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• Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

  - by mbcrump

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

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• Looking for Your Next Challenge...Don't Stretch Too Far

  - by david.talamelli

  In my role as a Recruiter at Oracle I receive a large number of resumes of people who are interested in working with us. People contact me for a number of reasons, it can be about a specific role that we may be hiring for or they may send me an email asking if there are any suitable roles for them. Sometimes when I speak to people we have similar roles available to the roles that they may actually be in now. Sometimes people are interested in making this type of sideways move if their motivation to change jobs is not necessarily that they are looking for increased responsibility or career advancement (example: money, redundancy, work environment). However there are times when after walking through a specific role with a candidate that they may say to me - "You know that is very similar to the role that I am doing now. I would not want to move unless my next role presents me with the next challenge in my career". This is a far statement - if a person is looking to change jobs for the next step in their career they should be looking at suitable opportunities that will address their need. In this instance a sideways step will not really present any new challenges or responsibilities. The main change would be the company they are working for. Candidates looking for a new role because they are looking to move up the ladder should be looking for a role that offers them the next level of responsibility. I think the best job changes for people who are looking for career advancement are the roles that stretch someone outside of their comfort zone but do not stretch them so much that they can't cope with the added responsibilities and pressure. In my head I often think of this example in the same context of an elastic band - you can stretch it, but only so much before it snaps. That is what you should be looking for - to be stretched but not so much that you snap. If you are for example in an individual contributor role and would like to move into a management role - you may not be quite ready to take on a role that is managing a large workforce or requires significant people management experience. While your intentions may be right, your lack of management experience may fit you outside of the scope of search to be successful this type of role. In this example you can move from an individual contributor role to a management role but it may need to be managing a smaller team rather than a larger team. While you are trying to make this transition you can try to pick up some responsibilities in your current role that would give you the skills and experience you need for your next role. Never be afraid to put your hand up to help on a new project or piece of work. You never know when that newly gained experience may come in handy in your career. This article was originally posted on David Talamelli's Blog - David's Journal on Tap

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• Upgrading from TFS 2010 RC to TFS 2010 RTM done

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Today is the big day, with the Launch of Visual Studio 2010 already done in Asia, and rolling around the world towards us, we are getting ready for the RTM (Released). We have had TFS 2010 in Production for nearly 6 months and have had only minimal problems. Update 12th April 2010  – Added Scott Hanselman’s tweet about the MSDN download release time. SSW was the first company in the world outside of Microsoft to deploy Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server to production, not once, but twice. I am hoping to make it 3 in a row, but with all the hype around the new version, and with it being a production release and not just a go-live, I think there will be a lot of competition. Developers: MSDN will be updated with #vs2010 downloads and details at 10am PST *today*! @shanselman - Scott Hanselman Same as before, we need to Uninstall 2010 RC and install 2010 RTM. The installer will take care of all the complexity of actually upgrading any schema changes. If you are upgrading from TFS 2008 to TFS2010 you can follow our Rules To Better TFS 2010 Migration and read my post on our successes.   We run TFS 2010 in a Hyper-V virtual environment, so we have the advantage of running a snapshot as well as taking a DB backup. Done - Snapshot the hyper-v server Microsoft does not support taking a snapshot of a running server, for very good reason, and Brian Harry wrote a post after my last upgrade with the reason why you should never snapshot a running server. Done - Uninstall Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 RC You will need to uninstall all of the Visual Studio 2010 RC client bits that you have on the server. Done - Uninstall TFS 2010 RC Done - Install TFS 2010 RTM Done - Configure TFS 2010 RTM Pick the Upgrade option and point it at your existing “tfs_Configuration” database to load all of the existing settings Done - Upgrade the SharePoint Extensions Upgrade Build Servers (Pending) Test the server The back out plan, and you should always have one, is to restore the snapshot. Upgrading to Team Foundation Server 2010 – Done The first thing you need to do is off the TFS server and then log into the Hyper-v server and create a snapshot. Figure: Make sure you turn the server off and delete all old snapshots before you take a new one I noticed that the snapshot that was taken before the Beta 2 to RC upgrade was still there. You should really delete old snapshots before you create a new one, but in this case the SysAdmin (who is currently tucked up in bed) asked me not to. I guess he is worried about a developer messing up his server Turn your server on and wait for it to boot in anticipation of all the nice shiny RTM’ness that is coming next. The upgrade procedure for TFS2010 is to uninstal the old version and install the new one. Figure: Remove Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server RC from the system.   Figure: Most of the heavy lifting is done by the Uninstaller, but make sure you have removed any of the client bits first. Specifically Visual Studio 2010 or Team Explorer 2010.  Once the uninstall is complete, this took around 5 minutes for me, you can begin the install of the RTM. Running the 64 bit OS will allow the application to use more than 2GB RAM, which while not common may be of use in heavy load situations. Figure: It is always recommended to install the 64bit version of a server application where possible. I do not think it is likely, with SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010  and even Windows Server 2008 R2 being 64 bit only, I do not think there will be another release of a server app that is 32bit. You then need to choose what it is you want to install. This depends on how you are running TFS and on how many servers. In our case we run TFS and the Team Foundation Build Service (controller only) on out TFS server along with Analysis services and Reporting Services. But our SharePoint server lives elsewhere. Figure: This always confuses people, but in reality it makes sense. Don’t install what you do not need. Every extra you install has an impact of performance. If you are integrating with SharePoint you will need to run this install on every Front end server in your farm and don’t forget to upgrade your Build servers and proxy servers later. Figure: Selecting only Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Team Foundation Build Services (TFBS)   It is worth noting that if you have a lot of builds kicking off, and hence a lot of get operations against your TFS server, you can use a proxy server to cache the source control on another server in between your TFS server and your build servers. Figure: Installing Microsoft .NET Framework 4 takes the most time. Figure: Now run Windows Update, and SSW Diagnostic to make sure all your bits and bobs are up to date. Note: SSW Diagnostic will check your Power Tools, Add-on’s, Check in Policies and other bits as well. Configure Team Foundation Server 2010 – Done Now you can configure the server. If you have no key you will need to pick “Install a Trial Licence”, but it is only £500, or free with a MSDN subscription. Anyway, if you pick Trial you get 90 days to get your key. Figure: You can pick trial and add your key later using the TFS Server Admin. Here is where the real choices happen. We are doing an Upgrade from a previous version, so I will pick Upgrade the same as all you folks that are using the RC or TFS 2008. Figure: The upgrade wizard takes your existing 2010 or 2008 databases and upgraded them to the release.   Once you have entered your database server name you can click “List available databases” and it will show what it can upgrade. Figure: Select your database from the list and at this point, make sure you have a valid backup. At this point you have not made ANY changes to the databases. At this point the configuration wizard will load configuration from your existing database if you have one. If you are upgrading TFS 2008 refer to Rules To Better TFS 2010 Migration. Mostly during the wizard the default values will suffice, but depending on the configuration you want you can pick different options. Figure: Set the application tier account and Authentication method to use. We use NTLM to keep things simple as we host our TFS server externally for our remote developers.  Figure: Setting your TFS server URL’s to be the remote URL’s allows the reports to be accessed without using VPN. Very handy for those remote developers. Figure: Detected the existing Warehouse no problem. Figure: Again we love green ticks. It gives us a warm fuzzy feeling. Figure: The username for connecting to Reporting services should be a domain account (if you are on a domain that is). Figure: Setup the SharePoint integration to connect to your external SharePoint server. You can take the option to connect later.   You then need to run all of your readiness checks. These check can save your life! it will check all of the settings that you have entered as well as checking all the external services are configures and running properly. There are two reasons that TFS 2010 is so easy and painless to install where previous version were not. Microsoft changes the install to two steps, Install and configuration. The second reason is that they have pulled out all of the stops in making the install run all the checks necessary to make sure that once you start the install that it will complete. if you find any errors I recommend that you report them on http://connect.microsoft.com so everyone can benefit from your misery.   Figure: Now we have everything setup the configuration wizard can do its work.  Figure: Took a while on the “Web site” stage for some point, but zipped though after that.  Figure: last wee bit. TFS Needs to do a little tinkering with the data to complete the upgrade. Figure: All upgraded. I am not worried about the yellow triangle as SharePoint was being a little silly Exception Message: TF254021: The account name or password that you specified is not valid. (type TfsAdminException) Exception Stack Trace:    at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Management.Controls.WizardCommon.AccountSelectionControl.TestLogon(String connectionString)    at System.ComponentModel.BackgroundWorker.WorkerThreadStart(Object argument) [Info   @16:10:16.307] Benign exception caught as part of verify: Exception Message: TF255329: The following site could not be accessed: http://projects.ssw.com.au/. The server that you specified did not return the expected response. Either you have not installed the Team Foundation Server Extensions for SharePoint Products on this server, or a firewall is blocking access to the specified site or the SharePoint Central Administration site. For more information, see the Microsoft Web site (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161206). (type TeamFoundationServerException) Exception Stack Trace:    at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.SharePoint.WssUtilities.VerifyTeamFoundationSharePointExtensions(ICredentials credentials, Uri url)    at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Admin.VerifySharePointSitesUrl.Verify() Inner Exception Details: Exception Message: TF249064: The following Web service returned an response that is not valid: http://projects.ssw.com.au/_vti_bin/TeamFoundationIntegrationService.asmx. This Web service is used for the Team Foundation Server Extensions for SharePoint Products. Either the extensions are not installed, the request resulted in HTML being returned, or there is a problem with the URL. Verify that the following URL points to a valid SharePoint Web application and that the application is available: http://projects.ssw.com.au. If the URL is correct and the Web application is operating normally, verify that a firewall is not blocking access to the Web application. (type TeamFoundationServerInvalidResponseException) Exception Data Dictionary: ResponseStatusCode = InternalServerError I’ll look at SharePoint after, probably the SharePoint box just needs a restart or a kick If there is a problem with SharePoint it will come out in testing, But I will definatly be passing this on to Microsoft.   Upgrading the SharePoint connector to TFS 2010 You will need to upgrade the Extensions for SharePoint Products and Technologies on all of your SharePoint farm front end servers. To do this uninstall  the TFS 2010 RC from it in the same way as the server, and then install just the RTM Extensions. Figure: Only install the SharePoint Extensions on your SharePoint front end servers. TFS 2010 supports both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.   Figure: When you configure SharePoint it uploads all of the solutions and templates. Figure: Everything is uploaded Successfully. Figure: TFS even remembered the settings from the previous installation, fantastic.   Upgrading the Team Foundation Build Servers to TFS 2010 Just like on the SharePoint servers you will need to upgrade the Build Server to the RTM. Just uninstall TFS 2010 RC and then install only the Team Foundation Build Services component. Unlike on the SharePoint server you will probably have some version of Visual Studio installed. You will need to remove this as well. (Coming Soon) Connecting Visual Studio 2010 / 2008 / 2005 and Eclipse to TFS2010 If you have developers still on Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 you will need do download the respective compatibility pack: Visual Studio Team System 2005 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 If you are using Eclipse you can download the new Team Explorer Everywhere install for connecting to TFS. Get your developers to check that you have the latest version of your applications with SSW Diagnostic which will check for Service Packs and hot fixes to Visual Studio as well.   Technorati Tags: TFS,TFS2010,TFS 2010,Upgrade

