computer case - Page 714

The Data Scientist

- by BuckWoody

A new term - well, perhaps not that new - has come up and I’m actually very excited about it. The term is Data Scientist, and since it’s new, it’s fairly undefined. I’ll explain what I think it means, and why I’m excited about it. In general, I’ve found the term deals at its most basic with analyzing data. Of course, we all do that, and the term itself in that definition is redundant. There is no science that I know of that does not work with analyzing lots of data. But the term seems to refer to more than the common practices of looking at data visually, putting it in a spreadsheet or report, or even using simple coding to examine data sets. The term Data Scientist (as far as I can make out this early in it’s use) is someone who has a strong understanding of data sources, relevance (statistical and otherwise) and processing methods as well as front-end displays of large sets of complicated data. Some - but not all - Business Intelligence professionals have these skills. In other cases, senior developers, database architects or others fill these needs, but in my experience, many lack the strong mathematical skills needed to make these choices properly. I’ve divided the knowledge base for someone that would wear this title into three large segments. It remains to be seen if a given Data Scientist would be responsible for knowing all these areas or would specialize. There are pretty high requirements on the math side, specifically in graduate-degree level statistics, but in my experience a company will only have a few of these folks, so they are expected to know quite a bit in each of these areas. Persistence The first area is finding, cleaning and storing the data. In some cases, no cleaning is done prior to storage - it’s just identified and the cleansing is done in a later step. This area is where the professional would be able to tell if a particular data set should be stored in a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), across a set of key/value pair storage (NoSQL) or in a file system like HDFS (part of the Hadoop landscape) or other methods. Or do you examine the stream of data without storing it in another system at all? This is an important decision - it’s a foundation choice that deals not only with a lot of expense of purchasing systems or even using Cloud Computing (PaaS, SaaS or IaaS) to source it, but also the skillsets and other resources needed to care and feed the system for a long time. The Data Scientist sets something into motion that will probably outlast his or her career at a company or organization. Often these choices are made by senior developers, database administrators or architects in a company. But sometimes each of these has a certain bias towards making a decision one way or another. The Data Scientist would examine these choices in light of the data itself, starting perhaps even before the business requirements are created. The business may not even be aware of all the strategic and tactical data sources that they have access to. Processing Once the decision is made to store the data, the next set of decisions are based around how to process the data. An RDBMS scales well to a certain level, and provides a high degree of ACID compliance as well as offering a well-known set-based language to work with this data. In other cases, scale should be spread among multiple nodes (as in the case of Hadoop landscapes or NoSQL offerings) or even across a Cloud provider like Windows Azure Table Storage. In fact, in many cases - most of the ones I’m dealing with lately - the data should be split among multiple types of processing environments. This is a newer idea. Many data professionals simply pick a methodology (RDBMS with Star Schemas, NoSQL, etc.) and put all data there, regardless of its shape, processing needs and so on. A Data Scientist is familiar not only with the various processing methods, but how they work, so that they can choose the right one for a given need. This is a huge time commitment, hence the need for a dedicated title like this one. Presentation This is where the need for a Data Scientist is most often already being filled, sometimes with more or less success. The latest Business Intelligence systems are quite good at allowing you to create amazing graphics - but it’s the data behind the graphics that are the most important component of truly effective displays. This is where the mathematics requirement of the Data Scientist title is the most unforgiving. In fact, someone without a good foundation in statistics is not a good candidate for creating reports. Even a basic level of statistics can be dangerous. Anyone who works in analyzing data will tell you that there are multiple errors possible when data just seems right - and basic statistics bears out that you’re on the right track - that are only solvable when you understanding why the statistical formula works the way it does. And there are lots of ways of presenting data. Sometimes all you need is a “yes” or “no” answer that can only come after heavy analysis work. In that case, a simple e-mail might be all the reporting you need. In others, complex relationships and multiple components require a deep understanding of the various graphical methods of presenting data. Knowing which kind of chart, color, graphic or shape conveys a particular datum best is essential knowledge for the Data Scientist. Why I’m excited I love this area of study. I like math, stats, and computing technologies, but it goes beyond that. I love what data can do - how it can help an organization. I’ve been fortunate enough in my professional career these past two decades to work with lots of folks who perform this role at companies from aerospace to medical firms, from manufacturing to retail. Interestingly, the size of the company really isn’t germane here. I worked with one very small bio-tech (cryogenics) company that worked deeply with analysis of complex interrelated data. So watch this space. No, I’m not leaving Azure or distributed computing or Microsoft. In fact, I think I’m perfectly situated to investigate this role further. We have a huge set of tools, from RDBMS to Hadoop to allow me to explore. And I’m happy to share what I learn along the way.

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Extending Oracle CEP with Predictive Analytics

- by vikram.shukla(at)oracle.com

Introduction: OCEP is often used as a business rules engine to execute a set of business logic rules via CQL statements, and take decisions based on the outcome of those rules. There are times where configuring rules manually is sufficient because an application needs to deal with only a small and well-defined set of static rules. However, in many situations customers don't want to pre-define such rules for two reasons. First, they are dealing with events with lots of columns and manually crafting such rules for each column or a set of columns and combinations thereof is almost impossible. Second, they are content with probabilistic outcomes and do not care about 100% precision. The former is the case when a user is dealing with data with high dimensionality, the latter when an application can live with "false" positives as they can be discarded after further inspection, say by a Human Task component in a Business Process Management software. The primary goal of this blog post is to show how this can be achieved by combining OCEP with Oracle Data Mining® and leveraging the latter's rich set of algorithms and functionality to do predictive analytics in real time on streaming events. The secondary goal of this post is also to show how OCEP can be extended to invoke any arbitrary external computation in an RDBMS from within CEP. The extensible facility is known as the JDBC cartridge. The rest of the post describes the steps required to achieve this: We use the dataset available at http://blogs.oracle.com/datamining/2010/01/fraud_and_anomaly_detection_made_simple.html to showcase the capabilities. We use it to show how transaction anomalies or fraud can be detected. Building the model: Follow the self-explanatory steps described at the above URL to build the model. It is very simple - it uses built-in Oracle Data Mining PL/SQL packages to cleanse, normalize and build the model out of the dataset. You can also use graphical Oracle Data Miner® to build the models. To summarize, it involves: Specifying which algorithms to use. In this case we use Support Vector Machines as we're trying to find anomalies in highly dimensional dataset.Build model on the data in the table for the algorithms specified. For this example, the table was populated in the scott/tiger schema with appropriate privileges. Configuring the Data Source: This is the first step in building CEP application using such an integration. Our datasource looks as follows in the server config file. It is advisable that you use the Visualizer to add it to the running server dynamically, rather than manually edit the file. <data-source> <name>DataMining</name> <data-source-params> <jndi-names> <element>DataMining</element> </jndi-names> <global-transactions-protocol>OnePhaseCommit</global-transactions-protocol> </data-source-params> <connection-pool-params> <credential-mapping-enabled></credential-mapping-enabled> <test-table-name>SQL SELECT 1 from DUAL</test-table-name> <initial-capacity>1</initial-capacity> <max-capacity>15</max-capacity> <capacity-increment>1</capacity-increment> </connection-pool-params> <driver-params> <use-xa-data-source-interface>true</use-xa-data-source-interface> <driver-name>oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver</driver-name> <url>jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1522:orcl</url> <properties> <element> <value>scott</value> <name>user</name> </element> <element> <value>{Salted-3DES}AzFE5dDbO2g=</value> <name>password</name> </element> <element> <name>com.bea.core.datasource.serviceName</name> <value>oracle11.2g</value> </element> <element> <name>com.bea.core.datasource.serviceVersion</name> <value>11.2.0</value> </element> <element> <name>com.bea.core.datasource.serviceObjectClass</name> <value>java.sql.Driver</value> </element> </properties> </driver-params> </data-source> Designing the EPN: The EPN is very simple in this example. We briefly describe each of the components. The adapter ("DataMiningAdapter") reads data from a .csv file and sends it to the CQL processor downstream. The event payload here is same as that of the table in the database (refer to the attached project or do a "desc table-name" from a SQL*PLUS prompt). While this is for convenience in this example, it need not be the case. One can still omit fields in the streaming events, and need not match all columns in the table on which the model was built. Better yet, it does not even need to have the same name as columns in the table, as long as you alias them in the USING clause of the mining function. (Caveat: they still need to draw values from a similar universe or domain, otherwise it constitutes incorrect usage of the model). There are two things in the CQL processor ("DataMiningProc") that make scoring possible on streaming events. 1. User defined cartridge function Please refer to the OCEP CQL reference manual to find more details about how to define such functions. We include the function below in its entirety for illustration. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <jdbcctxconfig:config xmlns:jdbcctxconfig="http://www.bea.com/ns/wlevs/config/application" xmlns:jc="http://www.oracle.com/ns/ocep/config/jdbc"> <jc:jdbc-ctx> <name>Oracle11gR2</name> <data-source>DataMining</data-source> <function name="prediction2"> <param name="CQLMONTH" type="char"/> <param name="WEEKOFMONTH" type="int"/> <param name="DAYOFWEEK" type="char" /> <param name="MAKE" type="char" /> <param name="ACCIDENTAREA" type="char" /> <param name="DAYOFWEEKCLAIMED" type="char" /> <param name="MONTHCLAIMED" type="char" /> <param name="WEEKOFMONTHCLAIMED" type="int" /> <param name="SEX" type="char" /> <param name="MARITALSTATUS" type="char" /> <param name="AGE" type="int" /> <param name="FAULT" type="char" /> <param name="POLICYTYPE" type="char" /> <param name="VEHICLECATEGORY" type="char" /> <param name="VEHICLEPRICE" type="char" /> <param name="FRAUDFOUND" type="int" /> <param name="POLICYNUMBER" type="int" /> <param name="REPNUMBER" type="int" /> <param name="DEDUCTIBLE" type="int" /> <param name="DRIVERRATING" type="int" /> <param name="DAYSPOLICYACCIDENT" type="char" /> <param name="DAYSPOLICYCLAIM" type="char" /> <param name="PASTNUMOFCLAIMS" type="char" /> <param name="AGEOFVEHICLES" type="char" /> <param name="AGEOFPOLICYHOLDER" type="char" /> <param name="POLICEREPORTFILED" type="char" /> <param name="WITNESSPRESNT" type="char" /> <param name="AGENTTYPE" type="char" /> <param name="NUMOFSUPP" type="char" /> <param name="ADDRCHGCLAIM" type="char" /> <param name="NUMOFCARS" type="char" /> <param name="CQLYEAR" type="int" /> <param name="BASEPOLICY" type="char" /> <return-component-type>char</return-component-type> <sql><![CDATA[ SELECT to_char(PREDICTION_PROBABILITY(CLAIMSMODEL, '0' USING *)) AS probability FROM (SELECT :CQLMONTH AS MONTH, :WEEKOFMONTH AS WEEKOFMONTH, :DAYOFWEEK AS DAYOFWEEK, :MAKE AS MAKE, :ACCIDENTAREA AS ACCIDENTAREA, :DAYOFWEEKCLAIMED AS DAYOFWEEKCLAIMED, :MONTHCLAIMED AS MONTHCLAIMED, :WEEKOFMONTHCLAIMED, :SEX AS SEX, :MARITALSTATUS AS MARITALSTATUS, :AGE AS AGE, :FAULT AS FAULT, :POLICYTYPE AS POLICYTYPE, :VEHICLECATEGORY AS VEHICLECATEGORY, :VEHICLEPRICE AS VEHICLEPRICE, :FRAUDFOUND AS FRAUDFOUND, :POLICYNUMBER AS POLICYNUMBER, :REPNUMBER AS REPNUMBER, :DEDUCTIBLE AS DEDUCTIBLE, :DRIVERRATING AS DRIVERRATING, :DAYSPOLICYACCIDENT AS DAYSPOLICYACCIDENT, :DAYSPOLICYCLAIM AS DAYSPOLICYCLAIM, :PASTNUMOFCLAIMS AS PASTNUMOFCLAIMS, :AGEOFVEHICLES AS AGEOFVEHICLES, :AGEOFPOLICYHOLDER AS AGEOFPOLICYHOLDER, :POLICEREPORTFILED AS POLICEREPORTFILED, :WITNESSPRESNT AS WITNESSPRESENT, :AGENTTYPE AS AGENTTYPE, :NUMOFSUPP AS NUMOFSUPP, :ADDRCHGCLAIM AS ADDRCHGCLAIM, :NUMOFCARS AS NUMOFCARS, :CQLYEAR AS YEAR, :BASEPOLICY AS BASEPOLICY FROM dual) ]]> </sql> </function> </jc:jdbc-ctx> </jdbcctxconfig:config> 2. Invoking the function for each event. Once this function is defined, you can invoke it from CQL as follows: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <wlevs:config xmlns:wlevs="http://www.bea.com/ns/wlevs/config/application"> <processor> <name>DataMiningProc</name> <rules> <query id="q1"><![CDATA[ ISTREAM(SELECT S.CQLMONTH, S.WEEKOFMONTH, S.DAYOFWEEK, S.MAKE, : S.BASEPOLICY, C.F AS probability FROM StreamDataChannel [NOW] AS S, TABLE(prediction2@Oracle11gR2(S.CQLMONTH, S.WEEKOFMONTH, S.DAYOFWEEK, S.MAKE, ..., S.BASEPOLICY) AS F of char) AS C) ]]></query> </rules> </processor> </wlevs:config> Finally, the last stage in the EPN prints out the probability of the event being an anomaly. One can also define a threshold in CQL to filter out events that are normal, i.e., below a certain mark as defined by the analyst or designer. Sample Runs: Now let's see how this behaves when events are streamed through CEP. We use only two events for brevity, one normal and other one not. This is one of the "normal" looking events and the probability of it being anomalous is less than 60%. Event is: eventType=DataMiningOutEvent object=q1 time=2904821976256 S.CQLMONTH=Dec, S.WEEKOFMONTH=5, S.DAYOFWEEK=Wednesday, S.MAKE=Honda, S.ACCIDENTAREA=Urban, S.DAYOFWEEKCLAIMED=Tuesday, S.MONTHCLAIMED=Jan, S.WEEKOFMONTHCLAIMED=1, S.SEX=Female, S.MARITALSTATUS=Single, S.AGE=21, S.FAULT=Policy Holder, S.POLICYTYPE=Sport - Liability, S.VEHICLECATEGORY=Sport, S.VEHICLEPRICE=more than 69000, S.FRAUDFOUND=0, S.POLICYNUMBER=1, S.REPNUMBER=12, S.DEDUCTIBLE=300, S.DRIVERRATING=1, S.DAYSPOLICYACCIDENT=more than 30, S.DAYSPOLICYCLAIM=more than 30, S.PASTNUMOFCLAIMS=none, S.AGEOFVEHICLES=3 years, S.AGEOFPOLICYHOLDER=26 to 30, S.POLICEREPORTFILED=No, S.WITNESSPRESENT=No, S.AGENTTYPE=External, S.NUMOFSUPP=none, S.ADDRCHGCLAIM=1 year, S.NUMOFCARS=3 to 4, S.CQLYEAR=1994, S.BASEPOLICY=Liability, probability=.58931702982118561 isTotalOrderGuarantee=true\nAnamoly probability: .58931702982118561 However, the following event is scored as an anomaly with a very high probability of 89%. So there is likely to be something wrong with it. A close look reveals that the value of "deductible" field (10000) is not "normal". What exactly constitutes normal here?. If you run the query on the database to find ALL distinct values for the "deductible" field, it returns the following set: {300, 400, 500, 700} Event is: eventType=DataMiningOutEvent object=q1 time=2598483773496 S.CQLMONTH=Dec, S.WEEKOFMONTH=5, S.DAYOFWEEK=Wednesday, S.MAKE=Honda, S.ACCIDENTAREA=Urban, S.DAYOFWEEKCLAIMED=Tuesday, S.MONTHCLAIMED=Jan, S.WEEKOFMONTHCLAIMED=1, S.SEX=Female, S.MARITALSTATUS=Single, S.AGE=21, S.FAULT=Policy Holder, S.POLICYTYPE=Sport - Liability, S.VEHICLECATEGORY=Sport, S.VEHICLEPRICE=more than 69000, S.FRAUDFOUND=0, S.POLICYNUMBER=1, S.REPNUMBER=12, S.DEDUCTIBLE=10000, S.DRIVERRATING=1, S.DAYSPOLICYACCIDENT=more than 30, S.DAYSPOLICYCLAIM=more than 30, S.PASTNUMOFCLAIMS=none, S.AGEOFVEHICLES=3 years, S.AGEOFPOLICYHOLDER=26 to 30, S.POLICEREPORTFILED=No, S.WITNESSPRESENT=No, S.AGENTTYPE=External, S.NUMOFSUPP=none, S.ADDRCHGCLAIM=1 year, S.NUMOFCARS=3 to 4, S.CQLYEAR=1994, S.BASEPOLICY=Liability, probability=.89171554529576691 isTotalOrderGuarantee=true\nAnamoly probability: .89171554529576691 Conclusion: By way of this example, we show: real-time scoring of events as they flow through CEP leveraging Oracle Data Mining.how CEP applications can invoke complex arbitrary external computations (function shipping) in an RDBMS.

