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How to use value from primary accessdatasource control as parameter in select query for secondary ac

- by weedave

Hi, I'm trying to display all orders placed and I have a primary accessdatasource control that has a select query to get the customer information and the orderID. I want to use the orderID value from this first query as a parameter for the secondary accessdatasource control that selects the product information of the products in the order. In plain english, I want to:- select product info from product table where orderID = ? (where ? is the orderID value from the first query) I have tried the <%#Eval("OrderID")% but I get a "server tag not well formed" error, but I do get results returned when I just type the order ID in, but obviously every result (order) just contains the same product info... <asp:Repeater ID="Repeater1" runat="server" DataSourceID="AccessDataSource1"> <ItemTemplate> <asp:AccessDataSource ID="AccessDataSource2" runat="server" DataFile="~/App_Data/project.mdb" SelectCommand="SELECT orderDetails.OrderID, album.Artist, album.Album, album.Cost, album.ImageURL, orderDetails.Quantity, orderDetails.Total FROM (album INNER JOIN orderDetails ON album.AlbumID = orderDetails.AlbumID) WHERE (orderDetails.OrderID = ? )"> <SelectParameters> // Error is on this line <asp:Parameter Name="OrderID" DefaultValue="<%#Eval ("OrderID")%>" /> </SelectParameters> </asp:AccessDataSource> <div class="viewAllOrdersOrderArea"> <div class="viewAllOrdersOrderSummary"> <p><b>Order ID: </b><%#Eval("OrderID")%></p> <h4>Shipping Details</h4> <p><b>Shipping Address: </b><%#Eval("ShippingName")%>, <%#Eval("ShippingAddress")%>, <%#Eval("ShippingTown")%>, <%#Eval("ShippingPostcode")%></p> <h4>Payment Details</h4> <p><b>Cardholder's Address: </b><%#Eval("CardHolder")%>, <%#Eval("BillingAddress")%>, <%#Eval("BillingTown")%>, <%#Eval("BillingPostcode")%></p> <p><b>Payment Method: </b><%#Eval("CardType")%></p> <p><b>Card Number: </b><%#Eval("CardNumber")%></p> <p><b>Start Date: </b><%#Eval("StartDate")%>, Expiry Date: <%#Eval("ExpiryDate")%></p> <p><b>Security Digits: </b><%#Eval("SecurityDigits")%></p> <h4>Ordered items:</h4> <asp:Repeater ID="Repeater2" runat="server" DataSourceID="AccessDataSource2"> <ItemTemplate> <div style="display: block; float: left;"> <div class="viewAllOrdersProductImage"> <img width="70px" height="70px" alt="<%# Eval("Artist") %> - <%# Eval("Album") %>" src="assets/images/thumbs/<%# Eval("ImageURL") %>" /> </div> <div style="display:block; float:left; padding-top:15px; padding-right:20px;"><p><b><%# Eval("Artist") %> - <%# Eval("Album") %></b></p> <p>£<%# Eval("Cost") %> x <%# Eval("Quantity") %> = £<%#Eval("Total")%></p></div> </div> </ItemTemplate> </asp:Repeater> </div> </div> </ItemTemplate> </asp:Repeater>

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How to Load In Content with jQuery?

- by ClarkSKent

Hello, I am trying to add ajax functionality to my pagination so the content loads in the same page instead of the user having to navigate to another page when clicking the page links. I should mention that I am using this php pagination class. Being new to jquery, I am unsure of how to properly do this with the pagination class. This is what the main page looks like: <?php $categoryId=$_GET['category']; echo $categoryId; ?> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.1/jquery.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery_page.js"></script> <?php //Include the PS_Pagination class include('ps_pagination.php'); //Connect to mysql db $conn = mysql_connect('localhost', 'root', 'root'); mysql_select_db('ajax_demo',$conn); $sql = "select * from explore where category='$categoryId'"; //Create a PS_Pagination object $pager = new PS_Pagination($conn, $sql, 3, 11, 'param1=value1&param2=value2'); //The paginate() function returns a mysql //result set for the current page $rs = $pager->paginate(); //Loop through the result set echo "<table width='800px'>"; while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($rs)) { echo "<tr>"; echo"<td>"; echo $row['id']; echo"</td>"; echo"<td>"; echo $row['site_description']; echo"</td>"; echo"<td>"; echo $row['site_price']; echo"</td>"; echo "</tr>"; } echo "</table>"; echo "<ul id='pagination'>"; echo "<li>"; //Display the navigation echo $pager->renderFullNav(); echo "</li>"; echo "</ul>"; ?> <div id="loading" ></div> <div id="content" ></div> <a href="#" class="category" id="marketing">Marketing</a> <a href="#" class="category" id="automotive">Automotive</a> <a href="#" class="category" id="sports">Sports</a> Any help on this would be great. Thanks.

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Form inside a hidden div has no values on post

- by Mick

I have a html form that posts to a new page on submit. If required a user can click a button to make a small table visible in a div box. this adds more text input fields to my form. The problem is, regardless of the div box being hidden or visible none of the additional fields data is sent when the form is posted . the div box code function quotevisi() { document.getElementById("quote").style.visibility = "visible"; tdat = "" ; tdat += "<h2 align='center' >Client Quotation </h2>" ; tdat += "<table align='center'cellpadding='1' width='690px'><tr>" tdat += "<td ></td><td>Additional 1</td>" ; tdat += "<td ><label><textarea id='line1' cols='50' rows='1'>" tdat += "</textarea></label></td></tr>" tdat += "<td ></td><td >Additional 2 </td>" ; tdat += "<td ><label><textarea id='line2' name='line2' cols='50' rows='1'>" tdat += "</textarea></label></td></tr>" tdat += "<td ></td><td >Additional 3 </td>" ; tdat += "<td ><label><textarea id='line3' name='line3' cols='50' rows='1'>" tdat += "</textarea></label></td></tr>" tdat += "<td ></td><td >Special Instructions</td>" ; tdat += "<td ><label><textarea id='special' name='special' cols='50' rows='1'>" tdat += "</textarea></label></td></tr>" tdat += "<td ></td><td ></td> <td>" ; tdat += "<input type='button' value='View Quote' onclick='view_quote()' /> " tdat += "<input type='button' value='Close' onclick='closequote()' /> " tdat += "<td ></td> " ; tdat += "</table> " // display in the quote div (style sheet) document.getElementById('quote').innerHTML= tdat } The form is a bit big to but the button for the hidden field is this <td ><input class="buttn" type="button" value="Extra Quote details " onclick="quotevisi();" /> </td> I would of thought that all this information would go with the form on post . But it doesent. Oh finally the div box code is placed after this line <form style='background-color:ccc' id='form1' name='form1' method='post' action='process.php' > Any help or thoughts would be much appreciated thanks Mick

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Repeater not repeating :0) (asp.net)(vb)

- by Phil

Morning stackoverflow, I have a repeater, with the following code in my aspx page; <asp:Repeater ID="Contactinforepeater" runat="server"> <HeaderTemplate> <h1>Contact Information</h1> </HeaderTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <table width="50%"> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%#Container.DataItem("position")%></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Name:</td> <td><%#Container.DataItem("surname")%></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Telephone:</td> <td><%#Container.DataItem("telephone")%></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Fax:</td> <td><%#Container.DataItem("fax")%></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Email:</td> <td><%#Container.DataItem("email")%></td> </tr> </table> </ItemTemplate> <SeparatorTemplate> <br /><hr /><br /> </SeparatorTemplate> </asp:Repeater> Then I have this code in my aspx.vb to get the data; If did = 0 Then s = "sql works on db server" x = New SqlCommand(s, c) x.Parameters.Add("@contentid", Data.SqlDbType.Int) x.Parameters("@contentid").Value = contentid c.Open() r = x.ExecuteReader r.Read() Contactinforepeater.DataSource = r Contactinforepeater.DataBind() End If c.Close() r.Close() If Not did = 0 Then s = "sql works on db server" x = New SqlCommand(s, c) x.Parameters.Add("@contentid", SqlDbType.Int) x.Parameters("@contentid").Value = contentid x.Parameters.Add("@did", SqlDbType.Int) x.Parameters("@did").Value = did c.Open() r = x.ExecuteReader r.Read() Contactinforepeater.DataSource = r Contactinforepeater.DataBind() End If r.Close() c.Close() If 'did' is or is not '0' I still get no data outputted to the page. I just get the 'contact information' h1 header from the header template. I've tested the value of s in sqlsms and it works fine. Position, surname, telephone, fax, email all exist in the db. The particular page I am checking exists and has 1 set of contact information attached. Where am I going wrong? Thanks! ps. Does my syntax appear correct? pps. I am also open to different ways of achieving the same result. I tried via an sqldatasource but ran into problems when using variables as params (there is no option to select them, only controls, querystring etc)

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create previous next button for iframe pages

- by Resu

This topic may have lots of code out there, BUT I seem to be looking for a variation that isn't based on history, is it possible... So I have this code... <script type="text/javascript"> var pages=new Array(); pages[0]="listItem1.html"; pages[1]="listItem2.html"; pages[2]="listItem3.html"; pages[3]="listItem4.html"; pages[4]="listItem5.html"; var i=0; var end=pages.length; end--; function changeSrc(operation) { if (operation=="next") { if (i==end) { document.getElementById('the_iframe').src=pages[end]; i=0;} else { document.getElementById('the_iframe').src=pages[i]; i++;}} if (operation=="back") { if (i==0) { document.getElementById('the_iframe').src=pages[0]; i=end;} else { document.getElementById('the_iframe').src=pages[i]; i--;}}} </script> </head> <body> <ul id="menu" role="group"> <li><a href="listItem1.html" target="ifrm" role="treeitem">Welcome</a> <ul> <li><a href="listItem2.html" target="ifrm" role="treeitem">Ease of Access Center</a></li> </ul> </li> <li><a href="listItem3.html" target="ifrm">Getting Started</a> <ul> <li><a href="listItem4.html" target="ifrm">Considerations</a></li> <li><a href="listItem5.html" target="ifrm">Changing Perspective</a></li> </ul> </li> </ul> <iframe id="the_iframe" scrolling="no" src="listItem1.htm" name="ifrm" style="width:540px;></iframe> <input type="button" onClick="changeSrc('back');" value="Back" /> <input type="button" onClick="changeSrc('next');" value="Next" /> and if I click on the next or prev button, it does move somewhere,but... let's say my iframe is showing listItem2, then I click on listItem4 in the menu (there is a tree menu involved), then I want to go to listItem3 and I hit the back button...instead of going to listItem3, it goes to listItem2 (or someplace that is not back a page from 4 to 3). It appears that the buttons are navigating based on history?...but I just want a straight forward or backward movement...I don't want my buttons to have this browser-type functionality...If I'm on listItem4 and hit the next button, I want it to go to listItem5. Many Thanks For Any Help!

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not able to show the file from the array...

- by sjl

Hi, i'm trying to do an image gallery. i was not able to display the thumbnails stored in the array. instead it keep showing the same thumbnails. anyone can help? very much appreciated.. // Arrays that store the filenames of the text, images and thumbnails var thumbnails:Array = [ "images/image1_thumb.jpg", "images/image2_thumb.jpg", "images/image3_thumb.jpg", "images/image4_thumb.jpg", "images/image5_thumb.jpg", "images/image6_thumb.jpg", "images/image7_thumb.jpg" ]; var images:Array = [ "images/image1.jpg", "images/image2.jpg", "images/image3.jpg", "images/image4.jpg", "images/image5.jpg", "images/image6.jpg", "images/image7.jpg" ]; var textFiles:Array = [ "text/picture1.txt", "text/picture2.txt", "text/picture3.txt", "text/picture4.txt", "text/picture5.txt", "text/picture6.txt", "text/picture7.txt" ]; // NOTE: thumbnail images are 60 x 43 pixels in size // loop through the array and create the thumbnails and position them vertically for (var i:int = 0; i <7; i++) { // create an instance of MyUIThumbnail var thumbs:MyUIThumbnail = new MyUIThumbnail(); // position the thumbnails on the left vertically thumbs.y = 43 * i;/*** FILL IN THE BLANK HERE ***/ // store the corresponding full size image name in the thumbnail // use the "images" array thumbs.image = "images/image1.jpg"; thumbs.image = "images/image2.jpg"; thumbs.image = "images/image3.jpg"; thumbs.image = "images/image4.jpg"; thumbs.image = "images/image5.jpg"; thumbs.image = "images/image6.jpg"; thumbs.image = "images/image7.jpg"; // store the corresponding text file name in the thumbnail // use the "textFiles" array thumbs.textFile = "text/picture1.txt"; thumbs.textFile = "text/picture2.txt"; thumbs.textFile = "text/picture3.txt"; thumbs.textFile = "text/picture4.txt"; thumbs.textFile = "text/picture5.txt"; thumbs.textFile = "text/picture6.txt"; thumbs.textFile = "text/picture7.txt"; thumbs.imageFullSize = full_image_mc ; // store the reference to the textfield in the thumbnail thumbs.infoText = info; // load and display the thumbnails // use the "thumbnails" array thumbs.loadThumbnail("images/image1_thumb.jpg"); thumbs.loadThumbnail("images/image2_thumb.jpg"); thumbs.loadThumbnail("images/image3_thumb.jpg"); thumbs.loadThumbnail("images/image4_thumb.jpg"); thumbs.loadThumbnail("images/image5_thumb.jpg"); thumbs.loadThumbnail("images/image6_thumb.jpg"); thumbs.loadThumbnail("images/image7_thumb.jpg"); addChild(thumbs); } below is my thumbanail. as package{ import fl.containers.; import flash.events.; import flash.text.; import flash.net.; import flash.display.*; public class MyUIThumbnail extends MovieClip { public var image:String = ""; public var textFile:String = ""; var loader:UILoader = new UILoader(); public var imageFullSize:MyFullSizeImage; // reference to loader to show the full size image public var infoText:TextField; // reference to textfield that displays image infoText var txtLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader(); // loader to load the text file public function MyUIThumbnail() { buttonMode = true; addChild(loader); this.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, myClick); txtLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, displayText); loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, thumbnailLoaded); } public function loadThumbnail(filename:String):void { loader.source = filename; preloader.trackLoading(loader); } function myClick(e:MouseEvent):void { // load and display the full size image imageFullSize.loadImage("my_full_mc"); // load and display the text textLoad("info"); } function textLoad(file:String) { // load the text description from the text file loader.load(new URLRequest(textFile)); } function displayText(e:Event) { //display the text when loading is completed addChild(infoText); } function thumbnailLoaded(e:Event) { loader.width = 60; loader.height = 43; } } }

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Is there a FlashBlock plugin written in Javascript?

