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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 19, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 19, 2011Popular ReleasesAdvanced Explorer for Wp7: Advanced Explorer for Wp7 Version 1.4 Test8: Added option to run under Lockscreen. Fixed a bug when you open a pdf/mobi file without starting adobe reader/amazon kindle first boost loading time for folders added \Windows directory (all devices) you can now interact with the filesystem while it is loading!Game Files Open - Map Editor: Game Files Open - Map Editor Beta 2 v1.0.0.0: The 2° beta release of the Map Editor, we have fixed a big bug of the files regen.Document.Editor: 2011.6: Whats new for Document.Editor 2011.6: New Left to Right and Left to Right support New Indent more/less support Improved Home tab Improved Tooltips/shortcut keys Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsCatel - WPF and Silverlight MVVM library: 1.2: Catel history ============= (+) Added (*) Changed (-) Removed (x) Error / bug (fix) For more information about issues or new feature requests, please visit: http://catel.codeplex.com =========== Version 1.2 =========== Release date: ============= 2011/02/17 Added/fixed: ============ (+) DataObjectBase now supports Isolated Storage out of the box: Person.Save(myStream) stores a whole object graph in Silverlight (+) DataObjectBase can now be converted to Json via Person.ToJson(); (+)...??????????: All-In-One Code Framework ??? 2011-02-18: ?????All-In-One Code Framework?2011??????????！！http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=128165 ?????，?????AzureBingMaps??????，??Azure，WCF, Silverlight, Window Phone????????，????????????????????????。 ???： Windows Azure SQL Azure Windows Azure AppFabric Windows Live Messenger Connect Bing Maps ?????： ??????HTML??? ??Windows PC?Mac?Silverlight??? ??Windows Phone?Silverlight??? ?????：http://blog.csdn.net/sjb5201/archive/2011...Image.Viewer: 2011: First version of 2011Silverlight Toolkit: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit - Feb 2011: Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit OverviewSilverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit offers developers additional controls for Windows Phone application development, designed to match the rich user experience of the Windows Phone 7. Suggestions? Features? Questions? Ask questions in the Create.msdn.com forum. Add bugs or feature requests to the Issue Tracker. Help us shape the Silverlight Toolkit with your feedback! Please clearly indicate that the work items and issues are for the phone t...VsTortoise - a TortoiseSVN add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio: VsTortoise Build 29 Beta: Note: This release does not work with custom VsTortoise toolbars. These get removed every time when you shutdown Visual Studio. (#7940) Build 29 (beta)New: Added VsTortoise Solution Explorer integration for Web Project Folder, Web Folder and Web Item. Fix: TortoiseProc was called with invalid parameters, when using TSVN 1.4.x or older #7338 (thanks psifive) Fix: Add-in does not work, when "TortoiseSVN/bin" is not added to PATH environment variable #7357 Fix: Missing error message when ...Sense/Net CMS - Enterprise Content Management: SenseNet 6.0.3 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.3 Community Edition We are happy to introduce you the latest version of Sense/Net with integrated ECM Workflow capabilities! In the past weeks we have been working hard to migrate the product to .Net 4 and include a workflow framework in Sense/Net built upon Windows Workflow Foundation 4. This brand new feature enables developers to define and develop workflows, and supports users when building and setting up complicated business processes involving content creation and response...thinktecture WSCF.blue: WSCF.blue V1 Update (1.0.11): Features Added a new option that allows properties on data contract types to be marked as virtual. Bug Fixes Fixed a bug caused by certain project properties not being available on Web Service Software Factory projects. Fixed a bug that could result in the WrapperName value of the MessageContractAttribute being incorrect when the Adjust Casing option is used. The menu item code now caters for CommandBar instances that are not available. For example the Web Item CommandBar does not exist ...Terminals: Version 2 - RC1: The "Clean Install" will overwrite your log4net configuration (if you have one). If you run in a Portable Environment, you can use the "Clean Install" and target your portable folder. Tested and it works fine. Changes for this release: Re-worked on the Toolstip settings are done, just to avoid the vs.net clash with auto-generating files for .settings files. renamed it to .settings.config Packged both log4net and ToolStripSettings files into the installer Upgraded the version inform...AllNewsManager.NET: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3: AllNewsManager.NET 1.3. This new version provide several new features, improvements and bug fixes. Some new features: Online Users. Avatars. Copy function (to create a new article from another one). SEO improvements (friendly urls). New admin buttons. And more...Facebook Graph Toolkit: Facebook Graph Toolkit 0.8: Version 0.8 (15 Feb 2011)moved to Beta stage publish photo feature "email" field of User object added new Graph Api object: Group, Event new Graph Api connection: likes, groups, eventsDJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC: DJME2 -The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC beta2: The source code and runtime library for DJME2. For more product info you can goto http://www.dotnetage.com/djme.html What is new ?The Grid extension added The ModelBinder added which helping you create Bindable data Action. The DnaFor() control factory added that enabled Model bindable extensions. Enhance the ListBox , ComboBox data binding.Jint - Javascript Interpreter for .NET: Jint - 0.9.0: New CLR interoperability features Many bugfixesBuild Version Increment Add-In Visual Studio: Build Version Increment v2.4.11046.2045: v2.4.11046.2045 Fixes and/or Improvements:Major: Added complete support for VC projects including .vcxproj & .vcproj. All padding issues fixed. A project's assembly versions are only changed if the project has been modified. Minor Order of versioning style values is now according to their respective positions in the attributes i.e. Major, Minor, Build, Revision. Fixed issue with global variable storage with some projects. Fixed issue where if a project item's file does not exist, a ...Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.1 release. Bug fixes and minor feature requests addedTV4Home - The all-in-one TV solution!: 0.1.0.0 Preview: This is the beta preview release of the TV4Home software.Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.2: Fixes a few minor issues with 1.1 including the broken per-desktop backgrounds Further improves the speed of switching desktops A few UI performance improvements Added donations linksNuGet: NuGet 1.1: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. This release is a Visual Studio 2010 extension and contains the the Package Manager Console and the Add Package Dialog. The URL to the package OData feed is: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=206669 To see the list of issues fixed in this release, visit this our issues list A...New ProjectsComplexityEvolution: Research projectCRM 2011 Metadata Browser: The CRM 2011 Metadata Browser is a Silverlight 4 application that is packaged as a Managed CRM Solution. This tool allows you to view metadata including Entities, Attributes and Relationships. The 2011 SOAP endpoint is used to connect to CRM using the Organization.svc/web serviceEFCFvsNH3: A sample project that shows the main differences between Entity Framework Code First and Nhibernate 3: -Mapping -Configuration -DB Initialization -Query API -Session & Transaction -ValidationE-Teacher for IELTS preparation: E-teacher helps IELTS students prepare for the IELTS Academic and General Training test. Qualified English Teachers can register to the e-community and helps candidates to understand what they really need to improve for the IELTS exam and how to reach for the maximum band score.FIM CM Extensions: Extensions for Forefront Identity Manager 2010 to enable integration between the FIM Service workflow and the FIM Certificate Management workflow. Game Files Open - Map Editor: This is a map editor for the metin2 clients, it's very simple edit or create a map with this tool.Garbage Collection Sample Code: Garbage collection sample code demonstrates the differences between the large and small object heaps. This code supports the blog post at http://www.deepcode.co.ukGardenersWorld: The aim of gardenersWorld community website is to provide a platform for budding gardenening enthusiasts, hobbyists and professionals to share information. Harvester - Debug Monitor for Log4Net and NLog: Harvester enables you to monitor all Win32 debug output from all applications running on your machine. Watch real time Log4Net and NLog output across multiple applications at the same time. Trace a call from client to server and back without having to look at multiple log files.Hjelp! Jeg skal ha farmakokinetikk-eksamen!: Sliter du med å pugge formler til farmakokinetikk-eksamenen? Da er redningen din her! :DMercury Business Framework: Mercury Business Framework is a project set up to define basic objects used by the vast majority of business and non business software. The idea is to define the low level objects required by most applications on the web and desktop.MyDistrictBuilder: MyDistrictBuilder allows anybody to build legislative districts and submit to the Florida House of Rep. It is built on Bing Maps, Silverlight and AZURE. Written in C#. It is written to allow anyone to adapt for any states census geography. www.floridaredistricting.cloudapp.netMySchoolApp: MySchoolApp is a customizable application written in Visual Basic and C# for the Windows Mobile Phone 7 platform using Visual Studio Professional 2010. The application combines links to RSS and Web sites about a school, and displays a map and local weather. Osm Parser Community Edition: Osm Parser parse highways in open street maps to generate routable roads network in spatialite.PRBox Cloud Website: This is the website base for PRBox.com SEO Reporter : open source search engine optimization software: SEO Reporter is an open source search engine optimization application for detecting HTML related SEO violations, gathering data about a Web page and analyzing its keywords strategy. It's a Windows navigation application developed in F#. Setting timeout for SharePoint 2010 Silverlight web part: This web part overwrites 5sec hard-coded timeout for SharePoint 2010 Silverlight web part.SharePoint 2010 Central Administration Automatic Resources Link Generator: This feature will automatically generate the resources links list (Quick Links) in your SharePoint 2010 Central Administration site making it easier for SharePoint Admins to navigate through the common Central Administration activities without populating it themselves - VS2010/c#SharePoint Holiday Loader: SharePoint Holiday Loader allows you to quickly import public holidays into a SharePoint calendar from the standard .HOL format.Sohu?????: ?????????WPF?????????????，????????????（??、??、???），??、??、???????，????????????，??????????????。 ??V1????????，V2?????????????????。SP2010 Form Manipulator: This project will hopefully make it easier to manipulate the list form in SharePoint 2010.SPRotator: A jQuery powered web part for SharePoint that cycles through any type of list.SQL Script to Create a Website Directory: Here you can download sql script to create a website directory using SQL Server. * This is only the easy directory sql script to develop your website. Directory software may publish in future.Sri Hits Zone: This is an online repository which used to share Sri Lankan music. This is to provide Sri Lankans who living abroad to being touches with Sri Lankan artist and their music. testz: testzTime domain dissipative acoustic problem: tddapWindows Azure Hosted Services VM Manager: Windows Azure Hosted Services VM Manager is a Windows Service that can manage the number of hosted services running in Azure by either a time based schedule or by CPU load. This allows your service to scale for either dynamic load or a known schedule. Z80TR: Z80TR

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• Using Oracle ADF Data Visualization Tools (DVT) Line Graphs to Display Weather Information

  - by Christian David Straub

  OverviewA guest post by Jeanne Waldman.I have a simple JDeveloper Fusion application that retrieves weather data. I wanted to compare the week's temperatures of different locations in a graph. I decided to check out the dvt:lineGraph component, and it took me a few minutes to add it to my jspx page and supply it with data.Drag and Drop the dvt:lineGraph onto your pageI opened my .jspx page in design modeIn the Component Palette, I selected ADF Data Visualization.Then I dragged 'Line' onto my page.A dialog popped up giving me options of the type of line graph. I chose the default.A lineGraph displayed with some default data. Hook up your weather dataNow I wanted to hook up my own data. I browsed the tagdoc, and I found the tabularData attribute.Attribute: tabularDataType: java.util.ListTagDoc:Specifies a list of data that the graph uses to create a grid and populate itself. The List consists of a three-member Object array for each data value to be passed to the graph. The members of each array must be organized as follows: The first member (index 0) is the column label, in the grid, of the data value. This is generally a String. If the graph has a time axis, then this should be a Java Date. Column labels typically identify groups in the graph. The second member (index 1) is the row label, in the grid, of the data value. This is generally a String. Row labels appear as series labels in the graph (usually in the legend). The third member (index 2) is the data value, which is usually a Double.The first member is the column label of the data value. This would be the day of the week.The second member is the row label of the data value. This would be the location name.The third member is the data value, usually a Double. This would be the temperature. I already had all this information, I just needed to put it in a List with a three-member Object array for each data value.   /**    * This is used for the lineGraph to show the data for each location.    */   public List<Object[]> getTabularData()   {      List<Object[]> tabularData = new ArrayList<Object []>();      List<WeatherForecast> weatherForecastList = getWeatherForecastList();      // loop through the list and build up the tabular data. Then cache it.      for(WeatherForecast wf : weatherForecastList)      {        List<ForecastDay> forecastDayList = wf.getForecastDayList();        String location = wf.getLocation();        for (ForecastDay fday : forecastDayList)        {          String day = fday.getPrettyDate();          String highTemp = fday.getHighF();          tabularData.add(new Object[]{day, location, Double.valueOf(highTemp)});        }             }      return tabularData;    }  Now I bound the lineGraph to this method by setting tabularData to#{weatherForAllLocationsBean.tabularData}weatherForAllLocationsBean is my bean that is defined in faces-config.xml. Adding a barGraphIn about 30 seconds, I added a barGraph with the same data. I dragged and dropped a bar graph onto the page, used the same tabularData as I did in the line graph. The page looks like this:  ConclusionI was very happy how fast it was to hook up my weather data to these graphs. They look great, and they have built in functionality. For instance, I can hide/show a location by clicking on the name of the location in the legend.

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• Request Limit Length Limits for IIS&rsquo;s requestFiltering Module

  - by Rick Strahl

  Today I updated my CodePaste.net site to MVC 3 and pushed an update to the site. The update of MVC went pretty smooth as well as most of the update process to the live site. Short of missing a web.config change in the /views folder that caused blank pages on the server, the process was relatively painless. However, one issue that kicked my ass for about an hour – and not foe the first time – was a problem with my OpenId authentication using DotNetOpenAuth. I tested the site operation fairly extensively locally and everything worked no problem, but on the server the OpenId returns resulted in a 404 response from IIS for a nice friendly OpenId return URL like this: http://codepaste.net/Account/OpenIdLogon?dnoa.userSuppliedIdentifier=http%3A%2F%2Frstrahl.myopenid.com%2F&dnoa.return_to_sig_handle=%7B634239223364590000%7D%7BjbHzkg%3D%3D%7D&dnoa.return_to_sig=7%2BcGhp7UUkcV2B8W29ibIDnZuoGoqzyS%2F%2FbF%2FhhYscgWzjg%2BB%2Fj10ZpNdBkUCu86dkTL6f4OK2zY5qHhCnJ2Dw%3D%3D&openid.assoc_handle=%7BHMAC-SHA256%7D%7B4cca49b2%7D%7BMVGByQ%3D%3D%7D&openid.claimed_id=http%3A%2F%2Frstrahl.myopenid.com%2F&openid.identity=http%3A%2F%2Frstrahl.myopenid.com%2F&openid.mode=id_res&openid.ns=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0&openid.ns.sreg=http%3A%2F%2Fopenid.net%2Fextensions%2Fsreg%2F1.1&openid.op_endpoint=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.myopenid.com%2Fserver&openid.response_nonce=2010-10-29T04%3A12%3A53Zn5F4r5&openid.return_to=http%3A%2F%2Fcodepaste.net%2FAccount%2FOpenIdLogon%3Fdnoa.userSuppliedIdentifier%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Frstrahl.myopenid.com%252F%26dnoa.return_to_sig_handle%3D%257B634239223364590000%257D%257BjbHzkg%253D%253D%257D%26dnoa.return_to_sig%3D7%252BcGhp7UUkcV2B8W29ibIDnZuoGoqzyS%252F%252FbF%252FhhYscgWzjg%252BB%252Fj10ZpNdBkUCu86dkTL6f4OK2zY5qHhCnJ2Dw%253D%253D&openid.sig=h1GCSBTDAn1on98sLA6cti%2Bj1M6RffNerdVEI80mnYE%3D&openid.signed=assoc_handle%2Cclaimed_id%2Cidentity%2Cmode%2Cns%2Cns.sreg%2Cop_endpoint%2Cresponse_nonce%2Creturn_to%2Csigned%2Csreg.email%2Csreg.fullname&openid.sreg.email=rstrahl%40host.com&openid.sreg.fullname=Rick+Strahl A 404 of course isn’t terribly helpful – normally a 404 is a resource not found error, but the resource is definitely there. So how the heck do you figure out what’s wrong? If you’re just interested in the solution, here’s the short version: IIS by default allows only for a 1024 byte query string, which is obviously exceeded by the above. The setting is controlled by the RequestFiltering module in IIS 6 and later which can be configured in ApplicationHost.config (in \%windir\system32\inetsvr\config). To set the value configure the requestLimits key like so: <configuration> <security> <requestFiltering> <requestLimits maxQueryString="2048"> </requestLimits> </requestFiltering> </security> </configuration> This fixed me right up and made the requests work. How do you find out about problems like this? Ah yes the troubles of an administrator? Read on and I’ll take you through a quick review of how I tracked this down. Finding the Problem The issue with the error returned is that IIS returns a 404 Resource not found error and doesn’t provide much information about it. If you’re lucky enough to be able to run your site from the localhost IIS is actually very helpful and gives you the right information immediately in a nicely detailed error page. The bottom of the page actually describes exactly what needs to be fixed. One problem with this easy way to find an error: You HAVE TO run localhost. On my server which has about 10 domains running localhost doesn’t point at the particular site I had problems with so I didn’t get the luxury of this nice error page. Using Failed Request Tracing to retrieve Error Info The first place I go with IIS errors is to turn on Failed Request Tracing in IIS to get more error information. If you have access to the server to make a configuration change you can enable Failed Request Tracing like this: Find the Failed Request Tracing Rules in the IIS Service Manager.   Select the option and then Edit Site Tracing to enable tracing. Then add a rule for * (all content) and specify status codes from 100-999 to capture all errors. if you know exactly what error you’re looking for it might help to specify it exactly to keep the number of errors down. Then run your request and let it fail. IIS will throw error log files into a folder like this C:\inetpub\logs\FailedReqLogFiles\W3SVC5 where the last 5 is the instance ID of the site. These files are XML but they include an XSL stylesheet that provides some decent formatting. In this case it pointed me straight at the offending module:   Ok, it’s the RequestFilteringModule. Request Filtering is built into IIS 6-7 and configured in ApplicationHost.config. This module defines a few basic rules about what paths and extensions are allowed in requests and among other things how long a query string is allowed to be. Most of these settings are pretty sensible but the query string value can easily become a problem especially if you’re dealing with OpenId since these return URLs are quite extensive. Debugging failed requests is never fun, but IIS 6 and forward at least provides us the tools that can help us point in the right direction. The error message the FRT report isn’t as nice as the IIS error message but it at least points at the offending module which gave me the clue I needed to look at request restrictions in ApplicationHost.config. This would still be a stretch if you’re not intimately familiar, but I think with some Google searches it would be easy to track this down with a few tries… Hope this was useful to some of you. Useful to me to put this out as a reminder – I’ve run into this issue before myself and totally forgot. Next time I got it, right?© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  Security  