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• Custom Live CD using UCK

  - by phifer2088

  I am trying to create a custom live iso that I can place onto thumb drives for the purpose of using putty to program Cisco switches and routers. I have ubuntu 14.04 LTS installed on a laptop and also installed UCK. I used the desktop image for 14.04 and created a custom ISO. I was able to run terminal and install the putty application and add a new user. I added the new user to the dialout group so they could then access the serial port. I am not exactly where I want to be yet, but it is a start. I have loaded the ISO to a USB drive using netbootin, but it will not boot into the live cd for me to test that everything works the way I need in the image. Is this because of the image I used? Any help would be great. Thank you.

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• Is this right in the use case of exec method of child_process? is there away to cody the envirorment along with the require module too?

  - by L2L2L

  I'm learning node. I am using child_process to move data to another script to be executed. But it seem that it does not copy the hold environment or I could be doing something wrong. To copy the hold environment --require modules too-- or is this when I use spawn, I'm not so clear or understanding spawn exec and execfile --although execfile is like what I'm doing at the bottom, but with exec... right?-- And I would just love to have some clarity on this matter. Please anyone? Thank you. parent.js - "use strict"; var fs, path, _err; fs = require("fs"), path = require("path"), _err = require("./err.js"); var url; url= process.argv[1]; var dirname, locate_r; dirname = path.dirname(url); locate_r = dirname + "/" + "test.json";//path.join(dirname,"/", "test.json"); var flag, str; flag = "r", str = ""; fs.open(locate_r, flag, function opd(error, fd){ if (error){_err(error, function(){ fs.close(fd,function(){ process.stderr.write("\n" + "In Finally Block: File Closed!" + "\n");});})} var readBuff, buffOffset, buffLength, filePos; readBuff = new Buffer(15), buffOffset = 0, buffLength = readBuff.length, filePos = 0; fs.read(fd, readBuff, buffOffset, buffLength, filePos, function rd(error, readBytes){ error&&_err(error, fd); str = readBuff.toString("utf8"); process.env.str = str; process.stdout.write("str: "+ str + "\n" + "readBuff: " + readBuff + "\n"); fs.close(fd, function(){process.stdout.write( "Read and Closed File." + "\n" )}); //write(str); //run test for process.exec** var env, varName, envCopy, exec; env = process.env, varName, envCopy = {}, exec = require("child_process").exec; for(varName in env){ envCopy[varName] = env[varName]; } process.env.fs = fs, process.env.path = path, process.env.dirname = dirname, process.env.flag = flag, process.env.str = str, process.env._err = _err; process.env.fd = fd; exec("node child.js", env, function(error, stdout, stderr){ if(error){throw (new Error(error));} }); }); }); child.js - "use strict"; var fs, path, _err; fs = require("fs"), path = require("path"), _err = require("./err.js"); var fd, fs, flag, path, dirname, str, _err; fd = process.env.fd, //fs = process.env.fs, //path = process.env.path, dirname = process.env.dirname, flag = process.env.flag, str = process.env.str, _err = process.env._err; var url; url= process.argv[1]; var locate_r; dirname = path.dirname(url); locate_r = dirname + "/" + "test.json";//path.join(dirname,"/", "test.json"); //function write(str){ var locate_a; locate_a = dirname + "/" + "test.json"; //path.join(dirname,"/", "test.json"); flag = "a"; fs.open(locate_a, flag, function opd(error, fd){ error&&_err(error, fs, fd); var writeBuff, buffPos, buffLgh, filePs; writeBuff = new Buffer(str), process.stdout.write( "writeBuff: " + writeBuff + "\n" + "str: " + str + "\n"), buffPos = 0, buffLgh = writeBuff.length, filePs = buffLgh;//null; fs.write(fd, writeBuff, buffPos, buffLgh, filePs-3, function(error, written){ error&&_err(error, function(){ fs.close(fd,function(){ process.stderr.write("\n" + "In Finally Block: File Closed!" + "\n"); }); }); fs.close(fd, function(){process.stdout.write( "Written and Closed File." + "\n");}); }); }); //} err.js - "use strict"; var fs; fs = require("fs"); module.exports = function _err(err, scp, cd){ try{ throw (new Error(err)); }catch(e){ process.stderr.write(e + "\n"); }finally{ cd; } }

