gate keeper) to manage the updates and distribution of the procedures library. 5. Establish a Document Maintenance Process Up Front (and stick to it) Everyone in your organization should know they are invited to suggest changes to procedures and should understand exactly what steps to take to do so. Tutor provides a set of procedures to help your company set up a healthy document control system. There are many document management products available to automate some of the document change and maintenance steps. Depending on the size of your organization, a simple document management system can reduce the effort it takes to track and distribute document changes and updates. Whether your company decides to store the written policies and procedures on a file server or in a database, the essential tasks for maintaining documents are the same, though some tasks are automated. 6. Document Critical Activities Only The best way to keep your documentation simple is to reduce the number of process documents to a bare minimum and to include in those documents only as much detail as is absolutely necessary. The first step to reducing process documentation is to document only those activities that are deemed critical. Not all activities require documentation. In fact, some critical activities cannot and should not be standardized. Others may be sufficiently documented with an instruction or a checklist and may not require a procedure. A document should only be created when it enhances the performance of the employee performing the activity. If it does not help the employee, then there is no reason to maintain the document. Activities that represent little risk (such as project status), activities that cannot be defined in terms of specific tasks (such as product research), and activities that can be performed in a variety of ways (such as advertising) often do not require documentation. Sometimes, an activity will evolve to the point where documentation is necessary. For example, an activity performed by single employee may be straightforward and uncomplicated -- that is, until the activity is performed by multiple employees. Sometimes, it is the interaction between co-workers that necessitates documentation; sometimes, it is the complexity or the diversity of the activity.7. Document Actual Practices The only reason to maintain process documentation is to enhance the performance of the employee performing the activity. And documentation can only enhance performance if it reflects reality -- that is, current best practice. Documentation that reflects an unattainable ideal or outdated practices will end up on the shelf, unused and forgotten.Documenting actual practice means (1) auditing the activity to understand how the work is really performed, (2) identifying best practices with employees who are involved in the activity, (3) building consensus so that everyone agrees on a common method, and (4) recording that consensus.8. Minimize Documentation One way to keep it simple is to document at the highest level possible. That is, include in your documents only as much detail as is absolutely necessary.When writing a document, you should ask yourself, What is the purpose of this document? That is, what problem will it solve?By focusing on this question, you can target the critical information.• What questions are the end users likely to have?• What level of detail is required?• Is any of this information extraneous to the document's purpose? Short, concise documents are user friendly and they are easier to keep up to date. 9. Support Continuous Improvement Employees who perform an activity are often in the best position to identify improvements to the process. In other words, continuous improvement is a natural byproduct of the work itself -- but only if the improvements are communicated to all employees who are involved in the process, and only if there is consensus among those employees.Traditionally, process documentation has been used to dictate performance, to limit employees' actions. In the Tutor environment, process documents are used to communicate improvements identified by employees. How does this work? The Tutor methodology requires a process document to reflect actual practice, so the owner of a document must routinely audit its content -- does the document match what the employees are doing? If it doesn't, the owner has the responsibility to evaluate the process, to build consensus among the employees, to identify "best practices," and to communicate these improvements via a document update. Continuous improvement can also be an outgrowth of corrective action -- but only if the solutions to problems are communicated effectively. The goal should be to solve a problem once and only once, which means not only identifying the solution, but ensuring that the solution becomes part of the process. The Tutor system provides the method through which improvements and solutions are documented and communicated to all affected employees in a cost-effective, timely manner; it ensures that improvements are not lost or confined to a single employee. 10. Keep it Simple Process documents don't have to be complex and unfriendly. In fact, the simpler the format and organization, the more likely the documents will be used. And the simpler the method of maintenance, the more likely the documents will be kept up-to-date. Keep it simply by:• Minimizing skills and training required• Following the established Tutor document format and layout• Avoiding technology just for technology's sake No other rule has as major an impact on the success of your internal documentation as -- keep it simple. Learn More For more information about Tutor, visit Oracle.Com or the Tutor Blog. Post your questions at the Tutor Forum.   Emily Chorba Principle Product Manager Oracle Tutor & BPM 

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• Connect to running web role on Azure using Remote Desktop Connection and VS2012

  - by Magnus Karlsson

  We want to be able to collect IntelliTrace information from our running app and also use remote desktop to connect to the IIS and look around(probably debugging). 1. Create certificate 1.1 Right-click the cloud project (marked in red) and select “Configure remote desktop”. 1.2 In the drop down list of certificates, choose <create> at the bottom. 1.3. Follow the instructions, you can set it up with default values. 1.4 When done. Choose the certificate and click “Copy to File…” as seen in the left of the picture above. 1.5. Save the file with any name you want. Now we will save it to local storage to be able to import it to our solution through the azure configuration manager in step 3. 2. Save certificate to local storage Now we need to attach it to our local certificate storage to be able to reach it from our confiuguration manager in visual studio. Microsoft provides the following steps for doing this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/232137 In order to view the Certificates store on the local computer, perform the following steps: Click Start, and then click Run. Type "MMC.EXE" (without the quotation marks) and click OK. Click Console in the new MMC you created, and then click Add/Remove Snap-in. In the new window, click Add. Highlight the Certificates snap-in, and then click Add. Choose the Computer option and click Next. Select Local Computer on the next screen, and then click OK. Click Close , and then click OK. You have now added the Certificates snap-in, which will allow you to work with any certificates in your computer's certificate store. You may want to save this MMC for later use. Now that you have access to the Certificates snap-in, you can import the server certificate into you computer's certificate store by following these steps: Open the Certificates (Local Computer) snap-in and navigate to Personal, and then Certificates. Note: Certificates may not be listed. If it is not, that is because there are no certificates installed. Right-click Certificates (or Personal if that option does not exist.) Choose All Tasks, and then click Import. When the wizard starts, click Next. Browse to the PFX file you created containing your server certificate and private key. Click Next. Enter the password you gave the PFX file when you created it. Be sure the Mark the key as exportable option is selected if you want to be able to export the key pair again from this computer. As an added security measure, you may want to leave this option unchecked to ensure that no one can make a backup of your private key. Click Next, and then choose the Certificate Store you want to save the certificate to. You should select Personal because it is a Web server certificate. If you included the certificates in the certification hierarchy, it will also be added to this store. Click Next. You should see a summary of screen showing what the wizard is about to do. If this information is correct, click Finish. You will now see the server certificate for your Web server in the list of Personal Certificates. It will be denoted by the common name of the server (found in the subject section of the certificate). Now that you have the certificate backup imported into the certificate store, you can enable Internet Information Services 5.0 to use that certificate (and the corresponding private key). To do this, perform the following steps: Open the Internet Services Manager (under Administrative Tools) and navigate to the Web site you want to enable secure communications (SSL/TLS) on. Right-click on the site and click Properties. You should now see the properties screen for the Web site. Click the Directory Security tab. Under the Secure Communications section, click Server Certificate. This will start the Web Site Certificate Wizard. Click Next. Choose the Assign an existing certificate option and click Next. You will now see a screen showing that contents of your computer's personal certificate store. Highlight your Web server certificate (denoted by the common name), and then click Next. You will now see a summary screen showing you all the details about the certificate you are installing. Be sure that this information is correct or you may have problems using SSL or TLS in HTTP communications. Click Next, and then click OK to exit the wizard. You should now have an SSL/TLS-enabled Web server. Be sure to protect your PFX files from any unwanted personnel. Image of a typical MMC.EXE with the certificates up.   3. Import the certificate to you visual studio project. 3.1 Now right click your equivalent to the MvcWebRole1 (as seen in the first picture under the red oval) and choose properties. 3.2 Choose Certificates. Right click the ellipsis to the right of the “thumbprint” and you should be able to select your newly created certificate here. After selecting it- save the file.   4. Upload the certificate to your Azure subscription. 4.1 Go to the azure management portal, click the services menu icon to the left and choose the service. Click Upload in the bottom menu.     5. Connect to server. Since I tried to use account settings(have to use another name) we have to set up a new name for the connection. No biggie. 5.1 Go to azure management portal, select your service and in the bottom menu, choose “REMOTE”. This will display the configuration for remote connection. It will actually change your ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file. After you change It here it might be good to choose download and replace the one in your project. Set a name that is not your windows azure account name and not Administrator. 5.2 Goto visual studio, click Server Explorer. Choose as selected in the picture below and click “COnnect using remote desktop”.   5.2 You will now be able to log in with the name and password set up in step 5.1. and voila! Windows server 2012, IIS and other nice stuff!   To do this one I’ve been using http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ff683671.aspx where you can collect some of this information and additional one.

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• setIncludesSubentities: in an NSFetchRequest is broken for entities across multiple persistent store

  - by SG

  Prior art which doesn't quite address this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1774359/core-data-migration-error-message-model-does-not-contain-configuration-xyz I have narrowed this down to a specific issue. It takes a minute to set up, though; please bear with me. The gist of the issue is that a persistentStoreCoordinator (apparently) cannot preserve the part of an object graph where a managedObject is marked as a subentity of another when they are stored in different files. Here goes... 1) I have 2 xcdatamodel files, each containing a single entity. In runtime, when the managed object model is constructed, I manually define one entity as subentity of another using setSubentities:. This is because defining subentities across multiple files in the editor is not supported yet. I then return the complete model with modelByMergingModels. //Works! [mainEntity setSubentities:canvasEntities]; NSLog(@"confirm %@ is super for %@", [[[canvasEntities lastObject] superentity] name], [[canvasEntities lastObject] name]); //Output: "confirm Note is super for Browser" 2) I have modified the persistentStoreCoordinator method so that it sets a different store for each entity. Technically, it uses configurations, and each entity has one and only one configuration defined. //Also works! for ( NSString *configName in [[HACanvasPluginManager shared].registeredCanvasTypes valueForKey:@"viewControllerClassName"] ) { storeUrl = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[self applicationDocumentsDirectory] stringByAppendingPathComponent:[configName stringByAppendingPathExtension:@"sqlite"]]]; //NSLog(@"entities for configuration '%@': %@", configName, [[[self managedObjectModel] entitiesForConfiguration:configName] valueForKey:@"name"]); //Output: "entities for configuration 'HATextCanvasController': (Note)" //Output: "entities for configuration 'HAWebCanvasController': (Browser)" if (![persistentStoreCoordinator addPersistentStoreWithType:NSSQLiteStoreType configuration:configName URL:storeUrl options:options error:&error]) //etc 3) I have a fetchRequest set for the parent entity, with setIncludesSubentities: and setAffectedStores: just to be sure we get both 1) and 2) covered. When inserting objects of either entity, they both are added to the context and they both are fetched by the fetchedResultsController and displayed in the tableView as expected. // Create the fetch request for the entity. NSFetchRequest *fetchRequest = [[NSFetchRequest alloc] init]; [fetchRequest setEntity:entity]; [fetchRequest setIncludesSubentities:YES]; //NECESSARY to fetch all canvas types [fetchRequest setSortDescriptors:sortDescriptors]; [fetchRequest setFetchBatchSize:20]; // Set the batch size to a suitable number. [fetchRequest setAffectedStores:[[managedObjectContext persistentStoreCoordinator] persistentStores]]; [fetchRequest setReturnsObjectsAsFaults:NO]; Here is where it starts misbehaving: after closing and relaunching the app, ONLY THE PARENT ENTITY is fetched. If I change the entity of the request using setEntity: to the entity for 'Note', all notes are fetched. If I change it to the entity for 'Browser', all the browsers are fetched. Let me reiterate that during the run in which an object is first inserted into the context, it will appear in the list. It is only after save and relaunch that a fetch request fails to traverse the hierarchy. Therefore, I can only conclude that it is the storage of the inheritance that is the problem. Let's recap why: - Both entities can be created, inserted into the context, and viewed, so the model is working - Both entities can be fetched with a single request, so the inheritance is working - I can confirm that the files are being stored separately and objects are going into their appropriate stores, so saving is working - Launching the app with either entity set for the request works, so retrieval from the store is working - This also means that traversing different stores with the request is working - By using a single store instead of multiple, the problem goes away completely, so creating, storing, fetching, viewing etc is working correctly. This leaves only one culprit (to my mind): the inheritance I'm setting with setSubentities: is effective only for objects creating during the session. Either objects/entities are being stored stripped of the inheritance info, or entity inheritance as defined programmatically only applies to new instances, or both. Either of these is unacceptable. Either it's a bug or I am way, way off course. I have been at this every which way for two days; any insight is greatly appreciated. The current workaround - just using a single store - works completely, except it won't be future-proof in the event that I remove one of the models from the app etc. It also boggles the mind because I can't see why you would have all this infrastructure for storing across multiple stores and for setting affected stores in fetch requests if it by core definition (of setSubentities:) doesn't work.