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, January 01, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, January 01, 2011Popular ReleasesBloodSim: BloodSim - 1.3.0.0: - Added tally for number of boss swings and swing avoids - Removed a large number of options that were carried over from Beta and are no longer relevant - Changed stat entry to use Rating format for Dodge, Parry, Haste and Mastery - Rearranged Settings interface - BloodSim will now check for updates on startup and notify the user if a new version is available - Added option to Show/Hide the Simulation Log to increase speed during large simulationsEnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.8 ALPHA: 2.2.8 ALPHAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 Rebuilt Feral Spir...CBM-Command: Version 2.0 Beta 2 - 2010-12-31: This version fixes three major bugs in Version 2.0 Beta 1 Changes(64, 128, Plus/4) Changed the timing code back to version 1.7 because the clock() function in cc65 does not reflect accurate timing. (VIC, PET) The time(NULL) function is not available on these targets and thus had to be removed. Help Hot-Key Fixed - Now when you press either F1 or H you get the help file (if the CBM-Command disk is in the drive you started CBM-Command from). Updated Help File - the new help file by popmi...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.6 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing final version of Visifire, v3.6.6 with the following new feature: * TextDecorations property is implemented in Title for Chart. * TitleTextDecorations property is implemented in Axis. * MinPointHeight property is now applicable for Column and Bar Charts. Also this release includes few bug fixes: * ToolTipText property of DataSeries was not getting applied from Style. * Chart threw exception if IndicatorEnabled property was set to true and Too...StyleCop Compliant Visual Studio Code Snippets: Visual Studio Code Snippets - January 2011: StyleCop Compliant Visual Studio Code Snippets Visual Studio 2010 provides C# developers with 38 code snippets, enhancing developer productivty and increasing the consistency of the code. Within this project the original code snippets have been refactored to provide StyleCop compliant versions of the original code snippets while also adding many new code snippets. Within the January 2011 release you'll find 82 code snippets to make you more productive and the code you write more consistent!...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.2: Version: 2.0.0.2 (Milestone 2): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ...eCompany: eCompany v0.2.0 Build 63: Version 0.2.0 Build 63: Added Splash screen & about box Added downloading of currencies when eCompany launched for the first time (must close any bug caused by no currency rate existing) Added corp creation when eCompany launched for the first time (for now, you didn't need to edit the company.xml file manually) You just need to decompress file "eCompany v0.2.0.63.zip" into your current eCompany install directory.SQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQL Monitor 3.0 alpha 8: 1. added truncate table/defrag index/check db functions 2. improved alert 3. fixed problem with alert causing config file corrupted(hopefully)Temporary Data Storage Folder: TDS Folder version 0.2 Beta: In this release following bugs are fixed: 'Send to' entry bug fixed Preferences bug fixedSilverlight File Upload and Download with Interlink: HSS Interlink v.2.1.300: Latest Release 2.1.300 - December 29th 2010 Change Log DownloadFileDialog Modified to support an absolute uri for the DownloadUri property, which is required for OOB support UploadFileDialog Modified to support an absolute uri for the UploadUri property, which is required for OOB support For existing users be sure to uninstall the older version prior to installing this version Note: The demo application is NOT included with the installer but can be reviewed here Stable release and ready...RDPAddins .NET: RDPAddins Alpha 2 (0.2.0.0): Second alpha release... Breaking changes (now this project has 0.2 version): now addin should implement RDPAddins.Common.IAddin and should me exported with RDPAddins.Common.AddinMetadataAtrribute !!!most of all old Addin base class method you can fide in IChannel or IUI interfeces see FileTransferAddin Now RDPAddins.Common.dll just provide interfaces for addin, channel, ui, and export metadata Whole implementation is in RDPAddins.exe RDPAddins.Common.dll has some documentation :) why all this...DocX: DocX v1.0.0.11: Building Examples projectTo build the Examples project, download DocX.dll and add it as a reference to the project. OverviewThis version of DocX contains many bug fixes, it is a serious step towards a stable release. Added1) Unit testing project, 2) Examples project, 3) To many bug fixes to list here, see the source code change list history.Cosmos (C# Open Source Managed Operating System): 71406: This is the second release supporting the full line of Visual Studio 2010 editions. Changes since release 71246 include: Debug info is now stored in a single .cpdb file (which is a Firebird database) Keyboard input works now (using Console.ReadLine) Console colors work (using Console.ForegroundColor and .BackgroundColor)AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.0: Added the all new Masteries Browser which replaces the Quick Open combobox AutoLoL will now attemt to create file associations for mastery (*.lolm) files Each Mastery Build can now contain keywords that the Masteries Browser will use for filtering Changed the way AutoLoL detects if another instance is already running Changed the format of the mastery files to allow more information stored in* Dialogs will now focus the Ok or Cancel button which allows the user to press Return to clo...Paint.NET PSD Plugin: 1.6.0: Handling of layer masks has been greatly improved. Improved reliability. Many PSD files that previously loaded in as garbage will now load in correctly. Parallelized loading. PSD files containing layer masks will load in a bit quicker thanks to the removal of the sequential bottleneck. Hidden layers are no longer made visible on save. Many thanks to the users who helped expose the layer masks problem: Rob Horowitz, M_Lyons10. Please keep sending in those bug reports and PSD repro files!Facebook C# SDK: 4.1.1: From 4.1.1 Release: Authentication bug fix caused by facebook change (error with redirects in Safari) Authenticator fix, always returning true From 4.1.0 Release Lots of bug fixes Removed Dynamic Runtime Language dependencies from non-dynamic platforms. Samples included in release for ASP.NET, MVC, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, WPF, WinForms, and one Visual Basic Sample Changed internal serialization to use Json.net BREAKING CHANGE: Canvas Session is no longer supported. Use Signed...Catel - WPF and Silverlight MVVM library: 1.0.0: And there it is, the final release of Catel, and it is no longer a beta version!Euro for Windows XP: ChangeRegionalSettings 1..0: *Rocket Framework (.Net 4.0): Rocket Framework for Windows V 1.0.0: Architecture is reviewed and adjusted in a way so that I can introduce the Web version and WPF version of this framework next. - Rocket.Core is introduced - Controller button functions revisited and updated - DB is renewed to suite the implemented features - Create New button functionality is changed - Add Question Handling featuresFlickr Wallpaper Rotator (for Windows desktop): Wallpaper Flickr 1.1: Some minor bugfixes (mostly covering when network connection is flakey, so I discovered them all while at my parents' house for Christmas).New Projects7-Up: PowerShell Scripts for Upgrading SharePoint 2007 to 2010: PowerShell scripts to automate the upgrade of SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 using a content database or hybrid upgrade approach.Apple Wireless Keyboard: Helper that Allows people use the Apple Wireless (or Wired possibly) Keyboard under Windows 7 without loosing the mac functionalityckTest: testtesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttestCrude - .Net Dependency Management: Crude is light dependency management for .net, there was no dependency management solution for .net as Maven or Ivy until now. DeepTime: Event tacking, management and plotting site.Dev/Test Cloud Platform: Dev/Test Cloud Platform is implemented by Beyondsoft and Microsoft. The platform is dedicated to software development and test scenarios. With Dev/Test Cloud you can save your cost, improve work efficiency, and improve product quality.Image Viewer (wpf version): Image viewer helps windows users to review images on their computer. It is written i Csharp and wpf.LNOne: All common code, framework code, utility code in one.LOGL::GLib: LOGL::GLib is an OpenGL game library written in C++ that allows new C++/OpenGL programmers to focus more on the game and less on the details.MAPI.GUI: Graphical program uses function from mcopyapi.codeplex.com and mdeleteapi.codeplex.com console programs. Program support longPath (above 259 chars and less 32000 chars)Movie Collection Manager: Gerenciador que ajuda a manusear coleção de filmes. Possui uma interface super atraente e simples de usar. Ferramentas e tecnologias usadas: - Visual C# 2010 Express - SQL Server 2008 R2 Express - Windows Forms - Entity Framework OBS: Projeto concorrente do Desafio .NETMyStudioServer.com: Source code for the DotNetNuke http://MyStudioServer.com websiteNusya Tester: A software to create and use various tests with right answers explanations to help one in self-education. It's developed in C#Project Zylaphon: Project Zylaphon is a C# GPL Open Source Computer Aided Music Composition System. Its design goals include highly interactive composition, music computation, and analysis; system control to be provided by an A.I. goal based agenda and quasi Blackboard for maximum flexibility.Remember The Task: RememberTheTask makes it easier to remember what you have been doing the last hour. It's developed in Visual Basic.Rent Payments Scheduling: Register rent schedules and keep track of them.Simple MVVM Toolkit for Silverlight: Simple MVVM Toolkit makes it easier to develop Silverlight applications using the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern.Sparrow.NET HtmlTemplate: Its a template engine for generating web pages.(?????HTML?????，??????html Tag???????html????。)SQLDiagUI: SQLDiagUI provides a GUI for Microsoft SQlDiag Utility which allows users to create a configuration file and start/stop/schedule SQLDiag against a SQL Server.Test Control: testing frameworkTwicko: Simple twitter client.Unity3D Utilities: Unity3D Utilities provides additional functionality to Unity3D (3.0+) via extensions, utilities, mini-frameworks, etc.VBA Composite Controls Object Model: VBA Composite Controls encapsulate complex event-driven interactions between ActiveX controls and other objects in Microsoft Office. It's uses are limited only by the imagination, from binding controls together for updating, to creating unique user interfaces!World of Warcraft Backit up(wow backit up): a project that helps you backup and restore your settings in wow easilyYamma: Yet Another Money Management Application. Build in .NET 4, SQLCE, LINQ and the Entity Framework.

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• Forcing an External Activation with Service Broker

  - by Davide Mauri

  In these last days I’ve been working quite a lot with Service Broker, a technology I’m really happy to work with, since it can give a lot of satisfaction. The scale-out solution one can easily build is simply astonishing. I’m helping a company to build a very scalable and – yet almost inexpensive – invoicing system that has to be able to scale out using commodity hardware. To offload the work from the main server to satellite “compute nodes” (yes, I’ve borrowed this term from PDW) we’re using Service Broker and the External Activator application available in the SQL Server Feature Pack. For those who are not used to work with SSB, the External Activation is a feature that allows you to intercept the arrival of a message in a queue right from your application code. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171617.aspx (Look for “Event-Based Activation”) In order to make life even more easier, Microsoft released the External Activation application that saves you even from writing even this code. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_service_broker/archive/tags/external+activator/ The External Activator application can be configured to execute your own application so that each time a message – an invoice in my case – arrives in the target queue, the invoking application is executed and the invoice is calculated. The very nice feature of External Activator is that it can automatically execute as many configured application in order to process as many messages as your system can handle.  This also a lot of create a scale-out solution, leaving to the developer only a fraction of the problems that usually came with asynchronous programming. Developers are also shielded from Service Broker since everything can be encapsulated in Stored Procedures, so that – for them – developing such scale-out asynchronous solution is not much more complex than just executing a bunch of Stored Procedures. Now, if everything works correctly, you don’t have to bother of anything else. You put messages in the queue and your application, invoked by the External Activator, process them. But what happen if for some reason your application fails to process the messages. For examples, it crashes? The message is safe in the queue so you just need to process it again. But your application is invoked by the External Activator application, so now the question is, how do you wake up that app? Service Broker will engage the activation process only if certain conditions are met: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171601.aspx But how we can invoke the activation process manually, without having to wait for another message to arrive (the arrival of a new message is a condition that can fire the activation process)? The “trick” is to do manually with the activation process does: sending a system message to a queue in charge of handling External Activation messages: declare @conversationHandle uniqueidentifier; declare @n xml = N' <EVENT_INSTANCE>   <EventType>QUEUE_ACTIVATION</EventType>   <PostTime>' + CONVERT(CHAR(24),GETDATE(),126) + '</PostTime>   <SPID>' + CAST(@@SPID AS VARCHAR(9)) + '</SPID>   <ServerName>[your_server_name]</ServerName>   <LoginName>[your_login_name]</LoginName>   <UserName>[your_user_name]</UserName>   <DatabaseName>[your_database_name]</DatabaseName>   <SchemaName>[your_queue_schema_name]</SchemaName>   <ObjectName>[your_queue_name]</ObjectName>   <ObjectType>QUEUE</ObjectType> </EVENT_INSTANCE>' begin dialog conversation     @conversationHandle from service        [<your_initiator_service_name>] to service          '<your_event_notification_service>' on contract         [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/PostEventNotification] with     encryption = off,     lifetime = 6000 ; send on conversation     @conversationHandle message type     [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/EventNotification] (@n) ;     end conversation @conversationHandle; That’s it! Put the code in a Stored Procedure and you can add to your application a button that says “Force Queue Processing” (or something similar) in order to start the activation process whenever you need it (which should not occur too frequently but it may happen). PS I know that the “fire-and-forget” (ending the conversation without waiting for an answer) technique is not a best practice, but in this case I don’t see how it can hurts so I decided to stay very close to the KISS principle []

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• ODI 12c's Mapping Designer - Combining Flow Based and Expression Based Mapping