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• Eclipse Check for Updates issue

  - by Nicholas Ryan Bowers

  I install Eclipse from the Software Center so it links up and will be updated with the rest of my software. Because I am developing for Android, however, I have to install the ADT Plugin within Eclipse by going to Help Install new software (or something to that effect). Now, I do understand that I can update Eclipse through the actual Ubuntu software center/system, but in order to update plugins and extensions within Eclipse, I have to go to Help Check for Updates (which then scans all plugins for updates). The only issue, is that when I installed through the software center, the owner became root, and whenever I run it without root, I'm not able to update - I get the error message "Insufficient access privileges to apply this update." When I run it as root, all of my plugins disappear, because I guess I installed them as myself, not as root. I tried to install the plugins as root, but the Install New Software choice would not work. Ubuntu 12.04 and Eclipse 3.7.2-1

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• Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2010

  - by jcortez

  Introducing the Developer Dashboard As a SharePoint developer (or IT Professional), how many times have you had the pleasure of figuring out why a particular page on your site is taking too long to render? I'm sure one of the techniques you have employed in troubleshooting is the process of elimination - removing individual web parts from the page hoping to identify which web part is misbehaving. One of the new features of SharePoint 2010 is the Developer Dashboard. This dashboard provides tracing and performance information that can be useful when you are trying to troubleshoot pages that are loading too slow. The Developer Dashboard is turned off by default and I'll go over 3 different ways to display it. Here is a screenshot of what the Developer Dashboard looks like when displayed at the bottom of the page:   You can see on the left side the different events that fired during the page processing pipeline and how long these events took. This is where you will see individual web parts being processed and how long it took to complete (obviously the kind of processing depends on what the web part does). On the right side you would see the different database calls issued through the SharePoint Object Model to process the page. You will notice that each of these database queries are actually a hyperlink and clicking on it displays a pop-up window that shows the actual SQL Query Text, the Call Stack that triggered the database call, and the IO statistics of that query. Enabling the Developer Dashboard Option 1: Managed Code   The Developer Dashboard is a farm-wide setting and the code above won't work if it is used within a web part hosted on any non-Central Admin site. The SPDeveloperDashboardLevel enum has three possible values: On, Off, and OnDemand. Setting it to On will always display the Developer Dashboard at the bottom of the page. Setting it Off will hide the Developer Dashboard. Setting it to OnDemand will add an icon at the top right corner of the page (see screenshot below) where a Site Collection Admin can toggle the display of the Developer Dashboard for a particular site collection. In my opinion, OnDemand is the best setting when troubleshooting a page or during development since a Site Collection Admin can turn it on or off and for a particular site only. The first cool thing about this is that the Site Collection Admin that turned it on will be the only one to see the Developer Dashboard output. Everyday users won't see the Developer Dashboard output even if it was turned on by a Site Collection Admin. If you need more flexibility on who gets to see the Developer Dashboard output, you can set the SPDeveloperDashboardSettings.RequiredPermissions to control which group of users will have the permission to see the output. Option 2: Using stsadm Using stsadm, you can run the following command to configure the Developer Dashboard: STSADM –o setproperty –pn developer-dashboard –pv OnDemand To successfully execute this command, be sure you that are running as a Farm Admin. Option 3: Using PowerShell For all scripts in SharePoint 2010, I prefer writing them as PowerShell scripts. Though the stsadm command is less verbose, the PowerShell equivalent is pretty straightforward and uses the SharePoint Object Model: You can of course parameterized the value that gets assigned to the DisplayLevel property so you can turn it On, Off or OnDemand depending on the parameter. Events and the Developer Dashboard  Now, don't assume that all the code inside your web part or page will show up in the Developer Dashboard complete with all the great troubleshooting information. Only a finite set of events are monitored by default (for a web part it will events in the base web part class). Let's say you have a click event that could take some time, for example a web service call. And you want to include troubleshooting information for this event in the Developer Dashboard. Enter SPMonitoredScope which is also a new feature in SharePoint 2010. In SharePoint 2010, everything is executed within a "Monitored Scope". And each scope has a set of "Monitors" that measures and counts calls and timings which appears in the Developer Dashboard. Below is an example on how to get your custom code to get included in the Developer Dashboard by wrapping it inside a new monitored scope: The code above would include your new scope "My long web service call" into the Developer Dashboard and would log the time it took to complete processing. In my opinion, wrapping your custom code in a SPMonitoredScope is a SharePoint development best practice since it provides you visibility and a better understanding on the performance of your components.

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• Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta supports IIS Express

  - by DigiMortal

  Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta and ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 were both announced today. I made a little test on one of my web applications to see how Visual Studio 2010 works with IIS Express. In this posting I will show you how to make your ASP.NET MVC 3 application work with IIS Express. Installing new stuff You can install IIS Express using Web Platform Installer. It is not part of WebMatrix anymore and you can just install IIS Express without WebMatrix. NB! You have to install IIS Express using Web Platform installer because IIS Express is not installed by SP1. After installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta on my machine (it took a long-long-long time to install) I installed also ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2. If you have Async CTP installed on your machine you have to uninstall it to get ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 installed and run without problems. Screenshot on right shows what kinf of horrors my old laptop had to survive to get all new stuff installer. Setting IIS Express as server for web application Now, when you right-click on some web project you should see new menu item in context menu – Use IIS Express…. If you click on it you are asked for confirmation and if you say Yes then your web application is reconfigured to use IIS Express. After configuration you will see dialog box like this. And you are done. You can run your application now. Running web application When you run your application it is run on IIS Express. You can see IIS Express icon on taskbar and when you click it you can open IIS Express settings. If you closed your application in browser you can open it again from IIS Express icon. Modifying IIS Express settings for web application You can modify IIS Express settings for your application. Just open your project properties and move to Web tab. IIS and IIS Express are using same settings. The difference is if you make check to Use IIS Express checkbox or not. Switching back to Visual Studio Development Server If you don’t want or you can’t use IIS Express for some reason you can easily switch back to Visual Studio Development Server. Just right-click on your web application project and select Use Visual Studio Development Server from context menu. Conclusion IIS Express is more independent than full version of IIS and it can be also installed and run on machines where are very strict rules (some corporate and academic environments by example). IIS Express was previously part of WebMatrix package but now it is separate product and Visual Studio 2010 has very nice support for it thanks to SP1. You can easily make your web applications use IIS Express and if you want to switch back to development server it is also very easy.