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• Communities - The importance of exchange and discussion

  Communication with your environment is an essential part of everyone's life. And it doesn't matter whether you are actually living in a rural area in the middle of nowhere, within the pulsating heart of a big city, or in my case on a wonderful island in the Indian Ocean. The ability to exchange your thoughts, your experience and your worries with another person helps you to get different points of view and new ideas on how to resolve an issue you might be confronted with. Benefits of community work What happens to be common sense in your daily life, also applies to your work environment. Working in IT, or ICT as it is called in Mauritius, requires a lot of reading and learning. Not only during your lectures at the university but with your colleagues in a project assignment and hopefully with 'unknown' pals in the universe of online communities. At least I can say that I learned quite a lot from other developers code, their responses in various forums, their numerous blog articles, and while attending local user group meetings. When I started to work as a professional software developer (or engineer some may say) years ago I immediately checked the existence of communities on the programming language, the database technology and other vital information on software development in general. Luckily, it wasn't too difficult to find. My employer had a subscription of the monthly magazines and newsletters of a national organisation which also run the biggest forum in that area. Getting in touch with other developers and reading their common problems but also solutions was a huge benefit to my growth. Image courtesy of Michael Kappel (CC BY-NC 2.0) Active participation and regular contribution to this community gave me some nice advantages, too. Within three years I was listed as a conference speaker at the annual developer's conference and provided several sessions on different topics during consecutive years. Back in 2004, I took over the responsibility and management of the monthly meetings of a regional user group, and organised it for more than two years. Furthermore, I was invited to the newly-founded community program of Microsoft Germany (Community Leader/Insider Program - CLIP). My website on Active FoxPro Pages was nominated in the second batch of online communities. Due to my community work and providing advice to others, I had the honour to be awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) - Visual Developer for Visual FoxPro in the years 2006 and 2007. It was a great experience to meet with other like-minded people and I'm really grateful for that. Just in case, more details are listed in my Curriculum Vitae. But this all changed when I moved to Mauritius... Cyber island Mauritius? During the first months in Mauritius I was way too busy to think about community activities at all. First of all, there was the new company that had to be set up, the new staff had to be trained and of course the communication work-flows and so on with the project managers back in Germany had to be sorted out, too. Second, I had to get a grip of my private matters like getting the basics for my new household or exploring the neighbourhood, and last but not least I needed a break from the hectic and intensive work prior to my departure. As soon as the sea literally calmed down, I started to have conversations with my colleagues about communities and user groups. Sadly, it turned out that there were none, or at least no one was aware of any at that time. Oh oh, what did I do? Anyway, having this kind of background and very positive experience with off-line and on-line activities I decided for myself that some day I'm going to found a community in Mauritius for all kind of IT/ICT-related fields. The main focus might be on software development but not on a certain technology or methodology. It was clear to me that it should be an open infrastructure and anyone is welcome to join, to experience, to share and to contribute if they would like to. That was the idea at that time... Ok, fast-forward to recent events. At the end of October 2012 I was invited to an event called Open Days organised by Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands together with other local partners and resellers. There I got in touch with local Technical Evangelist Arnaud Meslier and we had a good conversation on communities during the breaks. Eventually, I left a good impression on him, as we are having chats on Facebook or Skype irregularly. Well, seeing that my personal and professional surroundings have been settled and running smooth, having that great exchange and contact with Microsoft IOI (again), and being really eager to re-animate my intentions from 2007, I recently founded a new community: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community - #MSCC It took me a while to settle down with the name but it was obvious that the community should not be attached to one single technology, like ie. .NET user group, Oracle developers, or Joomla friends (these are fictitious names). There are several other reasons why I came up with 'Craftsmanship' as the core topic of this community. The expression of 'engineering' didn't feel right with the fields covered. Software development in all kind of facets is a craft, and therefore demands a lot of practice but also guidance from more experienced developers. It also includes the process of designing, modelling and drafting the ideas. Has to deal with various types of tests and test methodologies, and of course should be focused on flexible and agile ways of acting. In order to meet and to excel a customer's request for a solution. Next, I was looking for an easy way to handle the organisation of events and meeting appointments. Using all kind of social media platforms like Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Xing, etc. I was never really confident about their features of event handling. More by chance I stumbled upon Meetup.com and in combination with the other entities (G+ Communities, FB Pages or in Groups) I am looking forward to advertise and manage all future activities here: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community This is a community for those who care and are proud of what they do. For those developers, regardless how experienced they are, who want to improve and master their craft. This is a community for those who believe that being average is just not good enough. I know, there are not many 'craftsmen' yet but it's a start... Let's see how it looks like by the end of the year. There are free smartphone apps for Android and iOS from Meetup.com that allow you to keep track of meetings and to stay informed on latest updates. And last but not least, there will be a Trello workspace to collect and share ideas and provide downloads of slides, etc. Sharing is caring! As mentioned, the #MSCC is present in various social media networks in order to cover as many people as possible here in Mauritius. Following is an overview of the current networks: Twitter - Latest updates and quickies Google+ - Community channel Facebook - Community Page LinkedIn - Community Group Trello - Collaboration workspace to share and develop ideas Hopefully, this covers the majority of computer-related people in Mauritius. Please spread the word about the #MSCC between your colleagues, your friends and other interested 'geeks'. Your future looks bright Running and participating in a user group or any kind of community usually provides quite a number of advantages for anyone. On the one side it is very joyful for me to organise appointments and get in touch with people that might be interested to present a little demo of their projects or their recent problems they had to tackle down, and on the other side there are lots of companies that have various support programs or sponsorships especially tailored for user groups. At the moment, I already have a couple of gimmicks that I would like to hand out in small contests or raffles during one of the upcoming meetings, and as said, companies provide all kind of goodies, books free of charge, or sometimes even licenses for communities. Meeting other software developers or IT guys also opens up your point of view on the local market and there might be interesting projects or job offers available, too. A community like the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community is great for freelancers, self-employed, students and of course employees. Meetings will be organised on a regular basis, and I'm open to all kind of suggestions from you. Please leave a comment here in blog or join the conversations in the above mentioned social networks. Let's get this community up and running, my fellow Mauritians!

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• Creating Item Templates as Visual Studio 2010 Extensions

  - by maziar

  Technorati Tags: Visual Studio 2010 Extension,T4 Template,VSIX,Item Template Wizard This blog post briefly introduces creation of an item template as a Visual studio 2010 extension. Problem specification Assume you are writing a Framework for data-oriented applications and you decide to include all your application messages in a SQL server database table. After creating the table, your create a class in your framework for getting messages with a string key specified.   var message = FrameworkMessages.Get("ChangesSavedSuccess");   Everyone would say this code is so error prone, because message keys are not strong-typed, and might create errors in application that are not caught in tests. So we think of a way to make it strong-typed, i.e. create a class to use it like this:   var message = Messages.ChangesSavedSuccess; in Messages class the code looks like this: public string ChangesSavedSuccess {     get { return FrameworkMessages.Get("ChangesSavedSuccess"); } }   And clearly, we are not going to create the Messages class manually; we need a class generator for it.   Again assume that the application(s) that intend to use our framework, contain multiple sub-systems. So each sub-system need to have it’s own strong-typed message class that call FrameworkMessages.Get method. So we would like to make our code generator an Item Template so that each developer would easily add the item to his project and no other works would be necessary.   Solution We create a T4 Text Template to generate our strong typed class from database. Then create a Visual Studio Item Template with this generator and publish it.   What Are T4 Templates You might be already familiar with T4 templates. If it’s so, you can skip this section. T4 Text Template is a fine Visual Studio file type (.tt) that generates output text. This file is a mixture of text blocks and code logic (in C# or VB). For example, you can generate HTML files, C# classes, Resource files and etc with use of a T4 template.   Syntax highlighting In Visual Studio 2010 a T4 Template by default will no be syntax highlighted and no auto-complete is supported for it. But there is a fine visual studio extension named ‘Visual T4’ which can be downloaded free from VisualStudioGallery. This tool offers IntelliSense, syntax coloring, validation, transformation preview and more for T4 templates.     How Item Templates work in Visual Studio Visual studio extensions allow us to add some functionalities to visual studio. In our case we need to create a .vsix file that adds a template to visual studio item templates. Item templates are zip files containing the template file and a meta-data file with .vstemplate extension. This .vstemplate file is an XML file that provides some information about the template. A .vsix file also is a zip file (renamed to .vsix) that are open with visual studio extension installer. (Re-installing a vsix file requires that old one to be uninstalled from VS: Tools > Extension Manager.) Installing a vsix will need Visual Studio to be closed and re-opened to take effect. Visual studio extension installer will easily find the item template’s zip file and copy it to visual studio’s template items folder. You can find other visual studio templates in [<VS Install Path>\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates] and you can edit them; but be very careful with VS default templates.   How Can I Create a VSIX file 1. Visual Studio SDK depending on your Visual Studio’s version, you need to download Microsoft Visual Studio SDK. Note that if you have VS 2010 SP1, you will need to download and install VS 2010 SP1 SDK; VS 2010 SDK will not be installed (unless you change registry value that indicated your service pack number). Here is the link for VS 2010 SP1 SDK. After downloading, Run it and follow the wizard to complete the installation.   2. Create the file you want to make it an Item Template Create a project (or use an existing one) and add you file, edit it to make it work fine.   Back to our own problem, we need to create a T4 (.tt) template. VS-Prok: Add > New Item > General > Text Template Type a file name, ex. Message.tt, and press Add. Create the T4 template file (in this blog I do not intend to include T4 syntaxes so I just write down the code which is clear enough for you to understand)   <#@ template debug="false" hostspecific="true" language="C#" #> <#@ output extension=".cs" #> <#@ Assembly Name="System.Data" #> <#@ Import Namespace="System.Data.SqlClient" #> <#@ Import Namespace="System.Text" #> <#@ Import Namespace="System.IO" #> <#     var connectionString = "server=Maziar-PC; Database=MyDatabase; Integrated Security=True";     var systemName = "Sys1";     var builder = new StringBuilder();     using (var connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString))     {         connection.Open();         var command = connection.CreateCommand();         command.CommandText = string.Format("SELECT [Key] FROM [Message] WHERE System = '{0}'", systemName);         var reader = command.ExecuteReader();         while (reader.Read())         {             builder.AppendFormat("        public static string {0} {{ get {{ return FrameworkMessages.Get(\"{0}\"); }} }}\r\n", reader[0]);         }     } #> namespace <#= System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.CallContext.LogicalGetData("NamespaceHint") #> {     public static class <#= Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(Host.TemplateFile) #>     { <#= builder.ToString() #>     } } As you can see the T4 template connects to a database, reads message keys and generates a class. Here is the output: namespace MyProject.MyFolder {     public static class Messages     {         public static string ChangesSavedSuccess { get { return FrameworkMessages.Get("ChangesSavedSuccess"); } }         public static string ErrorSavingChanges { get { return FrameworkMessages.Get("ErrorSavingChanges"); } }     } }   The output looks fine but there is one problem. The connectionString and systemName are hard coded. so how can I create an flexible item template? One of features of item templates in visual studio is that you can create a designer wizard for your item template, so I can get connection information and system name there. now lets go on creating the vsix file.   3. Create Template In visual studio click on File > Export Template a wizard will show up. if first step click on Item Template on in the combo box select the project that contains Messages.tt. click next. Select Messages.tt from list in second step. click next. In the third step, you should choose References. For this template, System and System.Data are needed so choose them. click next. write down template name, description, if you like add a .ico file as the icon file and also preview image. Uncheck automatically add the templare … . Copy the output location in clip board. click finish.     4. Create VSIX Project In VS, Click File > New > Project > Extensibility > VSIX Project Type a name, ex. FrameworkMessages, Location, etc. The project will include a .vsixmanifest file. Fill in fields like Author, Product Name, Description, etc.   In Content section, click on Add Content. choose content type as Item Template. choose source as file. remember you have the template file address in clipboard? now paste it in front of file. click OK.     5. Build VSIX Project That’s it, build the project and go to output directory. You see a .vsix file. you can run it now. After restarting VS, if you click on a project > Add > New Item, you will see your item in list and you can add it. When you add this item to a project, if it has not references to System and System.Data they will be added. but the problem mentioned in step 2 is seen now.     6. Create Design Wizard for your Item Template Create a project i.e. Windows Application named ‘Framework.Messages.Design’, but better change its output type to Class Library. Add References to Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateWizardInterface and envdte Add a class Named MessagesDesigner in your project and Implement IWizard interface in it. This is what you should write: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateWizard; using EnvDTE; namespace Framework.Messages.Design {     class MessageDesigner : IWizard     {         private bool CanAddProjectItem;         public void RunStarted(object automationObject, Dictionary<string, string> replacementsDictionary, WizardRunKind runKind, object[] customParams)         {             // Prompt user for Connection String and System Name in a Windows form (ShowDialog) here             // (try to provide good interface)             // if user clicks on cancel of your windows form return;             string connectionString = "connection;string"; // Set value from the form             string systemName = "system;name"; // Set value from the form             CanAddProjectItem = true;             replacementsDictionary.Add("$connectionString$", connectionString);             replacementsDictionary.Add("$systemName$", systemName);         }         public bool ShouldAddProjectItem(string filePath)         {             return CanAddProjectItem;         }         public void BeforeOpeningFile(ProjectItem projectItem)         {         }         public void ProjectFinishedGenerating(Project project)         {         }         public void ProjectItemFinishedGenerating(ProjectItem projectItem)         {         }         public void RunFinished()         {         }     } }   before your code runs  replacementsDictionary contains list of default template parameters. After that, two other parameters are added. Now build this project and copy the output assembly to [<VS Install Path>\Common7\IDE] folder.   your designer is ready.     The template that you had created is now added to your VSIX project. In windows explorer open your template zip file (extract it somewhere). open the .vstemplate file. first of all remove <ProjectItem SubType="Code" TargetFileName="$fileinputname$.cs" ReplaceParameters="true">Messages.cs</ProjectItem> because the .cs file is not to be intended to be a part of template and it will be generated. change value of ReplaceParameters for your .tt file to true to enable parameter replacement in this file. now right after </TemplateContent> end element, write this: <WizardExtension>   <Assembly>Framework.Messages.Design</Assembly>   <FullClassName>Framework.Messages.Design.MessageDesigner</FullClassName> </WizardExtension>   one other thing that you should do is to edit your .tt file and remove your .cs file. Lines 8 and 9 of your .tt file should be:     var connectionString = "$connectionString$";     var systemName = "$systemName$"; this parameters will be replaced when the item is added to a project. Save the contents to a zip file with same file name and replace the original file.   now again build your VSIX project, uninstall your extension. close VS. now run .vsix file. open vs, add an item of type messages to your project, bingo, your wizard form will show up. fill the fields and click ok, values are replaced in .tt file added.     that’s it. tried so hard to make this post brief, hope it was not so long…   Cheers Maziar

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• Modelling boost::Lockable with semaphore rather than mutex (previously titled: Unlocking a mutex fr