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WhatsApp & Tasker for Android – Read & Write messages

- by Shaurya Anand

So, I finally gave up on all my previous the Microsoft Mobile/Phone OS devices and made my switch to Android this year. I am using my Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000 with CyanogenMod 9.1.0 (http://get.cm/get/jenkins/7086/cm-9.1.0-n7000.zip) and ClockworkMod 6.0.1.2 (http://download2.clockworkmod.com/recoveries/recovery-clockwork-6.0.1.2-n7000.zip) since August this year and I am so happy with the performance and the flexibility it offers me. As a software developer by profession, I would expect most of my gadget to be highly customizable and programmable (one time or at intervals) to suit my needs as close as it can. I was introduced to Automation for Android – Tasker (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch.android.taskerm&hl=en) via reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/tasker) and the word ‘automation’ was enough for me to dive right into this app. Only automation that I did earlier was switching profiles depending on location on there phones. And now, just imagine a complete set of possibilities that can be automate on the phone or via the phone. I did my research and found a couple of other tools that do the same/as close as what Tasker can do and few of them are even free. There’s one even by Microsoft called on{X} (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.onx.app&hl=en). Microsoft’s on{X} really caught my eye. You can write code for your phone on the web application by them, deploy it on your phone and even trace the flow all using your PC. Really brilliant, I love the fact that it’s all JavaScript. Here comes the but, it is still very very young and it’s policy of accessing my News Feed on Facebook is not something that I can not digest. On{X} is good, but as I said earlier, the API is not very mature and hence, I gave up on it. I bought Tasker, the best 5,00 € I spent in ages and I want to talk about it in this post. I am still a “noob” while operating this tool, but I tried my shot at automating WhatsApp (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whatsapp&hl=en), a popular messenger for various platform. The requirement for the automation is that, if I send a WhatsApp ‘wru’ message to the phone, it should respond back giving the location and battery level of my phone. It could be useful, if you like to locate your misplaced phone or automatically reply to your partner/friend, honestly, I don’t know what you will use it - through this post, I am just introducing automating WhatsApp using Tasker. Before we begin, the following script only works when your phone is rooted as we will be accessing the WhatsApp database and type some special characters like ‘:’. Let’s follow the code line by line: Profile: Location request from XYZ. (12) // Name of your profile. Event: Notification [ Owner Application:WhatsApp Title:* ] // When a new notification comes from WhatsApp, this event is fired. Read the end note, if you face problems with Chrome app after enabling Tasker accessibility. Enter: A1: Run Shell [ Command:sqlite3 // We will access the WhatsApp database and check if the message comes from designated phone number or not. We mustn’t reply to every message. /data/data/com.whatsapp/databases/msgstore.db "SELECT _id, data FROM messages WHERE key_from_me='0' AND key_remote_jid LIKE '%XXXXXXXXXXX%' // Replace XXXXXXXXXXX with the phone number of your message sender. ORDER BY _id DESC LIMIT 1;" Timeout (Seconds):10 Use Root:On Store // I made a timeout for 10 seconds, if in case WhatsApp is busy accessing the database. Result In:%WHATSAPP_CURRREQ ] // Store the read Id and the last message on to the variable %WHATSAPP_CURRREQ A2: If [ %WHATSAPP_CURRREQ ~R .*[wW][rR][uU].* ] // Check if the pattern of the message is correct and we are all set to send the location. A3: If [ %WHATSAPP_CURRREQ !~ %WHATSAPP_LASTREQ ] // Verify that the message is different from the last request. Remember every message has a unique Id. A4: Notify [ Title:WhatsApp location request... Text:Sending location // Just a notification that the location message is being prepared. to Krati Gupta... Icon:<icon> Number:0 Permanent:On Priority:3 ] // Make a note it is a permanent notification, we will clear it later. A5: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Pattern Lock Disabled // I am disabling the pattern lock, that I use using the plugin Secure Settings. Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure // You can download the plugin from here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin&hl=en Settings ] A6: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Keyguard Disabled // Disable the keygaurd, it is useful, when your phone is on lock and you want to automate everything, even the typing. Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure Settings ] A7: Secure Settings [ Configuration:GPS Enabled // Pretty clear, turn on the GPS and get location at A8 Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure Settings ] A8: AutoShortcut [ Configuration:WhatsApp: Some One // I am using AutoShortcut plugin (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.joaomgcd.autoshortcut) to start WhatsApp with the indented recipient. Package:com.joaomgcd.autoshortcut Name:AutoShortcut ] // Replace Some One, actually choose it from the plugin, the right recipient. A9: Get Location [ Source:Any Timeout (Seconds):30 Continue Task // I am getting the location, timeout is 30 seconds, adjust it accordingly. Immediately:Off Keep Tracking:Off ] A10: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Screen Dim // Now, this extension of the plugin Secure Settings, wakes your device so that you can type out the string on the WhatsApp app. 5 Seconds Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure Settings ] A11: Run Shell [ Command:input text // Now, I am using the shell script to type the text to the window, because the ‘:’ while not be typed from the Type task in Tasker. LOCATION:maps.google.com/maps?q=%LOC Timeout (Seconds):0 Use Root:On // And also, this is way faster, but remember you need root for this, not for the other way of typing. Store Result In: ] A12: Dpad [ Button:Right Repeat Times:1 ] // Focus the Send button A13: Dpad [ Button:Press Repeat Times:1 ] // And press it. A14: Dpad [ Button:Left Repeat Times:1 ] // Get back to the typing box. A15: Run Shell [ Command:input text LOCATION_ACCURACY:%LOCACC Timeout (Seconds):0 Use Root:On Store Result In: ] A16: Dpad [ Button:Right Repeat Times:1 ] A17: Dpad [ Button:Press Repeat Times:1 ] A18: Dpad [ Button:Left Repeat Times:1 ] A19: Run Shell [ Command:input text BATTERY_LEVEL:%BATT% Timeout // I am adding Battery level in my case as well. (Seconds):0 Use Root:On Store Result In: ] A20: Dpad [ Button:Right Repeat Times:1 ] A21: Dpad [ Button:Press Repeat Times:1 ] A22: Variable Set [ Name:%WHATSAPP_LASTREQ To:%WHATSAPP_CURRREQ Do // And now, we say, request is done. Maths:Off Append:Off ] A23: Button [ Button:Back ] // I am exiting the WhatsApp nicely and not killing it. If you are the murderer kind, kill it, just know, you don’t have any place in the heaven. A24: Button [ Button:Back ] A25: Notify Cancel [ Title: Warn Not Exist:Off ] // Remove the permanent notification. A26: Notify [ Title:WhatsApp location request Text:Location sent // Make a temporary notification, and say, location is sent. successfully. Icon:<icon> Number:0 Permanent:Off Priority:3 ] A27: Secure Settings [ Configuration:GPS Disabled // Disable all the horrible things we turned on earlier. Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure Settings ] A28: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Pattern Lock Enabled Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure Settings ] A29: Secure Settings [ Configuration:Keyguard Enabled Package:com.intangibleobject.securesettings.plugin Name:Secure Settings ] A30: End If A31: End If Download this Task from here: http://db.tt/9vRmbhyb That’s it in the above small example – you can read/write messages from/to WhatsApp app. I am using n7000-cm9.1-cwr6. Oh yea, and if you are having the Talkback auto enabled for Chrome browser, you need to turn Off the Web scripts to run. Tasker is amazing, I have automated a lot of tasks using this tool. I will share a few none generic ones with you in my coming post here.

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ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: MVC 2 Strongly Typed HTML Helper and Enhanced Validation Sample

- by mbridge

In lue of the off the official release of ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM, I decided I would put together a quick sample of the enhanced HTML.Helpers and validation controls. I am going to use my sample event site where I will have a form so a user can search for information about a certain events. So when the Search page loads the Search action is fired return my strongly typed model. to the view. 1: [HttpGet] 2: public ViewResult Search(): public ViewResult Search() 3: { 4: IList<EventsModel> result = _eventsService.GetEventList(); 5: var viewModel = new EventSearchModel 6: { 7: EventList = new SelectList(result, "EventCode","EventName","Select Event") 8: }; 9: return View(viewModel); 10: } Nothing special here, although I did want to show how to load up a strongly typed drop down list because that hung me up for a little bit. So to that, I am going to pass back a SelectList to the view and my HTML helper should no how to load this. So lets take a look at the mark up for the view. 1: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" 2: Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<EventsSample.Models.EventSearchModel>" %> 3: 4: <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> 5: Search 6: </asp:Content> 7: 8: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> 9: 10: <h2>Search for Events</h2> 11: 12: <% using (Html.BeginForm("Search","Events")) {%> 13: <%= Html.ValidationSummary(true) %> 14: 15: <fieldset> 16: <legend>Fields</legend> 17: 18: <div class="editor-label"> 19: <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.EventNumber) %> 20: </div> 21: <div class="editor-field"> 22: <%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.EventNumber) %> 23: <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.EventNumber) %> 24: </div> 25: 26: <div class="editor-label"> 27: <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %> 28: </div> 29: <div class="editor-field"> 30: <%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %> 31: <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %> 32: </div> 33: 34: <div class="editor-label"> 35: <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.EventName) %> 36: </div> 37: <div class="editor-field"> 38: <%= Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.EventName, Model.EventList,"Select Event") %> 39: <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.EventName) %> 40: </div> 41: 42: <p> 43: <input type="submit" value="Save" /> 44: </p> 45: </fieldset> 46: 47: <% } %> 48: 49: <div> 50: <%= Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index") %> 51: </div> 52: 53: </asp:Content> A nice feature is the scaffolding that MVC has to generate code. I simply right clicked inside my Search() action, inside the EventsController and selected “Add View” and then I selected my strongly typed object that I wanted to pass to the view and also selected that I wanted the content type be “Edit”. With that the aspx page was completely generated, although I did have to go back in and change the textbox for the Event Names to a drop down list of the names to select from. The new feature with MVC 2 are the strongly typed HTML helpers. So now, my textboxes, drop down list, and validation helpers are all strongly typed to my model. This features gives you the benefits of intellisense and also makes it easier to debug. “The Gu” has a great post about the feature in case you want more details. The DropDownListFor function to generate the drop down list was a little tricky for me. You first need to use a Lanbda expression to pass in the property you want the selected value assigned to in your model, and then you need to pass in the list directly from the model. Validations To validate the form, you can use the strongly type validation HTML helpers which will inspect your model and return errors if the validation fails. The definitions of these rules are set directly on the Model itself so lets take a look. 1: using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations; 2: using System.Web.Mvc; 3: 4: namespace EventsSample.Models 5: { 6: public class EventSearchModel 7: { 8: [Required(ErrorMessage = "Please enter the event number.")] 9: [RegularExpression(@"\w{6}", 10: ErrorMessage = "The Event Number must be 6 letters and/or numbers.")] 11: public string EventNumber { get; set; } 12: 13: [Required(ErrorMessage = "Please enter the guest's last name.")] 14: [RegularExpression(@"^[A-Za-zÀ-ÖØ-öø-ÿ1-9 '\-\.]{1,22}$", 15: ErrorMessage = "The gueest's last name must 1 to 20 characters.")] 16: public string GuestLastName { get; set; } 17: 18: public string EventName { get; set; } 19: public SelectList EventList { get; set; } 20: } 21: } Pretty cool! Okay, the only thing left to do is perform the validation in the POST action. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public ViewResult Search(EventSearchModel eventSearchModel) 3: { 4: if (ModelState.IsValid) return View("SearchResults"); 5: else 6: { 7: IList<EventsModel> result = _eventsService.GetEventList(); 8: eventSearchModel.EventList = new SelectList(result, "EVentCode","EventName"); 9: 10: return View(eventSearchModel); 11: } 12: } 13: } If the form entries are valid, here I am simply displaying the SearchResult, but in a real world sample I would also go out get the results first. You get the idea though. In my case, when the form is not valid, I also had to reload my SelectList with the event names before I loaded the page again. Remember this is MVC, no _VieState here :) So that’s it. Now my form is validating the data and when it fails it looks like this.