  - by Madhu Nair

  post by David Allan ODI is renowned for its declarative designer and minimal expression based paradigm. The new ODI 12c release has extended this even further to provide an extended declarative mapping designer. The ODI 12c mapper is a fusion of ODI's new declarative designer with the familiar flow based designer while retaining ODI’s key differentiators of: Minimal expression based definition, The ability to incrementally design an interface and to extract/load data from any combination of sources, and most importantly Backed by ODI’s extensible knowledge module framework. The declarative nature of the product has been extended to include an extensible library of common components that can be used to easily build simple to complex data integration solutions. Big usability improvements through consistent interactions of components and concepts all constructed around the familiar knowledge module framework provide the utmost flexibility. Here is a little taster: So what is a mapping? A mapping comprises of a logical design and at least one physical design, it may have many. A mapping can have many targets, of any technology and can be arbitrarily complex. You can build reusable mappings and use them in other mappings or other reusable mappings. In the example below all of the information from an Oracle bonus table and a bonus file are joined with an Oracle employees table before being written to a target. Some things that are cool include the one-click expression cross referencing so you can easily see what's used where within the design. The logical design in a mapping describes what you want to accomplish  (see the animated GIF here illustrating how the above mapping was designed) . The physical design lets you configure how it is to be accomplished. So you could have one logical design that is realized as an initial load in one physical design and as an incremental load in another. In the physical design below we can customize how the mapping is accomplished by picking Knowledge Modules, in ODI 12c you can pick multiple nodes (on logical or physical) and see common properties. This is useful as we can quickly compare property values across objects - below we can see knowledge modules settings on the access points between execution units side by side, in the example one table is retrieved via database links and the other is an external table. In the logical design I had selected an append mode for the integration type, so by default the IKM on the target will choose the most suitable/default IKM - which in this case is an in-built Oracle Insert IKM (see image below). This supports insert and select hints for the Oracle database (the ANSI SQL Insert IKM does not support these), so by default you will get direct path inserts with Oracle on this statement. In ODI 12c, the mapper is just that, a mapper. Design your mapping, write to multiple targets, the targets can be in the same data server, in different data servers or in totally different technologies - it does not matter. ODI 12c will derive and generate a plan that you can use or customize with knowledge modules. Some of the use cases which are greatly simplified include multiple heterogeneous targets, multi target inserts for Oracle and writing of XML. Let's switch it up now and look at a slightly different example to illustrate expression reuse. In ODI you can define reusable expressions using user functions. These can be reused across mappings and the implementations specialized per technology. So you can have common expressions across Oracle, SQL Server, Hive etc. shielding the design from the physical aspects of the generated language. Another way to reuse is within a mapping itself. In ODI 12c expressions can be defined and reused within a mapping. Rather than replicating the expression text in larger expressions you can decompose into smaller snippets, below you can see UNIT_TAX AMOUNT has been defined and is used in two downstream target columns - its used in the TOTAL_TAX_AMOUNT plus its used in the UNIT_TAX_AMOUNT (a recording of the calculation).  You can see the columns that the expressions depend on (upstream) and the columns the expression is used in (downstream) highlighted within the mapper. Also multi selecting attributes is a convenient way to see what's being used where, below I have selected the TOTAL_TAX_AMOUNT in the target datastore and the UNIT_TAX_AMOUNT in UNIT_CALC. You can now see many expressions at once now and understand much more at the once time without needlessly clicking around and memorizing information. Our mantra during development was to keep it simple and make the tool more powerful and do even more for the user. The development team was a fusion of many teams from Oracle Warehouse Builder, Sunopsis and BEA Aqualogic, debating and perfecting the mapper in ODI 12c. This was quite a project from supporting the capabilities of ODI in 11g to building the flow based mapping tool to support the future. I hope this was a useful insight, there is so much more to come on this topic, this is just a preview of much more that you will see of the mapper in ODI 12c.

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• Does IntelliJ-Idea support Groovy 2.x?

  - by Freewind

  I just tried IntelliJ-Idea 11.x and 12.x (EPA), but when I use Groovy 2.0.1 or 2.0.5, the code can't be run and there are some errors out there. The Groovy plugin of idea has little information about which version of Groovy has been supported. Does idea support Groovy 2.x? I want to try the new @TypeChecked annotation of Groovy 2. UPDATE My groovy code: class X { def hello() { println("hello, groovy") } def static main(String[] args) { new X().hello() } } It uses groovy 2.0.5: And the error thrown: E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\bin\java -Didea.launcher.port=7532 "-Didea.launcher.bin.path=E:\java\IntelliJ IDEA 11.1.4\bin" -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -classpath "E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\charsets.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\deploy.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\javaws.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\jce.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\jsse.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\management-agent.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\plugin.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\resources.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\rt.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\ext\dcevm.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\ext\dnsns.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\ext\localedata.jar;E:\java\jdk1.6.0_29_x64\jre\lib\ext\sunjce_provider.jar;E:\WORKSPACE\TestGroovy2\out\production\TestGroovy2;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\ant-1.8.4.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\ant-antlr-1.8.4.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\ant-junit-1.8.4.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\ant-launcher-1.8.4.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\antlr-2.7.7.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\asm-4.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\asm-analysis-4.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\asm-commons-4.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\asm-tree-4.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\asm-util-4.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\bsf-2.4.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\commons-cli-1.2.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\commons-logging-1.1.1.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\gpars-1.0-beta-3.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-ant-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-bsf-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-console-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-docgenerator-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-groovydoc-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-groovysh-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-jmx-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-json-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-jsr223-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-servlet-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-sql-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-swing-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-templates-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-test-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-testng-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\groovy-xml-2.0.5.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\hamcrest-core-1.1.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\ivy-2.2.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\jansi-1.6.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\jcommander-1.12.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\jline-1.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\jsp-api-2.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\jsr166y-1.7.0.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\junit-4.10.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\qdox-1.12.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\servlet-api-2.4.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\testng-6.5.2.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\xmlpull-1.1.3.1.jar;E:\java\groovy-2.0.5\lib\xstream-1.4.2.jar;E:\java\IntelliJ IDEA 11.1.4\lib\idea_rt.jar" com.intellij.rt.execution.application.AppMain X Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IncompatibleClassChangeError: Found interface org.objectweb.asm.MethodVisitor, but class was expected at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.CallSiteGenerator.genConstructor(CallSiteGenerator.java:141) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.CallSiteGenerator.genPogoMetaMethodSite(CallSiteGenerator.java:162) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.CallSiteGenerator.compilePogoMethod(CallSiteGenerator.java:215) at org.codehaus.groovy.reflection.CachedMethod.createPogoMetaMethodSite(CachedMethod.java:228) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.PogoMetaMethodSite.createCachedMethodSite(PogoMetaMethodSite.java:212) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.PogoMetaMethodSite.createPogoMetaMethodSite(PogoMetaMethodSite.java:188) at groovy.lang.MetaClassImpl.createPogoCallSite(MetaClassImpl.java:3035) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.CallSiteArray.createPogoSite(CallSiteArray.java:147) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.CallSiteArray.createCallSite(CallSiteArray.java:161) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.CallSiteArray.defaultCall(CallSiteArray.java:45) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.AbstractCallSite.call(AbstractCallSite.java:108) at org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.callsite.AbstractCallSite.call(AbstractCallSite.java:112) at X.main(sta.groovy:6) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at com.intellij.rt.execution.application.AppMain.main(AppMain.java:120) Process finished with exit code 1

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• Top 10 Tips & Tricks for Oracle SQL Developer

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Being a short week due to the holiday, and with everyone enjoying their Summer vacations (apologies Southern Hemispherians), I reckoned it was a great time to do one of those lazy recap-Top 10-Reader’s Digest type posts. I’ve been sharing 1-3 tips or ‘tricks’ a week since I started blogging about SQL Developer, and I have more than enough content to write a book. But since I’m lazy, I’m just going to compile a list of my favorite ‘must know’ tips instead. I always have to leave out a few tips when I do my presentations, so now I can refer back to this list to make sure I’m not forgetting anything. So without further ado… 1. Configure Your Preferences Yes, there are a LOT of options. But you don’t need to worry about all of them just yet. I do recommend you take a quick look at these ones in particular. Whether you’re new to the tool or have been using it for 5 years, don’t overlook these settings! 2. Disable Extensions You Aren’t Using If you’re not using Data Miner, or if you’re not working on a Migration – disable those extensions! SQL Developer will run leaner & meaner, plus the user interface will be a bit more simplified making the tool easier to navigate as well. 3. SQL Recall via Keyboard Access your history via the keyboard! Cycle through your recent SQL statements just using these magic key strokes! Ctrl+Up or Ctrl+Down. 4. Format Your Query Output Directly to CSV, XML, HTML, etc Have the query results pre-formatted in the format of your choice! Too lazy to run the Export wizard for your query result sets? Just add the SQL Developer output hints to your statement and have the output auto-magically formatted to the style of your choice! 5. Drag & Drop Multiple Tables to the Worksheet SQL Developer will auto-join the related objects. You can then toggle over to the Query Builder to toggle off the columns you don’t want to query. I guarantee this tip will save you time if you’re joining 3 or more tables! 6. Drag & Drop Multiple Tables to a Relational Model A pretty picture is worth a few dozen DDL scripts? SQL Developer does data modeling! If you ctrl-drag a table to a model, it will take that table and any related tables and reverse engineer them to a relational model! You can then print it out or export it to HTML, PDF, etc. 7. View Your PL/SQL Execution Output Automatically Function returns a refcursor? Procedure had 3 out parameters? When you run these programs via the Procedure Editor, we automatically capture the output and place them into one or more data grids for you to browse. 8. Disable Automatic Code Insight and Use It On-Demand Code Editor – Completion Insight – Enable Completion Auto-Popup (Keyword being Auto) Some folks really don’t like it when their IDEs or word-processors try to do ‘too much’ for them. Thankfully SQL Developer allows you to either increase the delay before it attempts to auto-complete your text OR to disable the automatic bit. Instead, you can invoke it on-demand. 9. Interactive Debugging – Change Your Variable Values as You Step Through Your PLSQL Watches aren’t just for watching. You can actually interact with your programs and ‘see what happens’ when X = 256 instead of 1. 10. Ditch the Tree View for the Schema Browser There’s nothing wrong with the Connection tree for browsing your database objects. But some folks just can’t seem to get comfortable with it. So, we built them a Schema Browser that uses a drop down control instead for changing up your schema and object types. Already Know This Stuff, Want More? Just check out my SQL Developer resource page, it’s one of the main links on the top of this page. Or if you can’t find something, just drop me a note in the form of a comment on this page and I’ll do my best to find it or write it for you.

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• The Interaction between Three-Tier Client/Server Model and Three-Tier Application Architecture Model

  The three-tier client/server model is a network architectural approach currently used in modern networking. This approach divides a network in to three distinct components. Three-Tier Client/Server Model Components Client Component Server Component Database Component The Client Component of the network typically represents any device on the network. A basic example of this would be computer or another network/web enabled devices that are connected to a network. Network clients request resources on the network, and are usually equipped with a user interface for the presentation of the data returned from the Server Component. This process is done through the use of various software clients, and example of this can be seen through the use of a web browser client. The web browser request information from the Server Component located on the network and then renders the results for the user to process. The Server Components of the network return data based on specific client request back to the requesting client.  Server Components also inherit the attributes of a Client Component in that they are a device on the network and that they can also request information from other Server Components. However what differentiates a Client Component from a Server Component is that a Server Component response to requests from devices on the network. An example of a Server Component can be seen in a web server. A web server listens for new requests and then interprets the request, processes the web pages, and then returns the processed data back to the web browser client so that it may render the data for the user to interpret. The Database Component of the network returns unprocessed data from databases or other resources. This component also inherits attributes from the Server Component in that it is a device on a network, it can request information from other server components and database components, and it also listens for new requests so that it can return data when needed. The three-tier client/server model is very similar to the three-tier application architecture model, and in fact the layers can be mapped to one another. Three-Tier Application Architecture Model Presentation Layer/Logic Business Layer/Logic Data Layer/Logic The Presentation Layer including its underlying logic is very similar to the Client Component of the three-tiered model. The Presentation Layer focuses on interpreting the data returned by the Business Layer as well as presents the data back to the user.  Both the Presentation Layer and the Client Component focus primarily on the user and their experience. This allows for segments of the Business Layer to be distributable and interchangeable because the Presentation Layer is not directly integrated in with Business Layer. The Presentation Layer does not care where the data comes from as long as it is in the proper format. This allows for the Presentation Layer and Business Layer to be stored on one or more different servers so that it can provide a higher availability to clients requesting data. A good example of this is a web site that uses load balancing. When a web site decides to take on the task of load balancing they must obtain a network device that sits in front of a one or machines in order to distribute the request across multiple servers. When a user comes in through the load balanced device they are redirected to a specific server based on a few factors. Common Load Balancing Factors Current Server Availability Current Server Response Time Current Server Priority The Business Layer and corresponding logic are business rules applied to data prior to it being sent to the Presentation Layer. These rules are used to manipulate the data coming from the Data Access Layer, in addition to validating any data prior to being stored in the Data Access Layer. A good example of this would be when a user is trying to create multiple accounts under one email address. The Business Layer logic can prevent duplicate accounts by enforcing a unique email for every new account before the data is even stored in the Data Access Layer. The Server Component can be directly tied to this layer in that the server typically stores and process the Business Layer before it is returned to the end-user via the Presentation Layer. In addition the Server Component can also run automated process through the Business Layer on the data in the Data Access Layer so that additional business analysis can be derived from the data that has been already collected. The Data Layer and its logic are responsible for storing information so that it can be easily retrieved. Typical in most modern applications data is stored in a database management system however data can also be in the form of files stored on a file server. In addition a database can take on one of several forms. Common Database Formats XML File Pipe Delimited File Tab Delimited File Comma Delimited File (CSV) Plain Text File Microsoft Access Microsoft SQL Server MySql Oracle Sybase The Database component of the Networking model can be directly tied to the Data Layer because this is where the Data Layer obtains the data to return back the Business Layer. The Database Component basically allows for a place on the network to store data for future use. This enables applications to save data when they can and then quickly recall the saved data as needed so that the application does not have to worry about storing the data in memory. This prevents overhead that could be created when an application must retain all data in memory. As you can see the Three-Tier Client/Server Networking Model and the Three-Tiered Application Architecture Model rely very heavily on one another to function especially if different aspects of an application are distributed across an entire network. The use of various servers and database servers are wonderful when an application has a need to distribute work across the network. Network Components and Application Layers Interaction Database components will store all data needed for the Data Access Layer to manipulate and return to the Business Layer Server Component executes the Business Layer that manipulates data so that it can be returned to the Presentation Layer Client Component hosts the Presentation Layer that  interprets the data and present it to the user

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• Insert Record by Drag & Drop from ADF Tree to ADF Tree Table