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• Guarding against CSRF Attacks in ASP.NET MVC2

  - by srkirkland

  Alongside XSS (Cross Site Scripting) and SQL Injection, Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks represent the three most common and dangerous vulnerabilities to common web applications today. CSRF attacks are probably the least well known but they are relatively easy to exploit and extremely and increasingly dangerous. For more information on CSRF attacks, see these posts by Phil Haack and Steve Sanderson. The recognized solution for preventing CSRF attacks is to put a user-specific token as a hidden field inside your forms, then check that the right value was submitted. It's best to use a random value which you’ve stored in the visitor’s Session collection or into a Cookie (so an attacker can't guess the value). ASP.NET MVC to the rescue ASP.NET MVC provides an HTMLHelper called AntiForgeryToken(). When you call <%= Html.AntiForgeryToken() %> in a form on your page you will get a hidden input and a Cookie with a random string assigned. Next, on your target Action you need to include [ValidateAntiForgeryToken], which handles the verification that the correct token was supplied. Good, but we can do better Using the AntiForgeryToken is actually quite an elegant solution, but adding [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] on all of your POST methods is not very DRY, and worse can be easily forgotten. Let's see if we can make this easier on the program but moving from an "Opt-In" model of protection to an "Opt-Out" model. Using AntiForgeryToken by default In order to mandate the use of the AntiForgeryToken, we're going to create an ActionFilterAttribute which will do the anti-forgery validation on every POST request. First, we need to create a way to Opt-Out of this behavior, so let's create a quick action filter called BypassAntiForgeryToken: [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Method, AllowMultiple=false)] public class BypassAntiForgeryTokenAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute { } Now we are ready to implement the main action filter which will force anti forgery validation on all post actions within any class it is defined on: [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class, AllowMultiple = false)] public class UseAntiForgeryTokenOnPostByDefault : ActionFilterAttribute { public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) { if (ShouldValidateAntiForgeryTokenManually(filterContext)) { var authorizationContext = new AuthorizationContext(filterContext.Controller.ControllerContext);   //Use the authorization of the anti forgery token, //which can't be inhereted from because it is sealed new ValidateAntiForgeryTokenAttribute().OnAuthorization(authorizationContext); }   base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext); }   /// <summary> /// We should validate the anti forgery token manually if the following criteria are met: /// 1. The http method must be POST /// 2. There is not an existing [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] attribute on the action /// 3. There is no [BypassAntiForgeryToken] attribute on the action /// </summary> private static bool ShouldValidateAntiForgeryTokenManually(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) { var httpMethod = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.HttpMethod;   //1. The http method must be POST if (httpMethod != "POST") return false;   // 2. There is not an existing anti forgery token attribute on the action var antiForgeryAttributes = filterContext.ActionDescriptor.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(ValidateAntiForgeryTokenAttribute), false);   if (antiForgeryAttributes.Length > 0) return false;   // 3. There is no [BypassAntiForgeryToken] attribute on the action var ignoreAntiForgeryAttributes = filterContext.ActionDescriptor.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(BypassAntiForgeryTokenAttribute), false);   if (ignoreAntiForgeryAttributes.Length > 0) return false;   return true; } } The code above is pretty straight forward -- first we check to make sure this is a POST request, then we make sure there aren't any overriding *AntiForgeryTokenAttributes on the action being executed. If we have a candidate then we call the ValidateAntiForgeryTokenAttribute class directly and execute OnAuthorization() on the current authorization context. Now on our base controller, you could use this new attribute to start protecting your site from CSRF vulnerabilities. [UseAntiForgeryTokenOnPostByDefault] public class ApplicationController : System.Web.Mvc.Controller { }   //Then for all of your controllers public class HomeController : ApplicationController {} What we accomplished If your base controller has the new default anti-forgery token attribute on it, when you don't use <%= Html.AntiForgeryToken() %> in a form (or of course when an attacker doesn't supply one), the POST action will throw the descriptive error message "A required anti-forgery token was not supplied or was invalid". Attack foiled! In summary, I think having an anti-CSRF policy by default is an effective way to protect your websites, and it turns out it is pretty easy to accomplish as well. Enjoy!

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• Map a Network Drive from XP to Windows 7

  - by Mysticgeek

  We’ve received a lot of questions about mapping a drive from XP to Windows 7 to access data easily. Today we look at how to map a drive in Windows 7, and how to map to an XP drive from Windows 7. With the new Homegroup feature in Windows 7, it makes sharing data between computers a lot easier. But you might need to map a network drive so you can go directly into a folder to access its contents. Mapping a network drive may sound like “IT talk”, but the process is fairly easy. Map Network Drive in Windows 7 Note: All of the computers used in this article are part of the same workgroup on a home network. In this first example we’re mapping to another Windows 7 drive on the network. Open Computer and from the toolbar click on Map Network Drive. Alternately in Computer you can hit “Alt+T” to pull up the toolbar and click on Tools \ Map Network Drive. Now give it an available drive letter, type in the path or browse to the folder you want to map to. Check the box next to Reconnect at logon if you want it available after a reboot, and click Finish. If both machines aren’t part of the same Homegroup, you may be prompted to enter in a username and password. Make sure and check the box next to Remember my credentials if you don’t want to log in every time to access it. The drive will map and the contents of the folder will open up. When you look in Computer, you’ll see the drive under network location. This process works if you want to connect to a server drive as well. In this example we map to a Home Server drive. Map an XP Drive to Windows 7 There might be times when you need to map a drive on an XP machine on your network. There are extra steps you’ll need to take to make it work however. Here we take a look at the problem you’ll encounter when trying to map to an XP machine if things aren’t set up correctly. If you try to browse to your XP machine you’ll see a message that you don’t have permission. Or if you try to enter in the path directly, you’ll be prompted for a username and password, and the annoyance is, no matter what credentials you put in, you can’t connect. To solve the problem we need to set up the Windows 7 machine as a user on the XP machine and make them part of the Administrators group. Right-click My Computer and select Manage. Under Computer Management expand Local Users and Groups and click on the Users folder. Right-click an empty area and click New User. Add in the user credentials, uncheck User must change password at next logon, then check Password never expires then click Create. Now you see the new user you created in the list. After the user is added you might want to reboot before proceeding to the next step.   Next we need to make the user part of the Administrators group. So go back into Computer Management \ Local Users and Groups \ Groups then double click on Administrators. Click the Add button in Administrators Properties window. Enter in the new user you created and click OK. An easy way to do this is to enter the name of the user you created then click Check Names and the path will be entered in for you. Now you see the user as a member of the Administrators group. Back on the Windows 7 machine we’ll start the process of mapping a drive. Here we’re browsing to the XP Media Center Edition machine. Now we can enter in the user name and password we just created. If you only want to access specific shared folders on the XP machine you can browse to them. Or if you want to map to the entire drive, enter in the drive path where in this example it’s “\\XPMCE\C$” –Don’t forget the “$” sign after the local drive letter. Then login… Again the contents of the drive will open up for you to access. Here you can see we have two drives mapped. One to another Windows 7 machine on the network, and the other one to the XP computer.   If you ever want to disconnect a drive, just right-click on it and then Disconnect. There are several scenarios where you might want to map a drive in Windows 7 to access specific data. It takes a little bit of work but you can map to an XP drive from Windows 7 as well. This comes in handy where you have a network with different versions of Windows running on it. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Find Your Missing USB Drive on Windows XPMake Vista Index Your Network ConnectionsEasily Backup & Import Your Wireless Network Settings in Windows 7Quickly Open Network Connections List in Windows 7 or VistaHow To Find Drives Easily with Desk Drive 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 Kill Processes Quickly with Process Assassin Need to Come Up with a Good Name? Try Wordoid StockFox puts a Lightweight Stock Ticker in your Statusbar Explore Google Public Data Visually The Ultimate Excel Cheatsheet Convert the Quick Launch Bar into a Super Application Launcher

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• Batch Best Practices and Technical Best Practices Updated

  - by ACShorten

  The Batch Best Practices for Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products (Doc Id: 836362.1) and Technical Best Practices for Oracle Utilities Application Framework Based Products (Doc Id: 560367.1) have been updated with updated and new advice for the various versions of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products. These documents cover the following products: Oracle Utilities Customer Care And Billing (V2 and above) Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management (V2 and above) Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management (V2 and above) Oracle Utilities Smart Grid Gateway (V2 and above) – All editions Oracle Enterprise Taxation Management (all versions) Oracle Enterprise Taxation and Policy Management (all versions) Whilst there is new advice, some of which has been posted on this blog, a lot of sections have been updated for advice based upon feedback from customers, partners, consultants, our development teams and our hard working Support personnel. All whitepapers are available from My Oracle Support.