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More Fun With Math

- by PointsToShare

More Fun with Math The runaway student – three different ways of solving one problem Here is a problem I read in a Russian site: A student is running away. He is moving at 1 mph. Pursuing him are a lion, a tiger and his math teacher. The lion is 40 miles behind and moving at 6 mph. The tiger is 28 miles behind and moving at 4 mph. His math teacher is 30 miles behind and moving at 5 mph. Who will catch him first? Analysis Obviously we have a set of three problems. They are all basically the same, but the details are different. The problems are of the same class. Here is a little excursion into computer science. One of the things we strive to do is to create solutions for classes of problems rather than individual problems. In your daily routine, you call it re-usability. Not all classes of problems have such solutions. If a class has a general (re-usable) solution, it is called computable. Otherwise it is unsolvable. Within unsolvable classes, we may still solve individual (some but not all) problems, albeit with different approaches to each. Luckily the vast majority of our daily problems are computable, and the 3 problems of our runaway student belong to a computable class. So, let’s solve for the catch-up time by the math teacher, after all she is the most frightening. She might even make the poor runaway solve this very problem – perish the thought! Method 1 – numerical analysis. At 30 miles and 5 mph, it’ll take her 6 hours to come to where the student was to begin with. But by then the student has advanced by 6 miles. 6 miles require 6/5 hours, but by then the student advanced by another 6/5 of a mile as well. And so on and so forth. So what are we to do? One way is to write code and iterate it until we have solved it. But this is an infinite process so we’ll end up with an infinite loop. So what to do? We’ll use the principles of numerical analysis. Any calculator – your computer included – has a limited number of digits. A double floating point number is good for about 14 digits. Nothing can be computed at a greater accuracy than that. This means that we will not iterate ad infinidum, but rather to the point where 2 consecutive iterations yield the same result. When we do financial computations, we don’t even have to go that far. We stop at the 10th of a penny. It behooves us here to stop at a 10th of a second (100 milliseconds) and this will how we will avoid an infinite loop. Interestingly this alludes to the Zeno paradoxes of motion – in particular “Achilles and the Tortoise”. Zeno says exactly the same. To catch the tortoise, Achilles must always first come to where the tortoise was, but the tortoise keeps moving – hence Achilles will never catch the tortoise and our math teacher (or lion, or tiger) will never catch the student, or the policeman the thief. Here is my resolution to the paradox. The distance and time in each step are smaller and smaller, so the student will be caught. The only thing that is infinite is the iterative solution. The race is a convergent geometric process so the steps are diminishing, but each step in the solution takes the same amount of effort and time so with an infinite number of steps, we’ll spend an eternity solving it. This BTW is an original thought that I have never seen before. But I digress. Let’s simply write the code to solve the problem. To make sure that it runs everywhere, I’ll do it in JavaScript. function LongCatchUpTime(D, PV, FV) // D is Distance; PV is Pursuers Velocity; FV is Fugitive’ Velocity { var t = 0; var T = 0; var d = parseFloat(D); var pv = parseFloat (PV); var fv = parseFloat (FV); t = d / pv; while (t > 0.000001) //a 10th of a second is 1/36,000 of an hour, I used 1/100,000 { T = T + t; d = t * fv; t = d / pv; } return T; } By and large, the higher the Pursuer’s velocity relative to the fugitive, the faster the calculation. Solving this with the 10th of a second limit yields: 7.499999232000001 Method 2 – Geometric Series. Each step in the iteration above is smaller than the next. As you saw, we stopped iterating when the last step was small enough, small enough not to really matter. When we have a sequence of numbers in which the ratio of each number to its predecessor is fixed we call the sequence geometric. When we are looking at the sum of sequence, we call the sequence of sums series. Now let’s look at our student and teacher. The teacher runs 5 times faster than the student, so with each iteration the distance between them shrinks to a fifth of what it was before. This is a fixed ratio so we deal with a geometric series. We normally designate this ratio as q and when q is less than 1 (0 < q < 1) the sum of + … + is – 1) / (q – 1). When q is less than 1, it is easier to use ) / (1 - q). Now, the steps are 6 hours then 6/5 hours then 6/5*5 and so on, so q = 1/5. And the whole series is multiplied by 6. Also because q is less than 1 , 1/ diminishes to 0. So the sum is just / (1 - q). or 1/ (1 – 1/5) = 1 / (4/5) = 5/4. This times 6 yields 7.5 hours. We can now continue with some algebra and take it back to a simpler formula. This is arduous and I am not going to do it here. Instead let’s do some simpler algebra. Method 3 – Simple Algebra. If the time to capture the fugitive is T and the fugitive travels at 1 mph, then by the time the pursuer catches him he travelled additional T miles. Time is distance divided by speed, so…. (D + T)/V = T thus D + T = VT and D = VT – T = (V – 1)T and T = D/(V – 1) This “strangely” coincides with the solution we just got from the geometric sequence. This is simpler ad faster. Here is the corresponding code. function ShortCatchUpTime(D, PV, FV) { var d = parseFloat(D); var pv = parseFloat (PV); var fv = parseFloat (FV); return d / (pv - fv); } The code above, for both the iterative solution and the algebraic solution are actually for a larger class of problems. In our original problem the student’s velocity (speed) is 1 mph. In the code it may be anything as long as it is less than the pursuer’s velocity. As long as PV > FV, the pursuer will catch up. Here is the really general formula: T = D / (PV – FV) Finally, let’s run the program for each of the pursuers. It could not be worse. I know he’d rather be eaten alive than suffering through yet another math lesson. See the code run? Select “Catch Up Time” in www.mgsltns.com/games.htm The host is running on Unix, so the link is case sensitive. That’s All Folks

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Oracle's Global Single Schema

- by david.butler(at)oracle.com

Maximizing business process efficiencies in a heterogeneous environment is very difficult. The difficulty stems from the fact that the various applications across the Information Technology (IT) landscape employ different integration standards, different message passing strategies, and different workflow engines. Vendors such as Oracle and others are delivering tools to help IT organizations manage the complexities introduced by these differences. But the one remaining intractable problem impacting efficient operations is the fact that these applications have different definitions for the same business data. Business data is your business information codified for computer programs to use. A good data model will represent the way your organization does business. The computer applications your organization deploys to improve operational efficiency are built to operate on the business data organized into this schema. If the schema does not represent how you do business, the applications on that schema cannot provide the features you need to achieve the desired efficiencies. Business processes span these applications. Data problems break these processes rendering them far less efficient than they need to be to achieve organization goals. Thus, the expected return on the investment in these applications is never realized. The success of all business processes depends on the availability of accurate master data. Clearly, the solution to this problem is to consolidate all the master data an organization uses to run its business. Then clean it up, augment it, govern it, and connect it back to the applications that need it. Until now, this obvious solution has been difficult to achieve because no one had defined a data model sufficiently broad, deep and flexible enough to support transaction processing on all key business entities and serve as a master superset to all other operational data models deployed in heterogeneous IT environments. Today, the situation has changed. Oracle has created an operational data model (aka schema) that can support accurate and consistent master data across heterogeneous IT systems. This is foundational for providing a way to consolidate and integrate master data without having to replace investments in existing applications. This Global Single Schema (GSS) represents a revolutionary breakthrough that allows for true master data consolidation. Oracle has deep knowledge of applications dating back to the early 1990s. It developed applications in the areas of Supply Chain Management (SCM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Capital Management (HCM), Financials and Manufacturing. In addition, Oracle applications were delivered for key industries such as Communications, Financial Services, Retail, Public Sector, High Tech Manufacturing (HTM) and more. Expertise in all these areas drove requirements for GSS. The following figure illustrates Oracle's unique position that enabled the creation of the Global Single Schema. GSS Requirements Gathering GSS defines all the key business entities and attributes including Customers, Contacts, Suppliers, Accounts, Products, Services, Materials, Employees, Installed Base, Sites, Assets, and Inventory to name just a few. In addition, Oracle delivers GSS pre-integrated with a wide variety of operational applications. Business Process Automation EBusiness is about maximizing operational efficiency. At the highest level, these 'operations' span all that you do as an organization. The following figure illustrates some of these high-level business processes. Enterprise Business Processes Supplies are procured. Assets are maintained. Materials are stored. Inventory is accumulated. Products and Services are engineered, produced and sold. Customers are serviced. And across this entire spectrum, Employees do the procuring, supporting, engineering, producing, selling and servicing. Not shown, but not to be overlooked, are the accounting and the financial processes associated with all this procuring, manufacturing, and selling activity. Supporting all these applications is the master data. When this data is fragmented and inconsistent, the business processes fail and inefficiencies multiply. But imagine having all the data under these operational business processes in one place. · The same accurate and timely customer data will be provided to all your operational applications from the call center to the point of sale. · The same accurate and timely supplier data will be provided to all your operational applications from supply chain planning to procurement. · The same accurate and timely product information will be available to all your operational applications from demand chain planning to marketing. You would have a single version of the truth about your assets, financial information, customers, suppliers, employees, products and services to support your business automation processes as they flow across your business applications. All company and partner personnel will access the same exact data entity across all your channels and across all your lines of business. Oracle's Global Single Schema enables this vision of a single version of the truth across the heterogeneous operational applications supporting the entire enterprise. Global Single Schema Oracle's Global Single Schema organizes hundreds of thousands of attributes into 165 major schema objects supporting over 180 business application modules. It is designed for international operations, and extensibility. The schema is delivered with a full set of public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and an Integration Repository with modern Service Oriented Architecture interfaces to make data available as a services (DaaS) to business processes and enable operations in heterogeneous IT environments. · Key tables can be extended with unlimited numbers of additional attributes and attribute groups for maximum flexibility. o This enables model extensions that reflect business entities unique to your organization's operations. · The schema is multi-organization enabled so data manipulation can be controlled along organizational boundaries. · It uses variable byte Unicode to support over 31 languages. · The schema encodes flexible date and flexible address formats for easy localizations. No matter how complex your business is, Oracle's Global Single Schema can hold your business objects and support your global operations. Oracle's Global Single Schema identifies and defines the business objects an enterprise needs within the context of its business operations. The interrelationships between the business objects are also contained within the GSS data model. Their presence expresses fundamental business rules for the interaction between business entities. The following figure illustrates some of these connections. Interconnected Business Entities Interconnecte business processes require interconnected business data. No other MDM vendor has this capability. Everyone else has either one entity they can master or separate disconnected models for various business entities. Higher level integrations are made available, but that is a weak architectural alternative to data level integration in this critically important aspect of Master Data Management.

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Anatomy of a .NET Assembly - CLR metadata 1

- by Simon Cooper

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

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WebSocket Applications using Java: JSR 356 Early Draft Now Available (TOTD #183)

- by arungupta

WebSocket provide a full-duplex and bi-directional communication protocol over a single TCP connection. JSR 356 is defining a standard API for creating WebSocket applications in the Java EE 7 Platform. This Tip Of The Day (TOTD) will provide an introduction to WebSocket and how the JSR is evolving to support the programming model. First, a little primer on WebSocket! WebSocket is a combination of IETF RFC 6455 Protocol and W3C JavaScript API (still a Candidate Recommendation). The protocol defines an opening handshake and data transfer. The API enables Web pages to use the WebSocket protocol for two-way communication with the remote host. Unlike HTTP, there is no need to create a new TCP connection and send a chock-full of headers for every message exchange between client and server. The WebSocket protocol defines basic message framing, layered over TCP. Once the initial handshake happens using HTTP Upgrade, the client and server can send messages to each other, independent from the other. There are no pre-defined message exchange patterns of request/response or one-way between client and and server. These need to be explicitly defined over the basic protocol. The communication between client and server is pretty symmetric but there are two differences: A client initiates a connection to a server that is listening for a WebSocket request. A client connects to one server using a URI. A server may listen to requests from multiple clients on the same URI. Other than these two difference, the client and server behave symmetrically after the opening handshake. In that sense, they are considered as "peers". After a successful handshake, clients and servers transfer data back and forth in conceptual units referred as "messages". On the wire, a message is composed of one or more frames. Application frames carry payload intended for the application and can be text or binary data. Control frames carry data intended for protocol-level signaling. Now lets talk about the JSR! The Java API for WebSocket is worked upon as JSR 356 in the Java Community Process. This will define a standard API for building WebSocket applications. This JSR will provide support for: Creating WebSocket Java components to handle bi-directional WebSocket conversations Initiating and intercepting WebSocket events Creation and consumption of WebSocket text and binary messages The ability to define WebSocket protocols and content models for an application Configuration and management of WebSocket sessions, like timeouts, retries, cookies, connection pooling Specification of how WebSocket application will work within the Java EE security model Tyrus is the Reference Implementation for JSR 356 and is already integrated in GlassFish 4.0 Promoted Builds. And finally some code! The API allows to create WebSocket endpoints using annotations and interface. This TOTD will show a simple sample using annotations. A subsequent blog will show more advanced samples. A POJO can be converted to a WebSocket endpoint by specifying @WebSocketEndpoint and @WebSocketMessage. @WebSocketEndpoint(path="/hello")public class HelloBean { @WebSocketMessage public String sayHello(String name) { return "Hello " + name + "!"; }} @WebSocketEndpoint marks this class as a WebSocket endpoint listening at URI defined by the path attribute. The @WebSocketMessage identifies the method that will receive the incoming WebSocket message. This first method parameter is injected with payload of the incoming message. In this case it is assumed that the payload is text-based. It can also be of the type byte[] in case the payload is binary. A custom object may be specified if decoders attribute is specified in the @WebSocketEndpoint. This attribute will provide a list of classes that define how a custom object can be decoded. This method can also take an optional Session parameter. This is injected by the runtime and capture a conversation between two endpoints. The return type of the method can be String, byte[] or a custom object. The encoders attribute on @WebSocketEndpoint need to define how a custom object can be encoded. The client side is an index.jsp with embedded JavaScript. The JSP body looks like: <div style="text-align: center;"> <form action=""> <input onclick="say_hello()" value="Say Hello" type="button"> <input id="nameField" name="name" value="WebSocket" type="text"><br> </form> </div> <div id="output"></div> The code is relatively straight forward. It has an HTML form with a button that invokes say_hello() method and a text field named nameField. A div placeholder is available for displaying the output. Now, lets take a look at some JavaScript code: <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> var wsUri = "ws://localhost:8080/HelloWebSocket/hello"; var websocket = new WebSocket(wsUri); websocket.onopen = function(evt) { onOpen(evt) }; websocket.onmessage = function(evt) { onMessage(evt) }; websocket.onerror = function(evt) { onError(evt) }; function init() { output = document.getElementById("output"); } function say_hello() { websocket.send(nameField.value); writeToScreen("SENT: " + nameField.value); } This application is deployed as "HelloWebSocket.war" (download here) on GlassFish 4.0 promoted build 57. So the WebSocket endpoint is listening at "ws://localhost:8080/HelloWebSocket/hello". A new WebSocket connection is initiated by specifying the URI to connect to. The JavaScript API defines callback methods that are invoked when the connection is opened (onOpen), closed (onClose), error received (onError), or a message from the endpoint is received (onMessage). The client API has several send methods that transmit data over the connection. This particular script sends text data in the say_hello method using nameField's value from the HTML shown earlier. Each click on the button sends the textbox content to the endpoint over a WebSocket connection and receives a response based upon implementation in the sayHello method shown above. How to test this out ? Download the entire source project here or just the WAR file. Download GlassFish4.0 build 57 or later and unzip. Start GlassFish as "asadmin start-domain". Deploy the WAR file as "asadmin deploy HelloWebSocket.war". Access the application at http://localhost:8080/HelloWebSocket/index.jsp. After clicking on "Say Hello" button, the output would look like: Here are some references for you: WebSocket - Protocol and JavaScript API JSR 356: Java API for WebSocket - Specification (Early Draft) and Implementation (already integrated in GlassFish 4 promoted builds) Subsequent blogs will discuss the following topics (not necessary in that order) ... Binary data as payload Custom payloads using encoder/decoder Error handling Interface-driven WebSocket endpoint Java client API Client and Server configuration Security Subprotocols Extensions Other topics from the API Capturing WebSocket on-the-wire messages