  - by arul.wilson(at)oracle.com

  If you want to create record based on the values Dragged from ADF Tree and Dropped on a ADF Tree Table, then here you go.UseCase DescriptionUser Drags a tree node from ADF Tree and Drops it on a ADF Tree Table node. A new row gets added in the Tree Table based on the source tree node, subsequently a record gets added to the database table on which Tree table in based on.Following description helps to achieve this using ADF BC.Run the DragDropSchema.sql to create required tables.Create Business Components from tables (PRODUCTS, COMPONENTS, SUB_COMPONENTS, USERS, USER_COMPONENTS) created above.Add custom method to App Module Impl, this method will be used to insert record from view layer.   public String createUserComponents(String p_bugdbId, String p_productId, String p_componentId, String p_subComponentId){    Row newUserComponentsRow = this.getUserComponentsView1().createRow();    try {      newUserComponentsRow.setAttribute("Bugdbid", p_bugdbId);      newUserComponentsRow.setAttribute("ProductId", new oracle.jbo.domain.Number(p_productId));      newUserComponentsRow.setAttribute("Component1", p_componentId);      newUserComponentsRow.setAttribute("SubComponent", p_subComponentId);    } catch (Exception e) {        e.printStackTrace();        return "Failure";    }        return "Success";  }Expose this method to client interface.To display the root node we need a custom VO which can be achieved using below query. SELECT Users.ACTIVE, Users.BUGDB_ID, Users.EMAIL, Users.FIRSTNAME, Users.GLOBAL_ID, Users.LASTNAME, Users.MANAGER_ID, Users.MANAGER_PRIVILEGEFROM USERS UsersWHERE Users.MANAGER_ID is NULLCreate VL between UsersView and UsersRootNodeView VOs.Drop ProductsView from DC as ADF Tree to jspx page.Add Tree Level Rule based on ComponentsView and SubComponentsView.Drop UsersRootNodeView as ADF Tree TableAdd Tree Level Rules based on UserComponentsView and UsersView.Add DragSource to ADF Tree and CollectionDropTarget to ADF Tree Table respectively.Bind CollectionDropTarget's DropTarget to backing bean and implement method of signature DnDAction (DropEvent), this method gets invoked when Tree Table encounters a drop action, here details required for creating new record are captured from the drag source and passed to 'createUserComponents' method. public DnDAction onTreeDrop(DropEvent dropEvent) {      String newBugdbId = "";      String msgtxt="";            try {          // Getting the target node bugdb id          Object serverRowKey = dropEvent.getDropSite();          if (serverRowKey != null) {                  //Code for Tree Table as target              String dropcomponent = dropEvent.getDropComponent().toString();              dropcomponent = (String)dropcomponent.subSequence(0, dropcomponent.indexOf("["));              if (dropcomponent.equals("RichTreeTable")){                RichTreeTable richTreeTable = (RichTreeTable)dropEvent.getDropComponent();                richTreeTable.setRowKey(serverRowKey);                int rowIndexTreeTable = richTreeTable.getRowIndex();                //Drop Target Logic                if (((JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)richTreeTable.getRowData(rowIndexTreeTable)).getAttributeValue()==null) {                  //Get Parent                  newBugdbId = (String)((JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)richTreeTable.getRowData(rowIndexTreeTable)).getParent().getAttributeValue();                } else {                  if (isNum(((JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)richTreeTable.getRowData(rowIndexTreeTable)).getAttributeValue().toString())) {                    //Get Parent's parent                              newBugdbId = (String)((JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)richTreeTable.getRowData(rowIndexTreeTable)).getParent().getParent().getAttributeValue();                  } else{                      //Dropped on USER                                          newBugdbId = (String)((JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)richTreeTable.getRowData(rowIndexTreeTable)).getAttributeValue();                  }                  }              }           }                     DataFlavor<RowKeySet> df = DataFlavor.getDataFlavor(RowKeySet.class);          RowKeySet droppedValue = dropEvent.getTransferable().getData(df);            Object[] keys = droppedValue.toArray();          Key componentKey = null;          Key subComponentKey = null;           // binding for createUserComponents method defined in AppModuleImpl class  to insert record in database.                      operationBinding = bindings.getOperationBinding("createUserComponents");            // get the Product, Component, Subcomponent details and insert to UserComponents table.          // loop through the keys if more than one comp/subcomponent is select.                   for (int i = 0; i < keys.length; i++) {                  System.out.println("in for :"+i);              List list = (List)keys[i];                  System.out.println("list "+i+" : "+list);              System.out.println("list size "+list.size());              if (list.size() == 1) {                                // we cannot drag and drop  the highest node !                                msgtxt="You cannot drop Products, please drop Component or SubComponent from the Tree.";                  System.out.println(msgtxt);                                this.showInfoMessage(msgtxt);              } else {                  if (list.size() == 2) {                    // were doing the first branch, in this case all components.                    componentKey = (Key)list.get(1);                    Object[] droppedProdCompValues = componentKey.getAttributeValues();                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_bugdbId",newBugdbId);                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_productId",droppedProdCompValues[0]);                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_componentId",droppedProdCompValues[1]);                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_subComponentId","ALL");                    Object result = operationBinding.execute();              } else {                    subComponentKey = (Key)list.get(2);                    Object[] droppedProdCompSubCompValues = subComponentKey.getAttributeValues();                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_bugdbId",newBugdbId);                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_productId",droppedProdCompSubCompValues[0]);                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_componentId",droppedProdCompSubCompValues[1]);                    operationBinding.getParamsMap().put("p_subComponentId",droppedProdCompSubCompValues[2]);                    Object result = operationBinding.execute();                  }                   }            }                        /* this.getCil1().setDisabled(false);            this.getCil1().setPartialSubmit(true); */                      return DnDAction.MOVE;        } catch (Exception ex) {          System.out.println("drop failed with : " + ex.getMessage());          ex.printStackTrace();                  /* this.getCil1().setDisabled(true); */          return DnDAction.NONE;          }    } Run jspx page and drop a Component or Subcomponent from Products Tree to UserComponents Tree Table.

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• Create Chemistry Equations and Diagrams in Word

  - by Matthew Guay

  Microsoft Word is a great tool for formatting text, but what if you want to insert a chemistry formula or diagram?  Thanks to a new free add-in for Word, you can now insert high-quality chemistry formulas and diagrams directly from the Ribbon in Word. Microsoft’s new Education Labs has recently released the new Chemistry Add-in for Word 2007 and 2010.  This free download adds support for entering and editing chemistry symbols, diagrams, and formulas using the standard XML based Chemical Markup Language.  You can convert any chemical name, such as benzene, or formula, such as H2O, into a chemical diagram, standard name, or formula.  Whether you’re a professional chemist, just taking chemistry in school, or simply curious about the makeup of Citric Acid, this add-in is an exciting way to bring chemistry to your computer. This add-in works great on Word 2007 and 2010, including the 64 bit version of Word 2010.  Please note that the current version is still in beta, so only run it if you are comfortable running beta products. Getting Started Download the Chemistry add-in from Microsoft Education Labs (link below), and unzip the file.  Then, run the ChemistryAddinforWordBeta2.Setup.msi. It may inform you that you need to install the Visual Studio Tools for Office 3.0.  Simply click Yes to download these tools. This will open the download in your default browser.  Simply click run, or save and then run it when it is downloaded. Now, click next to install the Visual Studio Tools for Office as usual. When this is finished, run the ChemistryAddinforWordBeta2.Setup.msi again.  This time, you can easily install it with the default options. Once it’s finished installing, open Word to try out the Chemistry Add-in.  You will be asked if you want to install this customization, so click Install to enable it. Now you will have a new Chemistry tab in your Word ribbon.  Here’s the ribbon in Word 2010… And here it is in Word 2007.   Using the Chemistry Add-in It’s very easy to insert nice chemistry diagrams and formulas in Word with the Chemistry add-in.  You can quickly insert a premade diagram from the Chemistry Gallery: Or you can insert a formula from file.  Simply click “From File” and choose any Chemical Markup Language (.cml) formatted file to insert the chemical formula. You can also convert any chemical name to it’s chemical form.  Simply select the word, right-click, select “Convert to Chemistry Zone” and then click on its name. Now you can see the chemical form in the sidebar if you click the Chemistry Navigator button, and can choose to insert the diagram into the document.  Some chemicals will automatically convert to the diagram in the document, while others simply link to it in the sidebar.  Either way, you can display exactly what you want. You can also convert a chemical formula directly to it’s chemical diagram.  Here we entered H2O and converted it to Chemistry Zone: This directly converted it to the diagram directly in the document. You can click the Edit button on the top, and from there choose to either edit the 2D model of the chemical, or edit the labels. When you click Edit Labels, you may be asked which form you wish to display.  Here’s the options for potassium permanganate: You can then edit the names and formulas, and add or remove any you wish. If you choose to edit the chemical in 2D, you can even edit the individual atoms and change the chemical you’re diagramming.  This 2D editor has a lot of options, so you can get your chemical diagram to look just like you want. And, if you need any help or want to learn more about the Chemistry add-in and its features, simply click the help button in the Chemistry Ribbon.  This will open a Word document containing examples and explanations which can be helpful in mastering all the features of this add-in. All of this works perfectly, whether you’re running it in Word 2007 or 2010, 32 or 64 bit editions. Conclusion Whether you’re using chemistry formulas everyday or simply want to investigate a chemical makeup occasionally, this is a great way to do it with tools you already have on your computer.  It will also help make homework a bit easier if you’re struggling with it in high school or college. Links Download the Chemistry Add-in for Word Introducing Chemistry Add-in for Word – MSDN blogs Chemistry Markup Language – Wikipedia Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Geek Reviews: Using Dia as a Free Replacement for Microsoft VisioEasily Summarize A Word 2007 DocumentCreate a Hyperlink in a Word 2007 Flow Chart and Hide Annoying ScreenTipsHow To Create and Publish Blog Posts in Word 2010 & 2007Using Word 2007 as a Blogging Tool TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver Optimize your computer the Microsoft way Stormpulse provides slick, real time weather data Geek Parents – Did you try Parental Controls in Windows 7? Change DNS servers on the fly with DNS Jumper

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• Programmatically reuse Dynamics CRM 4 icons

  - by gperera

  The team that wrote the dynamics crm sdk help rocks! I wanted to display the same crm icons on our time tracking application for consistency, so I opened up the sdk help file, searched for 'icon', ignored all the sitemap/isv config entries since I know I want to get these icons programatically, about half way down the search results I see 'organizationui', sure enough that contains the 16x16 (gridicon), 32x32 (outlookshortcuticon) and 66x48 (largeentityicon) icons!To get all the entities, execute a retrieve multiple request. RetrieveMultipleRequest request = new RetrieveMultipleRequest{    Query = new QueryExpression    {        EntityName = "organizationui",        ColumnSet = new ColumnSet(new[] { "objecttypecode", "formxml", "gridicon" }),    }}; var response = sdk.Execute(request) as RetrieveMultipleResponse;Now you have all the entities and icons, here's the tricky part, all the custom entities in crm store the icons inside gridicon, outlookshortcuticon and largeentityicon attributes, the built-in entity icons are stored inside the /_imgs/ folder with the format of /_imgs/ico_16_xxxx.gif (gridicon), with xxxx being the entity type code. The entity type code is not stored inside an attribute of organizationui, however you can get it by looking at the formxml attribute objecttypecode xml attribute. response.BusinessEntityCollection.BusinessEntities.ToList()    .Cast<organizationui>().ToList()    .ForEach(a =>    {        try        {            // easy way to check if it's a custom entity            if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(a.gridicon))            {                byte[] gif = Convert.FromBase64String(a.gridicon);            }            else            {                // built-in entity                if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(a.formxml))                {                    int start = a.formxml.IndexOf("objecttypecode=\"") + 16;                    int end = a.formxml.IndexOf("\"", start);                     // found the entity type code                    string code = a.formxml.Substring(start, end - start);                    string url = string.Format("/_imgs/ico_16_{0}.gif", code);Enjoy!

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• Developing web apps using ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor and EF Code First - Part 2

  - by shiju

  In my previous post Developing web apps using ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor and EF Code First - Part 1, we have discussed on how to work with ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First for developing web apps. We have created generic repository and unit of work with EF Code First for our ASP.NET MVC 3 application and did basic CRUD operations against a simple domain entity. In this post, I will demonstrate on working with domain entity with deep object graph, Service Layer and View Models and will also complete the rest of the demo application. In the previous post, we have done CRUD operations against Category entity and this post will be focus on Expense entity those have an association with Category entity. You can download the source code from http://efmvc.codeplex.com . The following frameworks will be used for this step by step tutorial.    1. ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM    2. EF Code First CTP 5    3. Unity 2.0 Domain Model Category Entity public class Category   {       public int CategoryId { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Name Required")]       [StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Must be less than 25 characters")]       public string Name { get; set;}       public string Description { get; set; }       public virtual ICollection<Expense> Expenses { get; set; }   } Expense Entity public class Expense     {                public int ExpenseId { get; set; }                public string  Transaction { get; set; }         public DateTime Date { get; set; }         public double Amount { get; set; }         public int CategoryId { get; set; }         public virtual Category Category { get; set; }     } We have two domain entities - Category and Expense. A single category contains a list of expense transactions and every expense transaction should have a Category. Repository class for Expense Transaction Let’s create repository class for handling CRUD operations for Expense entity public class ExpenseRepository : RepositoryBase<Expense>, IExpenseRepository     {     public ExpenseRepository(IDatabaseFactory databaseFactory)         : base(databaseFactory)         {         }                } public interface IExpenseRepository : IRepository<Expense> { } Service Layer If you are new to Service Layer, checkout Martin Fowler's article Service Layer . According to Martin Fowler, Service Layer defines an application's boundary and its set of available operations from the perspective of interfacing client layers. It encapsulates the application's business logic, controlling transactions and coordinating responses in the implementation of its operations. Controller classes should be lightweight and do not put much of business logic onto it. We can use the service layer as the business logic layer and can encapsulate the rules of the application. Let’s create a Service class for coordinates the transaction for Expense public interface IExpenseService {     IEnumerable<Expense> GetExpenses(DateTime startDate, DateTime ednDate);     Expense GetExpense(int id);             void CreateExpense(Expense expense);     void DeleteExpense(int id);     void SaveExpense(); } public class ExpenseService : IExpenseService {     private readonly IExpenseRepository expenseRepository;            private readonly IUnitOfWork unitOfWork;     public ExpenseService(IExpenseRepository expenseRepository, IUnitOfWork unitOfWork)     {                  this.expenseRepository = expenseRepository;         this.unitOfWork = unitOfWork;     }     public IEnumerable<Expense> GetExpenses(DateTime startDate, DateTime endDate)     {         var expenses = expenseRepository.GetMany(exp => exp.Date >= startDate && exp.Date <= endDate);         return expenses;     }     public void CreateExpense(Expense expense)     {         expenseRepository.Add(expense);         unitOfWork.Commit();     }     public Expense GetExpense(int id)     {         var expense = expenseRepository.GetById(id);         return expense;     }     public void DeleteExpense(int id)     {         var expense = expenseRepository.GetById(id);         expenseRepository.Delete(expense);         unitOfWork.Commit();     }     public void SaveExpense()     {         unitOfWork.Commit();     } }   View Model for Expense Transactions In real world ASP.NET MVC applications, we need to design model objects especially for our views. Our domain objects are mainly designed for the needs for domain model and it is representing the domain of our applications. On the other hand, View Model objects are designed for our needs for views. We have an Expense domain entity that has an association with Category. While we are creating a new Expense, we have to specify that in which Category belongs with the new Expense transaction. The user interface for Expense transaction will have form fields for representing the Expense entity and a CategoryId for representing the Category. So let's create view model for representing the need for Expense transactions. public class ExpenseViewModel {     public int ExpenseId { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Category Required")]     public int CategoryId { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Transaction Required")]     public string Transaction { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Date Required")]     public DateTime Date { get; set; }       [Required(ErrorMessage = "Amount Required")]     public double Amount { get; set; }       public IEnumerable<SelectListItem> Category { get; set; } } The ExpenseViewModel is designed for the purpose of View template and contains the all validation rules. It has properties for mapping values to Expense entity and a property Category for binding values to a drop-down for list values of Category. Create Expense transaction Let’s create action methods in the ExpenseController for creating expense transactions public ActionResult Create() {     var expenseModel = new ExpenseViewModel();     var categories = categoryService.GetCategories();     expenseModel.Category = categories.ToSelectListItems(-1);     expenseModel.Date = DateTime.Today;     return View(expenseModel); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Create(ExpenseViewModel expenseViewModel) {                      if (!ModelState.IsValid)         {             var categories = categoryService.GetCategories();             expenseViewModel.Category = categories.ToSelectListItems(expenseViewModel.CategoryId);             return View("Save", expenseViewModel);         }         Expense expense=new Expense();         ModelCopier.CopyModel(expenseViewModel,expense);         expenseService.CreateExpense(expense);         return RedirectToAction("Index");              } In the Create action method for HttpGet request, we have created an instance of our View Model ExpenseViewModel with Category information for the drop-down list and passing the Model object to View template. The extension method ToSelectListItems is shown below   public static IEnumerable<SelectListItem> ToSelectListItems(         this IEnumerable<Category> categories, int  selectedId) {     return           categories.OrderBy(category => category.Name)                 .Select(category =>                     new SelectListItem                     {                         Selected = (category.CategoryId == selectedId),                         Text = category.Name,                         Value = category.CategoryId.ToString()                     }); } In the Create action method for HttpPost, our view model object ExpenseViewModel will map with posted form input values. We need to create an instance of Expense for the persistence purpose. So we need to copy values from ExpenseViewModel object to Expense object. ASP.NET MVC futures assembly provides a static class ModelCopier that can use for copying values between Model objects. ModelCopier class has two static methods - CopyCollection and CopyModel.CopyCollection method will copy values between two collection objects and CopyModel will copy values between two model objects. We have used CopyModel method of ModelCopier class for copying values from expenseViewModel object to expense object. Finally we did a call to CreateExpense method of ExpenseService class for persisting new expense transaction. List Expense Transactions We want to list expense transactions based on a date range. So let’s create action method for filtering expense transactions with a specified date range. public ActionResult Index(DateTime? startDate, DateTime? endDate) {     //If date is not passed, take current month's first and last dte     DateTime dtNow;     dtNow = DateTime.Today;     if (!startDate.HasValue)     {         startDate = new DateTime(dtNow.Year, dtNow.Month, 1);         endDate = startDate.Value.AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1);     }     //take last date of start date's month, if end date is not passed     if (startDate.HasValue && !endDate.HasValue)     {         endDate = (new DateTime(startDate.Value.Year, startDate.Value.Month, 1)).AddMonths(1).AddDays(-1);     }     var expenses = expenseService.GetExpenses(startDate.Value ,endDate.Value);     //if request is Ajax will return partial view     if (Request.IsAjaxRequest())     {         return PartialView("ExpenseList", expenses);     }     //set start date and end date to ViewBag dictionary     ViewBag.StartDate = startDate.Value.ToShortDateString();     ViewBag.EndDate = endDate.Value.ToShortDateString();     //if request is not ajax     return View(expenses); } We are using the above Index Action method for both Ajax requests and normal requests. If there is a request for Ajax, we will call the PartialView ExpenseList. Razor Views for listing Expense information Let’s create view templates in Razor for showing list of Expense information ExpenseList.cshtml @model IEnumerable<MyFinance.Domain.Expense>   <table>         <tr>             <th>Actions</th>             <th>Category</th>             <th>                 Transaction             </th>             <th>                 Date             </th>             <th>                 Amount             </th>         </tr>       @foreach (var item in Model) {              <tr>             <td>                 @Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit",new { id = item.ExpenseId })                 @Ajax.ActionLink("Delete", "Delete", new { id = item.ExpenseId }, new AjaxOptions { Confirm = "Delete Expense?", HttpMethod = "Post", UpdateTargetId = "divExpenseList" })             </td>              <td>                 @item.Category.Name             </td>             <td>                 @item.Transaction             </td>             <td>                 @String.Format("{0:d}", item.Date)             </td>             <td>                 @String.Format("{0:F}", item.Amount)             </td>         </tr>          }       </table>     <p>         @Html.ActionLink("Create New Expense", "Create") |         @Html.ActionLink("Create New Category", "Create","Category")     </p> Index.cshtml @using MyFinance.Helpers; @model IEnumerable<MyFinance.Domain.Expense> @{     ViewBag.Title = "Index"; }    <h2>Expense List</h2>    <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-ui.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.ui.datepicker.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <link href="@Url.Content("~/Content/jquery-ui-1.8.6.custom.css")" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />      @using (Ajax.BeginForm(new AjaxOptions{ UpdateTargetId="divExpenseList", HttpMethod="Get"})) {     <table>         <tr>         <td>         <div>           Start Date: @Html.TextBox("StartDate", Html.Encode(String.Format("{0:mm/dd/yyyy}", ViewData["StartDate"].ToString())), new { @class = "ui-datepicker" })         </div>         </td>         <td><div>            End Date: @Html.TextBox("EndDate", Html.Encode(String.Format("{0:mm/dd/yyyy}", ViewData["EndDate"].ToString())), new { @class = "ui-datepicker" })          </div></td>          <td> <input type="submit" value="Search By TransactionDate" /></td>         </tr>     </table>         }   <div id="divExpenseList">             @Html.Partial("ExpenseList", Model)     </div> <script type="text/javascript">     $().ready(function () {         $('.ui-datepicker').datepicker({             dateFormat: 'mm/dd/yy',             buttonImage: '@Url.Content("~/Content/calendar.gif")',             buttonImageOnly: true,             showOn: "button"         });     }); </script> Ajax search functionality using Ajax.BeginForm The search functionality of Index view is providing Ajax functionality using Ajax.BeginForm. The Ajax.BeginForm() method writes an opening <form> tag to the response. You can use this method in a using block. In that case, the method renders the closing </form> tag at the end of the using block and the form is submitted asynchronously by using JavaScript. The search functionality will call the Index Action method and this will return partial view ExpenseList for updating the search result. We want to update the response UI for the Ajax request onto divExpenseList element. So we have specified the UpdateTargetId as "divExpenseList" in the Ajax.BeginForm method. Add jQuery DatePicker Our search functionality is using a date range so we are providing two date pickers using jQuery datepicker. You need to add reference to the following JavaScript files to working with jQuery datepicker. jquery-ui.js jquery.ui.datepicker.js For theme support for datepicker, we can use a customized CSS class. In our example we have used a CSS file “jquery-ui-1.8.6.custom.css”. For more details about the datepicker component, visit jquery UI website at http://jqueryui.com/demos/datepicker . In the jQuery ready event, we have used following JavaScript function to initialize the UI element to show date picker. <script type="text/javascript">     $().ready(function () {         $('.ui-datepicker').datepicker({             dateFormat: 'mm/dd/yy',             buttonImage: '@Url.Content("~/Content/calendar.gif")',             buttonImageOnly: true,             showOn: "button"         });     }); </script>   Source Code You can download the source code from http://efmvc.codeplex.com/ . Summary In this two-part series, we have created a simple web application using ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM, Razor and EF Code First CTP 5. I have demonstrated patterns and practices  such as Dependency Injection, Repository pattern, Unit of Work, ViewModel and Service Layer. My primary objective was to demonstrate different practices and options for developing web apps using ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First. You can implement these approaches in your own way for building web apps using ASP.NET MVC 3. I will refactor this demo app on later time.