- by user3709489

Anyone here have one ? I mean a plugin like Click to Play of Firefox and Chrome feature ( https://www.google.com/search?q=click+to+play+firefox&hl=vi&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=gOKPU5GCJsP_8QXFtYC4Aw&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1366&bih=717 ) but written in Javascript, work like LazyLoad I found here: https://github.com/kaizau/Lazy-Load-Images-without-jQuery If anyone here have something like that please share me, I also found a click to show function for image: <html> <head> <title></title> </head> <body>  <script type="text/javascript">  </script> <p><img data-src="graphics/one.gif" width="400" height="600" id="Image1" onClick="MM_swapImage('Image1','','http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/themes/NASAPortal/images/nasa-starfield-header-hr.png',0)"></p>  </body> </html> Many thank!

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Setting background image in asp.net (Master page)

- by JRC

I'm new in asp.net. And I am having trouble setting my background image. Here's the master page source: <%@ Master Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Master.master.cs" Inherits="Master"%> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head runat="server"> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="scripts/style.css"/> <title>Tracker</title> <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="head" runat="server"> </asp:ContentPlaceHolder> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <div class="container"> <a href="#"><img src="images/cross-header.gif" alt="Insert Logo Here" width="100%" id="Insert_logo" style="background: #C6D580; display:block;" /></a> <div class="sidebar1"> <nav> <ul> <li><a href="#">Home</a></li> <li><a href="#">LINK</a></li> <li><a href="#">LINK</a></li> <li><a href="#"><span style="font-weight:italic">LINK</span></a></li> <li><a href="#"><span style="font-weight:italic">LINK</span></a></li> </ul> </nav> <p>SOME LABEL</p> <p>SOME QUOTE HERE</p> <p></p> </div> </div> <footer> <a href="#">LINK HERE</a> | <a href="#">LINK HERE</a> | <a href="contact.php">CONTACT</a> | <a href="register.php">REGISTER</a> | <a href="login.php">LOGIN</a> <address> Copyright 2012 @JRC </address> </footer> </div> </form> </body> </html> The image that I am trying to use is located at the folder image. I don't know whats wrong. And here's what the style.css source: body { font: 100%/1.4 Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0; padding: 0; background-image:url('images/background.jpg'); background-repeat:no-repeat; background-attachment:scroll; background-position:repeat-x; } I also tried this url('image/background.jpeg') etc. but still fails.

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Not reaction to pressing button

- by Orange91

I have a ring in primefaces: <h:form> <p:ring id="ring" value="#{ringBean.images}" var="image" styleClass="image-ring" easing="easeInOutBack"> <p:graphicImage value="./../../images/#{image.image}" width="150" height="150"/> <p:commandButton value="#{image.name}" action="#{image.action}" /> </p:ring> </h:form> My RingBean: @ManagedBean @RequestScoped public class RingBean implements Serializable{ private List<PersonImage> images; private PersonImage selectedPerson; public RingBean() { images = new ArrayList<PersonImage>(); images.add(new PersonImage("person3.png", "Pacjent", "patientList")); images.add(new PersonImage("person4.png", "Admin", "adminList")); images.add(new PersonImage("person5.png", "Lekarz", "doctorList")); images.add(new PersonImage("person6.png", "Sekretarka", "secretaryList")); images.add(new PersonImage("person7.png", "Nieaktywni", "inactiveList")); } public List<PersonImage> getImages() { return images; } public PersonImage getSelectedPerson() { return selectedPerson; } public void setSelectedPerson(PersonImage selectedPerson) { this.selectedPerson = selectedPerson; } } PersonImage class: public class PersonImage { String image; String name; String action; public PersonImage() { } public PersonImage(String image, String name, String action) { this.image = image; this.name = name; this.action = action; } public String getImage() { return image; } public void setImage(String image) { this.image = image; } public String getName() { return name; } public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; } public String getAction() { return action; } public void setAction(String action) { this.action = action; } } faces-config: <navigation-case> <from-outcome>adminList</from-outcome> <to-view-id>/protected/admin/adminList.xhtml</to-view-id> <redirect/> </navigation-case> <navigation-case> <from-outcome>doctorList</from-outcome> <to-view-id>/protected/admin/doctorList.xhtml</to-view-id> <redirect/> </navigation-case> <navigation-case> <from-outcome>patientList</from-outcome> <to-view-id>/protected/admin/patientList.xhtml</to-view-id> <redirect/> </navigation-case> <navigation-case> <from-outcome>secretaryList</from-outcome> <to-view-id>/protected/admin/secretaryList.xhtml</to-view-id> <redirect/> </navigation-case> When i pressed my button, not reaction. Why? I added the action in button: And in Ring I add: images.add(new PersonImage("person4.png", "Admin", "adminList")); action is adminList. Why this not work? When i changed in button: <p:commandButton value="#{image.name}" action="adminList" /> all work. Why? Both construction returned identical string.

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10000's+ UI elements, bind or draw?

- by jpiccolo

I am drawing a header for a timeline control. It looks like this: I go to 0.01 millisecond per line, so for a 10 minute timeline I am looking at drawing 60000 lines + 6000 labels. This takes a while, ~10 seconds. I would like to offload this from the UI thread. My code is currently: private void drawHeader() { Header.Children.Clear(); switch (viewLevel) { case ViewLevel.MilliSeconds100: double hWidth = Header.Width; this.drawHeaderLines(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, 10), 100, 5, hWidth); //Was looking into background worker to off load UI //backgroundWorker = new BackgroundWorker(); //backgroundWorker.DoWork += delegate(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs args) // { // this.drawHeaderLines(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, 10), 100, 5, hWidth); // }; //backgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync(); break; } } private void drawHeaderLines(TimeSpan timeStep, int majorEveryXLine, int distanceBetweenLines, double headerWidth) { var currentTime = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, 0); const int everyXLine100 = 10; double currentX = 0; var currentLine = 0; while (currentX < headerWidth) { var l = new Line { ToolTip = currentTime.ToString(@"hh\:mm\:ss\.fff"), StrokeThickness = 1, X1 = 0, X2 = 0, Y1 = 30, Y2 = 25 }; if (((currentLine % majorEveryXLine) == 0) && currentLine != 0) { l.StrokeThickness = 2; l.Y2 = 15; var textBlock = new TextBlock { Text = l.ToolTip.ToString(), FontSize = 8, FontFamily = new FontFamily("Tahoma"), Foreground = new SolidColorBrush(Color.FromRgb(255, 255, 255)) }; Canvas.SetLeft(textBlock, (currentX - 22)); Canvas.SetTop(textBlock, 0); Header.Children.Add(textBlock); } if ((((currentLine % everyXLine100) == 0) && currentLine != 0) && (currentLine % majorEveryXLine) != 0) { l.Y2 = 20; var textBlock = new TextBlock { Text = string.Format(".{0}", TimeSpan.Parse(l.ToolTip.ToString()).Milliseconds), FontSize = 8, FontFamily = new FontFamily("Tahoma"), Foreground = new SolidColorBrush(Color.FromRgb(192, 192, 192)) }; Canvas.SetLeft(textBlock, (currentX - 8)); Canvas.SetTop(textBlock, 8); Header.Children.Add(textBlock); } l.Stroke = new SolidColorBrush(Color.FromRgb(255, 255, 255)); Header.Children.Add(l); Canvas.SetLeft(l, currentX); currentX += distanceBetweenLines; currentLine++; currentTime += timeStep; } } I had looked into BackgroundWorker, except you can't create UI elements on a non-UI thread. Is it possible at all to do drawHeaderLines in a non-UI thread? Could I use data binding for drawing the lines? Would this help with UI responsiveness? I would imagine I can use databinding, but the Styling is probably beyond my current WPF ability (coming from winforms and trying to learn what all these style objects are and binding them). Would anyone be able to supply a starting point for tempting this out? Or Google a tutorial that would get me started?

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CSS + jQuery - Unable to perform .toggle() and repeated jQueryTemplate Item [I must warn you this is a bit overwhelming]

- by user1027620

Okay here we go: Stream.html (Template file) <div class="streamItem clearfix"> <input type="button" /> <div class="clientStrip"> <img src="" alt="${Sender}" /> </div> <div class="clientView"> <a href="#" class="clientName">${Sender}</a> <p>${Value}</p> <p>${DateTime}</p> <div class="itemGadgets"> <ul> <li class="toggleInput">Value</li> <li></li> </ul> </div> <div class="inputContainer"> <input type="text" value="" /> </div> </div> </div> <div class="spacer" /> Default.aspx (jQuery) $('.toggleInput').live('click', function () { $(this).parent().parent() .find('.inputContainer').toggle(); $(this).parent().parent().find('.inputContainer') .find('input[type=text]').focus(); }); Update: The above has been changed to: $('.toggleInput').live('click', function () { $(this).closest(".clientView").find(".inputContainer").toggle() $(this).closest(".clientView").find(".inputContainer") .find('input[type=text]').focus(); }); Issues with jQuery: I have comments that belong to each .streamItem. My previous solution was to use ListView control as follows: <ItemTemplate> <asp:Panel ID="StreamItem" CssClass="StreamItem" runat="server"> ...  So as you can see, this is not a solution since I started using jQuery Templates and I am fetching the data using the following jQuery $.ajax method: $.ajax({ type: 'POST', url: 'Services.asmx/GetStream', data: "{}", contentType: 'application/json', success: function (Stream) { $.get('Templates/Stream.html', function (template) { $.tmpl(template, Stream.d).appendTo("#Stream"); }); } }); How can I resolve this without using the old ListView solution but by using jQuery Templates to load the comments whenever I am getting data for a specific stream? I am using a simple WebMethod to return my data as follows: [WebMethod] public List<Stream> GetStream() { List<Stream> Streams = Stream.GetRange(X, X, HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name); return Streams; } I am looking for a way to handle the .toggleInput click event. I need check if .Comments (a main container for the (to be comments container <div>)) has children (or more than one .commentItem). If so, then I need to show that .inputContainer and hide all the other .inputContainer divs with .Comments size() == 0 if they're visible. Please see the image below: Default.aspx (Partial CSS) div.streamItem div.clientView { float : left; width : 542px; } div.streamItem div.clientView p { margin : 5px 0 0 0; font-size : 10pt; } div.streamItem div.clientView div.inputContainer { display : none; /* Doesn't hide .inputContainer */ padding : 2px; background-color : #f1f1f1; } Issues with CSS: On page load, display: none; has no effect. That's it! If you're reading this I'd like to thank you for your time and thoughts! :)

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Does anyone get zero-height select fields in Firefox 3.6.3?