  - by dan

  I'm using the C++ boost::thread library, which in my case means I'm using pthreads. Officially, a mutex must be unlocked from the same thread which locks it, and I want the effect of being able to lock in one thread and then unlock in another. There are many ways to accomplish this. One possibility would be to write a new mutex class which allows this behavior. For example: class inter_thread_mutex{ bool locked; boost::mutex mx; boost::condition_variable cv; public: void lock(){ boost::unique_lock<boost::mutex> lck(mx); while(locked) cv.wait(lck); locked=true; } void unlock(){ { boost::lock_guard<boost::mutex> lck(mx); if(!locked) error(); locked=false; } cv.notify_one(); } // bool try_lock(); void error(); etc. } I should point out that the above code doesn't guarantee FIFO access, since if one thread calls lock() while another calls unlock(), this first thread may acquire the lock ahead of other threads which are waiting. (Come to think of it, the boost::thread documentation doesn't appear to make any explicit scheduling guarantees for either mutexes or condition variables). But let's just ignore that (and any other bugs) for now. My question is, if I decide to go this route, would I be able to use such a mutex as a model for the boost Lockable concept. For example, would anything go wrong if I use a boost::unique_lock< inter_thread_mutex for RAII-style access, and then pass this lock to boost::condition_variable_any.wait(), etc. On one hand I don't see why not. On the other hand, "I don't see why not" is usually a very bad way of determining whether something will work. The reason I ask is that if it turns out that I have to write wrapper classes for RAII locks and condition variables and whatever else, then I'd rather just find some other way to achieve the same effect. EDIT: The kind of behavior I want is basically as follows. I have an object, and it needs to be locked whenever it is modified. I want to lock the object from one thread, and do some work on it. Then I want to keep the object locked while I tell another worker thread to complete the work. So the first thread can go on and do something else while the worker thread finishes up. When the worker thread gets done, it unlocks the mutex. And I want the transition to be seemless so nobody else can get the mutex lock in between when thread 1 starts the work and thread 2 completes it. Something like inter_thread_mutex seems like it would work, and it would also allow the program to interact with it as if it were an ordinary mutex. So it seems like a clean solution. If there's a better solution, I'd be happy to hear that also. EDIT AGAIN: The reason I need locks to begin with is that there are multiple master threads, and the locks are there to prevent them from accessing shared objects concurrently in invalid ways. So the code already uses loop-level lock-free sequencing of operations at the master thread level. Also, in the original implementation, there were no worker threads, and the mutexes were ordinary kosher mutexes. The inter_thread_thingy came up as an optimization, primarily to improve response time. In many cases, it was sufficient to guarantee that the "first part" of operation A, occurs before the "first part" of operation B. As a dumb example, say I punch object 1 and give it a black eye. Then I tell object 1 to change it's internal structure to reflect all the tissue damage. I don't want to wait around for the tissue damage before I move on to punch object 2. However, I do want the tissue damage to occur as part of the same operation; for example, in the interim, I don't want any other thread to reconfigure the object in such a way that would make tissue damage an invalid operation. (yes, this example is imperfect in many ways, and no I'm not working on a game) So we made the change to a model where ownership of an object can be passed to a worker thread to complete an operation, and it actually works quite nicely; each master thread is able to get a lot more operations done because it doesn't need to wait for them all to complete. And, since the event sequencing at the master thread level is still loop-based, it is easy to write high-level master-thread operations, as they can be based on the assumption that an operation is complete when the corresponding function call returns. Finally, I thought it would be nice to use inter_thread mutex/semaphore thingies using RAII with boost locks to encapsulate the necessary synchronization that is required to make the whole thing work.

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• Oracle OpenWorld 2013 – Wrap up by Sven Bernhardt