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• 14+ Real Estate WordPress Themes

  - by Aditi

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

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• Geek Fun: Virtualized Old School Windows – Windows 95

  - by Matthew Guay

  Last week we enjoyed looking at Windows 3.1 running in VMware Player on Windows 7.  Today, let’s upgrade our 3.1 to 95, and get a look at how most of us remember Windows from the 90’s. In this demo, we’re running the first release of Windows 95 (version 4.00.950) in VMware Player 3.0 running on Windows 7 x64.  For fun, we ran the 95 upgrade on the 3.1 virtual machine we built last week. Windows 95 So let’s get started.  Here’s the first setup screen.  For the record, Windows 95 installed in about 15 minutes or less in VMware in our test. Strangely, Windows 95 offered several installation choices.  They actually let you choose what extra parts of Windows to install if you wished.  Oh, and who wants to run Windows 95 on your “Portable Computer”?  Most smartphones today are more powerful than the “portable computers” of 95. Your productivity may vastly increase if you run Windows 95.  Anyone want to switch? No, I don’t want to restart … I want to use my computer! Welcome to Windows 95!  Hey, did you know you can launch programs from the Start button? Our quick spin around Windows 95 reminded us why Windows got such a bad reputation in the ‘90’s for being unstable.  We didn’t even get our test copy fully booted after installation before we saw our first error screen.  Windows in space … was that the most popular screensaver in Windows 95, or was it just me? Hello Windows 3.1!  The UI was still outdated in some spots.   Ah, yes, Media Player before it got 101 features to compete with iTunes. But, you couldn’t even play CDs in Media Player.  Actually, CD player was one program I used almost daily in Windows 95 back in the day. Want some new programs?  This help file about new programs designed for Windows 95 lists a lot of outdated names in tech.    And, you really may want some programs.  The first edition of Windows 95 didn’t even ship with Internet Explorer.   We’ve still got Minesweeper, though! My Computer had really limited functionality, and by default opened everything in a new window.  Double click on C:, and it opens in a new window.  Ugh. But Explorer is a bit more like more modern versions. Hey, look, Start menu search!  If only it found the files you were looking for… Now I’m feeling old … this shutdown screen brought back so many memories … of shutdowns that wouldn’t shut down! But, you still have to turn off your computer.  I wonder how many old monitors had these words burned into them? So there’s yet another trip down Windows memory lane.  Most of us can remember using Windows 95, so let us know your favorite (or worst) memory of it!  At least we can all be thankful for our modern computers and operating systems today, right?  Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Geek Fun: Remember the Old-School SkiFree Game?Geek Fun: Virtualized old school Windows 3.11Stupid Geek Tricks: Tile or Cascade Multiple Windows in Windows 7Stupid Geek Tricks: Select Multiple Windows on the TaskbarHow to Delete a System File in Windows 7 or Vista 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 Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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• Geek Fun: Virtualized Old School Windows – Windows 95

  - by Matthew Guay

  Last week we enjoyed looking at Windows 3.1 running in VMware Player on Windows 7.  Today, let’s upgrade our 3.1 to 95, and get a look at how most of us remember Windows from the 90’s. In this demo, we’re running the first release of Windows 95 (version 4.00.950) in VMware Player 3.0 running on Windows 7 x64.  For fun, we ran the 95 upgrade on the 3.1 virtual machine we built last week. Windows 95 So let’s get started.  Here’s the first setup screen.  For the record, Windows 95 installed in about 15 minutes or less in VMware in our test. Strangely, Windows 95 offered several installation choices.  They actually let you choose what extra parts of Windows to install if you wished.  Oh, and who wants to run Windows 95 on your “Portable Computer”?  Most smartphones today are more powerful than the “portable computers” of 95. Your productivity may vastly increase if you run Windows 95.  Anyone want to switch? No, I don’t want to restart … I want to use my computer! Welcome to Windows 95!  Hey, did you know you can launch programs from the Start button? Our quick spin around Windows 95 reminded us why Windows got such a bad reputation in the ‘90’s for being unstable.  We didn’t even get our test copy fully booted after installation before we saw our first error screen.  Windows in space … was that the most popular screensaver in Windows 95, or was it just me? Hello Windows 3.1!  The UI was still outdated in some spots.   Ah, yes, Media Player before it got 101 features to compete with iTunes. But, you couldn’t even play CDs in Media Player.  Actually, CD player was one program I used almost daily in Windows 95 back in the day. Want some new programs?  This help file about new programs designed for Windows 95 lists a lot of outdated names in tech.    And, you really may want some programs.  The first edition of Windows 95 didn’t even ship with Internet Explorer.   We’ve still got Minesweeper, though! My Computer had really limited functionality, and by default opened everything in a new window.  Double click on C:, and it opens in a new window.  Ugh. But Explorer is a bit more like more modern versions. Hey, look, Start menu search!  If only it found the files you were looking for… Now I’m feeling old … this shutdown screen brought back so many memories … of shutdowns that wouldn’t shut down! But, you still have to turn off your computer.  I wonder how many old monitors had these words burned into them? So there’s yet another trip down Windows memory lane.  Most of us can remember using Windows 95, so let us know your favorite (or worst) memory of it!  At least we can all be thankful for our modern computers and operating systems today, right?  Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Geek Fun: Remember the Old-School SkiFree Game?Geek Fun: Virtualized old school Windows 3.11Stupid Geek Tricks: Tile or Cascade Multiple Windows in Windows 7Stupid Geek Tricks: Select Multiple Windows on the TaskbarHow to Delete a System File in Windows 7 or Vista 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 Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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• Upgrade existing WinForms applications to use the latest RadControls

  Upgrading projects to new versions can be a pain, especially when you have to update several assemblies from a single version, as is the case with RadControls for WinForms. Q1 2010 simplifies this process a lot, by giving a couple of ways (one new and one updated) to upgrade existing applications to the latest and greatest version of RadControls for WinForms: By using the new Visual Studio Extensions (VSX), available in VS2005, VS2008 and VS2010 RC; By using the updated Project Upgrade Utility. Here are the steps: Upgrading a classic Windows Forms application to the latest RadControls for WinForms by using the Visual Studio Extensions Install RadControls for WinForms Q1 2010 Open the classic Windows Forms application (VB or C#) Open the Telerik Menu and select RadControls for WinForms --> Convert to Telerik WinForms Application     Select the Telerik controls you plan to use in the application, as well as a theme, and click OK. The VSX package will add the needed assemblies to your project automatically for you.     Replace the standard controls on your form with the respective Telerik controls.     Run the application to see the result. Upgrading an older RadControls application to the latest RadControls for WinForms by using the Visual Studio Extensions Install RadControls for WinForms Q1 2010. Open your current RadControls application (VB or C#), which uses pre-Q1 2010 assembly versions. Open the Telerik Menu and select RadControls for WinForms --> Upgrade Wizard   Choose to either use the online downloader of the latest version, or to use the currently installed version. The VSX package will check what assemblies you use in your project and will upgrade them automatically.     Run the application to see the result. Upgrading an older RadControls application to the latest RadControls for WinForms by using the Project Upgrade Utility The Q1 2010 Project Upgrade Utility now features upgrading not only a single project, but all projects in a directory/solution (recursively). The tool is quite intuitive - simply choose your solution folder (or a folder with several projects)m and click Update. Feel free to leave a comment. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• PowerShell Script to Deploy Multiple VM on Azure in Parallel #azure #powershell