- by user350635

If you open this HTML in Firefox 3.6.3 (confirmed in some earlier versions too), and click the drawStuff() link repeatedly, it doesn't render the contents of the last div consistently. Looking more closely it seems like it's rendering select fields with height=0. Any idea why this would happen? <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <title> A Page </title> <script type="text/javascript"> function drawStuff() { for (var i = 1; i <= 5; i++) { var curHtmlArr = []; for (var j = 0; j < 5; j++){ curHtmlArr.push("<select>"); curHtmlArr.push(getOptgroup()); curHtmlArr.push(getOptgroup()); curHtmlArr.push(getOptgroup()); curHtmlArr.push("<\/select>"); } var foobar = document.getElementById('elem_' + i); foobar.innerHTML = curHtmlArr.join(''); } } function getOptgroup(){ var htmlArr = []; htmlArr.push('<optgroup label="Whatever">'); for (var ii = 0; ii < 32; ii++){ htmlArr.push(' <option value="' + ii + '"> Blah ' + "<\/option>"); } htmlArr.push("<\/optgroup>"); return htmlArr.join(''); } </script> </head> <body> <table border=1 style="width:900px;" summary="A Table"> <tr> <td> <div id="elem_1"></div> </td> <td> <div id="elem_2"></div> </td> <td> <div id="elem_3"></div> </td> <td> <div id="elem_4"></div> </td> <td> <div>abc</div> <div id="elem_5"></div> </td> </tr> </table> <a href="javascript:drawStuff()"> drawStuff() </a> <script type="text/javascript"> drawStuff(); </script> </body> </html>

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Drop down list in menu disappears before able to click

- by user1834770

I've had quite a search through forums looking for a solution for this, but since I don't know coding I'm not sure what applies to me and what doesn't. So, apologies if this is an often solved problem, but I'll greatly appreciate your help! After much trial and error, I've managed to get a drop down list of pages on my navigation bar; however, when I go to click on a sub-page, the entire menu disappears. I've read through other similar problems where there has been an issue with a margin that's too big, but I think my margins are set to '0'. The blog is at: http://swirlstwirlsblog.blogspot.com.au/ I haven't got content in the sub pages but there are there and linked in the html/javascript widget. I've also looked at it in Chrome, Mozilla, and Safari and it's the same issue. I'm also not sure if this is a javascript, css, or html problem, so please be kind in your responses--I'm only new! Thanks so much to anyone able to help me on this. Here's the script I used in the Widget: <ul id="jsddm"> <li><a href="http://swirlstwirlsblog.blogspot.com.au/">Home</a> <li><a href="http://swirlstwirlsblog.blogspot.com.au/search/label/sparkles">Sparkles</a> </li> <li><a href="http://swirlstwirlsblog.blogspot.com.au/search/label/friendship">Friendship</a> </li> <li><a href="http://swirlstwirlsblog.blogspot.com.au/search/label/humour">Humour</a> </li> <li><a href="">About</a> <ul> <li><a href="http://swirlstwirlsblog.blogspot.com.au/p/about_16.html">Us</a></li> <li><a href="http://swirlstwirlsblog.blogspot.com.au/p/contributers.html">Contributors</a> </li> <li><a href="http://swirlstwirlsblog.blogspot.com.au/p/advertising.html">Advertising</a> </li> <li><a href="http://swirlstwirlsblog.blogspot.com.au/p/privacy-policies.html">Privacy</a></li> <li><a href="http://swirlstwirlsblog.blogspot.com.au/p/contact.html">Contact</a></li> </ul> </li> </li></ul> And here's the html code I put in the template: <pre>#jsddm { margin: 0; padding: 15px; z-index:1000000000; position:relative; } #jsddm li { float: left; list-style: none; font: 12px Tahoma, Arial; } #jsddm li a { display: block; white-space: nowrap; margin:1px 3px; padding: 5px 10px; border-right: 1px color: eeeeee; text-shadow: #ffffff 0 1px 0; color: #363636; font-size: 15px; font-family: crushed; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: middle; } #jsddm li a:hover { background: #C8C8C8; } #jsddm li ul { margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; visibility: hidden; border-top: 1px solid white; } #jsddm li ul li { float: none; display: inline; } #jsddm li ul li a { width: auto; background: #ffffff; } #jsddm li ul li a:hover { background: #eeeeee; }</pre>

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How do I remove an element class after success?

- by sharataka

When the user clicks on a button in the form associated with it's image, I'd like the image to disappear on success. I'm having trouble implementing this. Any advice? <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function() { $(".removebutton").submit(function(event){ event.preventDefault(); $.ajax({ type:"POST", url:"/munch_video/", data: { 'video_id': $('.video_id', this).val(), // from form 'playlist': $('.playlist').val(), // from form 'add_remove': $('.add_remove').val(), // from form }, success: function(message){ alert(message); $('.span8').removeClass('.video_id', this); } }); return false; }); }); </script> <div class = "span8" style = "width: 900px;">  <div class='wrapper huluDotCom'>  <div class="image" style="position: relative; left: 0; top: 0;"> <a href = "/partners/Business/huluDotCom"> <img src = "/huluDotCom.png"> </a>  <div class='munchbutton'> <form method='post' action = '/munch_video/ ' class = 'removebutton'><div style='display:none'><input type='hidden' name='csrfmiddlewaretoken' value='dKrS8NzqPWFLM6u8wJrAeid4nGw1avGK' /></div> <input type="hidden" value="Channel" class = "playlist"/> <input type="hidden" value="huluDotCom" class = "video_id"/> <input type="hidden" value="remove_video" class = "add_remove"/> <input type='submit' class="btn btn-danger" value='Remove from plate'/> </form> </div>  </div>  </div>   <div class='wrapper TheEllenShow'>  <div class="image" style="position: relative; left: 0; top: 0;"> <a href = "/partners/Business/TheEllenShow"> <img src = "/TheEllenShow.png"> </a>  <div class='munchbutton'> <form method='post' action = '/munch_video/ ' class = 'removebutton'><div style='display:none'><input type='hidden' name='csrfmiddlewaretoken' value='dKrS8NzqPWFLM6u8wJrAeid4nGw1avGK' /></div> <input type="hidden" value="Channel" class = "playlist"/> <input type="hidden" value="TheEllenShow" class = "video_id"/> <input type="hidden" value="remove_video" class = "add_remove"/> <input type='submit' class="btn btn-danger" value='Remove from plate'/> </form> </div>  </div>  </div>  </div>

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Select list shrinks in size horizontally when empty

- by joe

Hello, I have two select list boxes and i can move items back and forth between them using the forward (--) and backward (<--) button. However, if there are no items in a select list, it shrinks in size horizontally. Any way to keep the select list a fixed size, irrespective of whether it contains any options or not ? Below is the code: <html> <head> <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">  </script> </head> <body> <form action="yourpage.asp" method="post"> <table border="0"> <tr> <td width="70"> <select name="sel1" size="10" multiple="multiple"> <option value="1">Left1</option> <option value="2">Left2</option> <option value="3">Left3</option> <option value="4">Left4</option> <option value="5">Left5</option> </select> </td> <td align="center" valign="middle"> <input type="button" value="-->" onclick="moveOptions(this.form.sel1, this.form.sel2);" /><br /> <input type="button" value="<--" onclick="moveOptions(this.form.sel2, this.form.sel1);" /> </td> <td> <select name="sel2" size="10" multiple="multiple"> <option value="1">Right1</option> <option value="2">Right2</option> <option value="3">Right3</option> <option value="4">Right4</option> <option value="5">Right5</option> </select> </td> </tr> </table> </form> </body> </html> Please help. Thank You.

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map with string is broken?[solved]

- by teritriano

Yes. I can't see what im doing wrong the map is string, int Here the method bange::function::Add(lua_State *vm){ //userdata, function if (!lua_isfunction(vm, 2)){ cout << "bange: AddFunction: First argument isn't a function." << endl; return false;} void *pfunction = const_cast<void *>(lua_topointer(vm, 2)); char key[32] = {0}; snprintf(key, 32, "%p", pfunction); cout << "Key: " << key << endl; string strkey = key; if (this->functions.find(strkey) != this->functions.end()){ luaL_unref(vm, LUA_REGISTRYINDEX, this->functions[strkey]);} this->functions[strkey] = luaL_ref(vm, LUA_REGISTRYINDEX); return true; Ok, when the code is executed... Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. 0x00007ffff6e6caa9 in std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > ::compare(std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&) const () from /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 Seriously, what's wrong with my code. Thanks for help. Edit 1: Ok, I've done the solution and still fails. I've tried directly insert a string but gives the same error. Let's see, the object is a bange::scene inherited from bange::function. I create the object with lua_newuserdata: bange::scene *scene = static_cast<bange::scene *>(lua_newuserdata(vm, sizeof(bange::scene))); (...) scene = new (scene) bange::scene(width, height, nlayers, vm); I need this for LUA garbage collection. Now the access to bange::function::Add from Lua: static int bangefunction_Add(lua_State *vm){ //userdata, function bange::function *function = reinterpret_cast<bange::function *>(lua_touserdata(vm, 1)); cout &lt&lt "object with bange::function: " &lt&lt function << endl; bool added = function->bange::function::Add(vm); lua_pushboolean(vm, static_cast<int>(added)); return 1; } Userdata is bange::scene stored in Lua. Knowing that userdata is scene, in fact, the object's direction is the same when I've created the scene before. I need the reinterpret_cast, and then call the method. The pointer "this" is still the same direction inside the method. solved I did a small test in the bange::function constructor which works without problems. bange::function::function(){ string test("test"); this->functions["test"] = 2; } I finally noticed that the problem is bange::function *function = reinterpret_cast<bange::function *>(lua_touserdata(vm, 1)); because the object is bange::scene and no bange::function (i admit it, a pointer corruption) and this seems more a code design issue. So this, in a way, is solved. Thanks everybody.

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Qt: TableWidget's ItemAt() acting weirdly

- by emredog

Hi, i'm working on a windows application, where in a dialog i query some data from Postgres, and manually show the output in a table widget. m_ui->tableWidget->setRowCount(joinedData.count()); for(int i=0; i<joinedData.count(); i++) //for each row { m_ui->tableWidget->setItem(i, 0, new QTableWidgetItem(joinedData[i].bobin.referenceNumber)); m_ui->tableWidget->setItem(i, 1, new QTableWidgetItem(QString::number(joinedData[i].bobin.width))); m_ui->tableWidget->setItem(i, 2, new QTableWidgetItem(QString::number(joinedData[i].tolerance.getHole()))); m_ui->tableWidget->setItem(i, 3, new QTableWidgetItem(QString::number(joinedData[i].tolerance.getLessThanZeroFive()))); m_ui->tableWidget->setItem(i, 4, new QTableWidgetItem(QString::number(joinedData[i].tolerance.getZeroFive_to_zeroSeven()))); m_ui->tableWidget->setItem(i, 5, new QTableWidgetItem(QString::number(joinedData[i].tolerance.getZeroFive_to_zeroSeven_repetitive()))); m_ui->tableWidget->setItem(i, 6, new QTableWidgetItem(QString::number(joinedData[i].tolerance.getZeroSeven_to_Three()))); m_ui->tableWidget->setItem(i, 7, new QTableWidgetItem(QString::number(joinedData[i].tolerance.getThree_to_five()))); m_ui->tableWidget->setItem(i, 8, new QTableWidgetItem(QString::number(joinedData[i].tolerance.getMoreThanFive()))); } Also, based on row and column information, i paint some of these tablewidgetitems to some colors, but i don't think it's relevant. I reimplemented the QDialog's contextMenuEvent, to obtain the right clicked tableWidgetItem's row and column coordinates: void BobinFlanView::contextMenuEvent(QContextMenuEvent *event) { QMenu menu(m_ui->tableWidget); //standard actions menu.addAction(this->markInactiveAction); menu.addAction(this->markActiveAction); menu.addSeparator(); menu.addAction(this->exportAction); menu.addAction(this->exportAllAction); //obtain the rightClickedItem QTableWidgetItem* clickedItem = m_ui->tableWidget->itemAt(m_ui->tableWidget->mapFromGlobal(event->globalPos())); // if it's a colored one, add some more actions if (clickedItem && clickedItem->column()>1 && clickedItem->row()>0) { //this is a property, i'm keeping this for a later use this->lastRightClickedItem = clickedItem; //debug purpose: QMessageBox::information(this, "", QString("clickedItem = %1, %2").arg(clickedItem->row()).arg(clickedItem->column())); QMessageBox::information(this, "", QString("globalClick = %1, %2\ntransformedPos = %3, %4").arg(event->globalX()).arg(event->globalY()) .arg(m_ui->tableWidget->mapFromGlobal(event->globalPos()).x()).arg(m_ui->tableWidget->mapFromGlobal(event->globalPos()).y())); menu.addSeparator(); menu.addAction(this->changeSelectedToleranceToUygun); menu.addAction(this->changeSelectedToleranceToUyar); menu.addAction(this->changeSelectedToleranceToDurdurUyar); //... some other irrevelant 'enable/disable' activities menu.exec(event->globalPos()); } The problem is, when i right click on the same item i get the same global coordinates, but randomly different row-column information. For instance, the global pos is exactly 600,230 but row-column pair is randomly (5,3) and (4,3). I mean, what?! Also, when i click to an item from the last to rows (later than 13, i guess) will never go into condition "if (clickedItem && clickedItem-column()1 && clickedItem-row()0)", i think it's mainly because 'clickedItem' is null. I'll be more than glad to share any more information, or even the full cpp-h-ui trio in order to get help. Thanks a lot.