  - by JuergenKress

  OOW 2013 is over and we’re heading home, so it is time to lean back and reflecting about the impressions we have from the conference. First of all: OOW was great! It was a pleasure to be a part of it. As already mentioned in our last blog article: It was the biggest OOW ever. Parallel to the conference the America’s Cup took place in San Francisco and the Oracle Team America won. Amazing job by the team and again congratulations from our side Back to the conference. The main topics for us are: Oracle SOA / BPM Suite 12c Adaptive Case management (ACM) Big Data Fast Data Cloud Mobile Below we will go a little more into detail, what are the key takeaways regarding the mentioned points: Oracle SOA / BPM Suite 12c During the five days at OOW, first details of the upcoming major release of Oracle SOA Suite 12c and Oracle BPM Suite 12c have been introduced. Some new key features are: Managed File Transfer (MFT) for transferring big files from a source to a target location Enhanced REST support by introducing a new REST binding Introduction of a generic cloud adapter, which can be used to connect to different cloud providers, like Salesforce Enhanced analytics with BAM, which has been totally reengineered (BAM Console now also runs in Firefox!) Introduction of templates (OSB pipelines, component templates, BPEL activities templates) EM as a single monitoring console OSB design-time integration into JDeveloper (Really great!) Enterprise modeling capabilities in BPM Composer These are only a few points from what is coming with 12c. We are really looking forward for the new realese to come out, because this seems to be really great stuff. The suite becomes more and more integrated. From 10g to 11g it was an evolution in terms of developing SOA-based applications. With 12c, Oracle continues it’s way – very impressive. Adaptive Case Management Another fantastic topic was Adaptive Case Management (ACM). The Oracle PMs did a great job especially at the demo grounds in showing the upcoming Case Management UI (will be available in 11g with the next BPM Suite MLR Patch), the roadmap and the differences between traditional business process modeling. They have been very busy during the conference because a lot of partners and customers have been interested Big Data Big Data is one of the current hype themes. Because of huge data amounts from different internal or external sources, the handling of these data becomes more and more challenging. Companies have a need for analyzing the data to optimize their business. The challenge is here: the amount of data is growing daily! To store and analyze the data efficiently, it is necessary to have a scalable and flexible infrastructure. Here it is important that hardware and software are engineered to work together. Therefore several new features of the Oracle Database 12c, like the new in-memory option, have been presented by Larry Ellison himself. From a hardware side new server machines like Fujitsu M10 or new processors, such as Oracle’s new M6-32 have been announced. The performance improvements, when using one of these hardware components in connection with the improved software solutions were really impressive. For more details about this, please take look at our previous blog post. Regarding Big Data, Oracle also introduced their Big Data architecture, which consists of: Oracle Big Data Appliance that is preconfigured with Hadoop Oracle Exdata which stores a huge amount of data efficently, to achieve optimal query performance Oracle Exalytics as a fast and scalable Business analytics system Analysis of the stored data can be performed using SQL, by streaming the data directly from Hadoop to an Oracle Database 12c. Alternatively the analysis can be directly implemented in Hadoop using “R”. In addition Oracle BI Tools can be used to analyze the data. Fast Data Fast Data is a complementary approach to Big Data. A huge amount of mostly unstructured data comes in via different channels with a high frequency. The analysis of these data streams is also important for companies, because the incoming data has to be analyzed regarding business-relevant patterns in real-time. Therefore these patterns must be identified efficiently and performant. To do so, in-memory grid solutions in combination with Oracle Coherence and Oracle Event Processing demonstrated very impressive how efficient real-time data processing can be. One example for Fast Data solutions that was shown during the OOW was the analysis of twitter streams regarding customer satisfaction. The feeds with negative words like “bad” or “worse” have been filtered and after a defined treshold has been reached in a certain timeframe, a business event was triggered. Cloud Another key trend in the IT market is of course Cloud Computing and what it means for companies and their businesses. Oracle announced their Cloud strategy and vision – companies can focus on their real business while all of the applications are available via Cloud. This also includes Oracle Database or Oracle Weblogic, so that companies can also build, deploy and run their own applications within the cloud. Three different approaches have been introduced: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) Software as a Service (SaaS) Using the IaaS approach only the infrastructure components will be managed in the Cloud. Customers will be very flexible regarding memory, storage or number of CPUs because those parameters can be adjusted elastically. The PaaS approach means that besides the infrastructure also the platforms (such as databases or application servers) necessary for running applications will be provided within the Cloud. Here customers can also decide, if installation and management of these infrastructure components should be done by Oracle. The SaaS approach describes the most complete one, hence all applications a company uses are managed in the Cloud. Oracle is planning to provide all of their applications, like ERP systems or HR applications, as Cloud services. In conclusion this seems to be a very forward-thinking strategy, which opens up new possibilities for customers to manage their infrastructure and applications in a flexible, scalable and future-oriented manner. As you can see, our OOW days have been very very interresting. We collected many helpful informations for our projects. The new innovations presented at the confernce are great and being part of this was even greater! We are looking forward to next years’ conference! Links: http://www.oracle.com/openworld/index.html http://thecattlecrew.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/first-impressions-from-oracle-open-world-2013 SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: cattleCrew,Sven Bernhard,OOW2013,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, February 21, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, February 21, 2011Popular ReleasesA2Command: 2011-02-21 - Version 1.0: IntroductionThis is the full release version of A2Command 1.0, dated February 21, 2011. These notes supersede any prior version's notes. All prior releases may be found on the project's website at http://a2command.codeplex.com/releases/ where you can read the release notes for older versions as well as download them. This version of A2Command is intended to replace any previous version you may have downloaded in the past. There were several bug fixes made after Release Candidate 2 and all...Chiave File Encryption: Chiave 0.9: Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit rijndael encyrption algorithm with simple to use UI. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5. It incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass. Feedbacks are Welcome!....Rawr: Rawr 4.0.20 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...Azure Storage Samples: Version 1.0 (February 2011): These downloads contain source code. Each is a complete sample that fully exercises Windows Azure Storage across blobs, queues, and tables. The difference between the downloads is implementation approach. Storage DotNet CS.zip is a .NET StorageClient library implementation in the C# language. This library come with the Windows Azure SDK. Contains helper classes for accessing blobs, queues, and tables. Storage REST CS.zip is a REST implementation in the C# language. The code to implement R...MiniTwitter: 1.66: MiniTwitter 1.66 ???? ?? ?????????? 2 ??????????????????? User Streams ?????????View Layout Replicator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: View Layout Replicator (1.0.119.18): Initial releaseWindows Phone 7 Isolated Storage Explorer: WP7 Isolated Storage Explorer v1.0 Beta: Current release features:WPF desktop explorer client Visual Studio integrated tool window explorer client (Visual Studio 2010 Professional and above) Supported operations: Refresh (isolated storage information), Add Folder, Add Existing Item, Download File, Delete Folder, Delete File Explorer supports operations running on multiple remote applications at the same time Explorer detects application disconnect (1-2 second delay) Explorer confirms operation completed status Explorer d...Advanced Explorer for Wp7: Advanced Explorer for Wp7 Version 1.4 Test8: Added option to run under Lockscreen. Fixed a bug when you open a pdf/mobi file without starting adobe reader/amazon kindle first boost loading time for folders added \Windows directory (all devices) you can now interact with the filesystem while it is loading!Game Files Open - Map Editor: Game Files Open - Map Editor Beta 2 v1.0.0.0: The 2° beta release of the Map Editor, we have fixed a big bug of the files regen.Document.Editor: 2011.6: Whats new for Document.Editor 2011.6: New Left to Right and Left to Right support New Indent more/less support Improved Home tab Improved Tooltips/shortcut keys Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsCatel - WPF and Silverlight MVVM library: 1.2: Catel history ============= (+) Added (*) Changed (-) Removed (x) Error / bug (fix) For more information about issues or new feature requests, please visit: http://catel.codeplex.com =========== Version 1.2 =========== Release date: ============= 2011/02/17 Added/fixed: ============ (+) DataObjectBase now supports Isolated Storage out of the box: Person.Save(myStream) stores a whole object graph in Silverlight (+) DataObjectBase can now be converted to Json via Person.ToJson(); (+)...??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2011-02-18: ?????All-In-One Code Framework?2011??????????！！http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ?????，?????AzureBingMaps??????，??Azure，WCF, Silverlight, Window Phone????????，????????????????????????。 ???： Windows Azure SQL Azure Windows Azure AppFabric Windows Live Messenger Connect Bing Maps ?????： ??????HTML??? ??Windows PC?Mac?Silverlight??? ??Windows Phone?Silverlight??? ?????：http://blog.csdn.net/sjb5201/archive/2011...Image.Viewer: 2011: First version of 2011Silverlight Toolkit: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit - Feb 2011: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit OverviewSilverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit offers developers additional controls for Windows Phone application development, designed to match the rich user experience of the Windows Phone 7. Suggestions? Features? Questions? Ask questions in the Create.msdn.com forum. Add bugs or feature requests to the Issue Tracker. Help us shape the Silverlight Toolkit with your feedback! Please clearly indicate that the work items and issues are for the phone t...VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 29 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 29 (beta)New: Added VsTortoise Solution Explorer integration for Web Project Folder, Web Folder and Web Item. Fix: TortoiseProc was called with invalid parameters, when using TSVN 1.4.x or older #7338 (thanks psifive) Fix: Add-in does not work, when "TortoiseSVN/bin" is not added to PATH environment variable #7357 Fix: Missing error message when ...Sense/Net CMS - Enterprise Content Management: SenseNet 6.0.3 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.3 Community Edition We are happy to introduce you the latest version of Sense/Net with integrated ECM Workflow capabilities! In the past weeks we have been working hard to migrate the product to .Net 4 and include a workflow framework in Sense/Net built upon Windows Workflow Foundation 4. This brand new feature enables developers to define and develop workflows, and supports users when building and setting up complicated business processes involving content creation and response...thinktecture WSCF.blue: WSCF.blue V1 Update (1.0.11): Features Added a new option that allows properties on data contract types to be marked as virtual. Bug Fixes Fixed a bug caused by certain project properties not being available on Web Service Software Factory projects. Fixed a bug that could result in the WrapperName value of the MessageContractAttribute being incorrect when the Adjust Casing option is used. The menu item code now caters for CommandBar instances that are not available. For example the Web Item CommandBar does not exist ...AllNewsManager.NET: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3. This new version provide several new features, improvements and bug fixes. Some new features: Online Users. Avatars. Copy function (to create a new article from another one). SEO improvements (friendly urls). New admin buttons. And more...Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.8: Version 0.8 (15 Feb 2011)moved to Beta stage publish photo feature "email" field of User object added new Graph Api object: Group, Event new Graph Api connection: likes, groups, eventsDJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC: DJME2 -The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC beta2: The source code and runtime library for DJME2. For more product info you can goto http://www.dotnetage.com/djme.html What is new ?The Grid extension added The ModelBinder added which helping you create Bindable data Action. The DnaFor() control factory added that enabled Model bindable extensions. Enhance the ListBox , ComboBox data binding.New ProjectsAuto-mobile Forum: Automobileforum is a website regarding cars where users can share their ideas about cars and whatever information they want about a car they can get that from this website. The language used for development of this website is ASP.NET Azure Storage Samples: Azure Storage Samples are Windows Azure Storage code samples. They show how to perform every Windows Azure Storage operation for blobs, queues, and tables. There are 2 identical implementations, one using REST and the other using the .NET Storage Client Library (both in C#).b1234: b1234 is b1234betrayal: bahothBungee Jumper: This is a community website for a sport known as Bungee Jumping which is one of the most dangerous adventure sport. Chiave File Encryption: Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit Rijndael encryption algorithm with simple UI to use. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5, it incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass.DecEncIT: DecEncIT rend l’expérience de l’utilisateur commun avec la cryptographie (cryptage) plus aisée. Pas de soucies pour les réglages et les termes techniques, vagues et difficiles à comprendre ; inclus également une option pour automatiser toutes les tâches recommandées. VB.Net/3.5ELearningTutorial: A list of tutorialsExtjs Practice - Open our extj journey: ????extjs 1.demo ?? 2.partice ?? 3.work ??Functional: This class library for .NET 3.5 and 4.0 provides extension methods for delegates, to help with functional style programming.HauntedNetworking: HauntedNetworking is a site where people can share their paranormal experiences and related photographs. They can also share pictures of haunted and scary places across the world.KharaSoft Nexus: Nexus is the last inbox you'll ever need.Kojax: kojax projectLEAD - Learn Execute And Develop: It’s a portal to share your knowledge, learn from blogs, wikis, post your questions in query board, learn new things under video training, Execute and develop these, helping gaining knowledge.Luac For 5.1 ????: luac??????? Lunar Lander: Simple WPF Lunar Lander simulator, with reactive intelligent agent autopilot.MasterSchool: Tworzenie swiadectwmovies blogspot: The Movies blog- spot is an interactive site for the information related to movies, actors, personnel and fictional characters features. MvcTemplates: MvcTemplates is a project devoted to creating a complete suite of Razor Editor and Display templates that utilize attributes, built in models, and jQuery. It is developed in C# and packages the templates into an easy to use dll.MySearcher: Quickly and easily search the major search engines with MySearcher. No clicking around, no switching windows; No matter how many windows you have open, or what you're doing, Searching the major search engines is as simple as moving your mouse to the side of the screen!Photography in Kerala: Photography in Kerala's a website which makes easier for people who are into naturistic Photography to share their photos and other Info of Kerala(also called God's own country).You'll no longer have to search about Kerala,Or share your own info/pics here.Developed in ASP.Net.Pixels(Storage Engine): Pixels(Storage Engine)PortsManager: C# Project to Simplify working with Ports Currnetly it's working with COMs in Receive only and soon it'll be updated to work in send and expand the library to handle send informations even in network.Public Web Browser: Public Web Browser is a webbrowser client with alot of featuresRealStatus - MS Communicator 2007 & A Traffic Light Indicator Hardware: A demonstration of a traffic light indicator hardware corresponding to status events of MS Communicator in real-time. A demo video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwgfSVeXVksSABnzbdNet: A SABnzbd monitor and administrator. Built in C# WPF.Sendill: Kerfi fyrir sendibílastöðvarT4 Metadata and Data Annotations Template: This T4 template handles generating metadata classes from an Entity Framework 4 model and decorates primitive and navigation properties with data annotation attributes such as [Required] and [StringLength]. The [DataType] attribute is also applied when appropriate.urlshorten service: urlshorten service need storoom @ http://storoom.codeplex.com/ developed in vb.netuVersionClientCache: uVersionClientCache is a custom macro to always automatically version (URL querstring parameter) your files based on a MD5 hash of the file contents or file last modified date to prevent issues with client browsers caching an old file after you have changed it.Video Game Network Library: A lightweight network library written in C++ for video games.View Layout Replicator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: View Layout Replicator make it easier for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 customizers to copying the layout of a view and paste it to the layout of other views in the same entityVLC MakeIT: This is virtual learning center yogaasana4you: The website is on Yoga Asana for the community who want to feel the amazing experience of Yoga asana - Yoga Exercises and Postures.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, October 30, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, October 30, 2011Popular ReleasesKoober: Koober - The Ebook Creator 0.2: The official release of Koober as Open source. Koober is a ebook creator for Windows, and Koob Reader is the reader.?????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????VidCoder: 1.2.0: Updated to HandBrake svn 4311. Refactored to read in list of encoders from HandBrake itself. Added ffaac, FLAC audio and ffmpeg2 video. Reworked audio encoding UI: removed grid and gave each encoding more vertical space. Added audio quality targeting and compression. Added status messages. Added messages for a few events (encode start/stop, playing a preview clip, update available, update download finished). Made source and destination path UI elements smarter about what parts they cut ...patterns & practices: Enterprise Library Contrib: Enterprise Library Contrib - 5.0 (Oct 2011): This release of Enterprise Library Contrib is based on the Microsoft patterns & practices Enterprise Library 5.0 core and contains the following: Common extensionsTypeConfigurationElement<T> - A Polymorphic Configuration Element without having to be part of a PolymorphicConfigurationElementCollection. AnonymousConfigurationElement - A Configuration element that can be uniquely identified without having to define its name explicitly. Data Access Application Block extensionsMySql Provider - ...Network Monitor Open Source Parsers: Network Monitor Parsers 3.4.2748: The Network Monitor Parsers packages contain parsers for more than 400 network protocols, including RFC based public protocols and protocols for Microsoft products defined in the Microsoft Open Specifications for Windows and SQL Server. NetworkMonitor_Parsers.msi is the base parser package which defines parsers for commonly used public protocols and protocols for Microsoft Windows. In this release, NetowrkMonitor_Parsers.msi continues to improve quality and fix bugs. It has included the fo...Duckworth Lewis Professional Edition Calculator: DLcalc 3.0: DLcalc 3.0 can perform Duckworth/Lewis Professional Edition calculations 100% accurately. It also produces over-by-over and ball-by-ball PAR score tables.Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 2.2.0.1: In this version: Custom Icons - now you can change the icons of the bookmarks. By default, whenever an image is added, the icon is automatically changed to a thumbnail of the picture. This can be turned off in the settings (Options... > Settings) Ability to remove items from the 'Recent' category Bugfixes - 'Choose' button in 'Edit Bookmark' now works Another bug fix: another problem in the 'Edit Bookmark' windowMedia Companion: MC 3.420b Weekly: Ensure .NET 4.0 Full Framework is installed. (Available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17718) Ensure the NFO ID fix is applied when transitioning from versions prior to 3.416b. (Details here) Movies Fixed: Fanart and poster scraping issues TV Shows (Re)Added: Rebuild single show Fixed: Issue when shows are moved from original location Ability to handle " for actor nicknames Crash when episode name contains "<" (does not scrape yet) Clears fanart when switch...patterns & practices - Unity: Unity 3.0 for .NET4.5 Preview: The Unity 3.0.1026.0 Preview enables Unity to work on .NET 4.5 with both the WinRT and desktop profiles. The major changes include: Unity projects updated to target .NET 4.5. Dynamic build plans modified to use compiled lambda expressions instead of Reflection.Emit Converting reflection to use the new TypeInfo for reflection. Projects updated to work with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2011 Preview Notes/Known Issues: The Microsoft.Practices.Unity.UnityServiceLocator class cannot be use...Managed Extensibility Framework: MEF 2 Preview 4: Detailed information on this release is available on the BCL team blog.Image Converter: Image Converter 0.3: New Features: - English and German support Technical Improvements: - Microsoft All Rules using Code Analysis Planned Features for future release: 1. Unit testing 2. Command line interface 3. Automatic UpdatesAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.6: ?? ● AcDown??????????、??????，??????????????????????，???????Acfun、Bilibili、???、???、???、Tucao.cc、SF???、?????80????，???????????、?????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDown?????"????????? ?? v3.6?? ??“????”...Path Copy Copy: 8.0: New version that mostly adds lots of requested features: 11340 11339 11338 11337 This version also features a more elaborate Settings UI that has several tabs. I tried to add some notes to better explain the use and purpose of the various options. The Path Copy Copy documentation is also on the way, both to explain how to develop custom plugins and to explain how to pre-configure options if you're a network admin. Stay tuned.MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.5.0: Added: The new Client Blocks feaure of Views A new "move" js method for the TreeViews The NewHtmlCreated js event to the DataGrid Improved the ChoiceList structure that now allows also the selection list of a dropdown to be chosen with a lambda expression Improved the AcceptViewHintAttribute controller filter. Now a client can specify not only the name of a View or Partial View it prefers, but also to receive just the rough data in Json format. Now the the SMinimum and SMaximum par...Free SharePoint Master Pages: Buried Alive (Halloween) Theme: Release Notes *Created for Halloween, you will find theme file, custom css file and images. *Created by Al Roome @AlstarRoome Features: Custom styling for web part Custom background *Screenshot https://s3.amazonaws.com/kkhipple/post/sharepoint-showcase-halloween.pngDevForce Application Framework: DevForce AF 2.0.3 RTW: PrerequisitesWPF 4.0 Silverlight 4.0 DevForce 2010 6.1.3.1 Download ContentsDebug and Release Assemblies API Documentation Source code License.txt Requirements.txt Release HighlightsNew: EventAggregator event forwarding New: EntityManagerInterceptor<T> to intercept EntityManger events New: IHarnessAware to allow for ViewModel setup when executed inside of the Development Harness New: Improved design time stability New: Support for add-in development New: CoroutineFns.To...NicAudio: NicAudio 2.0.5: Minor change to accept special DTS stereo modes (LtRt, AB,...)NDepend TFS 2010 integration: version 0.5.0 beta 1: Only the activity and the VS plugin are avalaible right now. They basically work. Data types that are logged into tfs reports are subject to change. This is no big deal since data is not yet sent into the warehouse.Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone v1.3.1: Upgraded Windows Azure projects to Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 1.5 – September 2011 Upgraded the tools tools to support the Windows Phone Developer Tools RTW Update SQL Azure only scenarios to use ASP.NET Universal Providers (through the System.Web.Providers v1.0.1 NuGet package) Changed Shared Access Signature service interface to support more operations Refactored Blobs API to have a similar interface and usage to that provided by the Windows Azure SDK Stor...DotNetNuke® FAQ: 05.00.00: FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) 05.00.00 will work for any DNN version 5.6.1 and up. It is the first version which is rewritten in C#. The scope of this update is to fix all known issues and improve user interface. Please review and rate this release... (stars are welcome)BUG FIXESManage Categories button text was not localized Edit/Add FAQ Entry: button text was not localized ENHANCEMENTSAdded an option to select the control for category display: Listbox with checkboxes (flat category ...New ProjectsalphaCards: Digitale LernkarteiBinary Code Interpreter: The Binary Code Interpreter is a small and funny programming languaage. This interpreter works a bit like a Turing Machine.Buscar ciudades: This is the source code for the application "Buscar ciudades" published in the Windows Phone Marketplace. CamOnWeb - Componente para WebCam: Este projeto tem como objetivo o desenvolvimento um componente para captura e exibição de videos da webcam. Compare.Net: Compare.Net is a configurable application to compare and reconclie from different sources. C# WPF applcation targeting .Net 4CSGame: Academic project for our studies. Subject "Client -server technology"curbside: curbsideDanish Language Pack for Community Server: Danish Language Packs for Community Server 2.1 and 2007. At its inception, this project contains quite incomplete translations to Danish. This project provides a common resource where all interested parties can gradually improve on this language pack. Please join to improve the contents. The source code tree contains two major folders: One for Community Server 2.1 and one for Community Server 2007.Dependency Variable Lib: ??????????????????、?????????????????????。（???????、?????????????ｗ） ???、「??×??＝??」???????????????、????????、????????、???「??×??」????????????????????????????????????。 FreedBack: FreedBack allows you to quickly and easily embed a configurable feedback form into any web application. It can be a standalone application that you install and deploy, then embed a bit of script into existing apps to implement feedback, or you can make it part of your MVC App.Hageveld - NieuwsModule (Chris' Tutorial: A news article manager made for educational purposes.Idea Resto: Aplicación para restaurantes.jqgridmvcgeneration: codesmith template that creates js, html and asp.net mvc server side json server for a jqgrid -based table on a arbitratrary database table. The code includes pagination and server side sorting. Jqgrid is a great jquery extension that provides an ajax-enabled fully customizable interactive table based on server side data. However, the actual coding can be a bit tedious and cryptic. This project provides a template base approach that basically performs two tasks: 1. creates a client si...MyClassMapper: A simple configurable classmapper for mapping ClassA to ClassB and vice versa, the ideas are borrowed from the Dozer project (http://dozer.sourceforge.net). Most code is based on 'Dynamic Access' code from Hongju Cao <hjcao_wei@hotmail.com> (All that code is located in the "DynamicAccess" sub-directory from the project.)NavigateTo Providers: This project is a collection of NavigateTo providers for Visual Studio 2010. NObsidian: A proxy component to access Obisidian Portal API from .NetNSession: The objective of this project is to allow ASP Classic to access ASP.NET out-of-process session stores in the same way that ASP.NET accesses them, and thus share the session state with ASP.NET.NTextile: NTextile is a lightweight, humane web compatible markup generator. It generates valid XHTML output using simple easy to remember conventions and text characters (a.k.a modifiers), to markup plain text. NTextile is especially useful to provide quick and valid markup for .NET web applications. For e.g. wikis, blogs, online forums, content management systems etc. This project was inspired by Dean Allen’s original Textile features, as included in the Textpattern content management application. T...OpenTasksBehaviorsLibrary for Windows Phone: Open Tasks Behavior for Windows Phone *OpenWebBrowserTask *OpenMediaLauncherTaskPowerShell Cmdlet Sample: PowerShell Cmdlet SamplePrismEx: PrismEx is a library of helpers and extension methods to allow developers to more easily develop and test Prism applications. QuickDelete: A Windows Explorer add-on to delete files and folders very quickly, much more so than the usual Explorer command. Works on Windows XP or later. Currently in EXPERIMENTAL state. No releases have been produced yet.Quiz Module for DotNetNuke: This is a module that allows you to quickly and easily provide a quiz that can be taken by the visitors on your DotNetNuke website.RaptorDB - The Key Value Store: Smallest, fastest embedded nosql persisted dictionary using b+tree or MurMur hash indexing. (Now with Hybrid WAH bitmap indexes)Rockin CMS-LMS Combo: RockinCmsLms Combo provides a great way for users to build their content and training sites with one great tool. It will be developed with C# 4.0-4.5, Silverlight, JQuery, and ASP.Net and MVC 3.0 with Razor. This project will demonstrate how to use todays technologies to build solutions that last. We may have 2 versions - one with a local db and one with a Windows Azure storage solution. Suggest using the Web Platform Installer to get all of the components.SandKeeper - Time Tracking Addin for Outlook 2010 tasks: SandKeeper is an Outlook Addin that enables you to track time for your tasks.Share: Share is a new web-based content management system. For more information about this project, please visit http://blog.aphysoft.com.SharePoint 2010 ViewEdit Group By Content Type: A simple project that injects JavaScript into the ribbon bar area to add "Content Type" as a choice on the ViewEdit.aspx page. With this, users can once again create views that group by Content Type without having to use SharePoint Designer 2010.Simple Merge Sort: This is a simple implementation of Merge-Sort, using to sort an Array of Integers.UKag: Unity3D?Kr2/KAG3??moduleUsingLinq: TestUtec Logger: Utec Logger is meant to be used the Turbo XS UTEC and UTEC Delta. It is simply a data logger application, it will auto logged based on pre defined conditionals. It also takes this information and displays it in a two dimensional table, averaging the values appropriately to ease of log analysis.WOXalizer: Fork of WOX project. http://woxserializer.sourceforge.net/Zeta Backup Validator: A small .NET 3.5 console application that helps you verifying whether your backups succeed by checking files and folders with various configurable rules (folder size, file age, etc.).Zeta Links: A web application for generating and measuring shortcut hyperlinks, similar to bit.ly.Zombie Slayer v1.0: Zombie Slayer v1.0 is an action first person shooter where players can try and survive a never-ending wave of zombies for as long as they can while a timer keeps track of how long they survived and posts times online from longest to shortest.?????????????: ??????????????????，????。