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Self-signed certificates for a known community

- by costlow

Recently announced changes scheduled for Java 7 update 51 (January 2014) have established that the default security slider will require code signatures and the Permissions Manifest attribute. Code signatures are a common practice recommended in the industry because they help determine that the code your computer will run is the same code that the publisher created. This post is written to help users that need to use self-signed certificates without involving a public Certificate Authority. The role of self-signed certificates within a known community You may still use self-signed certificates within a known community. The difference between self-signed and purchased-from-CA is that your users must import your self-signed certificate to indicate that it is valid, whereas Certificate Authorities are already trusted by default. This works for known communities where people will trust that my certificate is mine, but does not scale widely where I cannot actually contact or know the systems that will need to trust my certificate. Public Certificate Authorities are widely trusted already because they abide by many different requirements and frequent checks. An example would be students in a university class sharing their public certificates on a mailing list or web page, employees publishing on the intranet, or a system administrator rolling certificates out to end-users. Managed machines help this because you can automate the rollout, but they are not required -- the major point simply that people will trust and import your certificate. How to distribute self-signed certificates for a known community There are several steps required to distribute a self-signed certificate to users so that they will properly trust it. These steps are: Creating a public/private key pair for signing. Exporting your public certificate for others Importing your certificate onto machines that should trust you Verify work on a different machine Creating a public/private key pair for signing Having a public/private key pair will give you the ability both to sign items yourself and issue a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) to a certificate authority. Create your public/private key pair by following the instructions for creating key pairs.Every Certificate Authority that I looked at provided similar instructions, but for the sake of cohesiveness I will include the commands that I used here: Generate the key pair.keytool -genkeypair -alias erikcostlow -keyalg EC -keysize 571 -validity 730 -keystore javakeystore_keepsecret.jks Provide a good password for this file. The alias "erikcostlow" is my name and therefore easy to remember. Substitute your name of something like "mykey." The sigalg of EC (Elliptical Curve) and keysize of 571 will give your key a good strong lifetime. All keys are set to expire. Two years or 730 days is a reasonable compromise between not-long-enough and too-long. Most public Certificate Authorities will sign something for one to five years. You will be placing your keys in javakeystore_keepsecret.jks -- this file will contain private keys and therefore should not be shared. If someone else gets these private keys, they can impersonate your signature. Please be cautious about automated cloud backup systems and private key stores. Answer all the questions. It is important to provide good answers because you will stick with them for the "-validity" days that you specified above.What is your first and last name? [Unknown]: First LastWhat is the name of your organizational unit? [Unknown]: Line of BusinessWhat is the name of your organization? [Unknown]: MyCompanyWhat is the name of your City or Locality? [Unknown]: City NameWhat is the name of your State or Province? [Unknown]: CAWhat is the two-letter country code for this unit? [Unknown]: USIs CN=First Last, OU=Line of Business, O=MyCompany, L=City, ST=CA, C=US correct? [no]: yesEnter key password for <erikcostlow> (RETURN if same as keystore password): Verify your work:keytool -list -keystore javakeystore_keepsecret.jksYou should see your new key pair. Exporting your public certificate for others Public Key Infrastructure relies on two simple concepts: the public key may be made public and the private key must be private. By exporting your public certificate, you are able to share it with others who can then import the certificate to trust you. keytool -exportcert -keystore javakeystore_keepsecret.jks -alias erikcostlow -file erikcostlow.cer To verify this, you can open the .cer file by double-clicking it on most operating systems. It should show the information that you entered during the creation prompts. This is the file that you will share with others. They will use this certificate to prove that artifacts signed by this certificate came from you. If you do not manage machines directly, place the certificate file on an area that people within the known community should trust, such as an intranet page. Import the certificate onto machines that should trust you In order to trust the certificate, people within your known network must import your certificate into their keystores. The first step is to verify that the certificate is actually yours, which can be done through any band: email, phone, in-person, etc. Known networks can usually do this Determine the right keystore: For an individual user looking to trust another, the correct file is within that user’s directory.e.g. USER_HOME\AppData\LocalLow\Sun\Java\Deployment\security\trusted.certs For system-wide installations, Java’s Certificate Authorities are in JAVA_HOMEe.g. C:\Program Files\Java\jre8\lib\security\cacerts File paths for Mac and Linux are included in the link above. Follow the instructions to import the certificate into the keystore. keytool -importcert -keystore THEKEYSTOREFROMABOVE -alias erikcostlow -file erikcostlow.cer In this case, I am still using my name for the alias because it’s easy for me to remember. You may also use an alias of your company name. Scaling distribution of the import The easiest way to apply your certificate across many machines is to just push the .certs or cacerts file onto them. When doing this, watch out for any changes that people would have made to this file on their machines. Trusted.certs: When publishing into user directories, your file will overwrite any keys that the user has added since last update. CACerts: It is best to re-run the import command with each installation rather than just overwriting the file. If you just keep the same cacerts file between upgrades, you will overwrite any CAs that have been added or removed. By re-importing, you stay up to date with changes. Verify work on a different machine Verification is a way of checking on the client machine to ensure that it properly trusts signed artifacts after you have added your signing certificate. Many people have started using deployment rule sets. You can validate the deployment rule set by: Create and sign the deployment rule set on the computer that holds the private key. Copy the deployment rule set on to the different machine where you have imported the signing certificate. Verify that the Java Control Panel’s security tab shows your deployment rule set. Verifying an individual JAR file or multiple JAR files You can test a certificate chain by using the jarsigner command. jarsigner -verify filename.jar If the output does not say "jar verified" then run the following command to see why: jarsigner -verify -verbose -certs filename.jar Check the output for the term “CertPath not validated.”

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Get Application Title from Windows Phone

- by psheriff

In a Windows Phone application that I am currently developing I needed to be able to retrieve the Application Title of the phone application. You can set the Deployment Title in the Properties of your Windows Phone Application, however getting to this value programmatically can be a little tricky. This article assumes that you have Visual Studio 2010 and the Windows Phone tools installed along with it. The Windows Phone tools must be downloaded separately and installed with Visual Studio2010. You may also download the free Visual Studio2010 Express for Windows Phone developer environment. The WMAppManifest.xml File First off you need to understand that when you set the Deployment Title in the Properties windows of your Windows Phone application, this title actually gets stored into an XML file located under the \Properties folder of your application. This XML file is named WMAppManifest.xml. A portion of this file is shown in the following listing. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><Deployment http://schemas.microsoft.com/windowsphone/2009/deployment"http://schemas.microsoft.com/windowsphone/2009/deployment" AppPlatformVersion="7.0"> <App xmlns="" ProductID="{71d20842-9acc-4f2f-b0e0-8ef79842ea53}" Title="Mobile Time Track" RuntimeType="Silverlight" Version="1.0.0.0" Genre="apps.normal" Author="PDSA, Inc." Description="Mobile Time Track" Publisher="PDSA, Inc."> ... ... </App></Deployment> Notice the “Title” attribute in the <App> element in the above XML document. This is the value that gets set when you modify the Deployment Title in your Properties Window of your Phone project. The only value you can set from the Properties Window is the Title. All of the other attributes you see here must be set by going into the XML file and modifying them directly. Note that this information duplicates some of the information that you can also set from the Assembly Information… button in the Properties Window. Why Microsoft did not just use that information, I don’t know. Reading Attributes from WMAppManifest I searched all over the namespaces and classes within the Windows Phone DLLs and could not find a way to read the attributes within the <App> element. Thus, I had to resort to good old fashioned XML processing. First off I created a WinPhoneCommon class and added two static methods as shown in the snippet below: public class WinPhoneCommon{ /// <summary> /// Returns the Application Title /// from the WMAppManifest.xml file /// </summary> /// <returns>The application title</returns> public static string GetApplicationTitle() { return GetWinPhoneAttribute("Title"); } /// <summary> /// Returns the Application Description /// from the WMAppManifest.xml file /// </summary> /// <returns>The application description</returns> public static string GetApplicationDescription() { return GetWinPhoneAttribute("Description"); } ... GetWinPhoneAttribute method here ...} In your Windows Phone application you can now simply call WinPhoneCommon.GetApplicationTitle() or WinPhone.GetApplicationDescription() to retrieve the Title or Description properties from the WMAppManifest.xml file respectively. You notice that each of these methods makes a call to the GetWinPhoneAttribute method. This method is shown in the following code snippet: /// <summary>/// Gets an attribute from the Windows Phone WMAppManifest.xml file/// To use this method, add a reference to the System.Xml.Linq DLL/// </summary>/// <param name="attributeName">The attribute to read</param>/// <returns>The Attribute's Value</returns>private static string GetWinPhoneAttribute(string attributeName){ string ret = string.Empty; try { XElement xe = XElement.Load("WMAppManifest.xml"); var attr = (from manifest in xe.Descendants("App") select manifest).SingleOrDefault(); if (attr != null) ret = attr.Attribute(attributeName).Value; } catch { // Ignore errors in case this method is called // from design time in VS.NET } return ret;} I love using the new LINQ to XML classes contained in the System.Xml.Linq.dll. When I did a Bing search the only samples I found for reading attribute information from WMAppManifest.xml used either an XmlReader or XmlReaderSettings objects. These are fine and work, but involve a little extra code. Instead of using these, I added a reference to the System.Xml.Linq.dll, then added two using statements to the top of the WinPhoneCommon class: using System.Linq;using System.Xml.Linq; Now, with just a few lines of LINQ to XML code you can read to the App element and extract the appropriate attribute that you pass into the GetWinPhoneAttribute method. Notice that I added a little bit of exception handling code in this method. I ignore the exception in case you call this method in the Loaded event of a user control. In design-time you cannot access the WMAppManifest file and thus an exception would be thrown. Summary In this article you learned how to retrieve the attributes from the WMAppManifest.xml file. I use this technique to grab information that I would otherwise have to hard-code in my application. Getting the Title or Description for your Windows Phone application is easy with just a little bit of LINQ to XML code. NOTE: You can download the complete sample code at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Choose Tips & Tricks, then "Get Application Title from Windows Phone" from the drop-down. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free video on Silverlight entitled Silverlight XAML for the Complete Novice - Part 1.

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Setting useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy At Runtime

- by Reed

Version 4.0 of the .NET Framework included a new CLR which is almost entirely backwards compatible with the 2.0 version of the CLR. However, by default, mixed-mode assemblies targeting .NET 3.5sp1 and earlier will fail to load in a .NET 4 application. Fixing this requires setting useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy in your app.Config for the application. While there are many good reasons for this decision, there are times when this is extremely frustrating, especially when writing a library. As such, there are (rare) times when it would be beneficial to set this in code, at runtime, as well as verify that it’s running correctly prior to receiving a FileLoadException. Typically, loading a pre-.NET 4 mixed mode assembly is handled simply by changing your app.Config file, and including the relevant attribute in the startup element: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true"> <supportedRuntime version="v4.0"/> </startup> </configuration> .csharpcode { background-color: #ffffff; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; color: black; font-size: small } .csharpcode pre { background-color: #ffffff; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; color: black; font-size: small } .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; margin: 0em; width: 100% } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060 } This causes your application to run correctly, and load the older, mixed-mode assembly without issues. For full details on what’s happening here and why, I recommend reading Mark Miller’s detailed explanation of this attribute and the reasoning behind it. Before I show any code, let me say: I strongly recommend using the official approach of using app.config to set this policy. That being said, there are (rare) times when, for one reason or another, changing the application configuration file is less than ideal. While this is the supported approach to handling this issue, the CLR Hosting API includes a means of setting this programmatically via the ICLRRuntimeInfo interface. Normally, this is used if you’re hosting the CLR in a native application in order to set this, at runtime, prior to loading the assemblies. However, the F# Samples include a nice trick showing how to load this API and bind this policy, at runtime. This was required in order to host the Managed DirectX API, which is built against an older version of the CLR. This is fairly easy to port to C#. Instead of a direct port, I also added a little addition – by trapping the COM exception received if unable to bind (which will occur if the 2.0 CLR is already bound), I also allow a runtime check of whether this property was setup properly: public static class RuntimePolicyHelper { public static bool LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully { get; private set; } static RuntimePolicyHelper() { ICLRRuntimeInfo clrRuntimeInfo = (ICLRRuntimeInfo)RuntimeEnvironment.GetRuntimeInterfaceAsObject( Guid.Empty, typeof(ICLRRuntimeInfo).GUID); try { clrRuntimeInfo.BindAsLegacyV2Runtime(); LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully = true; } catch (COMException) { // This occurs with an HRESULT meaning // "A different runtime was already bound to the legacy CLR version 2 activation policy." LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully = false; } } [ComImport] [InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIUnknown)] [Guid("BD39D1D2-BA2F-486A-89B0-B4B0CB466891")] private interface ICLRRuntimeInfo { void xGetVersionString(); void xGetRuntimeDirectory(); void xIsLoaded(); void xIsLoadable(); void xLoadErrorString(); void xLoadLibrary(); void xGetProcAddress(); void xGetInterface(); void xSetDefaultStartupFlags(); void xGetDefaultStartupFlags(); [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.InternalCall, MethodCodeType = MethodCodeType.Runtime)] void BindAsLegacyV2Runtime(); } } Using this, it’s possible to not only set this at runtime, but also verify, prior to loading your mixed mode assembly, whether this will succeed. In my case, this was quite useful – I am working on a library purely for internal use which uses a numerical package that is supplied with both a completely managed as well as a native solver. The native solver uses a CLR 2 mixed-mode assembly, but is dramatically faster than the pure managed approach. By checking RuntimePolicyHelper.LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully at runtime, I can decide whether to enable the native solver, and only do so if I successfully bound this policy. There are some tricks required here – To enable this sort of fallback behavior, you must make these checks in a type that doesn’t cause the mixed mode assembly to be loaded. In my case, this forced me to encapsulate the library I was using entirely in a separate class, perform the check, then pass through the required calls to that class. Otherwise, the library will load before the hosting process gets enabled, which in turn will fail. This code will also, of course, try to enable the runtime policy before the first time you use this class – which typically means just before the first time you check the boolean value. As a result, checking this early on in the application is more likely to allow it to work. Finally, if you’re using a library, this has to be called prior to the 2.0 CLR loading. This will cause it to fail if you try to use it to enable this policy in a plugin for most third party applications that don’t have their app.config setup properly, as they will likely have already loaded the 2.0 runtime. As an example, take a simple audio player. The code below shows how this can be used to properly, at runtime, only use the “native” API if this will succeed, and fallback (or raise a nicer exception) if this will fail: public class AudioPlayer { private IAudioEngine audioEngine; public AudioPlayer() { if (RuntimePolicyHelper.LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully) { // This will load a CLR 2 mixed mode assembly this.audioEngine = new AudioEngineNative(); } else { this.audioEngine = new AudioEngineManaged(); } } public void Play(string filename) { this.audioEngine.Play(filename); } } Now – the warning: This approach works, but I would be very hesitant to use it in public facing production code, especially for anything other than initializing your own application. While this should work in a library, using it has a very nasty side effect: you change the runtime policy of the executing application in a way that is very hidden and non-obvious.