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Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

- by mbcrump

Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created. Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. If you click on a word in that browser, it will start another search to the word you clicked on. Handy if you want to trackback something to it's true origin. The word you looked for will be highlighted in red. Clicking on the red word will open the containing file in a text based viewer. Clicking on any word in the opened document will start another search on that word. Free KatMouse The prime purpose of the KatMouse utility is to enhance the functionality of mice with a scroll wheel, offering 'universal' scrolling: moving the mouse wheel will scroll the window directly beneath the mouse cursor (not the one with the keyboard focus, which is default on Windows OSes). This is a major increase in the usefulness of the mouse wheel. Free ScreenR Instant Screencast with nothing to download. Works with Mac or PC and free. Free Start++ Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands. For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia! Free Synergy Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Free Texter Texter lets you define text substitution hot strings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day. Free Total Commander File handling, FTP, Archive handling and much more. Even works with Win3.11. COST/Trial Available Wizmouse WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel. Free Xmarks Bookmark sync and search between computers. Free General Utilities – This is a list for power user users or anyone that wants more out of Windows. I usually install a majority of these whenever I get a new system. Name Description License µTorrent µTorrent is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client for Windows or Mac with many features. I use this for downloading LEGAL media. Free Audacity Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information. Free AVast Free FREE Antivirus. Free CD Burner XP Pro CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Free CDEX You can extract digital audio CDs into mp3/wav. Free Combofix Combofix is a freeware (a legitimate spyware remover created by sUBs), Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Free Cpu-Z Provides information about some of the main devices of your system. Free Cropper Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. Free DropBox Drag and Drop files to sync between computers. Free DVD-Fab Converts/Copies DVDs/Blu-Ray to different formats. (like mp4, mkv, avi) COST/Trial Available FastStone Capture FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. Free ffdshow FFDShow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, H.264, FLV1, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 movies. Free Filezilla FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You can also download a server version. Free FireFox Web Browser, do you really need an explanation? Free FireGestures A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures. Free FoxIt Reader Light weight PDF viewer. You should install this with the advanced setting or it will install a toolbar and setup some shortcuts. Free gSynchIt Synch Gmail and Outlook. Even supports Outlook 2010 32/64 bit COST/Trial Available Hulu Desktop At home or in a hotel, this has replaced my cable/satellite subscription. Free ImgBurn ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Free Infrarecorder InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. Free KeePass KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. Free LastPass Another password management, synchronize between browsers, automatic form filling and more. Free Live Essentials One download and lots of programs including Mail, Live Writer, Movie Maker and more! Free Monitores MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to "Away" / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back. Free mRemote mRemote is a full-featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. Free Open Office OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Free Paint.NET Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface for editing photos. Free Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Free Pidgin Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once. Free PING PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Free Putty PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. Free Revo Uninstaller Revo Uninstaller Pro helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer easily! Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. Free Desktop Management – The list below represent the best in Windows Desktop Management. Name Description License 7 Stacks Allows users to have "stacks" of icons in their taskbar. Free Executor Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. Free Fences Fences is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use. Free RocketDock Rocket Dock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock. Free WindowsTab Tabbing is an essential feature of modern web browsers. Window Tabs brings the productivity of tabbed window management to all of your desktop applications. Free

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Netflix, jQuery, JSONP, and OData

- by Stephen Walther

At the last MIX conference, Netflix announced that they are exposing their catalog of movie information using the OData protocol. This is great news! This means that you can take advantage of all of the advanced OData querying features against a live database of Netflix movies. In this blog entry, I’ll demonstrate how you can use Netflix, jQuery, JSONP, and OData to create a simple movie lookup form. The form enables you to enter a movie title, or part of a movie title, and display a list of matching movies. For example, Figure 1 illustrates the movies displayed when you enter the value robot into the lookup form. Using the Netflix OData Catalog API You can learn about the Netflix OData Catalog API at the following website: http://developer.netflix.com/docs/oData_Catalog The nice thing about this website is that it provides plenty of samples. It also has a good general reference for OData. For example, the website includes a list of OData filter operators and functions. The Netflix Catalog API exposes 4 top-level resources: Titles – A database of Movie information including interesting movie properties such as synopsis, BoxArt, and Cast. People – A database of people information including interesting information such as Awards, TitlesDirected, and TitlesActedIn. Languages – Enables you to get title information in different languages. Genres – Enables you to get title information for specific movie genres. OData is REST based. This means that you can perform queries by putting together the right URL. For example, if you want to get a list of the movies that were released after 2010 and that had an average rating greater than 4 then you can enter the following URL in the address bar of your browser: http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=ReleaseYear gt 2010&AverageRating gt 4 Entering this URL returns the movies in Figure 2. Creating the Movie Lookup Form The complete code for the Movie Lookup form is contained in Listing 1. Listing 1 – MovieLookup.htm <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Netflix with jQuery</title> <style type="text/css"> #movieTemplateContainer div { width:400px; padding: 10px; margin: 10px; border: black solid 1px; } </style> <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="App_Scripts/Microtemplates.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head> <body> <label>Search Movies:</label> <input id="movieName" size="50" /> <button id="btnLookup">Lookup</button> <div id="movieTemplateContainer"></div> <script id="movieTemplate" type="text/html"> <div> <img src="<%=BoxArtSmallUrl %>" /> <strong><%=Name%></strong> <p> <%=Synopsis %> </p> </div> </script> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#btnLookup").click(function () { // Build OData query var movieName = $("#movieName").val(); var query = "http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog" // netflix base url + "/Titles" // top-level resource + "?$filter=substringof('" + escape(movieName) + "',Name)" // filter by movie name + "&$callback=callback" // jsonp request + "&$format=json"; // json request // Make JSONP call to Netflix $.ajax({ dataType: "jsonp", url: query, jsonpCallback: "callback", success: callback }); }); function callback(result) { // unwrap result var movies = result["d"]["results"]; // show movies in template var showMovie = tmpl("movieTemplate"); var html = ""; for (var i = 0; i < movies.length; i++) { // flatten movie movies[i].BoxArtSmallUrl = movies[i].BoxArt.SmallUrl; // render with template html += showMovie(movies[i]); } $("#movieTemplateContainer").html(html); } </script> </body> </html> The HTML page in Listing 1 includes two JavaScript libraries: <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="App_Scripts/Microtemplates.js" type="text/javascript"></script> The first script tag retrieves jQuery from the Microsoft Ajax CDN. You can learn more about the Microsoft Ajax CDN by visiting the following website: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/cdn.ashx The second script tag is used to reference Resig’s micro-templating library. Because I want to use a template to display each movie, I need this library: http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/ When you enter a value into the Search Movies input field and click the button, the following JavaScript code is executed: // Build OData query var movieName = $("#movieName").val(); var query = "http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog" // netflix base url + "/Titles" // top-level resource + "?$filter=substringof('" + escape(movieName) + "',Name)" // filter by movie name + "&$callback=callback" // jsonp request + "&$format=json"; // json request // Make JSONP call to Netflix $.ajax({ dataType: "jsonp", url: query, jsonpCallback: "callback", success: callback }); This code Is used to build a query that will be executed against the Netflix Catalog API. For example, if you enter the search phrase King Kong then the following URL is created: http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/Titles?$filter=substringof(‘King%20Kong’,Name)&$callback=callback&$format=json This query includes the following parameters: $filter – You assign a filter expression to this parameter to filter the movie results. $callback – You assign the name of a JavaScript callback method to this parameter. OData calls this method to return the movie results. $format – you assign either the value json or xml to this parameter to specify how the format of the movie results. Notice that all of the OData parameters -- $filter, $callback, $format -- start with a dollar sign $. The Movie Lookup form uses JSONP to retrieve data across the Internet. Because WCF Data Services supports JSONP, and Netflix uses WCF Data Services to expose movies using the OData protocol, you can use JSONP when interacting with the Netflix Catalog API. To learn more about using JSONP with OData, see Pablo Castro’s blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/pablo/archive/2009/02/25/adding-support-for-jsonp-and-url-controlled-format-to-ado-net-data-services.aspx The actual JSONP call is performed by calling the $.ajax() method. When this call successfully completes, the JavaScript callback() method is called. The callback() method looks like this: function callback(result) { // unwrap result var movies = result["d"]["results"]; // show movies in template var showMovie = tmpl("movieTemplate"); var html = ""; for (var i = 0; i < movies.length; i++) { // flatten movie movies[i].BoxArtSmallUrl = movies[i].BoxArt.SmallUrl; // render with template html += showMovie(movies[i]); } $("#movieTemplateContainer").html(html); } The movie results from Netflix are passed to the callback method. The callback method takes advantage of Resig’s micro-templating library to display each of the movie results. A template used to display each movie is passed to the tmpl() method. The movie template looks like this: <script id="movieTemplate" type="text/html"> <div> <img src="<%=BoxArtSmallUrl %>" /> <strong><%=Name%></strong> <p> <%=Synopsis %> </p> </div> </script> This template looks like a server-side ASP.NET template. However, the template is rendered in the client (browser) instead of the server. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to demonstrate how well jQuery works with OData. We managed to use a number of interesting open-source libraries and open protocols while building the Movie Lookup form including jQuery, JSONP, JSON, and OData.

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West Wind WebSurge - an easy way to Load Test Web Applications