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, December 16, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, December 16, 2010Popular ReleasesSharpDropBox Client for .NET: WP7 SharpDropBox Client - 0.1 Technology Preview: I decided to go ahead and release this. It works well for simple browsing folder structure/downloading files (and login works). See samples for an example of how to use it. I am in progress with a couple other methods which aren't currently working.SQL Monitor: SQL Monitor 2.9: 1. automatically set sql for new query if a object is selected(table/sp/function/view)uComponents: uComponents v2.0.1: This release: Fixes a critical issue with IIS 6. Removes various script error issues in Internet Explorer Supports the media picker with advanced dialog and preview. uComponents is a collaborative project for creating components for Umbraco including data types, XSLT extensions, controls and more. Containing 20 data-types, 7 XSLT extension libraries, keyboard short-cuts, drag-n-drop functionality, as well as great developer utilities - uComponents is one of the must-have packages for a...SplendidCRM: SplendidCRM 5.0 Community Edition: SplendidCRM Software has adopted the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3 (AGPLv3) for its Community Edition. This release includes the full set of SQL source code in the Community Edition, something that was previously only available in the Professional and Enterprise Editions. An article on the subject of Commercial Open-Source licensing has been posted at http://www.codeproject.com/KB/architecture/splendid-guide-article6.aspx.DotSpatial: DotSpatial 12-15-2010: This release contains a few minor bug fixes and hopefully the GDAL libraries for the 3.5 x86 build actually built to the correct directory this time.DotNetNuke® Community Edition: 05.06.01 Beta: This is the initial Beta of DotNetNuke 5.6.1. See the DotNetNuke Roadmap a full list of changes in this release.MSBuild Extension Pack: December 2010: Release Blog Post The MSBuild Extension Pack December 2010 release provides a collection of over 380 MSBuild tasks. A high level summary of what the tasks currently cover includes the following: System Items: Active Directory, Certificates, COM+, Console, Date and Time, Drives, Environment Variables, Event Logs, Files and Folders, FTP, GAC, Network, Performance Counters, Registry, Services, Sound Code: Assemblies, AsyncExec, CAB Files, Code Signing, DynamicExecute, File Detokenisation, GU...Access Control Service Samples and Documentation (Labs): Samples-R3: Contains latest ACS samples (corresponding to R3 release) that show how to integrate ACS with web services, ASP.NET websites (Web Forms and MVC) and on how to interact with the ACS Management Service. The Readmes for these samples are available here.TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 5: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 5 ChangesMaintenance release with user reported fixes Preview 4 ChangesReintroduced fluent interface support via satellite assembly Added entities support, entity segmentation, and ITweetable/ITweeter interfaces for client development Numerous fixes reported by preview users Preview 3 ChangesNumerous ...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.2 ALPHA: 2.2.2 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 - The spirit ...Silverlight Contrib: Silverlight Contrib 2010.1.0: 2010.1.0 New FeaturesCompatibility Release for Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010FlickrNet API Library: 3.1.4000: Newest release. Now contains dedicated Windows Phone 7 DLL as well as all previous DLLs. Also contains Windows Help file documentation now as standard.mojoPortal: 2.3.5.8: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2358-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2010 Code Samples 2010-12-13: Code samples for Visual Studio 2010Wii 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...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 ????New ProjectsAchievement Information System: AchIS is a software which documented all about student's prestigeAutoMock: AutoMock saves you time when writing unit tests by wiring up all the dependencies as mocks for the class under test.Basic samples: Basic C# samplesBCrypt.Net: A .Net port of jBCrypt implemented in C#. It uses a variant of the Blowfish encryption algorithm’s keying schedule, and introduces a work factor, which allows you to determine how expensive the hash function will be, allowing the algorithm to be "future-proof".Desafio Dot.Net: Projeto para o Desafio DotNetEDAFramework: This is a Estimation of Distribution Algorithm framework.Fluxions: Fluxions is a 3D Graphics Engine designed to make writing simple graphics or visualization projects easy. It is ideal for writing computer games or scientific type work where you need to easily prototype an idea. It includes support for writing OpenGL apps with GLUT or SDL.Guruzan.Com: Guruzan.Com is a new way to share your ideas and especially your claims.. We are about the create a next generation social network which will bring improved standarts and innovations for internet sharing. Our project includes many students from different countries...HotCold: This game loads a board of squares, of which one is randomly selected as the "HOT" square. The goal is to find the "HOT" square in the fewest clicks possible. .InSim.NET: A .NET InSim library for the racing simulator Live for Speed.Javascript Utils: JavaScript Utilitieskoppees: Mingi veebiliidesKVB-Abfahrtstafel: Die KVB-Abfahrtstafel erlaubt es, sich einige Haltestellentafeln im Netz der Kölner Verkehrsbetriebe - inklusive Störungsmeldungen - schon vor dem Verlassen des Büros/Hauses/Hotels am PC anzusehen. Besonders bei miesem Wetter eine echte Erleichterung.Lessons in PivotViewer: The Silverlight PivotViewer is a great control with a great deal of potential. However, there are a lot of questions on how to use and customize the PivotViewer. This project will attempt to answer those questions by providing a series of lessons on the PivotViewer.Liuyi: liuyiLiuyi.network: Liuyi.networkMiniDouBan: MiniDouBanN2F Yverdon Database Helper: A class to aid in performing simple database queries within N2F Yverdon. Also provides the capability to store queries for later use.N2F Yverdon Form Helper: A system that allows interaction with web forms in a fashion similar to that of ASP.NET MVC model binding.N2F Yverdon Sanitizers: A system to help ease the pain of sanitizing data. The system comes with some basic sanitizers as well as the framework necessary to enable easy development of custom sanitizers.Next Question: By Relavance: Next Question makes it easier for System Users, Administrators, Business Analysts, etc to run ad-hoc queries on any data store. Regardless of the type or location of the information, Next Question removes the need for T-SQL programmers to write explicit queries to answer businessNPicConvertDemo: azure test/demo/example projectOpenSprints: OpenSprints for WindowsPML_FahrradVerleih: PML_FahrradVerleih PMS ProjektPowerLib: PowerLib extends .NET Base Class Library functionality with algorithms and data structures. First release would be at next week.ProJect Manager Software: Project Manager Softwareqxtplatform: qxtplatformSencha Direct Stack based on ASP.NET MVC: This project focuses on creating ExtJS/Sencha Direct server stack using ASP.NET MVC.SqlExecuter: Simply run sql scripts against a SQL Server databaseSystem8: Experimental Silverlight project to help understand system 8's behavior (mehod of calibration bottom-quark tagging).TeamManager: Team management software based on silverlight application. It use PRISM and MEF to have flexible and extensible architecture.Umbraco Single Item Picker: Extention to the Umbraco, needs to pick: - Content pages, - Media items, - File System Objects, - Member Items in more "better way" additionally control returns not only item name(title) but also extended information (path, icon). WebSharper Community Samples: WebSharper Community SamplesWindows Phone 7 Charts: Charting component for Windows Phone 7 applications.Windows Phone 7 Silverlight ZXing Barcode Scanning Library: ZXing (pronounced "zebra crossing") is an open-source, multi-format 1D/2D barcode image processing library originally implemented by Google in Java. This is a Silverlight port of the csharp ZXing port created by Suraj Supekar at revision 1202 in the SVN repository. WPF RCON: WPF RCON is a RCON client for COD4 servers. It's RCON library + WPF GUI. It's developed in C#. It's far from being complete.

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 3 – Agile or agile?

  - by Chris George

  Another early start for my last Lean Coffee of the conference, and again it was not wasted. We had some really interesting discussions around how to determine what test automation is useful, if agile is not faster, why do it? and a rather existential discussion on whether unicorns exist! First keynote of the day was entitled “Fast Feedback Teams” by Ola Ellnestam. Again this relates nicely to the releasing faster talk on day 2, and something that we are looking at and some teams are actively trying. Introducing the notion of feedback, Ola describes a game he wrote for his eldest child. It was a simple game where every time he clicked a button, it displayed “You’ve Won!”. He then changed it to be a Win-Lose-Win-Lose pattern and watched the feedback from his son who then twigged the pattern and got his younger brother to play, alternating turns… genius! (must do that with my children). The idea behind this was that you need that feedback loop to learn and progress. If you are not getting the feedback you need to close that loop. An interesting point Ola made was to solve problems BEFORE writing software. It may be that you don’t have to write anything at all, perhaps it’s a communication/training issue? Perhaps the problem can be solved another way. Writing software, although it’s the business we are in, is expensive, and this should be taken into account. He again mentions frequent releases, and how they should be made as soon as stuff is ready to be released, don’t leave stuff on the shelf cause it’s not earning you anything, money or data. I totally agree with this and it’s something that we will be aiming for moving forwards. “Exceptions, Assumptions and Ambiguity: Finding the truth behind the story” by David Evans started off very promising by making references to ‘Grim up North’ referring to the north of England. Not sure it was appreciated by most of the audience, but it made me laugh! David explained how there are always risks associated with exceptions, giving the example of a one-way road near where he lives, with an exception sign giving rights to coaches to go the wrong way. Therefore you could merrily swing around the corner of the one way road straight into a coach! David showed the danger in making assumptions with lyrical quotes from Lola by The Kinks “I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola” and with a picture of a toilet flush that needed instructions to operate the full and half flush. With this particular flush, you pulled the handle all the way down to half flush, and half way down to full flush! hmmm, a bit of a crappy user experience methinks! Then through a clever use of a passage from the Jabberwocky, David then went onto show how mis-translation/ambiguity is the can completely distort the original meaning of something, and this is a real enemy of software development. This was all helping to demonstrate that the term Story is often heavily overloaded in the Agile world, and should really be stripped back to what it is really for, stating a business problem, and offering a technical solution. Therefore a story could be worded as “In order to {make some improvement}, we will { do something}”. The first ‘in order to’ statement is stakeholder neutral, and states the problem through requesting an improvement to the software/process etc. The second part of the story is the verb, the doing bit. So to achieve the ‘improvement’ which is not currently true, we will do something to make this true in the future. My PM is very interested in this, and he’s observed some of the problems of overloading stories so I’m hoping between us we can use some of David’s suggestions to help clarify our stories better. The second keynote of the day (and our last) proved to be the most entertaining and exhausting of the conference for me. “The ongoing evolution of testing in agile development” by Scott Barber. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing Scott before… OMG I would love to have even half of the energy he has! What struck me during this presentation was Scott’s explanation of how testing has become the role/job that it is (largely) today, and how this has led to the need for ‘methodologies’ to make dev and test work! The argument that we should be trying to converge the roles again is a very valid one, and one that a couple of the teams at work are actively doing with great results. Making developers as responsible for quality as testers is something that has been lost over the years, but something that we are now striving to achieve. The idea that we (testers) should be testing experts/specialists, not testing ‘union members’, supports this idea so the entire team works on all aspects of a feature/product, with the ‘specialists’ taking the lead and advising/coaching the others. This leads to better propagation of information around the team, a greater holistic understanding of the project and it allows the team to continue functioning if some of it’s members are off sick, for example. Feeling somewhat drained from Scott’s keynote (but at the same time excited that alot of the points he raised supported actions we are taking at work), I headed into my last presentation for Agile Testing Days 2012 before having to make my way to Tegel to catch the flight home. “Thinking and working agile in an unbending world” with Pete Walen was a talk I was not going to miss! Having spoken to Pete several times during the past few days, I was looking forward to hearing what he was going to say, and I was not disappointed. Pete started off by trying to separate the definitions of ‘Agile’ as in the methodology, and ‘agile’ as in the adjective by pronouncing them the ‘english’ and ‘american’ ways. So Agile pronounced (Ajyle) and agile pronounced (ajul). There was much confusion around what the hell he was talking about, although I thought it was quite clear. Agile – Software development methodology agile – Marked by ready ability to move with quick easy grace; Having a quick resourceful and adaptable character. Anyway, that aside (although it provided a few laughs during the presentation), the point was that many teams that claim to be ‘Agile’ but are not, in fact, ‘agile’ by nature. Implementing ‘Agile’ methodologies that are so prescriptive actually goes against the very nature of Agile development where a team should anticipate, adapt and explore. Pete made a valid point that very few companies intentionally put up roadblocks to impede work, so if work is being blocked/delayed, why? This is where being agile as a team pays off because the team can inspect what’s going on, explore options and adapt their processes. It is through experimentation (and that means trying and failing as well as trying and succeeding) that a team will improve and grow leading to focussing on what really needs to be done to achieve X. So, that was it, the last talk of our conference. I was gutted that we had to miss the closing keynote from Matt Heusser, as Matt was another person I had spoken too a few times during the conference, but the flight would not wait, and just as well we left when we did because the traffic was a nightmare! My Takeaway Triple from Day 3: Release often and release small – don’t leave stuff on the shelf Keep the meaning of the word ‘agile’ in mind when working in ‘Agile Look at testing as more of a skill than a role  