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• Azure &ndash; Part 6 &ndash; Blob Storage Service

  - by Shaun

  When migrate your application onto the Azure one of the biggest concern would be the external files. In the original way we understood and ensure which machine and folder our application (website or web service) is located in. So that we can use the MapPath or some other methods to read and write the external files for example the images, text files or the xml files, etc. But things have been changed when we deploy them on Azure. Azure is not a server, or a single machine, it’s a set of virtual server machine running under the Azure OS. And even worse, your application might be moved between thses machines. So it’s impossible to read or write the external files on Azure. In order to resolve this issue the Windows Azure provides another storage serviec – Blob, for us. Different to the table service, the blob serivce is to be used to store text and binary data rather than the structured data. It provides two types of blobs: Block Blobs and Page Blobs. Block Blobs are optimized for streaming. They are comprised of blocks, each of which is identified by a block ID and each block can be a maximum of 4 MB in size. Page Blobs are are optimized for random read/write operations and provide the ability to write to a range of bytes in a blob. They are a collection of pages. The maximum size for a page blob is 1 TB.   In the managed library the Azure SDK allows us to communicate with the blobs through these classes CloudBlobClient, CloudBlobContainer, CloudBlockBlob and the CloudPageBlob. Similar with the table service managed library, the CloudBlobClient allows us to reach the blob service by passing our storage account information and also responsible for creating the blob container is not exist. Then from the CloudBlobContainer we can save or load the block blobs and page blobs into the CloudBlockBlob and the CloudPageBlob classes.   Let’s improve our exmaple in the previous posts – add a service method allows the user to upload the logo image. In the server side I created a method name UploadLogo with 2 parameters: email and image. Then I created the storage account from the config file. I also add the validation to ensure that the email passed in is valid. 1: var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString"); 2: var accountContext = new DynamicDataContext<Account>(storageAccount); 3:  4: // validation 5: var accountNumber = accountContext.Load() 6: .Where(a => a.Email == email) 7: .ToList() 8: .Count; 9: if (accountNumber <= 0) 10: { 11: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("Cannot find the account with the email {0}.", email)); 12: } Then there are three steps for saving the image into the blob service. First alike the table service I created the container with a unique name and create it if it’s not exist. 1: // create the blob container for account logos if not exist 2: CloudBlobClient blobStorage = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 3: CloudBlobContainer container = blobStorage.GetContainerReference("account-logo"); 4: container.CreateIfNotExist(); Then, since in this example I will just send the blob access URL back to the client so I need to open the read permission on that container. 1: // configure blob container for public access 2: BlobContainerPermissions permissions = container.GetPermissions(); 3: permissions.PublicAccess = BlobContainerPublicAccessType.Container; 4: container.SetPermissions(permissions); And at the end I combine the blob resource name from the input file name and Guid, and then save it to the block blob by using the UploadByteArray method. Finally I returned the URL of this blob back to the client side. 1: // save the blob into the blob service 2: string uniqueBlobName = string.Format("{0}_{1}.jpg", email, Guid.NewGuid().ToString()); 3: CloudBlockBlob blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(uniqueBlobName); 4: blob.UploadByteArray(image); 5:  6: return blob.Uri.ToString(); Let’s update a bit on the client side application and see the result. Here I just use my simple console application to let the user input the email and the file name of the image. If it’s OK it will show the URL of the blob on the server side so that we can see it through the web browser. Then we can see the logo I’ve just uploaded through the URL here. You may notice that the blob URL was based on the container name and the blob unique name. In the document of the Azure SDK there’s a page for the rule of naming them, but I think the simple rule would be – they must be valid as an URL address. So that you cannot name the container with dot or slash as it will break the ADO.Data Service routing rule. For exmaple if you named the blob container as Account.Logo then it will throw an exception says 400 Bad Request.   Summary In this short entity I covered the simple usage of the blob service to save the images onto Azure. Since the Azure platform does not support the file system we have to migrate our code for reading/writing files to the blob service before deploy it to Azure. In order to reducing this effort Microsoft provided a new approch named Drive, which allows us read and write the NTFS files just likes what we did before. It’s built up on the blob serivce but more properly for files accessing. I will discuss more about it in the next post.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• To ORM or Not to ORM. That is the question&hellip;

  - by Patrick Liekhus

  UPDATE:  Thanks for the feedback and comments.  I have adjusted my table below with your recommendations.  I had missed a point or two. I wanted to do a series on creating an entire project using the EDMX XAF code generation and the SpecFlow BDD Easy Test tools discussed in my earlier posts, but I thought it would be appropriate to start with a simple comparison and reasoning on why I choose to use these tools. Let’s start by defining the term ORM, or Object-Relational Mapping.  According to Wikipedia it is defined as the following: Object-relational mapping (ORM, O/RM, and O/R mapping) in computer software is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in object-oriented programming languages. This creates, in effect, a "virtual object database" that can be used from within the programming language. Why should you care?  Basically it allows you to map your business objects in code to their persistence layer behind them. And better yet, why would you want to do this?  Let me outline it in the following points: Development speed.  No more need to map repetitive tasks query results to object members.  Once the map is created the code is rendered for you. Persistence portability.  The ORM knows how to map SQL specific syntax for the persistence engine you choose.  It does not matter if it is SQL Server, Oracle and another database of your choosing. Standard/Boilerplate code is simplified.  The basic CRUD operations are consistent and case use database metadata for basic operations. So how does this help?  Well, let’s compare some of the ORM tools that I have used and/or researched.  I have been interested in ORM for some time now.  My ORM of choice for a long time was NHibernate and I still believe it has a strong case in some business situations.  However, you have to take business considerations into account and the law of diminishing returns.  Because of these two factors, my recent activity and experience has been around DevExpress eXpress Persistence Objects (XPO).  The primary reason for this is because they have the DevExpress eXpress Application Framework (XAF) that sits on top of XPO.  With this added value, the data model can be created (either database first of code first) and the Web and Windows client can be created from these maps.  While out of the box they provide some simple list and detail screens, you can verify easily extend and modify these to your liking.  DevExpress has done a tremendous job of providing enough framework while also staying out of the way when you need to extend it.  This sounds worse than it really is.  What I mean by this is that if you choose to follow DevExpress coding style and recommendations, the hooks and extension points provided allow you to do some pretty heavy lifting while also not worrying about the basics. I have put together a list of the top features that I have used to compare the limited list of ORM’s that I have exposure with.  Again, the biggest selling point in my opinion is that XPO is just a solid as any of the other ORM’s but with the added layer of XAF they become unstoppable.  And then couple that with the EDMX modeling tools and code generation, it becomes a no brainer. Designer Features Entity Framework NHibernate Fluent w/ Nhibernate Telerik OpenAccess DevExpress XPO DevExpress XPO/XAF plus Liekhus Tools Uses XML to map relationships - Yes - - -   Visual class designer interface Yes - - - - Yes Management integrated w/ Visual Studio Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports schema first approach Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports model first approach Yes - - Yes Yes Yes Supports code first approach Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Attribute driven coding style Yes - Yes - Yes Yes                 I have a very small team and limited resources with a lot of responsibilities.  In order to keep up with our customers, we must rely on tools like these.  We use the EDMX tool so that we can create a visual representation of the applications with our customers.  Second, we rely on the code generation so that we can focus on the business problems at hand and not whether a field is mapped correctly.  This keeps us from requiring as many junior level developers on our team.  I have also worked on multiple teams where they believed in writing their own “framework”.  In my experiences and opinion this is not the route to take unless you have a team dedicated to supporting just the framework.  Each time that I have worked on custom frameworks, the framework eventually becomes old, out dated and full of “performance” enhancements specific to one or two requirements.  With an ORM, there are a lot smarter people than me working on the bigger issue of persistence and performance.  Again, my recommendation would be to use an available framework and get to working on your business domain problems.  If your coding is not making money for you, why are you working on it?  Do you really need to be writing query to object member code again and again? Thanks

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• Algorithmia Source Code released on CodePlex

  - by FransBouma

  Following the release of our BCL Extensions Library on CodePlex, we have now released the source-code of Algorithmia on CodePlex! Algorithmia is an algorithm and data-structures library for .NET 3.5 or higher and is one of the pillars LLBLGen Pro v3's designer is built on. The library contains many data-structures and algorithms, and the source-code is well documented and commented, often with links to official descriptions and papers of the algorithms and data-structures implemented. The source-code is shared using Mercurial on CodePlex and is licensed under the friendly BSD2 license. User documentation is not available at the moment but will be added soon. One of the main design goals of Algorithmia was to create a library which contains implementations of well-known algorithms which weren't already implemented in .NET itself. This way, more developers out there can enjoy the results of many years of what the field of Computer Science research has delivered. Some algorithms and datastructures are known in .NET but are re-implemented because the implementation in .NET isn't efficient for many situations or lacks features. An example is the linked list in .NET: it doesn't have an O(1) concat operation, as every node refers to the containing LinkedList object it's stored in. This is bad for algorithms which rely on O(1) concat operations, like the Fibonacci heap implementation in Algorithmia. Algorithmia therefore contains a linked list with an O(1) concat feature. The following functionality is available in Algorithmia: Command, Command management. This system is usable to build a fully undo/redo aware system by building your object graph using command-aware classes. The Command pattern is implemented using a system which allows transparent undo-redo and command grouping so you can use it to make a class undo/redo aware and set properties, use its contents without using commands at all. The Commands namespace is the namespace to start. Classes you'd want to look at are CommandifiedMember, CommandifiedList and KeyedCommandifiedList. See the CommandQueueTests in the test project for examples. Graphs, Graph algorithms. Algorithmia contains a sophisticated graph class hierarchy and algorithms implemented onto them: non-directed and directed graphs, as well as a subgraph view class, which can be used to create a view onto an existing graph class which can be self-maintaining. Algorithms include transitive closure, topological sorting and others. A feature rich depth-first search (DFS) crawler is available so DFS based algorithms can be implemented quickly. All graph classes are undo/redo aware, as they can be set to be 'commandified'. When a graph is 'commandified' it will do its housekeeping through commands, which makes it fully undo-redo aware, so you can remove, add and manipulate the graph and undo/redo the activity automatically without any extra code. If you define the properties of the class you set as the vertex type using CommandifiedMember, you can manipulate the properties of vertices and the graph contents with full undo/redo functionality without any extra code. Heaps. Heaps are data-structures which have the largest or smallest item stored in them always as the 'root'. Extracting the root from the heap makes the heap determine the next in line to be the 'maximum' or 'minimum' (max-heap vs. min-heap, all heaps in Algorithmia can do both). Algorithmia contains various heaps, among them an implementation of the Fibonacci heap, one of the most efficient heap datastructures known today, especially when you want to merge different instances into one. Priority queues. Priority queues are specializations of heaps. Algorithmia contains a couple of them. Sorting. What's an algorithm library without sort algorithms? Algorithmia implements a couple of sort algorithms which sort the data in-place. This aspect is important in situations where you want to sort the elements in a buffer/list/ICollection in-place, so all data stays in the data-structure it already is stored in. PropertyBag. It re-implements Tony Allowatt's original idea in .NET 3.5 specific syntax, which is to have a generic property bag and to be able to build an object in code at runtime which can be bound to a property grid for editing. This is handy for when you have data / settings stored in XML or other format, and want to create an editable form of it without creating many editors. IEditableObject/IDataErrorInfo implementations. It contains default implementations for IEditableObject and IDataErrorInfo (EditableObjectDataContainer for IEditableObject and ErrorContainer for IDataErrorInfo), which make it very easy to implement these interfaces (just a few lines of code) without having to worry about bookkeeping during databinding. They work seamlessly with CommandifiedMember as well, so your undo/redo aware code can use them out of the box. EventThrottler. It contains an event throttler, which can be used to filter out duplicate events in an event stream coming into an observer from an event. This can greatly enhance performance in your UI without needing to do anything other than hooking it up so it's placed between the event source and your real handler. If your UI is flooded with events from data-structures observed by your UI or a middle tier, you can use this class to filter out duplicates to avoid redundant updates to UI elements or to avoid having observers choke on many redundant events. Small, handy stuff. A MultiValueDictionary, which can store multiple unique values per key, instead of one with the default Dictionary, and is also merge-aware so you can merge two into one. A Pair class, to quickly group two elements together. Multiple interfaces for helping with building a de-coupled, observer based system, and some utility extension methods for the defined data-structures. We regularly update the library with new code. If you have ideas for new algorithms or want to share your contribution, feel free to discuss it on the project's Discussions page or send us a pull request. Enjoy!