- by Rick Strahl

A few months ago on a project the subject of load testing came up. We were having some serious issues with a Web application that would start spewing SQL lock errors under somewhat heavy load. These sort of errors can be tough to catch, precisely because they only occur under load and not during typical development testing. To replicate this error more reliably we needed to put a load on the application and run it for a while before these SQL errors would flare up. It’s been a while since I’d looked at load testing tools, so I spent a bit of time looking at different tools and frankly didn’t really find anything that was a good fit. A lot of tools were either a pain to use, didn’t have the basic features I needed, or are extravagantly expensive. In the end I got frustrated enough to build an initially small custom load test solution that then morphed into a more generic library, then gained a console front end and eventually turned into a full blown Web load testing tool that is now called West Wind WebSurge. I got seriously frustrated looking for tools every time I needed some quick and dirty load testing for an application. If my aim is to just put an application under heavy enough load to find a scalability problem in code, or to simply try and push an application to its limits on the hardware it’s running I shouldn’t have to have to struggle to set up tests. It should be easy enough to get going in a few minutes, so that the testing can be set up quickly so that it can be done on a regular basis without a lot of hassle. And that was the goal when I started to build out my initial custom load tester into a more widely usable tool. If you’re in a hurry and you want to check it out, you can find more information and download links here: West Wind WebSurge Product Page Walk through Video Download link (zip) Install from Chocolatey Source on GitHub For a more detailed discussion of the why’s and how’s and some background continue reading. How did I get here? When I started out on this path, I wasn’t planning on building a tool like this myself – but I got frustrated enough looking at what’s out there to think that I can do better than what’s available for the most common simple load testing scenarios. When we ran into the SQL lock problems I mentioned, I started looking around what’s available for Web load testing solutions that would work for our whole team which consisted of a few developers and a couple of IT guys both of which needed to be able to run the tests. It had been a while since I looked at tools and I figured that by now there should be some good solutions out there, but as it turns out I didn’t really find anything that fit our relatively simple needs without costing an arm and a leg… I spent the better part of a day installing and trying various load testing tools and to be frank most of them were either terrible at what they do, incredibly unfriendly to use, used some terminology I couldn’t even parse, or were extremely expensive (and I mean in the ‘sell your liver’ range of expensive). Pick your poison. There are also a number of online solutions for load testing and they actually looked more promising, but those wouldn’t work well for our scenario as the application is running inside of a private VPN with no outside access into the VPN. Most of those online solutions also ended up being very pricey as well – presumably because of the bandwidth required to test over the open Web can be enormous. When I asked around on Twitter what people were using– I got mostly… crickets. Several people mentioned Visual Studio Load Test, and most other suggestions pointed to online solutions. I did get a bunch of responses though with people asking to let them know what I found – apparently I’m not alone when it comes to finding load testing tools that are effective and easy to use. As to Visual Studio, the higher end skus of Visual Studio and the test edition include a Web load testing tool, which is quite powerful, but there are a number of issues with that: First it’s tied to Visual Studio so it’s not very portable – you need a VS install. I also find the test setup and terminology used by the VS test runner extremely confusing. Heck, it’s complicated enough that there’s even a Pluralsight course on using the Visual Studio Web test from Steve Smith. And of course you need to have one of the high end Visual Studio Skus, and those are mucho Dinero ($$$) – just for the load testing that’s rarely an option. Some of the tools are ultra extensive and let you run analysis tools on the target serves which is useful, but in most cases – just plain overkill and only distracts from what I tend to be ultimately interested in: Reproducing problems that occur at high load, and finding the upper limits and ‘what if’ scenarios as load is ramped up increasingly against a site. Yes it’s useful to have Web app instrumentation, but often that’s not what you’re interested in. I still fondly remember early days of Web testing when Microsoft had the WAST (Web Application Stress Tool) tool, which was rather simple – and also somewhat limited – but easily allowed you to create stress tests very quickly. It had some serious limitations (mainly that it didn’t work with SSL), but the idea behind it was excellent: Create tests quickly and easily and provide a decent engine to run it locally with minimal setup. You could get set up and run tests within a few minutes. Unfortunately, that tool died a quiet death as so many of Microsoft’s tools that probably were built by an intern and then abandoned, even though there was a lot of potential and it was actually fairly widely used. Eventually the tools was no longer downloadable and now it simply doesn’t work anymore on higher end hardware. West Wind Web Surge – Making Load Testing Quick and Easy So I ended up creating West Wind WebSurge out of rebellious frustration… The goal of WebSurge is to make it drop dead simple to create load tests. It’s super easy to capture sessions either using the built in capture tool (big props to Eric Lawrence, Telerik and FiddlerCore which made that piece a snap), using the full version of Fiddler and exporting sessions, or by manually or programmatically creating text files based on plain HTTP headers to create requests. I’ve been using this tool for 4 months now on a regular basis on various projects as a reality check for performance and scalability and it’s worked extremely well for finding small performance issues. I also use it regularly as a simple URL tester, as it allows me to quickly enter a URL plus headers and content and test that URL and its results along with the ability to easily save one or more of those URLs. A few weeks back I made a walk through video that goes over most of the features of WebSurge in some detail: Note that the UI has slightly changed since then, so there are some UI improvements. Most notably the test results screen has been updated recently to a different layout and to provide more information about each URL in a session at a glance. The video and the main WebSurge site has a lot of info of basic operations. For the rest of this post I’ll talk about a few deeper aspects that may be of interest while also giving a glance at how WebSurge works. Session Capturing As you would expect, WebSurge works with Sessions of Urls that are played back under load. Here’s what the main Session View looks like: You can create session entries manually by individually adding URLs to test (on the Request tab on the right) and saving them, or you can capture output from Web Browsers, Windows Desktop applications that call services, your own applications using the built in Capture tool. With this tool you can capture anything HTTP -SSL requests and content from Web pages, AJAX calls, SOAP or REST services – again anything that uses Windows or .NET HTTP APIs. Behind the scenes the capture tool uses FiddlerCore so basically anything you can capture with Fiddler you can also capture with Web Surge Session capture tool. Alternately you can actually use Fiddler as well, and then export the captured Fiddler trace to a file, which can then be imported into WebSurge. This is a nice way to let somebody capture session without having to actually install WebSurge or for your customers to provide an exact playback scenario for a given set of URLs that cause a problem perhaps. Note that not all applications work with Fiddler’s proxy unless you configure a proxy. For example, .NET Web applications that make HTTP calls usually don’t show up in Fiddler by default. For those .NET applications you can explicitly override proxy settings to capture those requests to service calls. The capture tool also has handy optional filters that allow you to filter by domain, to help block out noise that you typically don’t want to include in your requests. For example, if your pages include links to CDNs, or Google Analytics or social links you typically don’t want to include those in your load test, so by capturing just from a specific domain you are guaranteed content from only that one domain. Additionally you can provide url filters in the configuration file – filters allow to provide filter strings that if contained in a url will cause requests to be ignored. Again this is useful if you don’t filter by domain but you want to filter out things like static image, css and script files etc. Often you’re not interested in the load characteristics of these static and usually cached resources as they just add noise to tests and often skew the overall url performance results. In my testing I tend to care only about my dynamic requests. SSL Captures require Fiddler Note, that in order to capture SSL requests you’ll have to install the Fiddler’s SSL certificate. The easiest way to do this is to install Fiddler and use its SSL configuration options to get the certificate into the local certificate store. There’s a document on the Telerik site that provides the exact steps to get SSL captures to work with Fiddler and therefore with WebSurge. Session Storage A group of URLs entered or captured make up a Session. Sessions can be saved and restored easily as they use a very simple text format that simply stored on disk. The format is slightly customized HTTP header traces separated by a separator line. The headers are standard HTTP headers except that the full URL instead of just the domain relative path is stored as part of the 1st HTTP header line for easier parsing. Because it’s just text and uses the same format that Fiddler uses for exports, it’s super easy to create Sessions by hand manually or under program control writing out to a simple text file. You can see what this format looks like in the Capture window figure above – the raw captured format is also what’s stored to disk and what WebSurge parses from. The only ‘custom’ part of these headers is that 1st line contains the full URL instead of the domain relative path and Host: header. The rest of each header are just plain standard HTTP headers with each individual URL isolated by a separator line. The format used here also uses what Fiddler produces for exports, so it’s easy to exchange or view data either in Fiddler or WebSurge. Urls can also be edited interactively so you can modify the headers easily as well: Again – it’s just plain HTTP headers so anything you can do with HTTP can be added here. Use it for single URL Testing Incidentally I’ve also found this form as an excellent way to test and replay individual URLs for simple non-load testing purposes. Because you can capture a single or many URLs and store them on disk, this also provides a nice HTTP playground where you can record URLs with their headers, and fire them one at a time or as a session and see results immediately. It’s actually an easy way for REST presentations and I find the simple UI flow actually easier than using Fiddler natively. Finally you can save one or more URLs as a session for later retrieval. I’m using this more and more for simple URL checks. Overriding Cookies and Domains Speaking of HTTP headers – you can also overwrite cookies used as part of the options. One thing that happens with modern Web applications is that you have session cookies in use for authorization. These cookies tend to expire at some point which would invalidate a test. Using the Options dialog you can actually override the cookie: which replaces the cookie for all requests with the cookie value specified here. You can capture a valid cookie from a manual HTTP request in your browser and then paste into the cookie field, to replace the existing Cookie with the new one that is now valid. Likewise you can easily replace the domain so if you captured urls on west-wind.com and now you want to test on localhost you can do that easily easily as well. You could even do something like capture on store.west-wind.com and then test on localhost/store which would also work. Running Load Tests Once you’ve created a Session you can specify the length of the test in seconds, and specify the number of simultaneous threads to run each session on. Sessions run through each of the URLs in the session sequentially by default. One option in the options list above is that you can also randomize the URLs so each thread runs requests in a different order. This avoids bunching up URLs initially when tests start as all threads run the same requests simultaneously which can sometimes skew the results of the first few minutes of a test. While sessions run some progress information is displayed: By default there’s a live view of requests displayed in a Console-like window. On the bottom of the window there’s a running total summary that displays where you’re at in the test, how many requests have been processed and what the requests per second count is currently for all requests. Note that for tests that run over a thousand requests a second it’s a good idea to turn off the console display. While the console display is nice to see that something is happening and also gives you slight idea what’s happening with actual requests, once a lot of requests are processed, this UI updating actually adds a lot of CPU overhead to the application which may cause the actual load generated to be reduced. If you are running a 1000 requests a second there’s not much to see anyway as requests roll by way too fast to see individual lines anyway. If you look on the options panel, there is a NoProgressEvents option that disables the console display. Note that the summary display is still updated approximately once a second so you can always tell that the test is still running. Test Results When the test is done you get a simple Results display: On the right you get an overall summary as well as breakdown by each URL in the session. Both success and failures are highlighted so it’s easy to see what’s breaking in your load test. The report can be printed or you can also open the HTML document in your default Web Browser for printing to PDF or saving the HTML document to disk. The list on the right shows you a partial list of the URLs that were fired so you can look in detail at the request and response data. The list can be filtered by success and failure requests. Each list is partial only (at the moment) and limited to a max of 1000 items in order to render reasonably quickly. Each item in the list can be clicked to see the full request and response data: This particularly useful for errors so you can quickly see and copy what request data was used and in the case of a GET request you can also just click the link to quickly jump to the page. For non-GET requests you can find the URL in the Session list, and use the context menu to Test the URL as configured including any HTTP content data to send. You get to see the full HTTP request and response as well as a link in the Request header to go visit the actual page. Not so useful for a POST as above, but definitely useful for GET requests. Finally you can also get a few charts. The most useful one is probably the Request per Second chart which can be accessed from the Charts menu or shortcut. Here’s what it looks like: Results can also be exported to JSON, XML and HTML. Keep in mind that these files can get very large rather quickly though, so exports can end up taking a while to complete. Command Line Interface WebSurge runs with a small core load engine and this engine is plugged into the front end application I’ve shown so far. There’s also a command line interface available to run WebSurge from the Windows command prompt. Using the command line you can run tests for either an individual URL (similar to AB.exe for example) or a full Session file. By default when it runs WebSurgeCli shows progress every second showing total request count, failures and the requests per second for the entire test. A silent option can turn off this progress display and display only the results. The command line interface can be useful for build integration which allows checking for failures perhaps or hitting a specific requests per second count etc. It’s also nice to use this as quick and dirty URL test facility similar to the way you’d use Apache Bench (ab.exe). Unlike ab.exe though, WebSurgeCli supports SSL and makes it much easier to create multi-URL tests using either manual editing or the WebSurge UI. Current Status Currently West Wind WebSurge is still in Beta status. I’m still adding small new features and tweaking the UI in an attempt to make it as easy and self-explanatory as possible to run. Documentation for the UI and specialty features is also still a work in progress. I plan on open-sourcing this product, but it won’t be free. There’s a free version available that provides a limited number of threads and request URLs to run. A relatively low cost license removes the thread and request limitations. Pricing info can be found on the Web site – there’s an introductory price which is $99 at the moment which I think is reasonable compared to most other for pay solutions out there that are exorbitant by comparison… The reason code is not available yet is – well, the UI portion of the app is a bit embarrassing in its current monolithic state. The UI started as a very simple interface originally that later got a lot more complex – yeah, that never happens, right? Unless there’s a lot of interest I don’t foresee re-writing the UI entirely (which would be ideal), but in the meantime at least some cleanup is required before I dare to publish it :-). The code will likely be released with version 1.0. I’m very interested in feedback. Do you think this could be useful to you and provide value over other tools you may or may not have used before? I hope so – it already has provided a ton of value for me and the work I do that made the development worthwhile at this point. You can leave a comment below, or for more extensive discussions you can post a message on the West Wind Message Board in the WebSurge section Microsoft MVPs and Insiders get a free License If you’re a Microsoft MVP or a Microsoft Insider you can get a full license for free. Send me a link to your current, official Microsoft profile and I’ll send you a not-for resale license. Send any messages to [email protected]. Resources For more info on WebSurge and to download it to try it out, use the following links. West Wind WebSurge Home Download West Wind WebSurge Getting Started with West Wind WebSurge Video© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in ASP.NET Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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14+ Real Estate WordPress Themes

- by Aditi

If you are looking for a great WordPress real estate theme. Below is a list of some of the best wordpress real estate themes, so you can find one, which is the best suited for you and be at par with increasing industry demands in real estates business.We have covered only the best themes available. The Themes are flexible & can be used by anybody in real estate business. If you are realtor, agent, appraiser or realty these can be modified as per your use. Estate It is an immensely powerful and simple to manage business theme. It offers advanced SEO control, clean code and styling modification features. It has new “Properties” management facility when installed – proving it’s far more than just a WordPress theme. It offers flexible page templates, an advanced search facility that allows you to drill down into properties based on very specific criteria, Google Maps integration and smart property images management. It is a complete web solution. It also has IDX functionality due to dsIDXpress plugin integration, which allows multi-listing services. Price: $200 View Demo Download ElegantEstate It makes your WordPress blog into a full-feature real estate website. The theme makes browsing your listings easy, and adds special integration features for property info, photos, Google Maps and more. Help increase sales by establishing an elegant and professional online presence today. It has opera compatibility, Netscape compatibility, Safari compatibility, WordPress 3.0 compatibility. It comes with five color schemes, threaded comments, optional blog-style structure, Gravatar ready, firefox compatible, IE8 + IE7 + IE6 compatible, advertisement ready, widget ready sidebars, theme options page, custom thumbnail images, PSD files, valid XHTML + CSS, smooth table less design, ePanel theme options, page templates, complete localization and many more features. Price: $39 (Package includes more than 55 themes) View Demo Download Open House Open House is fully compatible with WordPress 3.0+ and a highly customizable Real Estate WordPress theme. It has Google Maps Integration with Street View. It has a professional look for Agents and Realtors both. It is best suited for all markets and countries with theme localization, translation and internationalization. It provides for English, Spanish and Portuguese language files in the Developer Package. It has custom scripts, which makes it easy to add/delete/modify listings. It also includes photo gallery with a lightbox effect, gorgeous photo fade animations and automatic Google Maps integration. The theme can be used as a single or multi-agent website with individual Agent-Realtor pages with listings and biography information, Agent photo uploader, financing calculator.There is Multi Category search for potential customers to locate the house they want. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Residence Real Estate It is a WordPress 3.0+ compatible stunning real estate theme. It has a dynamic real estate framework management module for easy edit-delete-add more features options, which makes this theme super easy to customize to the market needs. It allows you to add your own labels and values in your own language and switch the theme to your own language with English and Spanish files included with the ability to add your own language. It offers Multi-Category search with breadcrumb filtered results, easy photo gallery management with drag-drop sorting of images. It allows you to build your own multi-category search section menu with custom labels-choices and unlimited dropdown menus. They have been presented in a professional module with search results in breadcrumb navigation. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Smooth Smooth is a WordPress Real Estate theme. It is a complete theme, which comes with Multi Category Search, Google Maps Integration, Agent Photo and Logo uploader that offers a professional and extremely affordable solution for Realtors and Agents to showcase their properties with ease. You can add your listings with the extremely easy and flexible Dynamic Real Estate Framework, edit-add-modify-delete all features, labels and values within the WordPress administration and upload unlimited photos to your galleries with latest WordPress 3.0+ features. It is a complete solution for real estate sites. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Homeowners It is another WordPress Real Estate theme, which is a fast loading optimized theme with Google Maps Integration, fully compatible with WordPress 3.0 features and all Real Estate markets. It has a professional clean look and it is full of features extremely easy to modify. It also provides for 12 new styles provided. English, Spanish and Portuguese language files are provided in the Developer Package. Homeowners WordPress Real Estate features custom scripts that make add/delete/modify listings an easy task with an included photo gallery with a lightbox effect and automatic Google Map integration with street view (New) Agents will have access only to their own listings and add the listing management for their account making this theme an ideal affordable solution for Realtors and Real Estate agencies. The theme can be used as a single or multi-agent website with individual Agent-Realtor pages with listings and biography information, Agent photo uploader, financing calculator. Multi category search has also been provided. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Real Agent Real Estate This theme is a WordPress 3.0+ compatible clean grid based real estate theme. It has a dynamic real estate framework management module for easy edit-delete-add more features options. It is easy to customize according to market. It allows you to add your own labels and values in your own language switch the theme to your own language with English and Spanish files included with the ability to add your own language. Multi-Category search with breadcrumb filtered results, easy photo gallery management with drag-drop sorting of images. You can upload property photos in bulk with the native WordPress uploader and the new image editing and resizing options in WordPress 3.0+. The theme features 5 different color styles, blue, black, red, green and purple with professional layouts, logo and agent photo uploaders. This theme is best suited for individual or multiple agents both. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Agent Press The AgentPress theme is an ideal solution for real estate agents. It offers multiple page templates that can be used to create a complete real estate website. You can create from single property templates to a custom homepage easily with it. It is compatible to WordPress 3.0 and 3.1. It has custom background/header, property template, 6 layout options, fixed width, threaded comments and many more features. Price: $99.95 View Demo Download Real Estate It is one of the best Real Estate themes. It offers single click auto install of the site, Allow user to pay & submit properties on your site, Multi-agent site with profiles, Strategically built real estate site with professional design, User dashboard to edit/renew their submissions, Auto generated Google Maps and Image Slideshows and many more unique features. Once the users search property as per their criteria, the properties are listed with all the necessary parameters that let them select the property of their choice. Users can also add the property to favorite so they can check the property later from their member area dashboard. Admin may display different sidebar on this page and add widgets of their choice. This theme is full of custom, dynamic widgets such as top agents, finance calculator, user login; advertise blocks, testimonials and so on. There is a property details page where users can see the actual property. The agent details is displayed with the full contact details and appropriate links so the visitor can get all info about the property being sold, seller and may contact them by filling out a simple form. The email will be sent directly to the person who listed the property. Price: $89.95 Single | $159.95 Developer View Demo Download Broker Real Estate It is also a WordPress 3.0+ compatible real estate theme. It has a featured property slideshow, dynamic real estate framework management module for easy edit-delete-add more features. You can add your own labels and values in your own language. It offers multi-category search with breadcrumb-filtered results, easy photo gallery management with drag-drop sorting of images. You can also build your own multi-category search section menu with custom labels-choices and unlimited dropdown menus. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Decasa It has custom search panel that lets your user easily browse your properties by keyword search or category select drop downs. It offers the property exposé, which is a user-friendly overview over the most important details of each real estate object. You can easily add this data through a post settings meta box on the post edit screen. You can easily create a real estate image gallery. Its theme options panel makes it easy to make the basic theme settings. It supports the new WordPress post thumbnail feature. When uploading an image file the theme will automatically create all the necessary image size. You can also create your own custom menu easily and fast with drag and drop without touching any code. Price: 39 € View Demo Download RealtorPress A real estate premium WordPress theme from PremiumPress. Versatile WordPress Theme that can be used by individual agents or real estate companies. The theme allows you to easily add property listings via the custom backend admin area or import CSV spreadsheets. It features customisable search options, Google maps integration, real estate data custom field creator, image management tools and more. Price: $79 | Premium Collection: $259 (all PremiumPress themes) View Demo Download Related posts:21+ WordPress Photo Blog & Portfolio Themes 14+ WordPress Portfolio Themes Professional WordPress Business Themes