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Full-text Indexing Books Online

- by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

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

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Premature-Optimization and Performance Anxiety

- by James Michael Hare

While writing my post analyzing the new .NET 4 ConcurrentDictionary class (here), I fell into one of the classic blunders that I myself always love to warn about. After analyzing the differences of time between a Dictionary with locking versus the new ConcurrentDictionary class, I noted that the ConcurrentDictionary was faster with read-heavy multi-threaded operations. Then, I made the classic blunder of thinking that because the original Dictionary with locking was faster for those write-heavy uses, it was the best choice for those types of tasks. In short, I fell into the premature-optimization anti-pattern. Basically, the premature-optimization anti-pattern is when a developer is coding very early for a perceived (whether rightly-or-wrongly) performance gain and sacrificing good design and maintainability in the process. At best, the performance gains are usually negligible and at worst, can either negatively impact performance, or can degrade maintainability so much that time to market suffers or the code becomes very fragile due to the complexity. Keep in mind the distinction above. I'm not talking about valid performance decisions. There are decisions one should make when designing and writing an application that are valid performance decisions. Examples of this are knowing the best data structures for a given situation (Dictionary versus List, for example) and choosing performance algorithms (linear search vs. binary search). But these in my mind are macro optimizations. The error is not in deciding to use a better data structure or algorithm, the anti-pattern as stated above is when you attempt to over-optimize early on in such a way that it sacrifices maintainability. In my case, I was actually considering trading the safety and maintainability gains of the ConcurrentDictionary (no locking required) for a slight performance gain by using the Dictionary with locking. This would have been a mistake as I would be trading maintainability (ConcurrentDictionary requires no locking which helps readability) and safety (ConcurrentDictionary is safe for iteration even while being modified and you don't risk the developer locking incorrectly) -- and I fell for it even when I knew to watch out for it. I think in my case, and it may be true for others as well, a large part of it was due to the time I was trained as a developer. I began college in in the 90s when C and C++ was king and hardware speed and memory were still relatively priceless commodities and not to be squandered. In those days, using a long instead of a short could waste precious resources, and as such, we were taught to try to minimize space and favor performance. This is why in many cases such early code-bases were very hard to maintain. I don't know how many times I heard back then to avoid too many function calls because of the overhead -- and in fact just last year I heard a new hire in the company where I work declare that she didn't want to refactor a long method because of function call overhead. Now back then, that may have been a valid concern, but with today's modern hardware even if you're calling a trivial method in an extremely tight loop (which chances are the JIT compiler would optimize anyway) the results of removing method calls to speed up performance are negligible for the great majority of applications. Now, obviously, there are those coding applications where speed is absolutely king (for example drivers, computer games, operating systems) where such sacrifices may be made. But I would strongly advice against such optimization because of it's cost. Many folks that are performing an optimization think it's always a win-win. That they're simply adding speed to the application, what could possibly be wrong with that? What they don't realize is the cost of their choice. For every piece of straight-forward code that you obfuscate with performance enhancements, you risk the introduction of bugs in the long term technical debt of the application. It will become so fragile over time that maintenance will become a nightmare. I've seen such applications in places I have worked. There are times I've seen applications where the designer was so obsessed with performance that they even designed their own memory management system for their application to try to squeeze out every ounce of performance. Unfortunately, the application stability often suffers as a result and it is very difficult for anyone other than the original designer to maintain. I've even seen this recently where I heard a C++ developer bemoaning that in VS2010 the iterators are about twice as slow as they used to be because Microsoft added range checking (probably as part of the 0x standard implementation). To me this was almost a joke. Twice as slow sounds bad, but it almost never as bad as you think -- especially if you're gaining safety. The only time twice is really that much slower is when once was too slow to begin with. Think about it. 2 minutes is slow as a response time because 1 minute is slow. But if an iterator takes 1 microsecond to move one position and a new, safer iterator takes 2 microseconds, this is trivial! The only way you'd ever really notice this would be in iterating a collection just for the sake of iterating (i.e. no other operations). To my mind, the added safety makes the extra time worth it. Always favor safety and maintainability when you can. I know it can be a hard habit to break, especially if you started out your career early or in a language such as C where they are very performance conscious. But in reality, these type of micro-optimizations only end up hurting you in the long run. Remember the two laws of optimization. I'm not sure where I first heard these, but they are so true: For beginners: Do not optimize. For experts: Do not optimize yet. This is so true. If you're a beginner, resist the urge to optimize at all costs. And if you are an expert, delay that decision. As long as you have chosen the right data structures and algorithms for your task, your performance will probably be more than sufficient. Chances are it will be network, database, or disk hits that will be your slow-down, not your code. As they say, 98% of your code's bottleneck is in 2% of your code so premature-optimization may add maintenance and safety debt that won't have any measurable impact. Instead, code for maintainability and safety, and then, and only then, when you find a true bottleneck, then you should go back and optimize further.

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Pet Peeves with the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace

- by Bil Simser

Have you ever noticed how something things just gnaw at your very being. This is the case with the WP7 marketplace, the Zune software, and the things that drive me batshit crazy with a side of fries. To go. I wanted to share. XBox Live is Not the Centre of the Universe Okay, it’s fine that the Zune software has an XBox live tag for games so can see them clearly but do we really need to have it shoved down our throats. On every click? Click on Games in the marketplace: The first thing that it defaults to on the filters on the right is XBox Live: Okay. Fine. However if you change it (say to Paid) then click onto a title when you come back from that title is the filter still set to Paid? No. It’s back to XBox Live again. Really? Give us a break. If you change to any filter on any other genre then click on the selected title, it doesn’t revert back to anything. It stays on the selection you picked. Let’s be fair here. The Games genre should behave just like every other one. If I pick Paid then when I come back to the list please remember that. Double Dipping On the subject of XBox Live titles, Microsoft (and developers who have an agreement with Microsoft to produce Live titles, which generally rules out indie game developers) is double dipping with regards to exposure of their titles. Here’s the Puzzle and Trivia Game section on the Marketplace for XBox Live titles: And here’s the same category filtered on Paid titles: See the problem? Two indie titles while the rest are XBox Live ones. So while XBL has it’s filter, they also get to showcase their wares in the Paid and Free filters as well. If you’re going to have an XBox Live filter then use it and stop pushing down indie titles until they’re off the screen (on some genres this is already the case). Free and Paid titles should be just that and not include XBox Live ones. If you’re really stoked that people can’t find the Free XBox Live titles vs. the paid ones, then create a Free XBox Live filter and a Paid XBox Live filter. I don’t think we would mind much. Whose Trial is it Anyways? You might notice apps in the marketplace with titles like “My Fart App Professional Lite” or “Silicon Lamb Spleen Builder Free”. When you submit and app to the marketplace it can either be free or paid. If it’s a paid app you also have the option to submit it with Trial capabilities. It’s up to you to decide what you offer in the trial version but trial versions can be purchased from within the app so after someone trys out your app (for free) and wants to unlock the Super Secret Obama Spy Ring Level, they can just go to the marketplace from your app (if you built that functionality in) and upgrade to the paid version. However it creates a rift of sorts when it comes to visibility. Some developers go the route of the paid app with a trial version, others decide to submit *two* apps instead of one. One app is the “Free” or “Lite” verions and the other is the paid version. Why go to the hassle of submitting two apps when you can just create a trial version in the same app? Again, visibility. There’s no way to tell Paid apps with Trial versions and ones without (it’s an option, you don’t have to provide trial versions, although I think it’s a good idea). However there is a way to see the Free apps from the Paid ones so some submit the two apps and have the Free version have links to buy the paid one (again through the Marketplace tasks in the API). What we as developers need for visibility is a new filter. Trial. That’s it. It would simply filter on Paid apps that have trial capabilities and surface up those apps just like the free ones. If Microsoft added this filter to the marketplace, it would eliminate the need for people to submit their “Free” and “Lite” versions and make it easier for the developer not to have to maintain two systems. I mean, is it really that hard? Can’t be any more difficult than the XBox Live Filter that’s already there. Location is Everything The last thing on my bucket list is about location. When I launch Zune I’m running in my native location setting, Canada. What’s great is that I navigate to the Travel Tools section where I have one of my apps and behold the splendour that I see: There are my apps in the number 1 and number 4 slot for top selling in that category. I show it to my wife to make up for the sleepless nights writing this stuff and we dance around and celebrate. Then I change my location on my operation system to United States and re-launch Zune. WTF? My flight app has slipped to the 10th spot (I’m only showing 4 across here out of the 7 in Zune) and my border check app that was #1 is now in the 32nd spot! End of celebration. Not only is relevance being looked at here, I value the comments people make on may apps as do most developers. I want to respond to them and show them that I’m listening. The next version of my border app will provide multiple camera angles. However when I’m running in my native Canada location, I only see two reviews. Changing over to United States I see fourteen! While there are tools out there to provide with you a unified view, I shouldn’t have to rely on them. My own Zune desktop software should allow me to see everything. I realize that some developers will submit an app and only target it for some locations and that’s their choice. However I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to see what apps are ahead of mine, or see people comments and ratings. Another proposal. Either unify the marketplace (i.e. when I’m looking at it show me everything combined) or let me choose a filter. I think the first option might be difficult as you’re trying to average out top selling apps across all markets and have to deal with some apps that have been omitted from some markets. Although I think you could come up with a set of use cases that would handle that, maybe that’s too much work. At the very least, let us developers view the markets in a drop down or something from within the Zune desktop. Having to shut down Zune, change our location, and re-launch Zune to see other perspectives is just too onerous. A Call to Action These are just one mans opinion. Do you agree? Disagree? Feel hungry for a bacon sandwich? Let everyone know via the comments below. Perhaps someone from Microsoft will be reading and take some of these ideas under advisement. Maybe not, but at least let’s get the word out that we really want to see some change. Egypt can do it, why not WP7 developers!

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Configuring Oracle HTTP Server 12c for WebLogic Server Domain

- by Emin Askerov

Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) 12c 12.1.2 which was released in July 2013 as a part of Oracle Web Tier 12c is the web server component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. In essence this is Apache HTTP Server 2.2.22 (with critical bug fixes from higher versions) which includes modules developed specifically by Oracle. It provides a listener functionality for Oracle WebLogic Server and the framework for hosting static pages, dynamic pages, and applications over the Web. OHS can be easily managed by Weblogic Management Framework, a set of tools which provides administrative capabilities (start, stop, lifecycle operations, etc.) for Oracle Fusion Middleware products. In other words all tools which are familiar to us (Node Manager, WLST, Administration Console, Fusion Middleware Control etc.) presented as a part of Weblogic Management Framework and using for managing Java and System Components both for Weblogic Server and Standalone Domain types. You can familiarize yourself with these terms using related documentation: 1. Introduction to Oracle HTTP Server: http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1212/webtier/index.html 2. Weblogic Management Framework: http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1212/core/ASCON/terminology.htm#ASCON11260 In the given post I would like to cover rather simple use case how to configure OHS as web proxy in Weblogic Cluster environment. For example, we have existing Weblogic Domain where some managed servers have been joined to cluster and host business applications. We need to configure web proxy component which will act as entry point, load balancer for our cluster for user requests. Of course, we could install old good Apache HTTP Server and configure mod_wl plugin. However this solution not optimal from manageability perspective: we need to install Apache, install additional plugin then configure it by editing configuration file which is not really convenient for FMW Administrators and often increase time of performing of simple administrative task. Alternatively, we could use OHS as System Component within Weblogic Domain and use full power of Weblogic Management Framework in order to configure, manage and monitor it! I like this idea! What about you? I hope after reading this post you will agree with me. First of all it is necessary to download OHS binaries. You can use this link for downloading: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/webtier/downloads/index2-303202.html As we will use Fusion Middleware Control for managing OHS instances it is necessary to extend your domain with Enterprise Manager and Oracle ADF and JRF templates. This is not topic for focusing in this post, but you could get more information from documentation or one of my previous posts: http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1212/wls/WLDTR/fmw_templates.htm#sthref64 https://blogs.oracle.com/imc/entry/the_specifics_of_adf_12c Note: you should have properly configured Node Manager utility for managing OHS instances Let’s consider configuration process step by step: 1. Shut down all Weblogic instances of existing domain including Admin Server; 2. Install Oracle HTTP Server. You should use your Fusion Middleware Home Path (e.g. /u01/Oracle/FMW12) for Installation Location and select Colocated HTTP Server option as Installation Type. I will not focus on this topic in this post. All information related to OHS installation you could find here: http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1212/webtier/WTINS/install_gui.htm#i1082009 3. Next we need to extend our existing domain with OHS component. In order to do this you should do the following: a. Run Fusion Middleware Configuration Wizard (ORACLE_HOME/oracle_common/common/bin/config.sh); b. On the step 1 select Update an existing domain option and point your Fusion Middleware Home Path; c. On the step 2 check Oracle HTTP Server, Oracle Enterprise Manager Plugin for WEBTIER templates; d. Go through other steps without any changes and finish configuration process. 4. Start Admin Server and all managed servers related to your cluster 5. Log in to Enterprise Manager FMW Control using http://<hostname>:<port>/em URL 6. Now we will create OHS instance within our Weblogic Domain Infrastructure. Navigate to Weblogic Domain -> Administration -> Create/Delete OHS menu item; 7. Enter to edit mode, clicking Changes -> Lock&Edit menu item; 8. Create new OHS instance clicking Create button; 9. Define Instance Name (e.g. DevOSH) and Machine parameters; 10. Now we need to define listen port. By default OHS will use 7777 port number for income HTTP requests. We could change it to any free port number we would like to use. In order to do it, right click on our created OHS instance (left hand panel) and navigate to Administration -> Port Configuration; 11. Click on record with port number 7777 and then click Edit button; 12. Change port number value (in our case this will be 8080) and then click OK button; 13. Now we need to edit mod_wl_ohs configuration in order to enable OHS to act as proxy for WebLogic Server Instances/Cluster; 14. In order to do it right click on our created OHS instance (left panel) and navigate to Administration -> mod_wl_ohs Configuration; a. In Weblogic Cluster you should enter cluster address (define <host:port> for all managed servers which participated in cluster), e.g: 192.168.56.2:7004,192.168.56.2:7005 b. Define Weblogic Port parameter at which the Oracle WebLogic Server host is listening for connection requests from the module (or from other servers); c. Check Dynamic Server List option. This will dynamically update cluster list for every request; d. In the Location table define list of endpoint locations which you would like to process. In order to do this click Add Row button and define Location, Weblogic Cluster, Path Trim and Path Prefix parameters (if required); e. Click Apply button in order to save changes. 15. Activate changes clicking Changes ? Activate Changes menu item; 16. Finally we will start configured OHS instance. Right click on OHS instance tree item under Web Tier folder, select Control -> Start Up menu item; 17. Ensure that OHS instance up and running and then test your environment. Run deployed application to your Weblogic Cluster accessing via OHS web proxy; Normal 0 false false false RU X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 02, 2013

CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 02, 2013Popular ReleasesMastersign.Expressions: Mastersign.Expressions v0.4.2: added support for if(<cond>, <true-part>, <false-part>) fixed multithreading issue with rand() improved demo applicationNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module: NB_Store v2.3.6 Rel0: v2.3.6 Is now DNN6 and DNN7 compatible Important : During update this install with overwrite the menu.xml setting, if you have changed this then make a backup before you upgrade and reapply your changes after the upgrade. Please view the following documentation if you are installing and configuring this module for the first time System Requirements Skill requirements Downloads and documents Step by step guide to a working store Please ask all questions in the Discussions tab. Document.Editor: 2013.26: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.26: New Insert Chart Improved User Interface Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsWsus Package Publisher: Release V1.2.1307.01: Fix an issue in the UI, approvals are not shown correctly in the 'Report' tabDirectX Tool Kit: July 2013: July 1, 2013 VS 2013 Preview projects added and updates for DirectXMath 3.05 vectorcall Added use of sRGB WIC metadata for JPEG, PNG, and TIFF SaveToWIC functions updated with new optional setCustomProps parameter and error check with optional targetFormatCore Server 2012 Powershell Script Hyper-v Manager: new_root.zip: Verison 1.0JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 4.1.736: Improved strinfigy performance New serializing feature New anonymous type support in constructorsDotNetNuke® IFrame: IFrame 04.05.00: New DNN6/7 Manifest file and Azure Compatibility.VidCoder: 1.5.2 Beta: Fixed crash on presets with an invalid bitrate.Gardens Point LEX: Gardens Point LEX version 1.2.1: The main distribution is a zip file. This contains the binary executable, documentation, source code and the examples. ChangesVersion 1.2.1 has new facilities for defining and manipulating character classes. These changes make the construction of large Unicode character classes more convenient. The runtime code for performing automaton backup has been re-implemented, and is now faster for scanners that need backup. Source CodeThe distribution contains a complete VS2010 project for the appli...ZXMAK2: Version 2.7.5.7: - fix TZX emulation (Bruce Lee, Zynaps) - fix ATM 16 colors for border - add memory module PROFI 512K; add PROFI V03 rom image; fix PROFI 3.XX configTwitter image Downloader: Twitter Image Downloader 2 with Installer: Application file with Install shield and Dot Net 4.0 redistributableUltimate Music Tagger: Ultimate Music Tagger 1.0.0.0: First release of Ultimate Music TaggerBlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.2: 2013.06.28 Ver5.9.2 (1) ??????????(????SMTP?????)?????????? (2) HTTPS???????????Outlook 2013 Add-In: Configuration Form: This new version includes the following changes: - Refactored code a bit. - Removing configuration from main form to gain more space to display items. - Moved configuration to separate form. You can click the little "gear" icon to access the configuration form (still very simple). - Added option to show past day appointments from the selected day (previous in time, that is). - Added some tooltips. You will have to uninstall the previous version (add/remove programs) if you had installed it ...Terminals: Version 3.0 - Release: Changes since version 2.0:Choose 100% portable or installed version Removed connection warning when running RDP 8 (Windows 8) client Fixed Active directory search Extended Active directory search by LDAP filters Fixed single instance mode when running on Windows Terminal server Merged usage of Tags and Groups Added columns sorting option in tables No UAC prompts on Windows 7 Completely new file persistence data layer New MS SQL persistence layer (Store data in SQL database)...NuGet: NuGet 2.6: Released June 26, 2013. Release notes: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/release-notes/nuget-2.6Python Tools for Visual Studio: 2.0 Beta: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 Beta. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, and cross platform debugging support. For a quick overview of the general IDE experience, please watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuewiStN...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 and WP8 (v1.3 beta): Preview: New MPEG DASH adaptive streaming plugin for Windows Azure Media Services Preview: New Ultraviolet CFF plugin. Preview: New WP7 version with WP8 compatibility. (source code only) Source code is now available via CodePlex Git Misc bug fixes and improvements: WP8 only: Added optional fullscreen and mute buttons to default xaml JS only: protecting currentTime from returning infinity. Some videos would cause currentTime to be infinity which could cause errors in plugins expectin...AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.8: SERVER OWNERS: note that the default maprot has changed once again. Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we continue to try to package for those OSes. Or better yet, try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compi...New ProjectsALM Rangers DevOps Tooling and Guidance: Practical tooling and guidance that will enable teams to realize a faster deployment based on continuous feedback.Core Server 2012 Powershell Script Hyper-v Manager: Free core Server 2012 powershell scripts and batch files that replace the non-existent hyper-v manager, vmconnect and mstsc.Enhanced Deployment Service (EDS): EDS is a web service based utility designed to extend the deployment capabilities of administrators with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit.ExtendedDialogBox: Libreria DialogBoxJazdy: This project is here only because we wanted to take advantage of a public git server.Mon Examen: This web interface is meant to make examinationsneet: summaryOrchard Multi-Choice Voting: A multiple choice voting Orchard module.Particle Swarm Optimization Solving Quadratic Assignment Problem: This project is submitted for the solving of QAP using PSO algorithms with addition of some modification Porjects: 23123123PPL Power Pack: PPL Power PackProperty Builder: Visual Studio tool for speeding up process of coding class properties getters and setters.RedRuler for Redline: I tried some on-screen rulers, none of them help me measure the UI element quickly based on the Redline. So I decided to created this handy RedRuler tool. Royale Living: Mahindra Royale Community PortalSearch and booking Hotel or Tours: Ð? án nghiên c?u c?a sinh viên tdt theo mô hình mvc 4SystemBuilder.Show: This tool is a helper after you create your project in visual studio to create the respective objects and interface. TalentDesk: new ptojectTcmplex: The Training Center teaches many different kind of course such as English, French, Computer hardware and computer softwareTFS Reporting Guide: Provides guidance and samples to enable TFS users to generate reports based on WIT data.Umbraco AdaptiveImages: Adaptive Images Package for UmbracoVirtualNet - A ILcode interpreter/emulator written in C++/Assembly: VirtualNet is a interpreter/emulator for running .net code in native without having to install the .Net FrameWorkVisual Blocks: Visual Blocks ????IDE ????? ??????? ????? ????/?? Visual Studio and Cloud Based Mobile Device Testing: Practical guidance enabling field to remove blockers to adoption and to use and extend the Perfecto Mobile Cloud Device testing within the context of VS.Windows 8 Time Picker for Windows Phone: A Windows Phone implementation of the Time Picker control found in the Windows 8.1 Alarms app.???? - SmallBasic?: ?????????

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How to ensure custom serverListener events fires before action events

- by frank.nimphius

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Using JavaScript in ADF Faces you can queue custom events defined by an af:serverListener tag. If the custom event however is queued from an af:clientListener on a command component, then the command component's action and action listener methods fire before the queued custom event. If you have a use case, for example in combination with client side integration of 3rd party technologies like HTML, Applets or similar, then you want to change the order of execution. The way to change the execution order is to invoke the command item action from the client event method that handles the custom event propagated by the af:serverListener tag. The following four steps ensure your successful doing this 1. Call cancel() on the event object passed to the client JavaScript function invoked by the af:clientListener tag 2. Call the custom event as an immediate action by setting the last argument in the custom event call to true function invokeCustomEvent(evt){ evt.cancel(); var custEvent = new AdfCustomEvent( evt.getSource(), "mycustomevent", {message:"Hello World"}, true); custEvent.queue(); } 3. When handling the custom event on the server, lookup the command item, for example a button, to queue its action event. This way you simulate a user clicking the button. Use the following code ActionEvent event = new ActionEvent(component); event.setPhaseId(PhaseId.INVOKE_APPLICATION); event.queue(); The component reference needs to be changed with the handle to the command item which action method you want to execute. 4. If the command component has behavior tags, like af:fileDownloadActionListener, or af:setPropertyListener, defined, then these are also executed when the action event is queued. However, behavior tags, like the file download action listener, may require a full page refresh to be issued to work, in which case the custom event cannot be issued as a partial refresh. File download action tag: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17904_01/apirefs.1111/e12419/tagdoc/af_fileDownloadActionListener.html " Since file downloads must be processed with an ordinary request - not XMLHttp AJAX requests - this tag forces partialSubmit to be false on the parent component, if it supports that attribute." To issue a custom event as a non-partial submit, the previously shown sample code would need to be changed as shown below function invokeCustomEvent(evt){ evt.cancel(); var custEvent = new AdfCustomEvent( evt.getSource(), "mycustomevent", {message:"Hello World"}, true); custEvent.queue(false); } To learn more about custom events and the af:serverListener, please refer to the tag documentation: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17904_01/apirefs.1111/e12419/tagdoc/af_serverListener.html

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SQL SERVER – Create a Very First Report with the Report Wizard

- by Pinal Dave

This example is from the Beginning SSRS by Kathi Kellenberger. Supporting files are available with a free download from the www.Joes2Pros.com web site. What is the report Wizard? In today’s world automation is all around you. Henry Ford began building his Model T automobiles on a moving assembly line a century ago and changed the world. The moving assembly line allowed Ford to build identical cars quickly and cheaply. Henry Ford said in his autobiography “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” Today you can buy a car straight from the factory with your choice of several colors and with many options like back up cameras, built-in navigation systems and heated leather seats. The assembly lines now use robots to perform some tasks along with human workers. When you order your new car, if you want something special, not offered by the manufacturer, you will have to find a way to add it later. In computer software, we also have “assembly lines” called wizards. A wizard will ask you a series of questions, often branching to specific questions based on earlier answers, until you get to the end of the wizard. These wizards are used for many things, from something simple like setting up a rule in Outlook to performing administrative tasks on a server. Often, a wizard will get you part of the way to the end result, enough to get much of the tedious work out of the way. Once you get the product from the wizard, if the wizard is not capable of doing something you need, you can tweak the results. Create a Report with the Report Wizard Let’s get started with your first report! Launch SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) from the Start menu under SQL Server 2012. Once SSDT is running, click New Project to launch the New Project dialog box. On the left side of the screen expand Business Intelligence and select Reporting Services. Configure the properties as shown in . Be sure to select Report Server Project Wizard as the type of report and to save the project in the C:\Joes2Pros\SSRSCompanionFiles\Chapter3\Project folder. Click OK and wait for the Report Wizard to launch. Click Next on the Welcome screen. On the Select the Data Source screen, make sure that New data source is selected. Type JProCo as the data source name. Make sure that Microsoft SQL Server is selected in the Type dropdown. Click Edit to configure the connection string on the Connection Properties dialog box. If your SQL Server database server is installed on your local computer, type in localhost for the Server name and select the JProCo database from the Select or enter a database name dropdown. Click OK to dismiss the Connection Properties dialog box. Check Make this a shared data source and click Next. On the Design the Query screen, you can use the query builder to build a query if you wish. Since this post is not meant to teach you T-SQL queries, you will copy all queries from files that have been provided for you. In the C:\Joes2Pros\SSRSCompanionFiles\Chapter3\Resources folder open the sales by employee.sql file. Copy and paste the code from the file into the Query string Text Box. Click Next. On the Select the Report Type screen, choose Tabular and click Next. On the Design the Table screen, you have to figure out the groupings of the report. How do you do this? Well, you often need to know a bit about the data and report requirements. I often draw the report out on paper first to help me determine the groups. In the case of this report, I could group the data several ways. Do I want to see the data grouped by Year and Month? Do I want to see the data grouped by Employee or Category? The only thing I know for sure about this ahead of time is that the TotalSales goes in the Details section. Let’s assume that the CIO asked to see the data grouped first by Year and Month, then by Category. Let’s move the fields to the right-hand side. This is done by selecting Page > Group or Details >, as shown in, and click Next. On the Choose the Table Layout screen, select Stepped and check Include subtotals and Enable drilldown, as shown in. On the Choose the Style screen, choose any color scheme you wish (unlike the Model T) and click Next. I chose the default, Slate. On the Choose the Deployment Location screen, change the Deployment folder to Chapter 3 and click Next. At the Completing the Wizard screen, name your report Employee Sales and click Finish. After clicking Finish, the report and a shared data source will appear in the Solution Explorer and the report will also be visible in Design view. Click the Preview tab at the top. This report expects the user to supply a year which the report will then use as a filter. Type in a year between 2006 and 2013 and click View Report. Click the plus sign next to the Sales Year to expand the report to see the months, then expand again to see the categories and finally the details. You now have the assembly line report completed, and you probably already have some ideas on how to improve the report. Tomorrow’s Post Tomorrow’s blog post will show how to create your own data sources and data sets in SSRS. If you want to learn SSRS in easy to simple words – I strongly recommend you to get Beginning SSRS book from Joes 2 Pros. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Reporting Services, SSRS