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• Windows Phone 7: Building a simple dictionary web client

  - by TechTwaddle

  Like I mentioned in this post a while back, I came across a dictionary web service called Aonaware that serves up word definitions from various dictionaries and is really easy to use. The services page on their website, http://services.aonaware.com/DictService/DictService.asmx, lists all the operations that are supported by the dictionary service. Here they are, Word Dictionary Web Service The following operations are supported. For a formal definition, please review the Service Description. Define Define given word, returning definitions from all dictionaries DefineInDict Define given word, returning definitions from specified dictionary DictionaryInfo Show information about the specified dictionary DictionaryList Returns a list of available dictionaries DictionaryListExtended Returns a list of advanced dictionaries (e.g. translating dictionaries) Match Look for matching words in all dictionaries using the given strategy MatchInDict Look for matching words in the specified dictionary using the given strategy ServerInfo Show remote server information StrategyList Return list of all available strategies on the server Follow the links above to get more information on each API. In this post we will be building a simple windows phone 7 client which uses this service to get word definitions for words entered by the user. The application will also allow the user to select a dictionary from all the available ones and look up the word definition in that dictionary. So of all the apis above we will be using only two, DictionaryList() to get a list of all supported dictionaries and DefineInDict() to get the word definition from a particular dictionary. Before we get started, a note to you all; I would have liked to implement this application using concepts from data binding, item templates, data templates etc. I have a basic understanding of what they are but, being a beginner, I am not very comfortable with those topics yet so I didn’t use them. I thought I’ll get this version out of the way and maybe in the next version I could give those a try. A somewhat scary mock-up of the what the final application will look like, Select Dictionary is a list picker control from the silverlight toolkit (you need to download and install the toolkit if you haven’t already). Below it is a textbox where the user can enter words to look up and a button beside it to fetch the word definition when clicked. Finally we have a textblock which occupies the remaining area and displays the word definition from the selected dictionary. Create a silverlight application for windows phone 7, AonawareDictionaryClient, and add references to the silverlight toolkit and the web service. From the solution explorer right on References and select Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Toolkit from under the .NET tab, Next, add a reference to the web service. Again right click on References and this time select Add Service Reference In the resulting dialog paste the service url in the Address field and press go, (url –> http://services.aonaware.com/DictService/DictService.asmx) once the service is discovered, provide a name for the NameSpace, in this case I’ve called it AonawareDictionaryService. Press OK. You can now use the classes and functions that are generated in the AonawareDictionaryClient.AonawareDictionaryService namespace. Let’s get the UI done now. In MainPage.xaml add a namespace declaration to use the toolkit controls, xmlns:toolkit="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Toolkit" the content of LayoutRoot is changed as follows, (sorry, no syntax highlighting in this post) <StackPanel x:Name="TitlePanel" Grid.Row="0" Margin="12,5,0,5">     <TextBlock x:Name="ApplicationTitle" Text="AONAWARE DICTIONARY CLIENT" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextNormalStyle}"/>     <!--<TextBlock x:Name="PageTitle" Text="page name" Margin="9,-7,0,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}"/>--> </StackPanel> <!--ContentPanel - place additional content here--> <Grid x:Name="ContentPanel" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0">     <Grid.RowDefinitions>         <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>         <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>         <RowDefinition Height="*"/>     </Grid.RowDefinitions>     <toolkit:ListPicker Grid.Column="1" x:Name="listPickerDictionaryList"                         Header="Select Dictionary :">     </toolkit:ListPicker>     <Grid Grid.Row="1" Margin="0,5,0,0">         <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>             <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/>             <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" />         </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>         <TextBox x:Name="txtboxInputWord" Grid.Column="0" GotFocus="OnTextboxInputWordGotFocus" />         <Button x:Name="btnGo" Grid.Column="1" Click="OnButtonGoClick" >             <Button.Content>                 <Image Source="/images/button-go.png"/>             </Button.Content>         </Button>     </Grid>     <ScrollViewer Grid.Row="2" x:Name="scrollViewer">         <TextBlock  Margin="12,5,12,5"  x:Name="txtBlockWordMeaning" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"                    VerticalAlignment="Stretch" TextWrapping="Wrap"                    FontSize="26" />     </ScrollViewer> </Grid> I have commented out the PageTitle as it occupies too much valuable space, and the ContentPanel is changed to contain three rows. First row contains the list picker control, second row contains the textbox and the button, and the third row contains a textblock within a scroll viewer. The designer will now be showing the final ui, Now go to MainPage.xaml.cs, and add the following namespace declarations, using Microsoft.Phone.Controls; using AonawareDictionaryClient.AonawareDictionaryService; using System.IO.IsolatedStorage; A class called DictServiceSoapClient would have been created for you in the background when you added a reference to the web service. This class functions as a wrapper to the services exported by the web service. All the web service functions that we saw at the start can be access through this class, or more precisely through an object of this class. Create a data member of type DictServiceSoapClient in the Mainpage class, and a function which initializes it, DictServiceSoapClient DictSvcClient = null; private DictServiceSoapClient GetDictServiceSoapClient() {     if (null == DictSvcClient)     {         DictSvcClient = new DictServiceSoapClient();     }     return DictSvcClient; } We have two major tasks remaining. First, when the application loads we need to populate the list picker with all the supported dictionaries and second, when the user enters a word and clicks on the arrow button we need to fetch the word’s meaning. Populating the List Picker In the OnNavigatingTo event of the MainPage, we call the DictionaryList() api. This can also be done in the OnLoading event handler of the MainPage; not sure if one has an advantage over the other. Here’s the code for OnNavigatedTo, protected override void OnNavigatedTo(System.Windows.Navigation.NavigationEventArgs e) {     DictServiceSoapClient client = GetDictServiceSoapClient();     client.DictionaryListCompleted += new EventHandler<DictionaryListCompletedEventArgs>(OnGetDictionaryListCompleted);     client.DictionaryListAsync();     base.OnNavigatedTo(e); } Windows Phone 7 supports only async calls to web services. When we added a reference to the dictionary service, asynchronous versions of all the functions were generated automatically. So in the above function we register a handler to the DictionaryListCompleted event which will occur when the call to DictionaryList() gets a response from the server. Then we call the DictionaryListAsynch() function which is the async version of the DictionaryList() api. The result of this api will be sent to the handler OnGetDictionaryListCompleted(), void OnGetDictionaryListCompleted(object sender, DictionaryListCompletedEventArgs e) {     IsolatedStorageSettings settings = IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings;     Dictionary[] listOfDictionaries;     if (e.Error == null)     {         listOfDictionaries = e.Result;         PopulateListPicker(listOfDictionaries, settings);     }     else if (settings.Contains("SavedDictionaryList"))     {         listOfDictionaries = settings["SavedDictionaryList"] as Dictionary[];         PopulateListPicker(listOfDictionaries, settings);     }     else     {         MessageBoxResult res = MessageBox.Show("An error occured while retrieving dictionary list, do you want to try again?", "Error", MessageBoxButton.OKCancel);         if (MessageBoxResult.OK == res)         {             GetDictServiceSoapClient().DictionaryListAsync();         }     }     settings.Save(); } I have used IsolatedStorageSettings to store a few things; the entire dictionary list and the dictionary that is selected when the user exits the application, so that the next time when the user starts the application the current dictionary is set to the last selected value. First we check if the api returned any error, if the error object is null e.Result will contain the list (actually array) of Dictionary type objects. If there was an error, we check the isolated storage settings to see if there is a dictionary list stored from a previous instance of the application and if so, we populate the list picker based on this saved list. Note that in this case there are chances that the dictionary list might be out of date if there have been changes on the server. Finally, if none of these cases are true, we display an error message to the user and try to fetch the list again. PopulateListPicker() is passed the array of Dictionary objects and the settings object as well, void PopulateListPicker(Dictionary[] listOfDictionaries, IsolatedStorageSettings settings) {     listPickerDictionaryList.Items.Clear();     foreach (Dictionary dictionary in listOfDictionaries)     {         listPickerDictionaryList.Items.Add(dictionary.Name);     }     settings["SavedDictionaryList"] = listOfDictionaries;     string savedDictionaryName;     if (settings.Contains("SavedDictionary"))     {         savedDictionaryName = settings["SavedDictionary"] as string;     }     else     {         savedDictionaryName = "WordNet (r) 2.0"; //default dictionary, wordnet     }     foreach (string dictName in listPickerDictionaryList.Items)     {         if (dictName == savedDictionaryName)         {             listPickerDictionaryList.SelectedItem = dictName;             break;         }     }     settings["SavedDictionary"] = listPickerDictionaryList.SelectedItem as string; } We first clear all the items from the list picker, add the dictionary names from the array and then create a key in the settings called SavedDictionaryList and store the dictionary list in it. We then check if there is saved dictionary available from a previous instance, if there is, we set it as the selected item in the list picker. And if not, we set “WordNet ® 2.0” as the default dictionary. Before returning, we save the selected dictionary in the “SavedDictionary” key of the isolated storage settings. Fetching word definitions Getting this part done is very similar to the above code. We get the input word from the textbox, call into DefineInDictAsync() to fetch the definition and when DefineInDictAsync completes, we get the result and display it in the textblock. Here is the handler for the button click, private void OnButtonGoClick(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {     txtBlockWordMeaning.Text = "Please wait..";     IsolatedStorageSettings settings = IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings;     if (txtboxInputWord.Text.Trim().Length <= 0)     {         MessageBox.Show("Please enter a word in the textbox and press 'Go'");     }     else     {         Dictionary[] listOfDictionaries = settings["SavedDictionaryList"] as Dictionary[];         string selectedDictionary = listPickerDictionaryList.SelectedItem.ToString();         string dictId = "wn"; //default dictionary is wordnet (wn is the dict id)         foreach (Dictionary dict in listOfDictionaries)         {             if (dict.Name == selectedDictionary)             {                 dictId = dict.Id;                 break;             }         }         DictServiceSoapClient client = GetDictServiceSoapClient();         client.DefineInDictCompleted += new EventHandler<DefineInDictCompletedEventArgs>(OnDefineInDictCompleted);         client.DefineInDictAsync(dictId, txtboxInputWord.Text.Trim());     } } We validate the input and then select the dictionary id based on the currently selected dictionary. We need the dictionary id because the api DefineInDict() expects the dictionary identifier and not the dictionary name. We could very well have stored the dictionary id in isolated storage settings too. Again, same as before, we register a event handler for the DefineInDictCompleted event and call the DefineInDictAsync() method passing in the dictionary id and the input word. void OnDefineInDictCompleted(object sender, DefineInDictCompletedEventArgs e) {     WordDefinition wd = e.Result;     scrollViewer.ScrollToVerticalOffset(0.0f);     if (wd.Definitions.Length == 0)     {         txtBlockWordMeaning.Text = String.Format("No definitions were found for '{0}' in '{1}'", txtboxInputWord.Text.Trim(), listPickerDictionaryList.SelectedItem.ToString().Trim());     }     else     {         foreach (Definition def in wd.Definitions)         {             string str = def.WordDefinition;             str = str.Replace("  ", " "); //some formatting             txtBlockWordMeaning.Text = str;         }     } } When the api completes, e.Result will contain a WordDefnition object. This class is also generated in the background while adding the service reference. We check the word definitions within this class to see if any results were returned, if not, we display a message to the user in the textblock. If a definition was found the text on the textblock is set to display the definition of the word. Adding final touches, we now need to save the current dictionary when the application exits. A small but useful thing is selecting the entire word in the input textbox when the user selects it. This makes sure that if the user has looked up a definition for a really long word, he doesn’t have to press ‘clear’ too many times to enter the next word, protected override void OnNavigatingFrom(System.Windows.Navigation.NavigatingCancelEventArgs e) {     IsolatedStorageSettings settings = IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings;     settings["SavedDictionary"] = listPickerDictionaryList.SelectedItem as string;     settings.Save();     base.OnNavigatingFrom(e); } private void OnTextboxInputWordGotFocus(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {     TextBox txtbox = sender as TextBox;     if (txtbox.Text.Trim().Length > 0)     {         txtbox.SelectionStart = 0;         txtbox.SelectionLength = txtbox.Text.Length;     } } OnNavigatingFrom() is called whenever you navigate away from the MainPage, since our application contains only one page that would mean that it is exiting. I leave you with a short video of the application in action, but before that if you have any suggestions on how to make the code better and improve it please do leave a comment. Until next time…

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• Finding the problem on a partially succeeded build

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Now that I have the Build failing because of a genuine bug and not just because of a test framework failure, lets see if we can trace through to finding why the first test in our new application failed. Lets look at the build and see if we can see why there is a red cross on it. First, lets open that build list. On Team Explorer Expand your Team Project Collection | Team Project and then Builds. Double click the offending build. Figure: Opening the Build list is a key way to see what the current state of your software is.   Figure: A test is failing, but we can now view the Test Results to find the problem      Figure: You can quite clearly see that the test has failed with “The device is not ready”. To me the “The Device is not ready” smacks of a System.IO exception, but it passed on my local computer, so why not on the build server? Its a FaultException so it is most likely coming from the Service and not the client, so lets take a look at the client method that the test is calling: bool IProfileService.SaveDefaultProjectFile(string strComputerName) { ProjectFile file = new ProjectFile() { ProjectFileName = strComputerName + "_" + System.DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyyMMddhhmmsss") + ".xml", ConnectionString = "persist security info=False; pooling=False; data source=(local); application name=SSW.SQLDeploy.vshost.exe; integrated security=SSPI; initial catalog=SSWSQLDeployNorthwindSample", DateCreated = System.DateTime.Now, DateUpdated = System.DateTime.Now, FolderPath = @"C:\Program Files\SSW SQL Deploy\SampleData\", IsComplete=false, Version = "1.3", NewDatabase = true, TimeOut = 5, TurnOnMSDE = false, Mode="AutomaticMode" }; string strFolderPath = "D:\\"; //LocalSettings.ProjectFileBasePath; string strFileName = strFolderPath + file.ProjectFileName; try { using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(strFileName, FileMode.Create)) { DataContractSerializer serializer = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(ProjectFile)); using (XmlDictionaryWriter writer = XmlDictionaryWriter.CreateTextWriter(fs)) { serializer.WriteObject(writer, file); } } } catch (Exception ex) { //TODO: Log the exception throw ex; return false; } return true; } Figure: You can see on lines 9 and 18 that there are calls being made to specific folders and disks. What is wrong with this code? What assumptions mistakes could the developer have made to make this look OK: That every install would be to “C:\Program Files\SSW SQL Deploy” That every computer would have a “D:\\” That checking in code at 6pm because the had to go home was a good idea. lets solve each of these problems: We are in a web service… lets store data within the web root. So we can call “Server.MapPath(“~/App_Data/SSW SQL Deploy\SampleData”) instead. Never reference an explicit path. If you need some storage for your application use IsolatedStorage. Shelve your code instead. What else could have been done? Code review before check-in – The developer should have shelved their code and asked another dev to look at it. Use Defensive programming – Make sure that any code that has the possibility of failing has checks. Any more options? Let me know and I will add them. What do we do? The correct things to do is to add a Bug to the backlog, but as this is probably going to be fixed in sprint, I will add it directly to the sprint backlog. Right click on the failing test Select “Create Work Item | Bug” Figure: Create an associated bug to add to the backlog. Set the values for the Bug making sure that it goes into the right sprint and Area. Make your steps to reproduce as explicit as possible, but “See test” is valid under these circumstances.   Figure: Add it to the correct Area and set the Iteration to the Area name or the Sprint if you think it will be fixed in Sprint and make sure you bring it up at the next Scrum Meeting. Note: make sure you leave the “Assigned To” field blank as in Scrum team members sign up for work, you do not give it to them. The developer who broke the test will most likely either sign up for the bug, or say that they are stuck and need help. Note: Visual Studio has taken care of associating the failing test with the Bug. Save… Technorati Tags: WCF,MSTest,MSBuild,Team Build 2010,Team Test 2010,Team Build,Team Test