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Parallelism in .NET – Part 3, Imperative Data Parallelism: Early Termination

- by Reed

Although simple data parallelism allows us to easily parallelize many of our iteration statements, there are cases that it does not handle well. In my previous discussion, I focused on data parallelism with no shared state, and where every element is being processed exactly the same. Unfortunately, there are many common cases where this does not happen. If we are dealing with a loop that requires early termination, extra care is required when parallelizing. Often, while processing in a loop, once a certain condition is met, it is no longer necessary to continue processing. This may be a matter of finding a specific element within the collection, or reaching some error case. The important distinction here is that, it is often impossible to know until runtime, what set of elements needs to be processed. In my initial discussion of data parallelism, I mentioned that this technique is a candidate when you can decompose the problem based on the data involved, and you wish to apply a single operation concurrently on all of the elements of a collection. This covers many of the potential cases, but sometimes, after processing some of the elements, we need to stop processing. As an example, lets go back to our previous Parallel.ForEach example with contacting a customer. However, this time, we’ll change the requirements slightly. In this case, we’ll add an extra condition – if the store is unable to email the customer, we will exit gracefully. The thinking here, of course, is that if the store is currently unable to email, the next time this operation runs, it will handle the same situation, so we can just skip our processing entirely. The original, serial case, with this extra condition, might look something like the following: foreach(var customer in customers) { // Run some process that takes some time... DateTime lastContact = theStore.GetLastContact(customer); TimeSpan timeSinceContact = DateTime.Now - lastContact; // If it's been more than two weeks, send an email, and update... if (timeSinceContact.Days > 14) { // Exit gracefully if we fail to email, since this // entire process can be repeated later without issue. if (theStore.EmailCustomer(customer) == false) break; customer.LastEmailContact = DateTime.Now; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Here, we’re processing our loop, but at any point, if we fail to send our email successfully, we just abandon this process, and assume that it will get handled correctly the next time our routine is run. If we try to parallelize this using Parallel.ForEach, as we did previously, we’ll run into an error almost immediately: the break statement we’re using is only valid when enclosed within an iteration statement, such as foreach. When we switch to Parallel.ForEach, we’re no longer within an iteration statement – we’re a delegate running in a method. This needs to be handled slightly differently when parallelized. Instead of using the break statement, we need to utilize a new class in the Task Parallel Library: ParallelLoopState. The ParallelLoopState class is intended to allow concurrently running loop bodies a way to interact with each other, and provides us with a way to break out of a loop. In order to use this, we will use a different overload of Parallel.ForEach which takes an IEnumerable<T> and an Action<T, ParallelLoopState> instead of an Action<T>. Using this, we can parallelize the above operation by doing: Parallel.ForEach(customers, (customer, parallelLoopState) => { // Run some process that takes some time... DateTime lastContact = theStore.GetLastContact(customer); TimeSpan timeSinceContact = DateTime.Now - lastContact; // If it's been more than two weeks, send an email, and update... if (timeSinceContact.Days > 14) { // Exit gracefully if we fail to email, since this // entire process can be repeated later without issue. if (theStore.EmailCustomer(customer) == false) parallelLoopState.Break(); else customer.LastEmailContact = DateTime.Now; } }); There are a couple of important points here. First, we didn’t actually instantiate the ParallelLoopState instance. It was provided directly to us via the Parallel class. All we needed to do was change our lambda expression to reflect that we want to use the loop state, and the Parallel class creates an instance for our use. We also needed to change our logic slightly when we call Break(). Since Break() doesn’t stop the program flow within our block, we needed to add an else case to only set the property in customer when we succeeded. This same technique can be used to break out of a Parallel.For loop. That being said, there is a huge difference between using ParallelLoopState to cause early termination and to use break in a standard iteration statement. When dealing with a loop serially, break will immediately terminate the processing within the closest enclosing loop statement. Calling ParallelLoopState.Break(), however, has a very different behavior. The issue is that, now, we’re no longer processing one element at a time. If we break in one of our threads, there are other threads that will likely still be executing. This leads to an important observation about termination of parallel code: Early termination in parallel routines is not immediate. Code will continue to run after you request a termination. This may seem problematic at first, but it is something you just need to keep in mind while designing your routine. ParallelLoopState.Break() should be thought of as a request. We are telling the runtime that no elements that were in the collection past the element we’re currently processing need to be processed, and leaving it up to the runtime to decide how to handle this as gracefully as possible. Although this may seem problematic at first, it is a good thing. If the runtime tried to immediately stop processing, many of our elements would be partially processed. It would be like putting a return statement in a random location throughout our loop body – which could have horrific consequences to our code’s maintainability. In order to understand and effectively write parallel routines, we, as developers, need a subtle, but profound shift in our thinking. We can no longer think in terms of sequential processes, but rather need to think in terms of requests to the system that may be handled differently than we’d first expect. This is more natural to developers who have dealt with asynchronous models previously, but is an important distinction when moving to concurrent programming models. As an example, I’ll discuss the Break() method. ParallelLoopState.Break() functions in a way that may be unexpected at first. When you call Break() from a loop body, the runtime will continue to process all elements of the collection that were found prior to the element that was being processed when the Break() method was called. This is done to keep the behavior of the Break() method as close to the behavior of the break statement as possible. We can see the behavior in this simple code: var collection = Enumerable.Range(0, 20); var pResult = Parallel.ForEach(collection, (element, state) => { if (element > 10) { Console.WriteLine("Breaking on {0}", element); state.Break(); } Console.WriteLine(element); }); If we run this, we get a result that may seem unexpected at first: 0 2 1 5 6 3 4 10 Breaking on 11 11 Breaking on 12 12 9 Breaking on 13 13 7 8 Breaking on 15 15 What is occurring here is that we loop until we find the first element where the element is greater than 10. In this case, this was found, the first time, when one of our threads reached element 11. It requested that the loop stop by calling Break() at this point. However, the loop continued processing until all of the elements less than 11 were completed, then terminated. This means that it will guarantee that elements 9, 7, and 8 are completed before it stops processing. You can see our other threads that were running each tried to break as well, but since Break() was called on the element with a value of 11, it decides which elements (0-10) must be processed. If this behavior is not desirable, there is another option. Instead of calling ParallelLoopState.Break(), you can call ParallelLoopState.Stop(). The Stop() method requests that the runtime terminate as soon as possible , without guaranteeing that any other elements are processed. Stop() will not stop the processing within an element, so elements already being processed will continue to be processed. It will prevent new elements, even ones found earlier in the collection, from being processed. Also, when Stop() is called, the ParallelLoopState’s IsStopped property will return true. This lets longer running processes poll for this value, and return after performing any necessary cleanup. The basic rule of thumb for choosing between Break() and Stop() is the following. Use ParallelLoopState.Stop() when possible, since it terminates more quickly. This is particularly useful in situations where you are searching for an element or a condition in the collection. Once you’ve found it, you do not need to do any other processing, so Stop() is more appropriate. Use ParallelLoopState.Break() if you need to more closely match the behavior of the C# break statement. Both methods behave differently than our C# break statement. Unfortunately, when parallelizing a routine, more thought and care needs to be put into every aspect of your routine than you may otherwise expect. This is due to my second observation: Parallelizing a routine will almost always change its behavior. This sounds crazy at first, but it’s a concept that’s so simple its easy to forget. We’re purposely telling the system to process more than one thing at the same time, which means that the sequence in which things get processed is no longer deterministic. It is easy to change the behavior of your routine in very subtle ways by introducing parallelism. Often, the changes are not avoidable, even if they don’t have any adverse side effects. This leads to my final observation for this post: Parallelization is something that should be handled with care and forethought, added by design, and not just introduced casually.

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IIS SSL Certificate Renewal Pain