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• Corsair Hackers Reboot

  It wasn't easy for me to attend but it was absolutely worth to go. The Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM) organised another get-together for any open source enthusiast here on the island. Strangely named "Corsair Hackers Reboot" but it stands for a positive cause: "Corsair Hackers Reboot Event A collaborative activity involving LUGM, UoM Computer Club, Fortune Way Shopping Mall and several geeks from around the island, striving to put FOSS into homes & offices. The public is invited to discover and explore Free Software & Open Source." And it was a good opportunity for me and the kids to visit the east coast of Mauritius, too. Perfect timing It couldn't have been better... Why? Well, for two important reasons (in terms of IT): End of support for Microsoft Windows XP - 08.04.2014 Release of Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support - 17.04.2014 Quite funnily, those two IT dates weren't the initial reasons and only during the weeks of preparations we put those together. And therefore it was even more positive to promote the use of Linux and open source software in general to a broader audience. Getting there ... Thanks to the new motor way M3 and all the additional road work which has been completed recently it was very simple to get across the island in a very quick and relaxed manner. Compared to my trips in the early days of living in Mauritius (and riding on a scooter) it was very smooth and within less than an hour we hit Centrale de Flacq. Well, being in the city doesn't necessarily mean that one has arrived at the destination. But thanks to modern technology I had a quick look on Google Maps, and we finally managed to get a parking behind the huge bus terminal in Flacq. From there it was just a short walk to Fortune Way. The children were trying to count the number of buses... Well, lots and lots of buses - really impressive actually. What was presented? There were different areas set up. Right at the entrance one's attention was directly drawn towards the elevated hacker's stage. Similar to rock stars performing their gig there was bunch of computers, laptops and networking equipment in order to cater the right working conditions for coding/programming challenge(s) on the one hand and for the pen-testing or system hacking competition on the other hand. Personally, I was very impresses that actually Nitin took care of the pen-testing competition. He hardly started one year back with Linux in general, and Kali Linux specifically. Seeing his personal development from absolute newbie to a decent Linux system administrator within such a short period of time, is really impressive. His passion to open source software made him a living. Next, clock-wise seen, was the Kid's Corner with face-painting as the main attraction. Additionally, there were numerous paper print outs to colour. Plus a decent workstation with the educational suite GCompris. Of course, my little ones were into that. They already know GCompris since a while as they are allowed to use it on an IGEL thin client terminal here at home. To simplify my life, I set up GCompris as full-screen guest session on the server, and they can pass the login screen without any further obstacles. And because it's a thin client hooked up to a XDMCP remote session I don't have to worry about the hardware on their desk, too. The next section was the main attraction of the event: BYOD - Bring Your Own Device Well, compared to the usual context of BYOD the corsairs had a completely different intention. Here, you could bring your own laptop and a team of knowledgeable experts - read: geeks and so on - offered to fully convert your system on any Linux distribution of your choice. And even though I came later, I was told that the USB pen drives had been in permanent use. From being prepared via dd command over launching LiveCD session to finally installing a fresh Linux system on bare metal. Most interestingly, I did a similar job already a couple of months ago, while upgrading an existing Windows XP system to Xubuntu 13.10. So far, the female owner is very happy and enjoys her system almost every evening to go shopping online, checking mails, and reading latest news from the Anime world. Back to the Hackers event, Ish told me that they managed approximately 20 conversion during the day. Furthermore, Ajay and others gladly assisted some visitors with some tricky issues and by the end of the day you can call is a success. While I was around, there was a elderly male visitor that got a full-fledged system conversion to a Linux system running completely in French language. A little bit more to the centre it was Yasir's turn to demonstrate his Arduino hardware that he hooked up with an experimental electrical circuit board connected to an LCD matrix display. That's the real spirit of hacking, and he showed some minor adjustments on the fly while demo'ing the system. Also, very interesting there was a thermal sensor around. Personally, I think that platforms like the Arduino as well as the Raspberry Pi have a great potential at a very affordable price in order to bring a better understanding of electronics as well as computer programming to a broader audience. It would be great to see more of those experiments during future activities. And last but not least there were a small number of vendors. Amongst them was Emtel - once again as sponsor of the general internet connectivity - and another hardware supplier from Riche Terre shopping mall. They had a good collection of Android related gimmicks, like a autonomous web cam that can convert any TV with HDMI connector into an online video chat system given WiFi. It's actually kind of awesome to have a Skype or Google hangout video session on the big screen rather than on the laptop. Some pictures of the event LUGM: Great conversations on Linux, open source and free software during the Corsair Hackers Reboot LUGM: Educational workstation running GCompris suite attracted the youngest attendees of the day. Of course, face painting had to be done prior to hacking... LUGM: Nadim demoing some Linux specifics to interested visitors. Everyone was pretty busy during the whole day LUGM: The hacking competition, here pen-testing a wireless connection and access point between multiple machines LUGM: Well prepared workstations to be able to 'upgrade' visitors' machines to any Linux operating system Final thoughts Gratefully, during the preparations of the event I was invited to leave some comments or suggestions, and the team of the LUGM did a great job. The outdoor banner was a eye-catcher, the various flyers and posters for the event were clearly written and as far as I understood from the quick chats I had with Ish, Nadim, Nitin, Ajay, and of course others all were very happy about the event execution. Great job, LUGM! And I'm already looking forward to the next Corsair Hackers Reboot event ... Crossing fingers: Very soon and hopefully this year again :) Update: In the media The event had been announced in local media, too. L'Express: Salon informatique: Hacking Challenge à Flacq

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• Creating a Document Library with Content Type in code

  - by David Jacobus

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/djacobus/archive/2013/10/15/154360.aspxIn the past, I have shown how to create a list content type and add the content type to a list in code.  As a Developer, many of the artifacts which we create are widgets which have a List or Document Library as the back end.   We need to be able to create our applications (Web Part, etc.) without having the user involved except to enter the list item data.  Today, I will show you how to do the same with a document library.    A summary of what we will do is as follows:   1.   Create an Empty SharePoint Project in Visual Studio 2.   Add a Code Folder in the solution and Drag and Drop Utilities and Extensions Libraries to the solution 3.   Create a new Feature and add and event receiver  all the code will be in the event receiver 4.   Add the fields which will extend the built-in Document content type 5.   If the Content Type does not exist, Create it 6.   If the Document Library does not exist, Create it with the new Content Type inherited from the Document Content Type 7.   Delete the Document Content Type from the Library (as we have a new one which inherited from it) 8.   Add the fields which we want to be visible from the fields added to the new Content Type   Here we go:   Create an Empty SharePoint Project in Visual Studio      Add a Code Folder in the solution and Drag and Drop Utilities and Extensions Libraries to the solution       The Utilities and Extensions Library will be part of this project which I will provide a download link at the end of this post.  Drag and drop them into your project.  If Dragged and Dropped from windows explorer you will need to show all files and then include them in your project.  Change the Namespace to agree with your project.   Create a new Feature and add and event receiver  all the code will be in the event receiver.  Here We added a new Feature called “CreateDocLib”  and then right click to add an Event Receiver All of our code will be in this Event Receiver.  For this Demo I will only be using the Feature Activated Event.      From this point on we will be looking at code!    We are adding two constants for use columGroup (How we want SharePoint to Group them, usually Company Name) and ctName(ContentType Name)  using System; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Security.Permissions; using Microsoft.SharePoint; namespace CreateDocLib.Features.CreateDocLib { /// <summary> /// This class handles events raised during feature activation, deactivation, installation, uninstallation, and upgrade. /// </summary> /// <remarks> /// The GUID attached to this class may be used during packaging and should not be modified. /// </remarks> [Guid("56e6897c-97c4-41ac-bc5b-5cd2c04f2dd1")] public class CreateDocLibEventReceiver : SPFeatureReceiver { const string columnGroup = "DJ"; const string ctName = "DJDocLib"; } }     Here we are creating the Feature Activated event.   Adding the new fields (Site Columns) ,  Testing if the Content Type Exists, if not adding it.  Testing if the document Library exists, if not adding it.   #region DocLib public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { using (SPWeb spWeb = properties.GetWeb() as SPWeb) { //add the fields addFields(spWeb); //add content type SPContentType testCT = spWeb.ContentTypes[ctName]; // we will not create the content type if it exists if (testCT == null) { //the content type does not exist add it addContentType(spWeb, ctName); } if ((spWeb.Lists.TryGetList("MyDocuments") == null)) { //create the list if it dosen't to exist CreateDocLib(spWeb); } } } #endregion The addFields method uses the utilities library to add site columns to the site. We can add as many fields within this method as we like. Here we are adding one for demonstration purposes. Icon as a Url type.  public void addFields(SPWeb spWeb) { Utilities.addField(spWeb, "Icon", SPFieldType.URL, false, columnGroup); }The addContentType method add the new Content Type to the site Content Types. We have already checked to see that it does not exist. In addition, here is where we add the linkages from our site columns previously created to our new Content Type   private static void addContentType(SPWeb spWeb, string name) { SPContentType myContentType = new SPContentType(spWeb.ContentTypes["Document"], spWeb.ContentTypes, name) { Group = columnGroup }; spWeb.ContentTypes.Add(myContentType); addContentTypeLinkages(spWeb, myContentType); myContentType.Update(); } Here we are adding just one linkage as we only have one additional field in our Content Type public static void addContentTypeLinkages(SPWeb spWeb, SPContentType ct) { Utilities.addContentTypeLink(spWeb, "Icon", ct); } Next we add the logic to create our new Document Library, which we have already checked to see if it exists.  We create the document library and turn on content types.  Add the new content type and then delete the old “Document” content types.   private void CreateDocLib(SPWeb web) { using (var site = new SPSite(web.Url)) { var web1 = site.RootWeb; var listId = web1.Lists.Add("MyDocuments", string.Empty, SPListTemplateType.DocumentLibrary); var lib = web1.Lists[listId] as SPDocumentLibrary; lib.ContentTypesEnabled = true; var docType = web.ContentTypes[ctName]; lib.ContentTypes.Add(docType); lib.ContentTypes.Delete(lib.ContentTypes["Document"].Id); lib.Update(); AddLibrarySettings(web1, lib); } }  Finally, we set some document library settings on our new document library with the AddLibrarySettings method. We then ensure that the new site column is visible when viewed in the browser.  private void AddLibrarySettings(SPWeb web, SPDocumentLibrary lib) { lib.OnQuickLaunch = true; lib.ForceCheckout = true; lib.EnableVersioning = true; lib.MajorVersionLimit = 5; lib.EnableMinorVersions = true; lib.MajorWithMinorVersionsLimit = 5; lib.Update(); var view = lib.DefaultView; view.ViewFields.Add("Icon"); view.Update(); } Okay, what's cool here: In a few lines of code, we have created site columns, A content Type, a document library. As a developer, I use this functionality all the time. For instance, I could now just add a web part to this same solutionwhich uses this document Library. I love SharePoint! Here is the complete solution: Create Document Library Code

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• Are IE 9 will have a place in heart of user ?

  - by anirudha

  in a advertisement of IE 9 MSFT compare two product first is their IE9 and second is chrome 6. I know 6 is not currently [9] but no objection because may be they make ads when 6 is currently version and have RC or beta in their hands. on IE 9 test-drive website they show many of people ads to show the user that IE9 is performance better or other chrome or Firefox not. well they not compare with Firefox because last days firefox not still in news and search trends like before RC release many of user googling for them. Well I myself found IE9 perform smoother then chrome. but what MSFT do after IE9 nothing they waiting for IE 10 not for give updates not as well as Google chrome and Firefox. Are IE9 have anything new for Developer even a small or big. well they tell you blah or useless things everytime when they make for next version no matter for you but a matter for them because they add a new thing even useless for developer. I am not have any feeling with IE bad but I like to make reviews as well as I can make. I show you something who I experience with IE and someother browser like Chrome and Firefox. IE 9 still have no plugin as well as other provided like Firefox have Firebug a great utilities who is best option for developer to debug their code. IE9 developer tool is good but still you never customize them or readymade customization available to work as in firefox many of person make customization for firebug like example :- firepicker for picking color in firebug , firebug autocomplete for intellisense like feature when you write JavaScript inside console panel , pixelperfect , firequery , sitepoint reference and many other great example we all love to use. as other things that Firefox give many things customizable like themes , ui and many thing customization means more thing user or developer want to make themselves and more contribution make them better software so Firefox is great because customization is a great thing inside firefox and chrome. if you read some post of developer on MSDN to what’s new in IE 9 developer tool that you feel they are joking whenever you see some other things of Firefox and chrome. in a Firefox a plugin perform many much things but in IE still use IE 9 developer tool no other option like in Firefox use Firebug and many other utilities to make development easier and time saving and best as we can do.if you see Firefox page on mozilla that sublines of firefox is high performance easy customization advanced security well you can say what’s performance but there is no comparison with IE because IE have only performance and nothing else. but Firefox have these three thing to make product love. and third thing I really love that security yeah security. from long time before whenever IE6 is no hackproff and many other easily hack IE6 whenever Firefox is secure. I found myself that many of website install a software on client’s computer and they still not know about them so they track everything. sometime they hijack the homepage and make their website as their homepage. sometime they do something and you trying  to go to  any website then they go to their site first. the problem I telling about not long before it’s time of late in 2008 whenever Firefox is much better then IE6. if someone have bad experience with anyone of these software share with us I like to hear your voice. whenever IE still not for use Firefox is a good option for us even user or developer. I not know why someone make next version of IE. IE still have time to go away from Web. Firefox not rude as IE they still believe in user feedback and chrome is also open the door for feedback on their product gooogle Chrome. but what thing they made in IE on user feedback nothing. they still thing to teach what they maked not thing about what user need. if you spent some hour on firefox and chrome then you found what’s matter. what thing you have whenever you use IE or other browser like google chrome and Firefox :- as a user IE give you nothing even tell you blah blah and more blah but still next version of IE means next IE6 for the web. as in Google chrome you find plugins addons or customization to make experience better but in IE9 you can’t customize anything even the themes they have by default. Firefox already have a great list of plugins or addons to make experience better with Web but IE9 have nothing. this means IE9 not for user and other like chrome and firefox give you much better experience then IE. next thing after user is developer. first thing is that all developer want smooth development who save their time not take too perhaps saving.posts on IE9 show that a list of thing improved in IE 9 developer tool but are one developer tool enough for web development so developer need more utilities to solve different different type of puzzle who IE 9 never give like in Firefox you have utilities to do a task even small or big one. in chrome same experience you have but IE9 never give any plugin or utilities to make our work faster even they are new headache for developer because IE not give update as soon as other because in Firefox and in chrome if a bug is reported then they solve them fast and distribute them in next version of software very soon but in IE wait for a long time like IE 9 and IE 8 have no official release between them as update. As my conclusion there is no reason to use IE and adopt 9 again. it’s really not for Developer or user even newbie or smart people. as a rule I want to beware you with IE because it’s my responsibilities to move the thing in good way as I can make. well are you sure that there is no reason or profit they thing to have with IE9  if not why they forget luna [windows xp] user. because they are old nothing they want to force user to give them some money by purchasing a new version of OS. so this a thing why they marketed their software. if you thing about what firefox and chrome want to make : Mozilla's mission is to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web. chrome mission we all see whenever we use them. but IE9 is a trick they promote because they want to add something to next version of windows. if somebody like IE9 [even surprised by ads they see or post they read] then they purchase windows soon as they possible. Well you feel that I am opposition of IE9 and favor of chrome and Firefox yeah you feel right I hate IE from a heart not from a pencil. well you get same thing when you have trying three product major I described here Chrome firefox and IE. well don’t believe on the blogs , posts or article who are provided by the merchant or vender’s website. open the eyes read and thing what they talk and feel are they really true. if you confused that compare with some other. now you know the true because no one telling so badly as a user can described who use them not only one who make their feature. always open the eyes don’t believe use your mind and find the truth. thanks for reading my post good bye and take care