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  This blog is usually dedicated to Business Intelligence and SQL Server, but I didn’t found easily on the web simple PowerShell scripts to help me deploying a number of virtual machines on Azure that I use for testing and development. Since I need to deploy, start, stop and remove many virtual machines created from a common image I created (you know, Tabular is not part of the standard images provided by Microsoft…), I wanted to minimize the time required to execute every operation from my Windows Azure PowerShell console (but I suggest you using Windows PowerShell ISE), so I also wanted to fire the commands as soon as possible in parallel, without losing the result in the console. In order to execute multiple commands in parallel, I used the Start-Job cmdlet, and using Get-Job and Receive-Job I wait for job completion and display the messages generated during background command execution. This technique allows me to reduce execution time when I have to deploy, start, stop or remove virtual machines. Please note that a few operations on Azure acquire an exclusive lock and cannot be really executed in parallel, but only one part of their execution time is subject to this lock. Thus, you obtain a better response time also in these scenarios (this is the case of the provisioning of a new VM). Finally, when you remove the VMs you still have the disk containing the virtual machine to remove. This cannot be done just after the VM removal, because you have to wait that the removal operation is completed on Azure. So I wrote a script that you have to run a few minutes after VMs removal and delete disks (and VHD) no longer related to a VM. I just check that the disk were associated to the original image name used to provision the VMs (so I don’t remove other disks deployed by other batches that I might want to preserve). These examples are specific for my scenario, if you need more complex configurations you have to change and adapt the code. But if your need is to create multiple instances of the same VM running in a workgroup, these scripts should be good enough. I prepared the following PowerShell scripts: ProvisionVMs: Provision many VMs in parallel starting from the same image. It creates one service for each VM. RemoveVMs: Remove all the VMs in parallel – it also remove the service created for the VM StartVMs: Starts all the VMs in parallel StopVMs: Stops all the VMs in parallel RemoveOrphanDisks: Remove all the disks no longer used by any VMs. Run this script a few minutes after RemoveVMs script. ProvisionVMs # Name of subscription $SubscriptionName = "Copy the SubscriptionName property you get from Get-AzureSubscription"   # Name of storage account (where VMs will be deployed) $StorageAccount = "Copy the Label property you get from Get-AzureStorageAccount"   function ProvisionVM( [string]$VmName ) {     Start-Job -ArgumentList $VmName {         param($VmName) $Location = "Copy the Location property you get from Get-AzureStorageAccount" $InstanceSize = "A5" # You can use any other instance, such as Large, A6, and so on $AdminUsername = "UserName" # Write the name of the administrator account in the new VM $Password = "Password"      # Write the password of the administrator account in the new VM $Image = "Copy the ImageName property you get from Get-AzureVMImage" # You can list your own images using the following command: # Get-AzureVMImage | Where-Object {$_.PublisherName -eq "User" }         New-AzureVMConfig -Name $VmName -ImageName $Image -InstanceSize $InstanceSize |             Add-AzureProvisioningConfig -Windows -Password $Password -AdminUsername $AdminUsername|             New-AzureVM -Location $Location -ServiceName "$VmName" -Verbose     } }   # Set the proper storage - you might remove this line if you have only one storage in the subscription Set-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $SubscriptionName -CurrentStorageAccount $StorageAccount   # Select the subscription - this line is fundamental if you have access to multiple subscription # You might remove this line if you have only one subscription Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $SubscriptionName   # Every line in the following list provisions one VM using the name specified in the argument # You can change the number of lines - use a unique name for every VM - don't reuse names # already used in other VMs already deployed ProvisionVM "test10" ProvisionVM "test11" ProvisionVM "test12" ProvisionVM "test13" ProvisionVM "test14" ProvisionVM "test15" ProvisionVM "test16" ProvisionVM "test17" ProvisionVM "test18" ProvisionVM "test19" ProvisionVM "test20"   # Wait for all to complete While (Get-Job -State "Running") {     Get-Job -State "Completed" | Receive-Job     Start-Sleep 1 }   # Display output from all jobs Get-Job | Receive-Job   # Cleanup of jobs Remove-Job *   # Displays batch completed echo "Provisioning VM Completed" RemoveVMs # Name of subscription $SubscriptionName = "Copy the SubscriptionName property you get from Get-AzureSubscription"   function RemoveVM( [string]$VmName ) {     Start-Job -ArgumentList $VmName {         param($VmName)         Remove-AzureService -ServiceName $VmName -Force -Verbose     } }   # Select the subscription - this line is fundamental if you have access to multiple subscription # You might remove this line if you have only one subscription Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $SubscriptionName   # Every line in the following list remove one VM using the name specified in the argument # You can change the number of lines - use a unique name for every VM - don't reuse names # already used in other VMs already deployed RemoveVM "test10" RemoveVM "test11" RemoveVM "test12" RemoveVM "test13" RemoveVM "test14" RemoveVM "test15" RemoveVM "test16" RemoveVM "test17" RemoveVM "test18" RemoveVM "test19" RemoveVM "test20"   # Wait for all to complete While (Get-Job -State "Running") {     Get-Job -State "Completed" | Receive-Job     Start-Sleep 1 }   # Display output from all jobs Get-Job | Receive-Job   # Cleanup Remove-Job *   # Displays batch completed echo "Remove VM Completed" StartVMs # Name of subscription $SubscriptionName = "Copy the SubscriptionName property you get from Get-AzureSubscription"   function StartVM( [string]$VmName ) {     Start-Job -ArgumentList $VmName {         param($VmName)         Start-AzureVM -Name $VmName -ServiceName $VmName -Verbose     } }   # Select the subscription - this line is fundamental if you have access to multiple subscription # You might remove this line if you have only one subscription Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $SubscriptionName   # Every line in the following list starts one VM using the name specified in the argument # You can change the number of lines - use a unique name for every VM - don't reuse names # already used in other VMs already deployed StartVM "test10" StartVM "test11" StartVM "test11" StartVM "test12" StartVM "test13" StartVM "test14" StartVM "test15" StartVM "test16" StartVM "test17" StartVM "test18" StartVM "test19" StartVM "test20"   # Wait for all to complete While (Get-Job -State "Running") {     Get-Job -State "Completed" | Receive-Job     Start-Sleep 1 }   # Display output from all jobs Get-Job | Receive-Job   # Cleanup Remove-Job *   # Displays batch completed echo "Start VM Completed"   StopVMs # Name of subscription $SubscriptionName = "Copy the SubscriptionName property you get from Get-AzureSubscription"   function StopVM( [string]$VmName ) {     Start-Job -ArgumentList $VmName {         param($VmName)         Stop-AzureVM -Name $VmName -ServiceName $VmName -Verbose -Force     } }   # Select the subscription - this line is fundamental if you have access to multiple subscription # You might remove this line if you have only one subscription Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $SubscriptionName   # Every line in the following list stops one VM using the name specified in the argument # You can change the number of lines - use a unique name for every VM - don't reuse names # already used in other VMs already deployed StopVM "test10" StopVM "test11" StopVM "test12" StopVM "test13" StopVM "test14" StopVM "test15" StopVM "test16" StopVM "test17" StopVM "test18" StopVM "test19" StopVM "test20"   # Wait for all to complete While (Get-Job -State "Running") {     Get-Job -State "Completed" | Receive-Job     Start-Sleep 1 }   # Display output from all jobs Get-Job | Receive-Job   # Cleanup Remove-Job *   # Displays batch completed echo "Stop VM Completed" RemoveOrphanDisks $Image = "Copy the ImageName property you get from Get-AzureVMImage" # You can list your own images using the following command: # Get-AzureVMImage | Where-Object {$_.PublisherName -eq "User" }   # Remove all orphan disks coming from the image specified in $ImageName Get-AzureDisk |     Where-Object {$_.attachedto -eq $null -and $_.SourceImageName -eq $ImageName} |     Remove-AzureDisk -DeleteVHD -Verbose  