- by Rick Strahl

I’m in the middle of my annual certificate renewal for the West Wind site and I can honestly say that I hate IIS’s certificate system. When it works it’s fine, but when it doesn’t man can it be a pain. Because I deal with public certificates on my site merely once a year, and you have to perform the certificate dance just the right way, I seem to run into some sort of trouble every year, thinking that Microsoft surely must have addressed the issues I ran into previously – HA! Not so. Don’t ever use the Renew Certificate Feature in IIS! The first rule that I should have never forgotten is that certificate renewals in IIS (7 is what I’m using but I think it’s no different in 7.5 and 8), simply don’t work if you’re submitting to get a public certificate from a certificate authority. I use DNSimple for my DNS domain management and SSL certificates because they provide ridiculously easy domain management and good prices for SSL certs – especially wildcard certificates, which is what I use on west-wind.com. Certificates in IIS can be found pegged to the machine root. If you go into the IIS Manager, go to the machine root the tree and then click on certificates and you then get various certificate options: Both of these options create a new Certificate request (CSR), which is just a text file. But if you’re silly enough like me to click on the Renew button on your old certificate, you’ll find that you end up generating a very long Certificate Request that looks nothing like the original certificate request and the format that’s used for this is not accepted by most certificate authorities. While I’m not sure exactly what the problem is, it simply looks like IIS is respecting none of your original certificate bit size choices and is generating a huge certificate request that is 3 times the size of a ‘normal’ certificate request. The end result is (and I’ve done this at least twice now) is that the certificate processor is likely to fail processing those renewals. Always create a new Certificate While it’s a little more work and you have to remember how to fill out the certificate request properly, this is the safe way to make sure your certificate generates properly. First comes the Distinguished Name Properties dialog: Ah yes you have to love the nomenclature of this stuff. Distinguished name, Common name – WTF is a common name? It doesn’t look common to me! Make sure this form gets filled out correctly. Common NameThis is the domain name of the Web site. In my case I’m creating a wildcard certificate so I’m using the * prefix. If you’re purchasing a certificate for a specific domain use www.west-wind.com or store.west-wind.com for example. Make sure this matches the EXACT domain you’re trying to use secure access on because that’s all the certificate is going to work on unless you get a wildcard certificate. Organization Is the name of your company or organization. Depending on the kind of certificate you purchase this name will show up on your certificate. Most low end SSL certificates (ie. those that cost under $100 for single domains) don’t list the organization, the higher signature certificates that also require extensive validation by the cert authority do. Regardless you should make sure this matches the right company/organization. Organizational Unit This can be anything. Not really sure what this is for, but traditionally I’ve always set this to Web because – well this is a Web thing after all right? I’ve never seen this used anywhere that I can tell other than to internally reference the cert. State and CountryPretty obvious. Should reflect the location of the business/organization/person or site. Next you have to configure the bit size used for the certificate: The default on this dialog is 1024, but I’ve found that most providers these days request a minimum bit length of 2048, as did my DNSimple provider. Again check with the provider when you submit to make sure. Bit length mismatches can cause problems if you use a size that isn’t supported by the provider. I had that happen last year when I submitted my CSR and it got rejected quite a bit later, when the certs usually are issued within an hour or less. When you’re done here, the certificate is saved to disk as a .txt file and it should look something like this (this is a 2048 bit length CSR):-----BEGIN NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- MIIEVGCCAz0CAQAwdjELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMxDzANBgNVBAgMBkhhd2FpaTENMAsG A1UEBwwEUGFpYTEfMB0GA1UECgwWV2VzdCBXaW5kIFRlY2hub2xvZ2llczEMMAoG B1UECwwDV2ViMRgwFgYDVQQDDA8qLndlc3Qtd2luZC5jb20wggEiMA0GCSqGSIb3 DQEBAQUAA4IBDwAwggEKAoIBAQDIPWOFMkMVRp2Ftj9w/cCVV4OYYhoZYtl+8lTk oqDwKca0xWHLgioX/9v0rZLS6a82MHqKEBxVXu+cuCmSE4AQtB/1YH9lS4tpc/be OZDvnTotP6l4MCEzzAfROcw4CiIg6X0RMSnl8IATAvv2V5LQM9TDdt9oDdMpX2IY +vVC9RZ7PMHBmR9kwI2i/lrKitzhQKaHgpmKcRlM6iqpALUiX28w5HJaDKK1MDHN 607tyFJLHijuJKx7PdTqZYf50KkC3NupfZ2avVycf18Q13jHWj59tvwEOczoVzRL l4LQivAqbhyiqMpWnrZunIOUZta5aGm+jo7O1knGWJjxuraTAgMBAAGgggGYMBoG CisGAQQBgjcNAgMxDBYKNi4yLjkyMDAuMjA0BgkrBgEEAYI3FRQxJzAlAgEFDAZS QVNYUFMMC1JBU1hQU1xSaWNrDAtJbmV0TWdyLmV4ZTByBgorBgEEAYI3DQICMWQw YgIBAR5aAE0AaQBjAHIAbwBzAG8AZgB0ACAAUgBTAEEAIABTAEMAaABhAG4AbgBl AGwAIABDAHIAeQBwAHQAbwBnAHIAYQBwAGgAaQBjACAAUAByAG8AdgBpAGQAZQBy AwEAMIHPBgkqhkiG9w0BCQ4xgcEwgb4wDgYDVR0PAQH/BAQDAgTwMBMGA1UdJQQM MAoGCCsGAQUFBwMBMHgGCSqGSIb3DQEJDwRrMGkwDgYIKoZIhvcNAwICAgCAMA4G CCqGSIb3DQMEAgIAgDALBglghkgBZQMEASowCwYJYIZIAWUDBAEtMAsGCWCGSAFl AwQBAjALBglghkgBZQMEAQUwBwYFKw4DAgcwCgYIKoZIhvcNAwcwHQYDVR0OBBYE FD/yOsTbXE+GVFCFMmldzQvyloz9MA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAA4IBAQCK6LlsCuIM 1AU0niB6QZ9v0FTsGFxP1dYvVUnJyY6VEKNiGFiQjZac7UCs0p58yScdXWEFOE8V OsjAYD3xYNc05+ckyD67UHRGEUAVB9RBvbKW23KeR/8kBmEzc8PemD52YOgExxAJ 57xWmAwEHAvbgYzQvhO8AOzH3TGvvHbg5UKM1pYgNmuwZq5DkL/IDoeIJwfk/wrI wghNTuxxIFgbH4YrgLgv4PRvrS/LaTCRBdboaCgzATMczaOb1nd/DVNR+3fCtMhM W0psTAjzRbmXF3nJyAQa7jF/52gkY0RfFX2lG5tJnG+XDsVNvKNvh9Qa5Tlmkm06 ILKCm9ciWCKk -----END NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- You can take that certificate request and submit that to your certificate provider. Since this is base64 encoded you can typically just paste it into a text box on the submission page, or some providers will ask you to upload the CSR as a file. What does a Renewal look like? Note the length of the CSR will vary somewhat with key strength, but compare this to a renewal request that IIS generated from my existing site:-----BEGIN NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- MIIPpwYFKoZIhvcNAQcCoIIPmDCCD5QCAQExCzAJBgUrDgMCGgUAMIIIqAYJKoZI hvcNAQcBoIIImQSCCJUwggiRMIIH+gIBADBdMSEwHwYDVQQLDBhEb21haW4gQ29u dHJvbCBWYWxpFGF0ZWQxHjAcBgNVBAsMFUVzc2VudGlhbFNTTCBXaWxkY2FyZDEY MBYGA1UEAwwPKi53ZXN0LXdpbmQuY29tMIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCB iQKBgQCK4OuIOR18Wb8tNMGRZiD1c9X57b332Lj7DhbckFqLs0ys8kVDHrTXSj+T Ye9nmAvfPpZmBtE5p9qRNN79rUYugAdl+qEtE4IJe1bRfxXzcKa1SXa8+TEs3zQa zYSmcR2dDuC8om1eAdeCtt0NnkvANgm1VLwGOor/UHMASaEhCQIDAQABoIIG8jAa BgorBgEEAYI3DQIDMQwWCjYuMi45MjAwLjIwNAYJKwYBBAGCNxUUMScwJQIBBQwG UkFTWFBTDAtSQVNYUFNcUmljawwLSW5ldE1nci5leGUwZgYKKwYBBAGCNw0CAjFY MFYCAQIeTgBNAGkAYwByAG8AcwBvAGYAdAAgAFMAdAByAG8AbgBnACAAQwByAHkA cAB0AG8AZwByAGEAcABoAGkAYwAgAFAAcgBvAHYAaQBkAGUAcgMBADCCAQAGCSqG SIb3DQEJDjGB8jCB7zAOBgNVHQ8BAf8EBAMCBaAwDAYDVR0TAQH/BAIwADA0BgNV 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And it didn’t work. IIS creates a custom CSR that is encoded in a format that no certificate authority I’ve ever used uses. If you want the gory details of what’s in there look at this ServerFault question (thanks to Mika in the comments). In the end it doesn’t matter though – no certificate authority knows what to do with this CSR. So create a new CSR and skip the renewal. Always! Use the same Server Keep in mind that on IIS at least you should always create your certificate on a single server and then when you receive the final certificate from your provider import it on that server. IIS tracks the CSR it created and requires it in order to import the final certificate properly. So if for some reason you try to install the certificate on another server, it won’t work. I’ve also run into trouble trying to install the same certificate twice – this time around I didn’t give my certificate the proper friendly name and IIS failed to allow me to assign the certificate to any of my Web sites. So I removed the certificate and tried to import again, only to find it failed the second time around. There are other ways to fix this, but in my case I had to have the certificate re-issued to work – not what you want to do. Regardless of what you do though, when you import make sure you do it right the first time by crossing all your t’s and dotting your i's– it’ll save you a lot of grief! You don’t actually have to use the server that the certificate gets installed on to generate the CSR and first install it, but it is generally a good idea to do so just so you can get the certificate installed into the right place right away. If you have access to the server where you need to install the certificate you might as well use it. But you can use another machine to generated the and install the certificate, then export the certificate and move it to another machine as needed. So you can use your Dev machine to create a certificate then export it and install it on a live server. More on installation and back up/export later. Installing the Certificate Once you’ve submitted a CSR request your provider will process the request and eventually issue you a new final certificate that contains another text file with the final key to import into your certificate store. IIS does this by combining the content in your certificate request with the original CSR. If all goes well your new certificate shows up in the certificate list and you’re ready to assign the certificate to your sites. Make sure you use a friendly name that matches domain name of your site. So use *.mysite.com or www.mysite.com or store.mysite.com to ensure IIS recognizes the certificate. I made the mistake of not naming my friendly name this way and found that IIS was unable to link my sites to my wildcard certificate. It needed to have the *. as part of the certificate otherwise the Hostname input field was blanked out. Changing the Friendly Name If you by accidentally used an invalid friendly name you can change it later in the Windows certificate store. Bring up a Run Box Type MMC File | Add/Remove Snap In Add Certificates | Computer Account | Local Computer Drill into Certificates | Personal | Certificates Find your Certificate | Right Click | Properties Edit the Friendly Name | Click OK Backing up your Certificate The first thing you should do once your certificate is successfully installed is to back it up! In case your server crashes or you otherwise lose your configuration this will ensure you have an easy way to recover and reinstall your certificate either on the same server or a different one. If you’re running a server farm or using a wildcard certificate you also need to get the certificate onto other machines and a PFX file import is the easiest way to do this. To back up your certificate select your certificate and choose Export from the context or sidebar menu: The Export Certificate option allows you to export a password protected binary file that you can import in a single step. You can copy the resulting binary PFX file to back up or copy to other machines to install on. Importing the certificate on another machine is as easy as pointing at the PFX file and specifying the password. IIS handles the rest. Assigning a new certificate to your Site Once you have the new certificate installed, all that’s left to do is assign it to your site. In IIS select your Web site and bring up the Site Bindings from the right sidebar. Add a new binding for https, bind it to port 443, specify your hostname and pick the certificate from the pick list. If you’re using a root site make sure to set up your certificate for www.yoursite.com and also for yoursite.com so that both work properly with SSL. Note that you need to explicitly configure each hostname for a certificate if you plan to use SSL. Luckily if you update your SSL certificate in the following year, IIS prompts you and asks whether you like to update all other sites that are using the existing cert to the newer cert. And you’re done. So what’s the Pain? So, all of this is old hat and it doesn’t look all that bad right? So what’s the pain here? Well if you follow the instructions and do everything right, then the process is about as straight forward as you would expect it to be. You create a cert request, you import it and assign it to your sites. That’s the basic steps and to be perfectly fair it works well – if nothing goes wrong. However, renewing tends to be the problem. The first unintuitive issue is that you simply shouldn’t renew but create a new CSR and generate your new certificate from that. Over the years I’ve fallen prey to the belief that Microsoft eventually will fix this so that the renewal creates the same type of CSR as the old cert, but apparently that will just never happen. Booo! The other problem I ran into is that I accidentally misnamed my imported certificate which in turn set off a chain of events that caused my originally issued certificate to become uninstallable. When I received my completed certificate I installed it and it installed just fine, but the friendly name was wrong. As a result IIS refused to assign the certificate to any of my host headered sites. That’s strike number one. Why the heck should the friendly name have any effect on the ability to attach the certificate??? Next I uninstalled the certificate because I figured that would be the easiest way to make sure I get it right. But I found that I could not reinstall my certificate. I kept getting these stop errors: "ASN1 bad tag value met" that would prevent the installation from completion. After searching around for this error and reading countless long messages on forums, I found that this error supposedly does not actually mean the install failed, but the list wouldn’t refresh. Commodo has this to say: Note: There is a known issue in IIS 7 giving the following error: "Cannot find the certificate request associated with this certificate file. A certificate request must be completed on the computer where it was created." You may also receive a message stating "ASN1 bad tag value met". If this is the same server that you generated the CSR on then, in most cases, the certificate is actually installed. Simply cancel the dialog and press "F5" to refresh the list of server certificates. If the new certificate is now in the list, you can continue with the next step. If it is not in the list, you will need to reissue your certificate using a new CSR (see our CSR creation instructions for IIS 7). After creating a new CSR, login to your Comodo account and click the 'replace' button for your certificate. Not sure if this issue is fixed in IIS 8 but that’s an insane bug to have crop up. As it turns out, in my case the refresh didn’t work and the certificate didn’t show up in the IIS list after the reinstall. In fact when looking at the certificate store I could see my certificate was installed in the right place, but the private key is missing which is most likely why IIS is not picking it up. It looks like IIS could not match the final cert to the original CSR generated. But again some sort of message to that affect might be helpful instead of ASN1 bad tag value met. Recovering the Private Key So it turns out my original problem was that I received the published key, but when I imported the private key was missing. There’s a relatively easy way to recover from this. If your certificate doesn’t show up in IIS check in the certificate store for the local machine (see steps above on how to bring this up). If you look at the certificate in Certificates/Personal/Certificates make sure you see the key as shown in the image below: if the key is missing it means that the certificate is missing the private key most likely. To fix a certificate you can do the following: Double click the certificate Go to the Details Tab Copy down the Serial number You can copy the serial number from the area blurred out above. The serial number will be in a format like ?00 a7 9b a1 a4 9d 91 63 57 d6 9f 26 b8 ee 79 b5 cb and you’ll need to strip out the spaces in order to use it in the next step. Next open up an Administrative command prompt and issue the following command: certutil -repairstore my 00a79ba1a49d916357d69f26b8ee79b5cb You should get a confirmation message that the repair worked. If you now go back to the certificate store you should now see the key icon show up on the certificate. Your certificate is fixed. Now go back into IIS Manager and refresh the list of certificates and if all goes well you should see all the certificates that showed in the cert store now: Remember – back up the key first then map to your site… Summary I deal with a lot of customers who run their own IIS servers, and I can’t tell you how often I hear about botched SSL installations. When I posted some of my issues on Twitter yesterday I got a hell storm of “me too” responses. I’m clearly not the only one, who’s run into this especially with renewals. I feel pretty comfortable with IIS configuration and I do a lot of it for support purposes, but the SSL configuration is one that never seems to go seamlessly. This blog post is meant as reminder to myself to read next time I do a renewal. So I can dot my i's and dash my t’s before I get caught in the mess I’m dealing with today. Hopefully some of you find this useful as well.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in IIS7 Security Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Parallelism in .NET – Part 7, Some Differences between PLINQ and LINQ to Objects