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• Oracle BI Server Modeling, Part 1- Designing a Query Factory

  - by bob.ertl(at)oracle.com

    Welcome to Oracle BI Development's BI Foundation blog, focused on helping you get the most value from your Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (BI EE) platform deployments.  In my first series of posts, I plan to show developers the concepts and best practices for modeling in the Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM), the semantic layer of Oracle BI EE.  In this segment, I will lay the groundwork for the modeling concepts.  First, I will cover the big picture of how the BI Server fits into the system, and how the CEIM controls the query processing. Oracle BI EE Query Cycle The purpose of the Oracle BI Server is to bridge the gap between the presentation services and the data sources.  There are typically a variety of data sources in a variety of technologies: relational, normalized transaction systems; relational star-schema data warehouses and marts; multidimensional analytic cubes and financial applications; flat files, Excel files, XML files, and so on. Business datasets can reside in a single type of source, or, most of the time, are spread across various types of sources. Presentation services users are generally business people who need to be able to query that set of sources without any knowledge of technologies, schemas, or how sources are organized in their company. They think of business analysis in terms of measures with specific calculations, hierarchical dimensions for breaking those measures down, and detailed reports of the business transactions themselves.  Most of them create queries without knowing it, by picking a dashboard page and some filters.  Others create their own analysis by selecting metrics and dimensional attributes, and possibly creating additional calculations. The BI Server bridges that gap from simple business terms to technical physical queries by exposing just the business focused measures and dimensional attributes that business people can use in their analyses and dashboards.   After they make their selections and start the analysis, the BI Server plans the best way to query the data sources, writes the optimized sequence of physical queries to those sources, post-processes the results, and presents them to the client as a single result set suitable for tables, pivots and charts. The CEIM is a model that controls the processing of the BI Server.  It provides the subject areas that presentation services exposes for business users to select simplified metrics and dimensional attributes for their analysis.  It models the mappings to the physical data access, the calculations and logical transformations, and the data access security rules.  The CEIM consists of metadata stored in the repository, authored by developers using the Administration Tool client.     Presentation services and other query clients create their queries in BI EE's SQL-92 language, called Logical SQL or LSQL.  The API simply uses ODBC or JDBC to pass the query to the BI Server.  Presentation services writes the LSQL query in terms of the simplified objects presented to the users.  The BI Server creates a query plan, and rewrites the LSQL into fully-detailed SQL or other languages suitable for querying the physical sources.  For example, the LSQL on the left below was rewritten into the physical SQL for an Oracle 11g database on the right. Logical SQL   Physical SQL SELECT "D0 Time"."T02 Per Name Month" saw_0, "D4 Product"."P01  Product" saw_1, "F2 Units"."2-01  Billed Qty  (Sum All)" saw_2 FROM "Sample Sales" ORDER BY saw_0, saw_1       WITH SAWITH0 AS ( select T986.Per_Name_Month as c1, T879.Prod_Dsc as c2,      sum(T835.Units) as c3, T879.Prod_Key as c4 from      Product T879 /* A05 Product */ ,      Time_Mth T986 /* A08 Time Mth */ ,      FactsRev T835 /* A11 Revenue (Billed Time Join) */ where ( T835.Prod_Key = T879.Prod_Key and T835.Bill_Mth = T986.Row_Wid) group by T879.Prod_Dsc, T879.Prod_Key, T986.Per_Name_Month ) select SAWITH0.c1 as c1, SAWITH0.c2 as c2, SAWITH0.c3 as c3 from SAWITH0 order by c1, c2   Probably everybody reading this blog can write SQL or MDX.  However, the trick in designing the CEIM is that you are modeling a query-generation factory.  Rather than hand-crafting individual queries, you model behavior and relationships, thus configuring the BI Server machinery to manufacture millions of different queries in response to random user requests.  This mass production requires a different mindset and approach than when you are designing individual SQL statements in tools such as Oracle SQL Developer, Oracle Hyperion Interactive Reporting (formerly Brio), or Oracle BI Publisher.   The Structure of the Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM) The CEIM has a unique structure specifically for modeling the relationships and behaviors that fill the gap from logical user requests to physical data source queries and back to the result.  The model divides the functionality into three specialized layers, called Presentation, Business Model and Mapping, and Physical, as shown below. Presentation services clients can generally only see the presentation layer, and the objects in the presentation layer are normally the only ones used in the LSQL request.  When a request comes into the BI Server from presentation services or another client, the relationships and objects in the model allow the BI Server to select the appropriate data sources, create a query plan, and generate the physical queries.  That's the left to right flow in the diagram below.  When the results come back from the data source queries, the right to left relationships in the model show how to transform the results and perform any final calculations and functions that could not be pushed down to the databases.   Business Model Think of the business model as the heart of the CEIM you are designing.  This is where you define the analytic behavior seen by the users, and the superset library of metric and dimension objects available to the user community as a whole.  It also provides the baseline business-friendly names and user-readable dictionary.  For these reasons, it is often called the "logical" model--it is a virtual database schema that persists no data, but can be queried as if it is a database. The business model always has a dimensional shape (more on this in future posts), and its simple shape and terminology hides the complexity of the source data models. Besides hiding complexity and normalizing terminology, this layer adds most of the analytic value, as well.  This is where you define the rich, dimensional behavior of the metrics and complex business calculations, as well as the conformed dimensions and hierarchies.  It contributes to the ease of use for business users, since the dimensional metric definitions apply in any context of filters and drill-downs, and the conformed dimensions enable dashboard-wide filters and guided analysis links that bring context along from one page to the next.  The conformed dimensions also provide a key to hiding the complexity of many sources, including federation of different databases, behind the simple business model. Note that the expression language in this layer is LSQL, so that any expression can be rewritten into any data source's query language at run time.  This is important for federation, where a given logical object can map to several different physical objects in different databases.  It is also important to portability of the CEIM to different database brands, which is a key requirement for Oracle's BI Applications products. Your requirements process with your user community will mostly affect the business model.  This is where you will define most of the things they specifically ask for, such as metric definitions.  For this reason, many of the best-practice methodologies of our consulting partners start with the high-level definition of this layer. Physical Model The physical model connects the business model that meets your users' requirements to the reality of the data sources you have available. In the query factory analogy, think of the physical layer as the bill of materials for generating physical queries.  Every schema, table, column, join, cube, hierarchy, etc., that will appear in any physical query manufactured at run time must be modeled here at design time. Each physical data source will have its own physical model, or "database" object in the CEIM.  The shape of each physical model matches the shape of its physical source.  In other words, if the source is normalized relational, the physical model will mimic that normalized shape.  If it is a hypercube, the physical model will have a hypercube shape.  If it is a flat file, it will have a denormalized tabular shape. To aid in query optimization, the physical layer also tracks the specifics of the database brand and release.  This allows the BI Server to make the most of each physical source's distinct capabilities, writing queries in its syntax, and using its specific functions. This allows the BI Server to push processing work as deep as possible into the physical source, which minimizes data movement and takes full advantage of the database's own optimizer.  For most data sources, native APIs are used to further optimize performance and functionality. The value of having a distinct separation between the logical (business) and physical models is encapsulation of the physical characteristics.  This encapsulation is another enabler of packaged BI applications and federation.  It is also key to hiding the complex shapes and relationships in the physical sources from the end users.  Consider a routine drill-down in the business model: physically, it can require a drill-through where the first query is MDX to a multidimensional cube, followed by the drill-down query in SQL to a normalized relational database.  The only difference from the user's point of view is that the 2nd query added a more detailed dimension level column - everything else was the same. Mappings Within the Business Model and Mapping Layer, the mappings provide the binding from each logical column and join in the dimensional business model, to each of the objects that can provide its data in the physical layer.  When there is more than one option for a physical source, rules in the mappings are applied to the query context to determine which of the data sources should be hit, and how to combine their results if more than one is used.  These rules specify aggregate navigation, vertical partitioning (fragmentation), and horizontal partitioning, any of which can be federated across multiple, heterogeneous sources.  These mappings are usually the most sophisticated part of the CEIM. Presentation You might think of the presentation layer as a set of very simple relational-like views into the business model.  Over ODBC/JDBC, they present a relational catalog consisting of databases, tables and columns.  For business users, presentation services interprets these as subject areas, folders and columns, respectively.  (Note that in 10g, subject areas were called presentation catalogs in the CEIM.  In this blog, I will stick to 11g terminology.)  Generally speaking, presentation services and other clients can query only these objects (there are exceptions for certain clients such as BI Publisher and Essbase Studio). The purpose of the presentation layer is to specialize the business model for different categories of users.  Based on a user's role, they will be restricted to specific subject areas, tables and columns for security.  The breakdown of the model into multiple subject areas organizes the content for users, and subjects superfluous to a particular business role can be hidden from that set of users.  Customized names and descriptions can be used to override the business model names for a specific audience.  Variables in the object names can be used for localization. For these reasons, you are better off thinking of the tables in the presentation layer as folders than as strict relational tables.  The real semantics of tables and how they function is in the business model, and any grouping of columns can be included in any table in the presentation layer.  In 11g, an LSQL query can also span multiple presentation subject areas, as long as they map to the same business model. Other Model Objects There are some objects that apply to multiple layers.  These include security-related objects, such as application roles, users, data filters, and query limits (governors).  There are also variables you can use in parameters and expressions, and initialization blocks for loading their initial values on a static or user session basis.  Finally, there are Multi-User Development (MUD) projects for developers to check out units of work, and objects for the marketing feature used by our packaged customer relationship management (CRM) software.   The Query Factory At this point, you should have a grasp on the query factory concept.  When developing the CEIM model, you are configuring the BI Server to automatically manufacture millions of queries in response to random user requests. You do this by defining the analytic behavior in the business model, mapping that to the physical data sources, and exposing it through the presentation layer's role-based subject areas. While configuring mass production requires a different mindset than when you hand-craft individual SQL or MDX statements, it builds on the modeling and query concepts you already understand. The following posts in this series will walk through the CEIM modeling concepts and best practices in detail.  We will initially review dimensional concepts so you can understand the business model, and then present a pattern-based approach to learning the mappings from a variety of physical schema shapes and deployments to the dimensional model.  Along the way, we will also present the dimensional calculation template, and learn how to configure the many additivity patterns.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #005

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of curetted articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 SQL SERVER – Cursor to Kill All Process in Database I indeed wrote this cursor and when I often look back, I wonder how naive I was to write this. The reason for writing this cursor was to free up my database from any existing connection so I can do database operation. This worked fine but there can be a potentially big issue if there was any important transaction was killed by this process. There is another way to to achieve the same thing where we can use ALTER syntax to take database in single user mode. Read more about that over here and here. 2007 Rules of Third Normal Form and Normalization Advantage – 3NF The rules of 3NF are mentioned here Make a separate table for each set of related attributes, and give each table a primary key. If an attribute depends on only part of a multi-valued key, remove it to a separate table If attributes do not contribute to a description of the key, remove them to a separate table. Correct Syntax for Stored Procedure SP Sometime a simple question is the most important question. I often see in industry incorrectly written Stored Procedure. Few writes code after the most outer BEGIN…END and few writes code after the GO Statement. In this brief blog post, I have attempted to explain the same. 2008 Switch Between Result Pan and Query Pan – SQL Shortcut Many times when I am writing query I have to scroll the result displayed in the result set. Most of the developer uses the mouse to switch between and Query Pane and Result Pane. There are few developers who are crazy about Keyboard shortcuts. F6 is the keyword which can be used to switch between query pane and tabs of the result pane. Interesting Observation – Use of Index and Execution Plan Query Optimization is a complex game and it has its own rules. From the example in the article we have discovered that Query Optimizer does not use clustered index to retrieve data, sometime non clustered index provides optimal performance for retrieving Primary Key. When all the rows and columns are selected Primary Key should be used to select data as it provides optimal performance. 2009 Interesting Observation – TOP 100 PERCENT and ORDER BY If you pull up any application or system where there are more than 100 SQL Server Views are created – I am very confident that at one or two places you will notice the scenario wherein View the ORDER BY clause is used with TOP 100 PERCENT. SQL Server 2008 VIEW with ORDER BY clause does not throw an error; moreover, it does not acknowledge the presence of it as well. In this article we have taken three perfect examples and demonstrated which clause we should use when. Comma Separated Values (CSV) from Table Column A Very common question – How to create comma separated values from a table in the database? The answer is also very common if we use XML. Check out this article for quick learning on the same subject. Azure Start Guide – Step by Step Installation Guide Though Azure portal has changed a quite bit since I wrote this article, the concept used in this article are not old. They are still valid and many of the functions are still working as mentioned in the article. I believe this one article will put you on the track to use Azure! Size of Index Table for Each Index – Solution Earlier I have posted a small question on this blog and requested help from readers to participate here and provide a solution. The puzzle was to write a query that will return the size for each index that is on any particular table. We need a query that will return an additional column in the above listed query and it should contain the size of the index. This article presents two of the best solutions from the puzzle. 2010 Well, this week in 2010 was the week of puzzles as I posted three interesting puzzles. Till today I am noticing pretty good interesting in the puzzles. They are tricky but for sure brings a great value if you are a database developer for a long time. I suggest you go over this puzzles and their answers. Did you really know all of the answers? I am confident that reading following three blog post will for sure help you enhance the experience with T-SQL. SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Usage of FAST Hint SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Challenge – Error While Converting Money to Decimal SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Why does RIGHT JOIN Exists 2011 DVM sys.dm_os_sys_info Column Name Changed in SQL Server 2012 Have you ever faced a situation where something does not work? When you try to fix it - you enjoy fixing it and started to appreciate the breaking changes. Well, this was exactly I felt yesterday. Before I begin my story, I want to candidly state that I do not encourage anybody to use * in the SELECT statement. Now the disclaimer is over – I suggest you read the original story – you will love it! Get Directory Structure using Extended Stored Procedure xp_dirtree Here is the question to you – why would you do something in SQL Server where you can do the same task in command prompt much easily. Well, the answer is sometime there are real use cases when we have to do such thing. This is a similar example where I have demonstrated how in SQL Server 2012 we can use extended stored procedure to retrieve directory structure. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• My History with Agile

  - by Robert May

  I’m going to write my history with Agile here.  That way, in future posts, I can refer back to it, instead of typing it out in the post that contains information you may actually want to read.  Note that I’m actually a pretty senior developer, and do lots of technical interviews.  I’m an Agile fan because of the difference it makes in peoples lives and the improvement in quality it brings, and I’ll sacrifice my technological advance to help teams. Management History I started management pretty early in my career, starting with the first job that I ever had.  I actually do NOT have a CS or similar degree.  I have a Bachelor’s of Business Administration with an emphasis in Computer Information Systems. My first management gigs were around call center work and were very schedule oriented.  I didn’t understand the true value of teams, and I’m ashamed to admit, I actually installed a fingerprint scanner as a time clock in this job.  I shudder to think of the impact that I had on the team spirit.  I didn’t even trust them enough to fill out their time cards correctly.  How sad. I was managing nearly 100 people in this position, with the help of a great set of subordinates. I did try to come up with reward programs for the team, but again, didn’t understand the concept of team, so instead of letting the team determine how the rewards should work, I mandated from on high, which isn’t a good thing. I was told that I wasn’t the type that would be a good manager by people whom I respected a lot.  They said it because I was a computer geek, since they don’t understand good management either, but in retrospect, they were right about me then.  I was too green. After my first job, I went on to other jobs and with the exception of one job, I’ve managed people at them all.  The rest of the management story is important for understanding agile, so I’ll save it for my next post. Technical History I’ve been in software development for many, many years.  I technically started programming on a commodore 64 in basic.  I didn’t know that I was programming, but I was sure having fun.  That was followed by batch files, Gorilla hacking (I always had to win), WordPerfect Macro programming and other things that taught me the basics. My first “real” job was with a telephone company, and that’s where I made my first database application in DataEase, wrote my first VBA app and started using real programming tools, like turbo pascal, vb3-vb5, and semi-real tools like RPG and VisualRPG.  I wrote my first web page in 1994, and built my first data driven web page in 1995 using perlDB.  You really can do anything with Perl.  At this time, I also started a Linux based internet service provider that is still in operation today.  One of the people I worked with is now a Microsoft employee building and designing frameworks you probably know well.  Smart guy.  I also built my first ASP applications connecting to Sql Server 6.5, setup Exchange 5.5 for the company, and many other system administration stuff.  I’m a programmer by choice, mostly because I don’t really like PC support. From there, I went on to a large state agency.  I got to see and maintain true waterfall projects.  5 years of maintaining the 200 VB COM+ (MTS, actually) dlls that were used to calculate a single number is a long time.  That was all Microsoft DNS technologies.  SQL Server and VB6 were the tools of choice, although .net started to be a factor near the end of employment.  I did some heavy XML work at this job and even wrote an XSD parser and validator in VB6 that was a shim until MSXML 3.0 came out.  Prior to 3.0, XSD’s weren’t supported, and I didn’t want to write DTDs. Ironically, jobs after this were more generic.  I pretty much settled in on the .net framework and revisions of it.  Lots of WPF, some silverlight, lots of ASP.NET, some SQL Azure, lots of SQL Server, some Oracle, but I don’t think that I was as passionate about development and technologies.  I was more into the management of development.  I like people. Technorati Tags: Agile,history