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• Possible SWITCH Optimization in DAX – #powerpivot #dax #tabular

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  In one of the Advanced DAX Workshop I taught this year, I had an interesting discussion about how to optimize a SWITCH statement (which could be frequently used checking a slicer, like in the Parameter Table pattern). Let’s start with the problem. What happen when you have such a statement? Sales :=     SWITCH (         VALUES ( Period[Period] ),         "Current", [Internet Total Sales],         "MTD", [MTD Sales],         "QTD", [QTD Sales],         "YTD", [YTD Sales],          BLANK ()     ) The SWITCH statement is in reality just syntax sugar for a nested IF statement. When you place such a measure in a pivot table, for every cell of the pivot table the IF options are evaluated. In order to optimize performance, the DAX engine usually does not compute cell-by-cell, but tries to compute the values in bulk-mode. However, if a measure contains an IF statement, every cell might have a different execution path, so the current implementation might evaluate all the possible IF branches in bulk-mode, so that for every cell the result from one of the branches will be already available in a pre-calculated dataset. The price for that could be high. If you consider the previous Sales measure, the YTD Sales measure could be evaluated for all the cells where it’s not required, and also when YTD is not selected at all in a Pivot Table. The actual optimization made by the DAX engine could be different in every build, and I expect newer builds of Tabular and Power Pivot to be better than older ones. However, we still don’t live in an ideal world, so it could be better trying to help the engine finding a better execution plan. One student (Niek de Wit) proposed this approach: Selection := IF (     HASONEVALUE ( Period[Period] ),     VALUES ( Period[Period] ) ) Sales := CALCULATE (     [Internet Total Sales],     FILTER (         VALUES ( 'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity] ),         'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity]             = IF (                 [Selection] = "Current",                 'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity],                 -1             )     ) )     + CALCULATE (         [MTD Sales],         FILTER (             VALUES ( 'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity] ),             'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity]                 = IF (                     [Selection] = "MTD",                     'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity],                     -1                 )         )     )     + CALCULATE (         [QTD Sales],         FILTER (             VALUES ( 'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity] ),             'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity]                 = IF (                     [Selection] = "QTD",                     'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity],                     -1                 )         )     )     + CALCULATE (         [YTD Sales],         FILTER (             VALUES ( 'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity] ),             'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity]                 = IF (                     [Selection] = "YTD",                     'Internet Sales'[Order Quantity],                     -1                 )         )     ) At first sight, you might think it’s impossible that this approach could be faster. However, if you examine with the profiler what happens, there is a different story. Every original IF’s execution branch is now a separate CALCULATE statement, which applies a filter that does not execute the required measure calculation if the result of the FILTER is empty. I used the ‘Internet Sales’[Order Quantity] column in this example just because in Adventure Works it has only one value (every row has 1): in the real world, you should use a column that has a very low number of distinct values, or use a column that has always the same value for every row (so it will be compressed very well!). Because the value –1 is never used in this column, the IF comparison in the filter discharge all the values iterated in the filter if the selection does not match with the desired value. I hope to have time in the future to write a longer article about this optimization technique, but in the meantime I’ve seen this optimization has been useful in many other implementations. Please write your feedback if you find scenarios (in both Power Pivot and Tabular) where you obtain performance improvements using this technique!

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center : Using Operational Profiles to Install Packages and other Content

  - by LeonShaner

  Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides numerous ways to deploy content, such as through OS Update Profiles, or as part of an OS Provisioning plan or combinations of those and other "Install Software" capabilities of Deployment Plans.  This short "how-to" blog will highlight an alternative way to deploy content using Operational Profiles. Usually we think of Operational Profiles as a way to execute a simple "one-time" script to perform a basic system administration function, which can optionally be based on user input; however, Operational Profiles can be much more powerful than that.  There is often more to performing an action than merely running a script -- sometimes configuration files, packages, binaries, and other scripts, etc. are needed to perform the action, and sometimes the user would like to leave such content on the system for later use. For shell scripts and other content written to be generic enough to work on any flavor of UNIX, converting the same scripts and configuration files into Solaris 10 SVR4 package, Solaris 11 IPS package, and/or a Linux RPM's might be seen as three times the work, for little appreciable gain.   That is where using an Operational Profile to deploy simple scripts and other generic content can be very helpful.  The approach is so powerful, that pretty much any kind of content can be deployed using an Operational Profile, provided the files involved are not overly large, and it is not necessary to convert the content into UNIX variant-specific formats. The basic formula for deploying content with an Operational Profile is as follows: Begin with a traditional script header, which is a UNIX shell script that will be responsible for decoding and extracting content, copying files into the right places, and executing any other scripts and commands needed to install and configure that content. Include steps to make the script platform-aware, to do the right thing for a given UNIX variant, or a "sorry" message if the operator has somehow tried to run the Operational Profile on a system where the script is not designed to run.  Ops Center can constrain execution by target type, so such checks at this level are an added safeguard, but also useful with the generic target type of "Operating System" where the admin wants the script to "do the right thing," whatever the UNIX variant. Include helpful output to show script progress, and any other informational messages that can help the admin determine what has gone wrong in the case of a problem in script execution.  Such messages will be shown in the job execution log. Include necessary "clean up" steps for normal and error exit conditions Set non-zero exit codes when appropriate -- a non-zero exit code will cause an Operational Profile job to be marked failed, which is the admin's cue to look into the job details for diagnostic messages in the output from the script. That first bullet deserves some explanation.  If Operational Profiles are usually simple "one-time" scripts and binary content is not allowed, then how does the actual content, packages, binaries, and other scripts get delivered along with the script?  More specifically, how does one include such content without needing to first create some kind of traditional package?   All that is required is to simply encode the content and append it to the end of the Operational Profile.  The header portion of the Operational Profile will need to contain the commands to decode the embedded content that has been appended to the bottom of the script.  The header code can do whatever else is needed, and finally clean up any intermediate files that were created during the decoding and extraction of the content. One way to encode binary and other content for inclusion in a script is to use the "uuencode" utility to convert the content into simple base64 ASCII text -- a form that is suitable to be appended to an Operational Profile.   The behavior of the "uudecode" utility is such that it will skip over any parts of the input that do not fit the uuencoded "begin" and "end" clauses.  For that reason, your header script will be skipped over, and uudecode will find your embedded content, that you will uuencode and paste at the end of the Operational Profile.  You can have as many "begin" / "end" clauses as you need -- just separate each embedded file by an empty line between "begin" and "end" clauses. Example:  Install SUNWsneep and set the system serial number Script:  deploySUNWsneep.sh ( <- right-click / save to download) Highlights: #!/bin/sh # Required variables: OC_SERIAL="$OC_SERIAL" # The user-supplied serial number for the asset ... Above is a good practice, showing right up front what kind of input the Operational Profile will require.   The right-hand side where $OC_SERIAL appears in this example will be filled in by Ops Center based on the user input at deployment time. The script goes on to restrict the use of the program to the intended OS type (Solaris 10 or older, in this example, but other content might be suitable for Solaris 11, or Linux -- it depends on the content and the script that will handle it). A temporary working directory is created, and then we have the command that decodes the embedded content from "self" which in scripting terms is $0 (a variable that expands to the name of the currently executing script): # Pass myself through uudecode, which will extract content to the current dir uudecode $0 At that point, whatever content was appended in uuencoded form at the end of the script has been written out to the current directory.  In this example that yields a file, SUNWsneep.7.0.zip, which the rest of the script proceeds to unzip, and pkgadd, followed by running "/opt/SUNWsneep/bin/sneep -s $OC_SERIAL" which is the command that stores the system serial for future use by other programs such as Explorer.   Don't get hung up on the example having used a pkgadd command.  The content started as a zip file and it could have been a tar.gz, or any other file.  This approach simply decodes the file.  The header portion of the script has to make sense of the file and do the right thing (e.g. it's up to you). The script goes on to clean up after itself, whether or not the above was successful.  Errors are echo'd by the script and a non-zero exit code is set where appropriate. Second to last, we have: # just in case, exit explicitly, so that uuencoded content will not cause error OPCleanUP exit # The rest of the script is ignored, except by uudecode # # UUencoded content follows # # e.g. for each file needed, #  $ uuencode -m {source} {source} > {target}.uu5 # then paste the {target}.uu5 files below # they will be extracted into the workding dir at $TDIR # The commentary above also describes how to encode the content. Finally we have the uuencoded content: begin-base64 444 SUNWsneep.7.0.zip UEsDBBQAAAAIAPsRy0Di3vnukAAAAMcAAAAKABUAcmVhZG1lLnR4dFVUCQADOqnVT7up ... VXgAAFBLBQYAAAAAAgACAJEAAADTNwEAAAA= ==== That last line of "====" is the base64 uuencode equivalent of a blank line, followed by "end" and as mentioned you can have as many begin/end clauses as you need.  Just separate each embedded file by a blank line after each ==== and before each begin-base64. Deploying the example Operational Profile looks like this (where I have pasted the system serial number into the required field): The job succeeded, but here is an example of the kind of diagnostic messages that the example script produces, and how Ops Center displays them in the job details: This same general approach could be used to deploy Explorer, and other useful utilities and scripts. Please let us know what you think?  Until next time...\Leon-- Leon Shaner | Senior IT/Product ArchitectSystems Management | Ops Center Engineering @ Oracle The views expressed on this [blog; Web site] are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle. For more information, please go to Oracle Enterprise Manager  web page or  follow us at :  Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter

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• Fun with Aggregates

  - by Paul White

  There are interesting things to be learned from even the simplest queries.  For example, imagine you are given the task of writing a query to list AdventureWorks product names where the product has at least one entry in the transaction history table, but fewer than ten. One possible query to meet that specification is: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p JOIN Production.TransactionHistory AS th ON p.ProductID = th.ProductID GROUP BY p.ProductID, p.Name HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10; That query correctly returns 23 rows (execution plan and data sample shown below): The execution plan looks a bit different from the written form of the query: the base tables are accessed in reverse order, and the aggregation is performed before the join.  The general idea is to read all rows from the history table, compute the count of rows grouped by ProductID, merge join the results to the Product table on ProductID, and finally filter to only return rows where the count is less than ten. This ‘fully-optimized’ plan has an estimated cost of around 0.33 units.  The reason for the quote marks there is that this plan is not quite as optimal as it could be – surely it would make sense to push the Filter down past the join too?  To answer that, let’s look at some other ways to formulate this query.  This being SQL, there are any number of ways to write logically-equivalent query specifications, so we’ll just look at a couple of interesting ones.  The first query is an attempt to reverse-engineer T-SQL from the optimized query plan shown above.  It joins the result of pre-aggregating the history table to the Product table before filtering: SELECT p.Name FROM ( SELECT th.ProductID, cnt = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th GROUP BY th.ProductID ) AS q1 JOIN Production.Product AS p ON p.ProductID = q1.ProductID WHERE q1.cnt < 10; Perhaps a little surprisingly, we get a slightly different execution plan: The results are the same (23 rows) but this time the Filter is pushed below the join!  The optimizer chooses nested loops for the join, because the cardinality estimate for rows passing the Filter is a bit low (estimate 1 versus 23 actual), though you can force a merge join with a hint and the Filter still appears below the join.  In yet another variation, the < 10 predicate can be ‘manually pushed’ by specifying it in a HAVING clause in the “q1” sub-query instead of in the WHERE clause as written above. The reason this predicate can be pushed past the join in this query form, but not in the original formulation is simply an optimizer limitation – it does make efforts (primarily during the simplification phase) to encourage logically-equivalent query specifications to produce the same execution plan, but the implementation is not completely comprehensive. Moving on to a second example, the following query specification results from phrasing the requirement as “list the products where there exists fewer than ten correlated rows in the history table”: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Unfortunately, this query produces an incorrect result (86 rows): The problem is that it lists products with no history rows, though the reasons are interesting.  The COUNT_BIG(*) in the EXISTS clause is a scalar aggregate (meaning there is no GROUP BY clause) and scalar aggregates always produce a value, even when the input is an empty set.  In the case of the COUNT aggregate, the result of aggregating the empty set is zero (the other standard aggregates produce a NULL).  To make the point really clear, let’s look at product 709, which happens to be one for which no history rows exist: -- Scalar aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709;   -- Vector aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709 GROUP BY th.ProductID; The estimated execution plans for these two statements are almost identical: You might expect the Stream Aggregate to have a Group By for the second statement, but this is not the case.  The query includes an equality comparison to a constant value (709), so all qualified rows are guaranteed to have the same value for ProductID and the Group By is optimized away. In fact there are some minor differences between the two plans (the first is auto-parameterized and qualifies for trivial plan, whereas the second is not auto-parameterized and requires cost-based optimization), but there is nothing to indicate that one is a scalar aggregate and the other is a vector aggregate.  This is something I would like to see exposed in show plan so I suggested it on Connect.  Anyway, the results of running the two queries show the difference at runtime: The scalar aggregate (no GROUP BY) returns a result of zero, whereas the vector aggregate (with a GROUP BY clause) returns nothing at all.  Returning to our EXISTS query, we could ‘fix’ it by changing the HAVING clause to reject rows where the scalar aggregate returns zero: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) BETWEEN 1 AND 9 ); The query now returns the correct 23 rows: Unfortunately, the execution plan is less efficient now – it has an estimated cost of 0.78 compared to 0.33 for the earlier plans.  Let’s try adding a redundant GROUP BY instead of changing the HAVING clause: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY th.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Not only do we now get correct results (23 rows), this is the execution plan: I like to compare that plan to quantum physics: if you don’t find it shocking, you haven’t understood it properly :)  The simple addition of a redundant GROUP BY has resulted in the EXISTS form of the query being transformed into exactly the same optimal plan we found earlier.  What’s more, in SQL Server 2008 and later, we can replace the odd-looking GROUP BY with an explicit GROUP BY on the empty set: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); I offer that as an alternative because some people find it more intuitive (and it perhaps has more geek value too).  Whichever way you prefer, it’s rather satisfying to note that the result of the sub-query does not exist for a particular correlated value where a vector aggregate is used (the scalar COUNT aggregate always returns a value, even if zero, so it always ‘EXISTS’ regardless which ProductID is logically being evaluated). The following query forms also produce the optimal plan and correct results, so long as a vector aggregate is used (you can probably find more equivalent query forms): WHERE Clause SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) < 10; APPLY SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p CROSS APPLY ( SELECT NULL FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ) AS ca (dummy); FROM Clause SELECT q1.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q1 WHERE q1.cnt < 10; This last example uses SUM(1) instead of COUNT and does not require a vector aggregate…you should be able to work out why :) SELECT q.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT SUM(1) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q WHERE q.cnt < 10; The semantics of SQL aggregates are rather odd in places.  It definitely pays to get to know the rules, and to be careful to check whether your queries are using scalar or vector aggregates.  As we have seen, query plans do not show in which ‘mode’ an aggregate is running and getting it wrong can cause poor performance, wrong results, or both. © 2012 Paul White Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi email: [email protected]