- by Reed

In my previous post on Declarative Data Parallelism, I mentioned that PLINQ extends LINQ to Objects to support parallel operations. Although nearly all of the same operations are supported, there are some differences between PLINQ and LINQ to Objects. By introducing Parallelism to our declarative model, we add some extra complexity. This, in turn, adds some extra requirements that must be addressed. In order to illustrate the main differences, and why they exist, let’s begin by discussing some differences in how the two technologies operate, and look at the underlying types involved in LINQ to Objects and PLINQ . LINQ to Objects is mainly built upon a single class: Enumerable. The Enumerable class is a static class that defines a large set of extension methods, nearly all of which work upon an IEnumerable<T>. Many of these methods return a new IEnumerable<T>, allowing the methods to be chained together into a fluent style interface. This is what allows us to write statements that chain together, and lead to the nice declarative programming model of LINQ: double min = collection .Where(item => item.SomeProperty > 6 && item.SomeProperty < 24) .Min(item => item.PerformComputation()); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Other LINQ variants work in a similar fashion. For example, most data-oriented LINQ providers are built upon an implementation of IQueryable<T>, which allows the database provider to turn a LINQ statement into an underlying SQL query, to be performed directly on the remote database. PLINQ is similar, but instead of being built upon the Enumerable class, most of PLINQ is built upon a new static class: ParallelEnumerable. When using PLINQ, you typically begin with any collection which implements IEnumerable<T>, and convert it to a new type using an extension method defined on ParallelEnumerable: AsParallel(). This method takes any IEnumerable<T>, and converts it into a ParallelQuery<T>, the core class for PLINQ. There is a similar ParallelQuery class for working with non-generic IEnumerable implementations. This brings us to our first subtle, but important difference between PLINQ and LINQ – PLINQ always works upon specific types, which must be explicitly created. Typically, the type you’ll use with PLINQ is ParallelQuery<T>, but it can sometimes be a ParallelQuery or an OrderedParallelQuery<T>. Instead of dealing with an interface, implemented by an unknown class, we’re dealing with a specific class type. This works seamlessly from a usage standpoint – ParallelQuery<T> implements IEnumerable<T>, so you can always “switch back” to an IEnumerable<T>. The difference only arises at the beginning of our parallelization. When we’re using LINQ, and we want to process a normal collection via PLINQ, we need to explicitly convert the collection into a ParallelQuery<T> by calling AsParallel(). There is an important consideration here – AsParallel() does not need to be called on your specific collection, but rather any IEnumerable<T>. This allows you to place it anywhere in the chain of methods involved in a LINQ statement, not just at the beginning. This can be useful if you have an operation which will not parallelize well or is not thread safe. For example, the following is perfectly valid, and similar to our previous examples: double min = collection .AsParallel() .Select(item => item.SomeOperation()) .Where(item => item.SomeProperty > 6 && item.SomeProperty < 24) .Min(item => item.PerformComputation()); However, if SomeOperation() is not thread safe, we could just as easily do: double min = collection .Select(item => item.SomeOperation()) .AsParallel() .Where(item => item.SomeProperty > 6 && item.SomeProperty < 24) .Min(item => item.PerformComputation()); In this case, we’re using standard LINQ to Objects for the Select(…) method, then converting the results of that map routine to a ParallelQuery<T>, and processing our filter (the Where method) and our aggregation (the Min method) in parallel. PLINQ also provides us with a way to convert a ParallelQuery<T> back into a standard IEnumerable<T>, forcing sequential processing via standard LINQ to Objects. If SomeOperation() was thread-safe, but PerformComputation() was not thread-safe, we would need to handle this by using the AsEnumerable() method: double min = collection .AsParallel() .Select(item => item.SomeOperation()) .Where(item => item.SomeProperty > 6 && item.SomeProperty < 24) .AsEnumerable() .Min(item => item.PerformComputation()); Here, we’re converting our collection into a ParallelQuery<T>, doing our map operation (the Select(…) method) and our filtering in parallel, then converting the collection back into a standard IEnumerable<T>, which causes our aggregation via Min() to be performed sequentially. This could also be written as two statements, as well, which would allow us to use the language integrated syntax for the first portion: var tempCollection = from item in collection.AsParallel() let e = item.SomeOperation() where (e.SomeProperty > 6 && e.SomeProperty < 24) select e; double min = tempCollection.AsEnumerable().Min(item => item.PerformComputation()); This allows us to use the standard LINQ style language integrated query syntax, but control whether it’s performed in parallel or serial by adding AsParallel() and AsEnumerable() appropriately. The second important difference between PLINQ and LINQ deals with order preservation. PLINQ, by default, does not preserve the order of of source collection. This is by design. In order to process a collection in parallel, the system needs to naturally deal with multiple elements at the same time. Maintaining the original ordering of the sequence adds overhead, which is, in many cases, unnecessary. Therefore, by default, the system is allowed to completely change the order of your sequence during processing. If you are doing a standard query operation, this is usually not an issue. However, there are times when keeping a specific ordering in place is important. If this is required, you can explicitly request the ordering be preserved throughout all operations done on a ParallelQuery<T> by using the AsOrdered() extension method. This will cause our sequence ordering to be preserved. For example, suppose we wanted to take a collection, perform an expensive operation which converts it to a new type, and display the first 100 elements. In LINQ to Objects, our code might look something like: // Using IEnumerable<SourceClass> collection IEnumerable<ResultClass> results = collection .Select(e => e.CreateResult()) .Take(100); If we just converted this to a parallel query naively, like so: IEnumerable<ResultClass> results = collection .AsParallel() .Select(e => e.CreateResult()) .Take(100); We could very easily get a very different, and non-reproducable, set of results, since the ordering of elements in the input collection is not preserved. To get the same results as our original query, we need to use: IEnumerable<ResultClass> results = collection .AsParallel() .AsOrdered() .Select(e => e.CreateResult()) .Take(100); This requests that PLINQ process our sequence in a way that verifies that our resulting collection is ordered as if it were processed serially. This will cause our query to run slower, since there is overhead involved in maintaining the ordering. However, in this case, it is required, since the ordering is required for correctness. PLINQ is incredibly useful. It allows us to easily take nearly any LINQ to Objects query and run it in parallel, using the same methods and syntax we’ve used previously. There are some important differences in operation that must be considered, however – it is not a free pass to parallelize everything. When using PLINQ in order to parallelize your routines declaratively, the same guideline I mentioned before still applies: Parallelization is something that should be handled with care and forethought, added by design, and not just introduced casually.

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Parallelism in .NET – Part 9, Configuration in PLINQ and TPL

- by Reed

Parallel LINQ and the Task Parallel Library contain many options for configuration. Although the default configuration options are often ideal, there are times when customizing the behavior is desirable. Both frameworks provide full configuration support. When working with Data Parallelism, there is one primary configuration option we often need to control – the number of threads we want the system to use when parallelizing our routine. By default, PLINQ and the TPL both use the ThreadPool to schedule tasks. Given the major improvements in the ThreadPool in CLR 4, this default behavior is often ideal. However, there are times that the default behavior is not appropriate. For example, if you are working on multiple threads simultaneously, and want to schedule parallel operations from within both threads, you might want to consider restricting each parallel operation to using a subset of the processing cores of the system. Not doing this might over-parallelize your routine, which leads to inefficiencies from having too many context switches. In the Task Parallel Library, configuration is handled via the ParallelOptions class. All of the methods of the Parallel class have an overload which accepts a ParallelOptions argument. We configure the Parallel class by setting the ParallelOptions.MaxDegreeOfParallelism property. For example, let’s revisit one of the simple data parallel examples from Part 2: Parallel.For(0, pixelData.GetUpperBound(0), row => { for (int col=0; col < pixelData.GetUpperBound(1); ++col) { pixelData[row, col] = AdjustContrast(pixelData[row, col], minPixel, maxPixel); } }); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Here, we’re looping through an image, and calling a method on each pixel in the image. If this was being done on a separate thread, and we knew another thread within our system was going to be doing a similar operation, we likely would want to restrict this to using half of the cores on the system. This could be accomplished easily by doing: var options = new ParallelOptions(); options.MaxDegreeOfParallelism = Math.Max(Environment.ProcessorCount / 2, 1); Parallel.For(0, pixelData.GetUpperBound(0), options, row => { for (int col=0; col < pixelData.GetUpperBound(1); ++col) { pixelData[row, col] = AdjustContrast(pixelData[row, col], minPixel, maxPixel); } }); Now, we’re restricting this routine to using no more than half the cores in our system. Note that I included a check to prevent a single core system from supplying zero; without this check, we’d potentially cause an exception. I also did not hard code a specific value for the MaxDegreeOfParallelism property. One of our goals when parallelizing a routine is allowing it to scale on better hardware. Specifying a hard-coded value would contradict that goal. Parallel LINQ also supports configuration, and in fact, has quite a few more options for configuring the system. The main configuration option we most often need is the same as our TPL option: we need to supply the maximum number of processing threads. In PLINQ, this is done via a new extension method on ParallelQuery<T>: ParallelEnumerable.WithDegreeOfParallelism. Let’s revisit our declarative data parallelism sample from Part 6: double min = collection.AsParallel().Min(item => item.PerformComputation()); Here, we’re performing a computation on each element in the collection, and saving the minimum value of this operation. If we wanted to restrict this to a limited number of threads, we would add our new extension method: int maxThreads = Math.Max(Environment.ProcessorCount / 2, 1); double min = collection .AsParallel() .WithDegreeOfParallelism(maxThreads) .Min(item => item.PerformComputation()); This automatically restricts the PLINQ query to half of the threads on the system. PLINQ provides some additional configuration options. By default, PLINQ will occasionally revert to processing a query in parallel. This occurs because many queries, if parallelized, typically actually cause an overall slowdown compared to a serial processing equivalent. By analyzing the “shape” of the query, PLINQ often decides to run a query serially instead of in parallel. This can occur for (taken from MSDN): Queries that contain a Select, indexed Where, indexed SelectMany, or ElementAt clause after an ordering or filtering operator that has removed or rearranged original indices. Queries that contain a Take, TakeWhile, Skip, SkipWhile operator and where indices in the source sequence are not in the original order. Queries that contain Zip or SequenceEquals, unless one of the data sources has an originally ordered index and the other data source is indexable (i.e. an array or IList(T)). Queries that contain Concat, unless it is applied to indexable data sources. Queries that contain Reverse, unless applied to an indexable data source. If the specific query follows these rules, PLINQ will run the query on a single thread. However, none of these rules look at the specific work being done in the delegates, only at the “shape” of the query. There are cases where running in parallel may still be beneficial, even if the shape is one where it typically parallelizes poorly. In these cases, you can override the default behavior by using the WithExecutionMode extension method. This would be done like so: var reversed = collection .AsParallel() .WithExecutionMode(ParallelExecutionMode.ForceParallelism) .Select(i => i.PerformComputation()) .Reverse(); Here, the default behavior would be to not parallelize the query unless collection implemented IList<T>. We can force this to run in parallel by adding the WithExecutionMode extension method in the method chain. Finally, PLINQ has the ability to configure how results are returned. When a query is filtering or selecting an input collection, the results will need to be streamed back into a single IEnumerable<T> result. For example, the method above returns a new, reversed collection. In this case, the processing of the collection will be done in parallel, but the results need to be streamed back to the caller serially, so they can be enumerated on a single thread. This streaming introduces overhead. IEnumerable<T> isn’t designed with thread safety in mind, so the system needs to handle merging the parallel processes back into a single stream, which introduces synchronization issues. There are two extremes of how this could be accomplished, but both extremes have disadvantages. The system could watch each thread, and whenever a thread produces a result, take that result and send it back to the caller. This would mean that the calling thread would have access to the data as soon as data is available, which is the benefit of this approach. However, it also means that every item is introducing synchronization overhead, since each item needs to be merged individually. On the other extreme, the system could wait until all of the results from all of the threads were ready, then push all of the results back to the calling thread in one shot. The advantage here is that the least amount of synchronization is added to the system, which means the query will, on a whole, run the fastest. However, the calling thread will have to wait for all elements to be processed, so this could introduce a long delay between when a parallel query begins and when results are returned. The default behavior in PLINQ is actually between these two extremes. By default, PLINQ maintains an internal buffer, and chooses an optimal buffer size to maintain. Query results are accumulated into the buffer, then returned in the IEnumerable<T> result in chunks. This provides reasonably fast access to the results, as well as good overall throughput, in most scenarios. However, if we know the nature of our algorithm, we may decide we would prefer one of the other extremes. This can be done by using the WithMergeOptions extension method. For example, if we know that our PerformComputation() routine is very slow, but also variable in runtime, we may want to retrieve results as they are available, with no bufferring. This can be done by changing our above routine to: var reversed = collection .AsParallel() .WithExecutionMode(ParallelExecutionMode.ForceParallelism) .WithMergeOptions(ParallelMergeOptions.NotBuffered) .Select(i => i.PerformComputation()) .Reverse(); On the other hand, if are already on a background thread, and we want to allow the system to maximize its speed, we might want to allow the system to fully buffer the results: var reversed = collection .AsParallel() .WithExecutionMode(ParallelExecutionMode.ForceParallelism) .WithMergeOptions(ParallelMergeOptions.FullyBuffered) .Select(i => i.PerformComputation()) .Reverse(); Notice, also, that you can specify multiple configuration options in a parallel query. By chaining these extension methods together, we generate a query that will always run in parallel, and will always complete before making the results available in our IEnumerable<T>.

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