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Neo4J and Azure and VS2012 and Windows 8

- by Chris Skardon

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

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The challenge of communicating externally with IRM secured content

- by Simon Thorpe

I am often asked by customers about how they handle sending IRM secured documents to external parties. Their concern is that using IRM to secure sensitive information they need to share outside their business, is troubled with the inability for third parties to install the software which enables them to gain access to the information. It is a very legitimate question and one i've had to answer many times in the past 10 years whilst helping customers plan successful IRM deployments. The operating system does not provide the required level of content security The problem arises from what IRM delivers, persistent security to your sensitive information where ever it resides and whenever it is in use. Oracle IRM gives customers an array of features that help ensure sensitive information in an IRM document or email is always protected and only accessed by authorized users using legitimate applications. Examples of such functionality are; Control of the clipboard, either by disabling completely in the opened document or by allowing the cut and pasting of information between secured IRM documents but not into insecure applications. Protection against programmatic access to the document. Office documents and PDF documents have the ability to be accessed by other applications and scripts. With Oracle IRM we have to protect against this to ensure content cannot be leaked by someone writing a simple program. Securing of decrypted content in memory. At some point during the process of opening and presenting a sealed document to an end user, we must decrypt it and give it to the application (Adobe Reader, Microsoft Word, Excel etc). This process must be secure so that someone cannot simply get access to the decrypted information. The operating system alone just doesn't have the functionality to deliver these types of features. This is why for every IRM technology there must be some extra software installed and typically this software requires administrative rights to do so. The fact is that if you want to have very strong security and access control over a document you are going to send to someone who is beyond your network infrastructure, there must be some software to provide that functionality. Simple installation with Oracle IRM The software used to control access to Oracle IRM sealed content is called the Oracle IRM Desktop. It is a small, free piece of software roughly about 12mb in size. This software delivers functionality for everything a user needs to work with an Oracle IRM solution. It provides the functionality for all formats we support, the storage and transparent synchronization of user rights and unique to Oracle, the ability to search inside sealed files stored on the local computer. In Oracle we've made every technical effort to ensure that installing this software is a simple as possible. In situations where the user's computer is part of the enterprise, this software is typically deployed using existing technologies such as Systems Management Server from Microsoft or by using Active Directory Group Policies. However when sending sealed content externally, you cannot automatically install software on the end users machine. You need to rely on them to download and install themselves. Again we've made every effort for this manual install process to be as simple as we can. Starting with the small download size of the software itself to the simple installation process, most end users are able to install and access sealed content very quickly. You can see for yourself how easily this is done by walking through our free and easy self service demonstration of using sealed content. How to handle objections and ensure there is value However the fact still remains that end users may object to installing, or may simply be unable to install the software themselves due to lack of permissions. This is often a problem with any technology that requires specialized software to access a new type of document. In Oracle, over the past 10 years, we've learned many ways to get over this barrier of getting software deployed by external users. First and I would say of most importance, is the content MUST have some value to the person you are asking to install software. Without some type of value proposition you are going to find it very difficult to get past objections to installing the IRM Desktop. Imagine if you were going to secure the weekly campus restaurant menu and send this to contractors. Their initial response will be, "why on earth are you asking me to download some software just to access your menu!?". A valid objection... there is no value to the user in doing this. Now consider the scenario where you are sending one of your contractors their employment contract which contains their address, social security number and bank account details. Are they likely to take 5 minutes to install the IRM Desktop? You bet they are, because there is real value in doing so and they understand why you are doing it. They want their personal information to be securely handled and a quick download and install of some software is a small task in comparison to dealing with the loss of this information. Be clear in communicating this value So when sending sealed content to people externally, you must be clear in communicating why you are using an IRM technology and why they need to install some software to access the content. Do not try and avoid the issue, you must be clear and upfront about it. In doing so you will significantly reduce the "I didn't know I needed to do this..." responses and also gain respect for being straight forward. One customer I worked with, 6 months after the initial deployment of Oracle IRM, called me panicking that the partner they had started to share their engineering documents with refused to install any software to access this highly confidential intellectual property. I explained they had to communicate to the partner why they were doing this. I told them to go back with the statement that "the company takes protecting its intellectual property seriously and had decided to use IRM to control access to engineering documents." and if the partner didn't respect this decision, they would find another company that would. The result? A few days later the partner had made the Oracle IRM Desktop part of their approved list of software in the company. Companies are successful when sending sealed content to third parties We have many, many customers who send sensitive content to third parties. Some customers actually sell access to Oracle IRM protected content and therefore 99% of their users are external to their business, one in particular has sold content to hundreds of thousands of external users. Oracle themselves use the technology to secure M&A documents, payroll data and security assessments which go beyond the traditional enterprise security perimeter. Pretty much every company who deploys Oracle IRM will at some point be sending those documents to people outside of the company, these customers must be successful otherwise Oracle IRM wouldn't be successful. Because our software is used by a wide variety of companies, some who use it to sell content, i've often run into people i'm sharing a sealed document with and they already have the IRM Desktop installed due to accessing content from another company. The future In summary I would say that yes, this is a hurdle that many customers are concerned about but we see much evidence that in practice, people leap that hurdle with relative ease as long as they are good at communicating the value of using IRM and also take measures to ensure end users can easily go through the process of installation. We are constantly developing new ideas to reducing this hurdle and maybe one day the operating systems will give us enough rich security functionality to have no software installation. Until then, Oracle IRM is by far the easiest solution to balance security and usability for your business. If you would like to evaluate it for yourselves, please contact us.

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Communities - The importance of exchange and discussion

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

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NUMA-aware placement of communication variables

- by Dave

For classic NUMA-aware programming I'm typically most concerned about simple cold, capacity and compulsory misses and whether we can satisfy the miss by locally connected memory or whether we have to pull the line from its home node over the coherent interconnect -- we'd like to minimize channel contention and conserve interconnect bandwidth. That is, for this style of programming we're quite aware of where memory is homed relative to the threads that will be accessing it. Ideally, a page is collocated on the node with the thread that's expected to most frequently access the page, as simple misses on the page can be satisfied without resorting to transferring the line over the interconnect. The default "first touch" NUMA page placement policy tends to work reasonable well in this regard. When a virtual page is first accessed, the operating system will attempt to provision and map that virtual page to a physical page allocated from the node where the accessing thread is running. It's worth noting that the node-level memory interleaving granularity is usually a multiple of the page size, so we can say that a given page P resides on some node N. That is, the memory underlying a page resides on just one node. But when thinking about accesses to heavily-written communication variables we normally consider what caches the lines underlying such variables might be resident in, and in what states. We want to minimize coherence misses and cache probe activity and interconnect traffic in general. I don't usually give much thought to the location of the home NUMA node underlying such highly shared variables. On a SPARC T5440, for instance, which consists of 4 T2+ processors connected by a central coherence hub, the home node and placement of heavily accessed communication variables has very little impact on performance. The variables are frequently accessed so likely in M-state in some cache, and the location of the home node is of little consequence because a requester can use cache-to-cache transfers to get the line. Or at least that's what I thought. Recently, though, I was exploring a simple shared memory point-to-point communication model where a client writes a request into a request mailbox and then busy-waits on a response variable. It's a simple example of delegation based on message passing. The server polls the request mailbox, and having fetched a new request value, performs some operation and then writes a reply value into the response variable. As noted above, on a T5440 performance is insensitive to the placement of the communication variables -- the request and response mailbox words. But on a Sun/Oracle X4800 I noticed that was not the case and that NUMA placement of the communication variables was actually quite important. For background an X4800 system consists of 8 Intel X7560 Xeons . Each package (socket) has 8 cores with 2 contexts per core, so the system is 8x8x2. Each package is also a NUMA node and has locally attached memory. Every package has 3 point-to-point QPI links for cache coherence, and the system is configured with a twisted ladder "mobius" topology. The cache coherence fabric is glueless -- there's not central arbiter or coherence hub. The maximum distance between any two nodes is just 2 hops over the QPI links. For any given node, 3 other nodes are 1 hop distant and the remaining 4 nodes are 2 hops distant. Using a single request (client) thread and a single response (server) thread, a benchmark harness explored all permutations of NUMA placement for the two threads and the two communication variables, measuring the average round-trip-time and throughput rate between the client and server. In this benchmark the server simply acts as a simple transponder, writing the request value plus 1 back into the reply field, so there's no particular computation phase and we're only measuring communication overheads. In addition to varying the placement of communication variables over pairs of nodes, we also explored variations where both variables were placed on one page (and thus on one node) -- either on the same cache line or different cache lines -- while varying the node where the variables reside along with the placement of the threads. The key observation was that if the client and server threads were on different nodes, then the best placement of variables was to have the request variable (written by the client and read by the server) reside on the same node as the client thread, and to place the response variable (written by the server and read by the client) on the same node as the server. That is, if you have a variable that's to be written by one thread and read by another, it should be homed with the writer thread. For our simple client-server model that means using split request and response communication variables with unidirectional message flow on a given page. This can yield up to twice the throughput of less favorable placement strategies. Our X4800 uses the QPI 1.0 protocol with source-based snooping. Briefly, when node A needs to probe a cache line it fires off snoop requests to all the nodes in the system. Those recipients then forward their response not to the original requester, but to the home node H of the cache line. H waits for and collects the responses, adjudicates and resolves conflicts and ensures memory-model ordering, and then sends a definitive reply back to the original requester A. If some node B needed to transfer the line to A, it will do so by cache-to-cache transfer and let H know about the disposition of the cache line. A needs to wait for the authoritative response from H. So if a thread on node A wants to write a value to be read by a thread on node B, the latency is dependent on the distances between A, B, and H. We observe the best performance when the written-to variable is co-homed with the writer A. That is, we want H and A to be the same node, as the writer doesn't need the home to respond over the QPI link, as the writer and the home reside on the very same node. With architecturally informed placement of communication variables we eliminate at least one QPI hop from the critical path. Newer Intel processors use the QPI 1.1 coherence protocol with home-based snooping. As noted above, under source-snooping a requester broadcasts snoop requests to all nodes. Those nodes send their response to the home node of the location, which provides memory ordering, reconciles conflicts, etc., and then posts a definitive reply to the requester. In home-based snooping the snoop probe goes directly to the home node and are not broadcast. The home node can consult snoop filters -- if present -- and send out requests to retrieve the line if necessary. The 3rd party owner of the line, if any, can respond either to the home or the original requester (or even to both) according to the protocol policies. There are myriad variations that have been implemented, and unfortunately vendor terminology doesn't always agree between vendors or with the academic taxonomy papers. The key is that home-snooping enables the use of a snoop filter to reduce interconnect traffic. And while home-snooping might have a longer critical path (latency) than source-based snooping, it also may require fewer messages and less overall bandwidth. It'll be interesting to reprise these experiments on a platform with home-based snooping. While collecting data I also noticed that there are placement concerns even in the seemingly trivial case when both threads and both variables reside on a single node. Internally, the cores on each X7560 package are connected by an internal ring. (Actually there are multiple contra-rotating rings). And the last-level on-chip cache (LLC) is partitioned in banks or slices, which with each slice being associated with a core on the ring topology. A hardware hash function associates each physical address with a specific home bank. Thus we face distance and topology concerns even for intra-package communications, although the latencies are not nearly the magnitude we see inter-package. I've not seen such communication distance artifacts on the T2+, where the cache banks are connected to the cores via a high-speed crossbar instead of a ring -- communication latencies seem more regular.

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IIS 7.0 informational HTTP status codes