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• Entity Framework Batch Update and Future Queries

  - by pwelter34

  Entity Framework Extended Library A library the extends the functionality of Entity Framework. Features Batch Update and Delete Future Queries Audit Log Project Package and Source NuGet Package PM> Install-Package EntityFramework.Extended NuGet: http://nuget.org/List/Packages/EntityFramework.Extended Source: http://github.com/loresoft/EntityFramework.Extended Batch Update and Delete A current limitations of the Entity Framework is that in order to update or delete an entity you have to first retrieve it into memory. Now in most scenarios this is just fine. There are however some senerios where performance would suffer. Also, for single deletes, the object must be retrieved before it can be deleted requiring two calls to the database. Batch update and delete eliminates the need to retrieve and load an entity before modifying it. Deleting //delete all users where FirstName matches context.Users.Delete(u => u.FirstName == "firstname"); Update //update all tasks with status of 1 to status of 2 context.Tasks.Update( t => t.StatusId == 1, t => new Task {StatusId = 2}); //example of using an IQueryable as the filter for the update var users = context.Users .Where(u => u.FirstName == "firstname"); context.Users.Update( users, u => new User {FirstName = "newfirstname"}); Future Queries Build up a list of queries for the data that you need and the first time any of the results are accessed, all the data will retrieved in one round trip to the database server. Reducing the number of trips to the database is a great. Using this feature is as simple as appending .Future() to the end of your queries. To use the Future Queries, make sure to import the EntityFramework.Extensions namespace. Future queries are created with the following extension methods... Future() FutureFirstOrDefault() FutureCount() Sample // build up queries var q1 = db.Users .Where(t => t.EmailAddress == "[email protected]") .Future(); var q2 = db.Tasks .Where(t => t.Summary == "Test") .Future(); // this triggers the loading of all the future queries var users = q1.ToList(); In the example above, there are 2 queries built up, as soon as one of the queries is enumerated, it triggers the batch load of both queries. // base query var q = db.Tasks.Where(t => t.Priority == 2); // get total count var q1 = q.FutureCount(); // get page var q2 = q.Skip(pageIndex).Take(pageSize).Future(); // triggers execute as a batch int total = q1.Value; var tasks = q2.ToList(); In this example, we have a common senerio where you want to page a list of tasks. In order for the GUI to setup the paging control, you need a total count. With Future, we can batch together the queries to get all the data in one database call. Future queries work by creating the appropriate IFutureQuery object that keeps the IQuerable. The IFutureQuery object is then stored in IFutureContext.FutureQueries list. Then, when one of the IFutureQuery objects is enumerated, it calls back to IFutureContext.ExecuteFutureQueries() via the LoadAction delegate. ExecuteFutureQueries builds a batch query from all the stored IFutureQuery objects. Finally, all the IFutureQuery objects are updated with the results from the query. Audit Log The Audit Log feature will capture the changes to entities anytime they are submitted to the database. The Audit Log captures only the entities that are changed and only the properties on those entities that were changed. The before and after values are recorded. AuditLogger.LastAudit is where this information is held and there is a ToXml() method that makes it easy to turn the AuditLog into xml for easy storage. The AuditLog can be customized via attributes on the entities or via a Fluent Configuration API. Fluent Configuration // config audit when your application is starting up... var auditConfiguration = AuditConfiguration.Default; auditConfiguration.IncludeRelationships = true; auditConfiguration.LoadRelationships = true; auditConfiguration.DefaultAuditable = true; // customize the audit for Task entity auditConfiguration.IsAuditable<Task>() .NotAudited(t => t.TaskExtended) .FormatWith(t => t.Status, v => FormatStatus(v)); // set the display member when status is a foreign key auditConfiguration.IsAuditable<Status>() .DisplayMember(t => t.Name); Create an Audit Log var db = new TrackerContext(); var audit = db.BeginAudit(); // make some updates ... db.SaveChanges(); var log = audit.LastLog;

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• WordPress SEO Plugins to make your Blog Search Engine Friendly

  - by Vaibhav

  WordPress is the most common blogging system in use today and its use as a CMS is also wide spread. With hundreds of millions of sites using wordpress, getting correct SEO for your WordPress based Blog or Site is very important. We get regular queries from people who want Search Engine Optimisation for their site or blog which is made using wordpress. Here is a list of 16 of the best WordPress Plug-ins That can help you achieve better rankings: All in one SEO Pack This is most popular plugin among all SEO plugins for WordPress. It is easy to use and is compatible with most of the WordPress plugins. It works as a complete package of SEO plugin – automatically generating META tags and optimizing search engines for your titles and avoiding duplicate content. You can also include META tags manually (Met title, Meta description and Met keywords) for all pages and post in your website. HeadSpace2 HeasSpace2 is available in different languages , you can manage a wide range of SEO Tasks related with meta data, you can tag your posts, Custom descriptions and titles. So your page can rank the created relevancy on Search engines and you can load different settings for different pages. Platinum SEO plugin Automatic 301 redirects permalink changes, META tags generation, avoids duplicate content, and does SEO optimization of post and page titles and a lots of other features. TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin It’s a modified version of all-in-one SEO Pack. It has some unique feature over All-in-one SEO plugin, It generate titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords automatically when overrides are not present. Google XML Sitemaps Sitemaps Generated by this tool are supported by  Google,  Yahoo,  Bing, and Ask. We all know Sitemaps make indexing of web pages easier for web crawlers. Crawlers can retrieve complete structure of site and more information by sitemaps. They notify all major search engines about new posts every time you create a new post. Sitemap Generator You can generate highly customizable sitemap for your WordPress page. You can choose what to show and what not to show, you can list the items in your choice of orde. It supports pages and permalinks and multi-level categories. SEO Slugs They can generate more search engine friendly URLs for your site. Slugs are filename assigned to your post , this plugin removes all  common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’, ‘what’, ‘you’ from slug which are assigned automatically to your post. SEO Post Links This is a similar plugin to SEO Slug, it removes unnecessary keywords from slug to make it short and SEO friendly and you can fix the number of characters in your post. Automatic SEO links With this tool you can create auto linking in your post. You can use this tool for inter linking or external linking too. Just select your words, anchor text target URL nature of links ( Do fallow / No follow ). This plugin will replace the matches found in post, WP Backlinks A helpful plugin for link exchange , whenever any webmaster submits a link for link exchange, the plugin will spider webmasters site for reciprocal link, and if everything is found good , your link will be exchanged. SEO Title Tag You can optimize your Title  tags of  Word press blog through this plugin . You can also override the title tag with custom titles , mass editing and title tags for 404 pages which are the main feature of this plugin. 404 SEO plugin With this Plugin you can customize 404 page of your site; you can give customized error message and links to relevant pages of your site. Redirection A powerful plugins to manage 301 redirection and logs related with redirection, with this plugin you can track 404 errors and track the log of all redirected URLs , this plugin can redirect  post automatically when URL changes for that post. AddToAny This plugin helps your readers to share, save, email and bookmark your posts and pages. It supports more than a hundred social bookmarking , networking and sharing sites. SEO Friendly Images You can make SEO friendly images available on your site with the help of this tool. It updates images with proper titles and ALT tags. Robots Meta A plugin which prevents Search engines to index comments on your post, login and admin pages. It also allows to add tags for individual pages.

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• Visualising data a different way with Pivot collections

  - by Rob Farley

  Roger’s been doing a great job extending PivotViewer recently, and you can find the list of LobsterPot pivots at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au Many months back, the TED Talk that Gary Flake did about Pivot caught my imagination, and I did some research into it. At the time, most of what we did with Pivot was geared towards what we could do for clients, including making Pivot collections based on students at a school, and using it to browse PDF invoices by their various properties. We had actual commercial work based on Pivot collections back then, and it was all kinds of fun. Later, we made some collections for events that were happening, and even got featured in the TechEd Australia keynote. But I’m getting ahead of myself... let me explain the concept. A Pivot collection is an XML file (with .cxml extension) which lists Items, each linking to an image that’s stored in a Deep Zoom format (this means that it contains tiles like Bing Maps, so that the browser can request only the ones of interest according to the zoom level). This collection can be shown in a Silverlight application that uses the PivotViewer control, or in the Pivot Browser that’s available from getpivot.com. Filtering and sorting the items according to their facets (attributes, such as size, age, category, etc), the PivotViewer rearranges the way that these are shown in a very dynamic way. To quote Gary Flake, this lets us “see patterns which are otherwise hidden”. This browsing mechanism is very suited to a number of different methods, because it’s just that – browsing. It’s not searching, it’s more akin to window-shopping than doing an internet search. When we decided to put something together for the conferences such as TechEd Australia 2010 and the PASS Summit 2010, we did some screen-scraping to provide a different view of data that was already available online. Nick Hodge and Michael Kordahi from Microsoft liked the idea a lot, and after a bit of tweaking, we produced one that Michael used in the TechEd Australia keynote to show the variety of talks on offer. It’s interesting to see a pattern in this data: The Office track has the most sessions, but if the Interactive Sessions and Instructor-Led Labs are removed, it drops down to only the sixth most popular track, with Cloud Computing taking over. This is something which just isn’t obvious when you look an ordinary search tool. You get a much better feel for the data when moving around it like this. The more observant amongst you will have noticed some difference in the collection that Michael is demonstrating in the picture above with the screenshots I’ve shown. That’s because it’s been extended some more. At the SQLBits conference in the UK this year, I had some interesting discussions with the guys from Xpert360, particularly Phil Carter, who I’d met in 2009 at an earlier SQLBits conference. They had got around to producing a Pivot collection based on the SQLBits data, which we had been planning to do but ran out of time. We discussed some of ways that Pivot could be used, including the ways that my old friend Howard Dierking had extended it for the MSDN Magazine. I’m not suggesting I influenced Xpert360 at all, but they certainly inspired us with some of their posts on the matter So with LobsterPot guys David Gardiner and Roger Noble both having dabbled in Pivot collections (and Dave doing some for clients), I set Roger to work on extending it some more. He’s used various events and so on to be able to make an environment that allows us to do quick deployment of new collections, as well as showing the data in a grid view which behaves as if it were simply a third view of the data (the other two being the array of images and the ‘histogram’ view). I see PivotViewer as being a significant step in data visualisation – so much so that I feature it when I deliver talks on Spatial Data Visualisation methods. Any time when there is information that can be conveyed through an image, you have to ask yourself how best to show that image, and whether that image is the focal point. For Spatial data, the image is most often a map, and the map becomes the central mode for navigation. I show Pivot with postcode areas, since I can browse the postcodes based on their data, and many of the images are recognisable (to locals of South Australia). Naturally, the images could link through to the map itself, and so on, but generally people think of Spatial data in terms of navigating a map, which doesn’t always gel with the information you’re trying to extract. Roger’s even looking into ways to hook PivotViewer into the Bing Maps API, in a similar way to the Deep Earth project, displaying different levels of map detail according to how ‘zoomed in’ the images are. Some of the work that Dave did with one of the schools was generating the Deep Zoom tiles “on the fly”, based on images stored in a database, and Roger has produced a collection which uses images from flickr, that lets you move from one search term to another. Pulling the images down from flickr.com isn’t particularly ideal from a performance aspect, and flickr doesn’t store images in a small-enough format to really lend itself to this use, but you might agree that it’s an interesting concept which compares nicely to using Maps. I’m looking forward to future versions of the PivotViewer control, and hope they provide many more events that can be used, and even more hooks into it. Naturally, LobsterPot could help provide your business with a PivotViewer experience, but you can probably do a lot of it yourself too. There’s a thorough guide at getpivot.com, which is how we got into it. For some examples of what we’ve done, have a look at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au. I’d like to see PivotViewer really catch on a data visualisation tool.

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• Using real fonts in HTML 5 & CSS 3 pages

  - by nikolaosk

  This is going to be the fifth post in a series of posts regarding HTML 5. You can find the other posts here, here , here and here.In this post I will provide a hands-on example on how to use real fonts in HTML 5 pages with the use of CSS 3.Font issues have been appearing in all websites and caused all sorts of problems for web designers.The real problem with fonts for web developers until now was that they were forced to use only a handful of fonts.CSS 3 allows web designers not to use only web-safe fonts.These fonts are in wide use in most user's operating systems.Some designers (when they wanted to make their site stand out) resorted in various techniques like using images instead of fonts. That solution is not very accessible-friendly and definitely less SEO friendly.CSS (through CSS3's Fonts module) 3 allows web developers to embed fonts directly on a web page.First we need to define the font and then attach the font to elements.Obviously we have various formats for fonts. Some are supported by all modern browsers and some are not.The most common formats are, Embedded OpenType (EOT),TrueType(TTF),OpenType(OTF). I will use the @font-face declaration to define the font used in this page.  Before you download fonts (in any format) make sure you have understood all the licensing issues. Please note that all these real fonts will be downloaded in the client's computer.A great resource on the web (maybe the best) is http://www.typekit.com/.They have an abundance of web fonts for use. Please note that they sell those fonts.Another free (best things in life a free, aren't they?) resource is the http://www.google.com/webfonts website. I have visited the website and downloaded the Aladin webfont.When you download any font you like make sure you read the license first. Aladin webfont is released under the Open Font License (OFL) license. Before I go on with the actual demo I will use the (http://www.caniuse.com) to see the support for web fonts from the latest versions of modern browsers.Please have a look at the picture below. We see that all the latest versions of modern browsers support this feature. In order to be absolutely clear this is not (and could not be) a detailed tutorial on HTML 5. There are other great resources for that.Navigate to the excellent interactive tutorials of W3School.Another excellent resource is HTML 5 Doctor.Two very nice sites that show you what features and specifications are implemented by various browsers and their versions are http://caniuse.com/ and http://html5test.com/. At this times Chrome seems to support most of HTML 5 specifications.Another excellent way to find out if the browser supports HTML 5 and CSS 3 features is to use the Javascript lightweight library Modernizr.In this hands-on example I will be using Expression Web 4.0.This application is not a free application. You can use any HTML editor you like.You can use Visual Studio 2012 Express edition. You can download it here.I create a simple HTML 5 page. The markup follows and it is very easy to use and understand<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en">  <head>    <title>HTML 5, CSS3 and JQuery</title>    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" >    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">       </head>  <body>      <div id="header">      <h1>Learn cutting edge technologies</h1>      <p>HTML 5, JQuery, CSS3</p>    </div>        <div id="main">          <h2>HTML 5</h2>                        <p>            HTML5 is the latest version of HTML and XHTML. The HTML standard defines a single language that can be written in HTML and XML. It attempts to solve issues found in previous iterations of HTML and addresses the needs of Web Applications, an area previously not adequately covered by HTML.          </p>      </div>             </body>  </html> Then I create the style.css file.<style type="text/css">@font-face{font-family:Aladin;src: url('Aladin-Regular.ttf')}h1{font-family:Aladin,Georgia,serif;}</style> As you can see we want to style the h1 tag in our HTML 5 markup.I just use the @font-face property,specifying the font-family and the source of the web font. Then I just use the name in the font-family property to style the h1 tag.Have a look below to see my page in IE10. Make sure you open this page in all your browsers installed in your machine. Make sure you have downloaded the latest versions. Now we can make our site stand out with web fonts and give it a really unique look and feel. Hope it helps!!!  

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