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• Dec 5th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, Silverlight, Visual Studio

  - by ScottGu

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my VS 2010 and .NET 4 series for another on-going blog series I’m working on. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET ASP.NET Code Samples Collection: J.D. Meier has a great post that provides a detailed round-up of ASP.NET code samples and tutorials from a wide variety of sources.  Lots of useful pointers. Slash your ASP.NET compile/load time without any hard work: Nice article that details a bunch of optimizations you can make to speed up ASP.NET project load and compile times. You might also want to read my previous blog post on this topic here. 10 Essential Tools for Building ASP.NET Websites: Great article by Stephen Walther on 10 great (and free) tools that enable you to more easily build great ASP.NET Websites.  Highly recommended reading. Optimize Images using the ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Framework: A nice article by 4GuysFromRolla that discusses how to use the open-source ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Framework (one of the tools recommended by Stephen in the previous article).  You can use this to significantly improve the load-time of your pages on the client. Formatting Dates, Times and Numbers in ASP.NET: Scott Mitchell has a great article that discusses formatting dates, times and numbers in ASP.NET.  A very useful link to bookmark.  Also check out James Michael’s DateTime is Packed with Goodies blog post for other DateTime tips. Examining ASP.NET’s Membership, Roles and Profile APIs (Part 18): Everything you could possibly want to known about ASP.NET’s built-in Membership, Roles and Profile APIs must surely be in this tutorial series. Part 18 covers how to store additional user info with Membership. ASP.NET with jQuery An Introduction to jQuery Templates: Stephen Walther has written an outstanding introduction and tutorial on the new jQuery Template plugin that the ASP.NET team has contributed to the jQuery project. Composition with jQuery Templates and jQuery Templates, Composite Rendering, and Remote Loading: Dave Ward has written two nice posts that talk about composition scenarios with jQuery Templates and some cool scenarios you can enable with them. Using jQuery and ASP.NET to Build a News Ticker: Scott Mitchell has a nice tutorial that demonstrates how to build a dynamically updated “news ticker” style UI with ASP.NET and jQuery. Checking All Checkboxes in a GridView using jQuery: Scott Mitchell has a nice post that covers how to use jQuery to enable a checkbox within a GridView’s header to automatically check/uncheck all checkboxes contained within rows of it. Using jQuery to POST Form Data to an ASP.NET AJAX Web Service: Rick Strahl has a nice post that discusses how to capture form variables and post them to an ASP.NET AJAX Web Service (.asmx). ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC Diagnostics Using NuGet: Phil Haack has a nice post that demonstrates how to easily install a diagnostics page (using NuGet) that can help identify and diagnose common configuration issues within your apps. ASP.NET MVC 3 JsonValueProviderFactory: James Hughes has a nice post that discusses how to take advantage of the new JsonValueProviderFactory support built into ASP.NET MVC 3.  This makes it easy to post JSON payloads to MVC action methods. Practical jQuery Mobile with ASP.NET MVC: James Hughes has another nice post that discusses how to use the new jQuery Mobile library with ASP.NET MVC to build great mobile web applications. Credit Card Validator for ASP.NET MVC 3: Benjii Me has a nice post that demonstrates how to build a [CreditCard] validator attribute that can be used to easily validate credit card numbers are in the correct format with ASP.NET MVC. Silverlight Silverlight FireStarter Keynote and Sessions: A great blog post from John Papa that contains pointers and descriptions of all the great Silverlight content we published last week at the Silverlight FireStarter.  You can watch all of the talks online.  More details on my keynote and Silverlight 5 announcements can be found here. 31 Days of Windows Phone 7: 31 great tutorials on how to build Windows Phone 7 applications (using Silverlight).  Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit Update: David Anson has a nice post that discusses some of the additional controls provided with the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit. Visual Studio JavaScript Editor Extensions: A nice (and free) Visual Studio plugin built by the web tools team that significantly improves the JavaScript intellisense support within Visual Studio. HTML5 Intellisense for Visual Studio: Gil has a blog post that discusses a new extension my team has posted to the Visual Studio Extension Gallery that adds HTML5 schema support to Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. Team Build + Web Deployment + Web Deploy + VS 2010 = Goodness: Visual blogs about how to enable a continuous deployment system with VS 2010, TFS 2010 and the Microsoft Web Deploy framework.  Visual Studio 2010 Emacs Emulation Extension and VIM Emulation Extension: Check out these two extensions if you are fond of Emacs and VIM key bindings and want to enable them within Visual Studio 2010. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Need to know the origin and coordinates for 2d texture and 2d/3d vertices in webgl

  - by mathacka

  Long story short, I know my coordinates are off and I believe my indices might be off. I'm trying to render a simple 2d rectangle with a texture in webgl here's the code I have for the vbo/ibo: rectVertices.vertices = new Float32Array( [ -0.5, -0.5, // Vertice 1, bottom / left 0.0, 0.0, // UV 1 -0.5, 0.5, // Vertice 2, top / left 0.0, 1.0, // UV 2 0.5, 0.5, // Vertice 3, top / right 1.0, 1.0, // UV 3 0.5, -0.5, // Vertice 4, bottom / right 1.0, 0.0, // UV 4 ]); rectVertices.indices = new Int16Array([ 1,2,3,1,3,4 ]); /* I'm assuming the vertices go like this (-0.5, 0.5) ------ ( 0.5, 0.5) | | | | (-0.5,-0.5) ------ ( 0.5,-0.5) with the origin in the middle and the texture coordinates go like this: ( 0.0, 1.0) ------ ( 1.0, 1.0) | | | | ( 0.0, 0.0) ------ ( 1.0, 0.0) so as you can see I'm all messed up. I'm also using: gl.pixelStorei(gl.UNPACK_FLIP_Y_WEBGL, true); */ So, I need to know the origins.

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• Dynamic connection for LINQ to SQL DataContext

  - by Steve Clements

  If for some reason you need to specify a specific connection string for a DataContext, you can of course pass the connection string when you initialise you DataContext object.  A common scenario could be a dev/test/stage/live connection string, but in my case its for either a live or archive database.   I however want the connection string to be handled by the DataContext, there are probably lots of different reasons someone would want to do this…but here are mine. I want the same connection string for all instances of DataContext, but I don’t know what it is yet! I prefer the clean code and ease of not using a constructor parameter. The refactoring of using a constructor parameter could be a nightmare.   So my approach is to create a new partial class for the DataContext and handle empty constructor in there. First from within the LINQ to SQL designer I changed the connection property to None.  This will remove the empty constructor code from the auto generated designer.cs file. Right click on the .dbml file, click View Code and a file and class is created for you! You’ll see the new class created in solutions explorer and the file will open. We are going to be playing with constructors so you need to add the inheritance from System.Data.Linq.DataContext public partial class DataClasses1DataContext : System.Data.Linq.DataContext    {    }   Add the empty constructor and I have added a property that will get my connection string, you will have whatever logic you need to decide and get the connection string you require.  In my case I will be hitting a database, but I have omitted that code. public partial class DataClasses1DataContext : System.Data.Linq.DataContext {    // Connection String Keys - stored in web.config    static string LiveConnectionStringKey = "LiveConnectionString";    static string ArchiveConnectionStringKey = "ArchiveConnectionString";      protected static string ConnectionString    {       get       {          if (DoIWantToUseTheLiveConnection) {             return global::System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[LiveConnectionStringKey].ConnectionString;          }          else {             return global::System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[ArchiveConnectionStringKey].ConnectionString;          }       }    }      public DataClasses1DataContext() :       base(ConnectionString, mappingSource)    {       OnCreated();    } }   Now when I new up my DataContext, I can just leave the constructor empty and my partial class will decide which one i need to use. Nice, clean code that can be easily refractored and tested.   Share this post :