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• Book Review: Brownfield Application Development in .NET

  - by DotNetBlues

  I recently finished reading the book Brownfield Application Development in .NET by Kyle Baley and Donald Belcham.  The book is available from Manning.  First off, let me say that I'm a huge fan of Manning as a publisher.  I've found their books to be top-quality, over all.  As a Kindle owner, I also appreciate getting an ebook copy along with the dead tree copy.  I find ebooks to be much more convenient to read, but hard-copies are easier to reference. The book covers, surprisingly enough, working with brownfield applications.  Which is well and good, if that term has meaning to you.  It didn't for me.  Without retreading a chunk of the first chapter, the authors break code bases into three broad categories: greenfield, brownfield, and legacy.  Greenfield is, essentially, new development that hasn't had time to rust and is (hopefully) being approached with some discipline.  Legacy applications are those that are more or less stable and functional, that do not expect to see a lot of work done to them, and are more likely to be replaced than reworked. Brownfield code is the gray (brown?) area between the two and the authors argue, quite effectively, that it is the most likely state for an application to be in.  Brownfield code has, in some way, been allowed to tarnish around the edges and can be difficult to work with.  Although I hadn't realized it, most of the code I've worked on has been brownfield.  Sometimes, there's talk of scrapping and starting over.  Sometimes, the team dismisses increased discipline as ivory tower nonsense.  And, sometimes, I've been the ignorant culprit vexing my future self. The book is broken into two major sections, plus an introduction chapter and an appendix.  The first section covers what the authors refer to as "The Ecosystem" which consists of version control, build and integration, testing, metrics, and defect management.  The second section is on actually writing code for brownfield applications and discusses object-oriented principles, architecture, external dependencies, and, of course, how to deal with these when coming into an existing code base. The ecosystem section is just shy of 140 pages long and brings some real meat to the matter.  The focus on "pain points" immediately sets the tone as problem-solution, rather than academic.  The authors also approach some of the topics from a different angle than some essays I've read on similar topics.  For example, the chapter on automated testing is on just that -- automated testing.  It's all well and good to criticize a project as conflating integration tests with unit tests, but it really doesn't make anyone's life better.  The discussion on testing is more focused on the "right" level of testing for existing projects.  Sometimes, an integration test is the best you can do without gutting a section of functional code.  Even if you can sell other developers and/or management on doing so, it doesn't actually provide benefit to your customers to rewrite code that works.  This isn't to say the authors encourage sloppy coding.  Far from it.  Just that they point out the wisdom of ignoring the sleeping bear until after you deal with the snarling wolf. The other sections take a similarly real-world, workable approach to the pain points they address.  As the section moves from technical solutions like version control and continuous integration (CI) to the softer, process issues of metrics and defect tracking, the authors begin to gently suggest moving toward a zero defect count.  While that really sounds like an unreasonable goal for a lot of ongoing projects, it's quite apparent that the authors have first-hand experience with taming some gruesome projects.  The suggestions are grounded and workable, and the difficulty of some situations is explicitly acknowledged. I have to admit that I started getting bored by the end of the ecosystem section.  No matter how valuable I think a good project manager or business analyst is to a successful ALM, at the end of the day, I'm a gear-head.  Also, while I agreed with a lot of the ecosystem ideas, in theory, I didn't necessarily feel that a lot of the single-developer projects that I'm often involved in really needed that level of rigor.  It's only after reading the sidebars and commentary in the coding section that I had the context for the arguments made in favor of a strong ecosystem supporting the development process.  That isn't to say that I didn't support good product management -- indeed, I've probably pushed too hard, on occasion, for a strong ALM outside of just development.  This book gave me deeper insight into why some corners shouldn't be cut and how damaging certain sins of omission can be. The code section, though, kept me engaged for its entirety.  Many technical books can be used as reference material from day one.  The authors were clear, however, that this book is not one of these.  The first chapter of the section (chapter seven, over all) addresses object oriented (OO) practices.  I've read any number of definitions, discussions, and treatises on OO.  None of the chapter was new to me, but it was a good review, and I'm of the opinion that it's good to review the foundations of what you do, from time to time, so I didn't mind. The remainder of the book is really just about how to apply OOP to existing code -- and, just because all your code exists in classes does not mean that it's object oriented.  That topic has the potential to be extremely condescending, but the authors miraculously managed to never once make me feel like a dolt or that they were wagging their finger at me for my prior sins.  Instead, they continue the "pain points" and problem-solution presentation to give concrete examples of how to apply some pretty academic-sounding ideas.  That's a point worth emphasizing, as my experience with most OO discussions is that they stay in the academic realm.  This book gives some very, very good explanations of why things like the Liskov Substitution Principle exist and why a corporate programmer should even care.  Even if you know, with absolute certainty, that you'll never have to work on an existing code-base, I would recommend this book just for the clarity it provides on OOP. This book goes beyond just theory, or even real-world application.  It presents some methods for fixing problems that any developer can, and probably will, encounter in the wild.  First, the authors address refactoring application layers and internal dependencies.  Then, they take you through those layers from the UI to the data access layer and external dependencies.  Finally, they come full circle to tie it all back to the overall process.  By the time the book is done, you're left with a lot of ideas, but also a reasonable plan to begin to improve an existing project structure. Throughout the book, it's apparent that the authors have their own preferred methodology (TDD and domain-driven design), as well as some preferred tools.  The "Our .NET Toolbox" is something of a neon sign pointing to that latter point.  They do not beat the reader over the head with anything resembling a "One True Way" mentality.  Even for the most emphatic points, the tone is quite congenial and helpful.  With some of the near-theological divides that exist within the tech community, I found this to be one of the more remarkable characteristics of the book.  Although the authors favor tools that might be considered Alt.NET, there is no reason the advice and techniques given couldn't be quite successful in a pure Microsoft shop with Team Foundation Server.  For that matter, even though the book specifically addresses .NET, it could be applied to a Java and Oracle shop, as well.

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• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

  - by Argenis

    This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups had completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

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• Moving from Tortoise to TFS

  - by MarkPearl

  The Past A few years ago my small software company made the jump from storing code on a shared folder to source code control. At the time we had evaluated a few of the options and settled on Tortoise SVN. The main motivation for going the SVN route was that we found a great plugin for Visual Studio that allowed us to avoid the command prompt for uploading changes (like I said we are windows programmers… command prompt bad!! ) and it was free. Up to now we have been pretty happy with SVN as it removed many of the worries that I had about how safe my code was on a shared folder and also gave us the opportunity to safely have several developers work on the same project at the same time. The only times when we have been unhappy has been when we have had SVN hell days – which pretty much occur when you are doing something out of the norm and suddenly SVN just won’t resolve conflicts or something along those lines. This happens once every 4 or 5 months and is not necessarily a problem caused directly by SVN – but a problem augmented by SVN. When you have SVN hell days you want to curse SVN! With that in mind I recently have been relooking at our source code control. I have explored using GIT and was very impressed by it and have also looked at TFS. From a source code control perspective I don’t want to get into a heated discussion on which one is better – but I do want to mention that I wear two hats in my organization – software developer & manager, and with the manager hat on I tend to sway the TFS route. So when I was given a coupon to test DiscountASP.Net Team Foundation Server Service for a year, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to try TFS in a distributed environment and also make the first step towards having an integrated development management system. Some of the things that appeal to me about DiscountASP’s offering are the following… Basic management / planning facilities like to do lists inside Visual Studio Daily backup of data on the server – we are developers, not IT managers and so the more of this I could outsource the better Distributed solution – all of us work remotely and so this was a big one as well. Registering and Setting Up with DiscountASP.NET The whole registration process was simple and intuitive. The web interface is not the most visually impressive one, but it is functional and a few seconds after I clicked the last submit button a email was sitting in my inbox giving me my control panel username and suggesting that I read the “Getting Started” article. The getting started article was easy to read and understand so no complaints there either. Next to set my dev environment to work. With a few references to the getting started article I had completed the whole setup process in a matter of minutes. Ten minutes after initiating the whole thing I was logged into VS2010 and creating my first TFS project. With the service that I signed up for, I have access for 5 users – which is sufficient for my internal needs. So from what I can tell, to set the rest of us up on the system I just need to supply them with their user credentials and url. My Concerns Resolved 1) Security So, a few concerns I had about the service. First and foremost – is it secure? I would hate for someone to get access to our code and the whole idea of putting it up on the internet is a concern for me. Turning to the Knowledge Base on the DiscountASP website this is one of the first question I can see answered. According to them it is secure. I have extracted their comment below regarding this. Our TFS hosting service is secure. We only accept HTTPS connections ensuring that any client-server data transmission is encrypted. At the network level, all of our systems are protected by multiple Juniper firewalls, Tipping Point's Intrusion Detection System (see Tipping Point's case study of our use here), and we also employ DDoS mitigation to add extra layers of security. Additionally, physical access to the servers is tightly restricted. Please see the security section of this Knowledge Base article for further details. 2) Web Portal Access The other big concern I have is regarding web portal access. In the ideal world I would like to be able to give my end users access to a web portal for reporting bugs etc. When I initially read through the FAQ of the site it mentioned that there was web portal access – but from what I can see this is just for “users”. Since I am limited to 5 users for the account, it would not be practical to set up external users that we could get feedback from on bugs etc. I would be interested if this is possible – and if so if someone could post it in the comments it would be much appreciated. If this isn’t possible, it is a slight let down as we rely heavily on end user feedback to get feedback and it would have been ideal to have gotten this within the service. Other than those two items, I didn’t have any real concerns that were unresolved. So where do I go from here? So time passed by from the initial writing of this post and as work whirred in and out of my inbox I have still not had a proper opportunity to give the service a test run. Recently though things have began to slow down and then surprise surprise I had another SVN Hell day. With that experience I had a new found resolve to get our team on TFS and so today we are going to start to use the service as a team. I am hoping that I do not have TFS hell days – but if I do, I will be sure to write about them. In short - the verdict is still out on whether this service is going to be invaluable to my business or whether it will create more headaches than it is worth BUT I am hopping it will be an invaluable service. I will only really be able to determine that in a few months… till then!

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• Cascading updates with business key equality: Hibernate best practices?

  - by Traphicone

  I'm new to Hibernate, and while there are literally tons of examples to look at, there seems to be so much flexibility here that it's sometimes very hard to narrow all the options down the best way of doing things. I've been working on a project for a little while now, and despite reading through a lot of books, articles, and forums, I'm still left with a bit of a head scratcher. Any veteran advice would be very appreciated. So, I have a model involving two classes with a one-to-many relationship from parent to child. Each class has a surrogate primary key and a uniquely constrained composite business key. <class name="Container"> <id name="id" type="java.lang.Long"> <generator class="identity"/> </id> <properties name="containerBusinessKey" unique="true" update="false"> <property name="name" not-null="true"/> <property name="owner" not-null="true"/> </properties> <set name="items" inverse="true" cascade="all-delete-orphan"> <key column="container" not-null="true"/> <one-to-many class="Item"/> </set> </class> <class name="Item"> <id name="id" type="java.lang.Long"> <generator class="identity"/> </id> <properties name="itemBusinessKey" unique="true" update="false"> <property name="type" not-null="true"/> <property name="color" not-null="true"/> </properties> <many-to-one name="container" not-null="true" update="false" class="Container"/> </class> The beans behind these mappings are as boring as you can possibly imagine--nothing fancy going on. With that in mind, consider the following code: Container c = new Container("Things", "Me"); c.addItem(new Item("String", "Blue")); c.addItem(new Item("Wax", "Red")); Transaction t = session.beginTransaction(); session.saveOrUpdate(c); t.commit(); Everything works fine the first time, and both the Container and its Items are persisted. If the above code block is executed again, however, Hibernate throws a ConstraintViolationException--duplicate values for the "name" and "owner" columns. Because the new Container instance has a null identifier, Hibernate assumes it is an unsaved transient instance. This is expected but not desired. Since the persistent and transient Container objects have the same business key values, what we really want is to issue an update. It is easy enough to convince Hibernate that our new Container instance is the same as our old one. With a quick query we can get the identifier of the Container we'd like to update, and set our transient object's identifier to match. Container c = new Container("Things", "Me"); c.addItem(new Item("String", "Blue")); c.addItem(new Item("Wax", "Red")); Query query = session.createSQLQuery("SELECT id FROM Container" + "WHERE name = ? AND owner = ?"); query.setString(0, c.getName()); query.setString(1, c.getOwner()); BigInteger id = (BigInteger)query.uniqueResult(); if (id != null) { c.setId(id.longValue()); } Transaction t = session.beginTransaction(); session.saveOrUpdate(c); t.commit(); This almost satisfies Hibernate, but because the one-to-many relationship from Container to Item cascades, the same ConstraintViolationException is also thrown for the child Item objects. My question is: what is the best practice in this situation? It is highly recommended to use surrogate primary keys, and it is also recommended to use business key equality. When you put these two recommendations in to practice together, however, two of the greatest conveniences of Hibernate--saveOrUpdate and cascading operations--seem to be rendered almost completely useless. As I see it, I have only two options: Manually fetch and set the identifier for each object in the mapping. This clearly works, but for even a moderately sized schema this is a lot of extra work which it seems Hibernate could easily be doing. Write a custom interceptor to fetch and set object identifiers on each operation. This looks cleaner than the first option but is rather heavy-handed, and it seems wrong to me that you should be expected to write a plug-in which overrides Hibernate's default behavior for a mapping which follows the recommended design. Is there a better way? Am I making completely the wrong assumptions? I'm hoping that I'm just missing something. Thanks.

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