- by Samir R. Bhogayta

1xx - Informational These HTTP status codes indicate a provisional response. The client computer receives one or more 1xx responses before the client computer receives a regular response. IIS 7.0 uses the following informational HTTP status codes: 100 - Continue. 101 - Switching protocols. 2xx - Success These HTTP status codes indicate that the server successfully accepted the request. IIS 7.0 uses the following success HTTP status codes: 200 - OK. The client request has succeeded. 201 - Created. 202 - Accepted. 203 - Nonauthoritative information. 204 - No content. 205 - Reset content. 206 - Partial content. 3xx - Redirection These HTTP status codes indicate that the client browser must take more action to fulfill the request. For example, the client browser may have to request a different page on the server. Or, the client browser may have to repeat the request by using a proxy server. IIS 7.0 uses the following redirection HTTP status codes: 301 - Moved permanently. 302 - Object moved. 304 - Not modified. 307 - Temporary redirect. 4xx - Client error These HTTP status codes indicate that an error occurred and that the client browser appears to be at fault. For example, the client browser may have requested a page that does not exist. Or, the client browser may not have provided valid authentication information. IIS 7.0 uses the following client error HTTP status codes: 400 - Bad request. The request could not be understood by the server due to malformed syntax. The client should not repeat the request without modifications. IIS 7.0 defines the following HTTP status codes that indicate a more specific cause of a 400 error: 400.1 - Invalid Destination Header. 400.2 - Invalid Depth Header. 400.3 - Invalid If Header. 400.4 - Invalid Overwrite Header. 400.5 - Invalid Translate Header. 400.6 - Invalid Request Body. 400.7 - Invalid Content Length. 400.8 - Invalid Timeout. 400.9 - Invalid Lock Token. 401 - Access denied. IIS 7.0 defines several HTTP status codes that indicate a more specific cause of a 401 error. The following specific HTTP status codes are displayed in the client browser but are not displayed in the IIS log: 401.1 - Logon failed. 401.2 - Logon failed due to server configuration. 401.3 - Unauthorized due to ACL on resource. 401.4 - Authorization failed by filter. 401.5 - Authorization failed by ISAPI/CGI application. 403 - Forbidden. IIS 7.0 defines the following HTTP status codes that indicate a more specific cause of a 403 error: 403.1 - Execute access forbidden. 403.2 - Read access forbidden. 403.3 - Write access forbidden. 403.4 - SSL required. 403.5 - SSL 128 required. 403.6 - IP address rejected. 403.7 - Client certificate required. 403.8 - Site access denied. 403.9 - Forbidden: Too many clients are trying to connect to the Web server. 403.10 - Forbidden: Web server is configured to deny Execute access. 403.11 - Forbidden: Password has been changed. 403.12 - Mapper denied access. 403.13 - Client certificate revoked. 403.14 - Directory listing denied. 403.15 - Forbidden: Client access licenses have exceeded limits on the Web server. 403.16 - Client certificate is untrusted or invalid. 403.17 - Client certificate has expired or is not yet valid. 403.18 - Cannot execute requested URL in the current application pool. 403.19 - Cannot execute CGI applications for the client in this application pool. 403.20 - Forbidden: Passport logon failed. 403.21 - Forbidden: Source access denied. 403.22 - Forbidden: Infinite depth is denied. 404 - Not found. IIS 7.0 defines the following HTTP status codes that indicate a more specific cause of a 404 error: 404.0 - Not found. 404.1 - Site Not Found. 404.2 - ISAPI or CGI restriction. 404.3 - MIME type restriction. 404.4 - No handler configured. 404.5 - Denied by request filtering configuration. 404.6 - Verb denied. 404.7 - File extension denied. 404.8 - Hidden namespace. 404.9 - File attribute hidden. 404.10 - Request header too long. 404.11 - Request contains double escape sequence. 404.12 - Request contains high-bit characters. 404.13 - Content length too large. 404.14 - Request URL too long. 404.15 - Query string too long. 404.16 - DAV request sent to the static file handler. 404.17 - Dynamic content mapped to the static file handler via a wildcard MIME mapping. 404.18 - Querystring sequence denied. 404.19 - Denied by filtering rule. 405 - Method Not Allowed. 406 - Client browser does not accept the MIME type of the requested page. 408 - Request timed out. 412 - Precondition failed. 5xx - Server error These HTTP status codes indicate that the server cannot complete the request because the server encounters an error. IIS 7.0 uses the following server error HTTP status codes: 500 - Internal server error. IIS 7.0 defines the following HTTP status codes that indicate a more specific cause of a 500 error: 500.0 - Module or ISAPI error occurred. 500.11 - Application is shutting down on the Web server. 500.12 - Application is busy restarting on the Web server. 500.13 - Web server is too busy. 500.15 - Direct requests for Global.asax are not allowed. 500.19 - Configuration data is invalid. 500.21 - Module not recognized. 500.22 - An ASP.NET httpModules configuration does not apply in Managed Pipeline mode. 500.23 - An ASP.NET httpHandlers configuration does not apply in Managed Pipeline mode. 500.24 - An ASP.NET impersonation configuration does not apply in Managed Pipeline mode. 500.50 - A rewrite error occurred during RQ_BEGIN_REQUEST notification handling. A configuration or inbound rule execution error occurred. Note Here is where the distributed rules configuration is read for both inbound and outbound rules. 500.51 - A rewrite error occurred during GL_PRE_BEGIN_REQUEST notification handling. A global configuration or global rule execution error occurred. Note Here is where the global rules configuration is read. 500.52 - A rewrite error occurred during RQ_SEND_RESPONSE notification handling. An outbound rule execution occurred. 500.53 - A rewrite error occurred during RQ_RELEASE_REQUEST_STATE notification handling. An outbound rule execution error occurred. The rule is configured to be executed before the output user cache gets updated. 500.100 - Internal ASP error. 501 - Header values specify a configuration that is not implemented. 502 - Web server received an invalid response while acting as a gateway or proxy. IIS 7.0 defines the following HTTP status codes that indicate a more specific cause of a 502 error: 502.1 - CGI application timeout. 502.2 - Bad gateway. 503 - Service unavailable. IIS 7.0 defines the following HTTP status codes that indicate a more specific cause of a 503 error: 503.0 - Application pool unavailable. 503.2 - Concurrent request limit exceeded.

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Network communications mechanisms for SQL Server

- by Akshay Deep Lamba

Problem I am trying to understand how SQL Server communicates on the network, because I'm having to tell my networking team what ports to open up on the firewall for an edge web server to communicate back to the SQL Server on the inside. What do I need to know? Solution In order to understand what needs to be opened where, let's first talk briefly about the two main protocols that are in common use today: TCP - Transmission Control Protocol UDP - User Datagram Protocol Both are part of the TCP/IP suite of protocols. We'll start with TCP. TCP TCP is the main protocol by which clients communicate with SQL Server. Actually, it is more correct to say that clients and SQL Server use Tabular Data Stream (TDS), but TDS actually sits on top of TCP and when we're talking about Windows and firewalls and other networking devices, that's the protocol that rules and controls are built around. So we'll just speak in terms of TCP. TCP is a connection-oriented protocol. What that means is that the two systems negotiate the connection and both agree to it. Think of it like a phone call. While one person initiates the phone call, the other person has to agree to take it and both people can end the phone call at any time. TCP is the same way. Both systems have to agree to the communications, but either side can end it at any time. In addition, there is functionality built into TCP to ensure that all communications can be disassembled and reassembled as necessary so it can pass over various network devices and be put together again properly in the right order. It also has mechanisms to handle and retransmit lost communications. Because of this functionality, TCP is the protocol used by many different network applications. The way the applications all can share is through the use of ports. When a service, like SQL Server, comes up on a system, it must listen on a port. For a default SQL Server instance, the default port is 1433. Clients connect to the port via the TCP protocol, the connection is negotiated and agreed to, and then the two sides can transfer information as needed until either side decides to end the communication. In actuality, both sides will have a port to use for the communications, but since the client's port is typically determined semi-randomly, when we're talking about firewalls and the like, typically we're interested in the port the server or service is using. UDP UDP, unlike TCP, is not connection oriented. A "client" can send a UDP communications to anyone it wants. There's nothing in place to negotiate a communications connection, there's nothing in the protocol itself to coordinate order of communications or anything like that. If that's needed, it's got to be handled by the application or by a protocol built on top of UDP being used by the application. If you think of TCP as a phone call, think of UDP as a postcard. I can put a postcard in the mail to anyone I want, and so long as it is addressed properly and has a stamp on it, the postal service will pick it up. Now, what happens it afterwards is not guaranteed. There's no mechanism for retransmission of lost communications. It's great for short communications that doesn't necessarily need an acknowledgement. Because multiple network applications could be communicating via UDP, it uses ports, just like TCP. The SQL Browser or the SQL Server Listener Service uses UDP. Network Communications - Talking to SQL Server When an instance of SQL Server is set up, what TCP port it listens on depends. A default instance will be set up to listen on port 1433. A named instance will be set to a random port chosen during installation. In addition, a named instance will be configured to allow it to change that port dynamically. What this means is that when a named instance starts up, if it finds something already using the port it normally uses, it'll pick a new port. If you have a named instance, and you have connections coming across a firewall, you're going to want to use SQL Server Configuration Manager to set a static port. This will allow the networking and security folks to configure their devices for maximum protection. While you can change the network port for a default instance of SQL Server, most people don't. Network Communications - Finding a SQL Server When just the name is specified for a client to connect to SQL Server, for instance, MySQLServer, this is an attempt to connect to the default instance. In this case the client will automatically attempt to communicate to port 1433 on MySQLServer. If you've switched the port for the default instance, you'll need to tell the client the proper port, usually by specifying the following syntax in the connection string: <server>,<port>. For instance, if you moved SQL Server to listen on 14330, you'd use MySQLServer,14330 instead of just MySQLServer. However, because a named instance sets up its port dynamically by default, the client never knows at the outset what the port is it should talk to. That's what the SQL Browser or the SQL Server Listener Service (SQL Server 2000) is for. In this case, the client sends a communication via the UDP protocol to port 1434. It asks, "Where is the named instance?" So if I was running a named instance called SQL2008R2, it would be asking the SQL Browser, "Hey, how do I talk to MySQLServer\SQL2008R2?" The SQL Browser would then send back a communications from UDP port 1434 back to the client telling the client how to talk to the named instance. Of course, you can skip all of this of you set that named instance's port statically. Then you can use the <server>,<port> mechanism to connect and the client won't try to talk to the SQL Browser service. It'll simply try to make the connection. So, for instance, is the SQL2008R2 instance was listening on port 20080, specifying MySQLServer,20080 would attempt a connection to the named instance. Network Communications - Named Pipes Named pipes is an older network library communications mechanism and it's generally not used any longer. It shouldn't be used across a firewall. However, if for some reason you need to connect to SQL Server with it, this protocol also sits on top of TCP. Named Pipes is actually used by the operating system and it has its own mechanism within the protocol to determine where to route communications. As far as network communications is concerned, it listens on TCP port 445. This is true whether we're talking about a default or named instance of SQL Server. The Summary Table To put all this together, here is what you need to know: Type of Communication Protocol Used Default Port Finding a SQL Server or SQL Server Named Instance UDP 1434 Communicating with a default instance of SQL Server TCP 1433 Communicating with a named instance of SQL Server TCP * Determined dynamically at start up Communicating with SQL Server via Named Pipes TCP 445

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Use a Fake Http Channel to Unit Test with HttpClient

- by Steve Michelotti

Applications get data from lots of different sources. The most common is to get data from a database or a web service. Typically, we encapsulate calls to a database in a Repository object and we create some sort of IRepository interface as an abstraction to decouple between layers and enable easier unit testing by leveraging faking and mocking. This works great for database interaction. However, when consuming a RESTful web service, this is is not always the best approach. The WCF Web APIs that are available on CodePlex (current drop is Preview 3) provide a variety of features to make building HTTP REST services more robust. When you download the latest bits, you’ll also find a new HttpClient which has been updated for .NET 4.0 as compared to the one that shipped for 3.5 in the original REST Starter Kit. The HttpClient currently provides the best API for consuming REST services on the .NET platform and the WCF Web APIs provide a number of extension methods which extend HttpClient and make it even easier to use. Let’s say you have a client application that is consuming an HTTP service – this could be Silverlight, WPF, or any UI technology but for my example I’ll use an MVC application: 1: using System; 2: using System.Net.Http; 3: using System.Web.Mvc; 4: using FakeChannelExample.Models; 5: using Microsoft.Runtime.Serialization; 6: 7: namespace FakeChannelExample.Controllers 8: { 9: public class HomeController : Controller 10: { 11: private readonly HttpClient httpClient; 12: 13: public HomeController(HttpClient httpClient) 14: { 15: this.httpClient = httpClient; 16: } 17: 18: public ActionResult Index() 19: { 20: var response = httpClient.Get("Person(1)"); 21: var person = response.Content.ReadAsDataContract<Person>(); 22: 23: this.ViewBag.Message = person.FirstName + " " + person.LastName; 24: 25: return View(); 26: } 27: } 28: } On line #20 of the code above you can see I’m performing an HTTP GET request to a Person resource exposed by an HTTP service. On line #21, I use the ReadAsDataContract() extension method provided by the WCF Web APIs to serialize to a Person object. In this example, the HttpClient is being passed into the constructor by MVC’s dependency resolver – in this case, I’m using StructureMap as an IoC and my StructureMap initialization code looks like this: 1: using StructureMap; 2: using System.Net.Http; 3: 4: namespace FakeChannelExample 5: { 6: public static class IoC 7: { 8: public static IContainer Initialize() 9: { 10: ObjectFactory.Initialize(x => 11: { 12: x.For<HttpClient>().Use(() => new HttpClient("http://localhost:31614/")); 13: }); 14: return ObjectFactory.Container; 15: } 16: } 17: } My controller code currently depends on a concrete instance of the HttpClient. Now I *could* create some sort of interface and wrap the HttpClient in this interface and use that object inside my controller instead – however, there are a few why reasons that is not desirable: For one thing, the API provided by the HttpClient provides nice features for dealing with HTTP services. I don’t really *want* these to look like C# RPC method calls – when HTTP services have REST features, I may want to inspect HTTP response headers and hypermedia contained within the message so that I can make intelligent decisions as to what to do next in my workflow (although I don’t happen to be doing these things in my example above) – this type of workflow is common in hypermedia REST scenarios. If I just encapsulate HttpClient behind some IRepository interface and make it look like a C# RPC method call, it will become difficult to take advantage of these types of things. Second, it could get pretty mind-numbing to have to create interfaces all over the place just to wrap the HttpClient. Then you’re probably going to have to hard-code HTTP knowledge into your code to formulate requests rather than just “following the links” that the hypermedia in a message might provide. Third, at first glance it might appear that we need to create an interface to facilitate unit testing, but actually it’s unnecessary. Even though the code above is dependent on a concrete type, it’s actually very easy to fake the data in a unit test. The HttpClient provides a Channel property (of type HttpMessageChannel) which allows you to create a fake message channel which can be leveraged in unit testing. In this case, what I want is to be able to write a unit test that just returns fake data. I also want this to be as re-usable as possible for my unit testing. I want to be able to write a unit test that looks like this: 1: [TestClass] 2: public class HomeControllerTest 3: { 4: [TestMethod] 5: public void Index() 6: { 7: // Arrange 8: var httpClient = new HttpClient("http://foo.com"); 9: httpClient.Channel = new FakeHttpChannel<Person>(new Person { FirstName = "Joe", LastName = "Blow" }); 10: 11: HomeController controller = new HomeController(httpClient); 12: 13: // Act 14: ViewResult result = controller.Index() as ViewResult; 15: 16: // Assert 17: Assert.AreEqual("Joe Blow", result.ViewBag.Message); 18: } 19: } Notice on line #9, I’m setting the Channel property of the HttpClient to be a fake channel. I’m also specifying the fake object that I want to be in the response on my “fake” Http request. I don’t need to rely on any mocking frameworks to do this. All I need is my FakeHttpChannel. The code to do this is not complex: 1: using System; 2: using System.IO; 3: using System.Net.Http; 4: using System.Runtime.Serialization; 5: using System.Threading; 6: using FakeChannelExample.Models; 7: 8: namespace FakeChannelExample.Tests 9: { 10: public class FakeHttpChannel<T> : HttpClientChannel 11: { 12: private T responseObject; 13: 14: public FakeHttpChannel(T responseObject) 15: { 16: this.responseObject = responseObject; 17: } 18: 19: protected override HttpResponseMessage Send(HttpRequestMessage request, CancellationToken cancellationToken) 20: { 21: return new HttpResponseMessage() 22: { 23: RequestMessage = request, 24: Content = new StreamContent(this.GetContentStream()) 25: }; 26: } 27: 28: private Stream GetContentStream() 29: { 30: var serializer = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(T)); 31: Stream stream = new MemoryStream(); 32: serializer.WriteObject(stream, this.responseObject); 33: stream.Position = 0; 34: return stream; 35: } 36: } 37: } The HttpClientChannel provides a Send() method which you can override to return any HttpResponseMessage that you want. You can see I’m using the DataContractSerializer to serialize the object and write it to a stream. That’s all you need to do. In the example above, the only thing I’ve chosen to do is to provide a way to return different response objects. But there are many more features you could add to your own re-usable FakeHttpChannel. For example, you might want to provide the ability to add HTTP headers to the message. You might want to use a different serializer other than the DataContractSerializer. You might want to provide custom hypermedia in the response as well as just an object or set HTTP response codes. This list goes on. This is the just one example of the really cool features being added to the next version of WCF to enable various HTTP scenarios. The code sample for this post can be downloaded here.

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