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

  - by Reed

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

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• Access violation in DirectX OMSetRenderTargets

  - by IDWMaster

  I receive the following error (Unhandled exception at 0x527DAE81 (d3d11_1sdklayers.dll) in Lesson2.Triangles.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000000) when running the Triangle sample application for DirectX 11 in D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_9_1. This error occurs at the OMSetRenderTargets function, as shown below, and does not happen if I remove that function from the program (but then, the screen is blue, and does not render the triangle) //// THIS CODE AND INFORMATION IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF //// ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO //// THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND/OR FITNESS FOR A //// PARTICULAR PURPOSE. //// //// Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved #include #include #include "DirectXSample.h" #include "BasicMath.h" #include "BasicReaderWriter.h" using namespace Microsoft::WRL; using namespace Windows::UI::Core; using namespace Windows::Foundation; using namespace Windows::ApplicationModel::Core; using namespace Windows::ApplicationModel::Infrastructure; // This class defines the application as a whole. ref class Direct3DTutorialViewProvider : public IViewProvider { private: CoreWindow^ m_window; ComPtr m_swapChain; ComPtr m_d3dDevice; ComPtr m_d3dDeviceContext; ComPtr m_renderTargetView; public: // This method is called on application launch. void Initialize( _In_ CoreWindow^ window, _In_ CoreApplicationView^ applicationView ) { m_window = window; } // This method is called after Initialize. void Load(_In_ Platform::String^ entryPoint) { } // This method is called after Load. void Run() { // First, create the Direct3D device. // This flag is required in order to enable compatibility with Direct2D. UINT creationFlags = D3D11_CREATE_DEVICE_BGRA_SUPPORT; #if defined(_DEBUG) // If the project is in a debug build, enable debugging via SDK Layers with this flag. creationFlags |= D3D11_CREATE_DEVICE_DEBUG; #endif // This array defines the ordering of feature levels that D3D should attempt to create. D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL featureLevels[] = { D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_11_1, D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_11_0, D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_10_1, D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_10_0, D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_9_3, D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_9_1 }; ComPtr d3dDevice; ComPtr d3dDeviceContext; DX::ThrowIfFailed( D3D11CreateDevice( nullptr, // specify nullptr to use the default adapter D3D_DRIVER_TYPE_HARDWARE, nullptr, // leave as nullptr if hardware is used creationFlags, // optionally set debug and Direct2D compatibility flags featureLevels, ARRAYSIZE(featureLevels), D3D11_SDK_VERSION, // always set this to D3D11_SDK_VERSION &d3dDevice, nullptr, &d3dDeviceContext ) ); // Retrieve the Direct3D 11.1 interfaces. DX::ThrowIfFailed( d3dDevice.As(&m_d3dDevice) ); DX::ThrowIfFailed( d3dDeviceContext.As(&m_d3dDeviceContext) ); // After the D3D device is created, create additional application resources. CreateWindowSizeDependentResources(); // Create a Basic Reader-Writer class to load data from disk. This class is examined // in the Resource Loading sample. BasicReaderWriter^ reader = ref new BasicReaderWriter(); // Load the raw vertex shader bytecode from disk and create a vertex shader with it. auto vertexShaderBytecode = reader-ReadData("SimpleVertexShader.cso"); ComPtr vertexShader; DX::ThrowIfFailed( m_d3dDevice-CreateVertexShader( vertexShaderBytecode-Data, vertexShaderBytecode-Length, nullptr, &vertexShader ) ); // Create an input layout that matches the layout defined in the vertex shader code. // For this lesson, this is simply a float2 vector defining the vertex position. const D3D11_INPUT_ELEMENT_DESC basicVertexLayoutDesc[] = { { "POSITION", 0, DXGI_FORMAT_R32G32_FLOAT, 0, 0, D3D11_INPUT_PER_VERTEX_DATA, 0 }, }; ComPtr inputLayout; DX::ThrowIfFailed( m_d3dDevice-CreateInputLayout( basicVertexLayoutDesc, ARRAYSIZE(basicVertexLayoutDesc), vertexShaderBytecode-Data, vertexShaderBytecode-Length, &inputLayout ) ); // Load the raw pixel shader bytecode from disk and create a pixel shader with it. auto pixelShaderBytecode = reader-ReadData("SimplePixelShader.cso"); ComPtr pixelShader; DX::ThrowIfFailed( m_d3dDevice-CreatePixelShader( pixelShaderBytecode-Data, pixelShaderBytecode-Length, nullptr, &pixelShader ) ); // Create vertex and index buffers that define a simple triangle. float3 triangleVertices[] = { float3(-0.5f, -0.5f,13.5f), float3( 0.0f, 0.5f,0), float3( 0.5f, -0.5f,0), }; D3D11_BUFFER_DESC vertexBufferDesc = {0}; vertexBufferDesc.ByteWidth = sizeof(float3) * ARRAYSIZE(triangleVertices); vertexBufferDesc.Usage = D3D11_USAGE_DEFAULT; vertexBufferDesc.BindFlags = D3D11_BIND_VERTEX_BUFFER; vertexBufferDesc.CPUAccessFlags = 0; vertexBufferDesc.MiscFlags = 0; vertexBufferDesc.StructureByteStride = 0; D3D11_SUBRESOURCE_DATA vertexBufferData; vertexBufferData.pSysMem = triangleVertices; vertexBufferData.SysMemPitch = 0; vertexBufferData.SysMemSlicePitch = 0; ComPtr vertexBuffer; DX::ThrowIfFailed( m_d3dDevice-CreateBuffer( &vertexBufferDesc, &vertexBufferData, &vertexBuffer ) ); // Once all D3D resources are created, configure the application window. // Allow the application to respond when the window size changes. m_window-SizeChanged += ref new TypedEventHandler( this, &Direct3DTutorialViewProvider::OnWindowSizeChanged ); // Specify the cursor type as the standard arrow cursor. m_window-PointerCursor = ref new CoreCursor(CoreCursorType::Arrow, 0); // Activate the application window, making it visible and enabling it to receive events. m_window-Activate(); // Enter the render loop. Note that tailored applications should never exit. while (true) { // Process events incoming to the window. m_window-Dispatcher-ProcessEvents(CoreProcessEventsOption::ProcessAllIfPresent); // Specify the render target we created as the output target. ID3D11RenderTargetView* targets[1] = {m_renderTargetView.Get()}; m_d3dDeviceContext-OMSetRenderTargets( 1, targets, NULL // use no depth stencil ); // Clear the render target to a solid color. const float clearColor[4] = { 0.071f, 0.04f, 0.561f, 1.0f }; //Code fails here m_d3dDeviceContext-ClearRenderTargetView( m_renderTargetView.Get(), clearColor ); m_d3dDeviceContext-IASetInputLayout(inputLayout.Get()); // Set the vertex and index buffers, and specify the way they define geometry. UINT stride = sizeof(float3); UINT offset = 0; m_d3dDeviceContext-IASetVertexBuffers( 0, 1, vertexBuffer.GetAddressOf(), &stride, &offset ); m_d3dDeviceContext-IASetPrimitiveTopology(D3D11_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_TRIANGLELIST); // Set the vertex and pixel shader stage state. m_d3dDeviceContext-VSSetShader( vertexShader.Get(), nullptr, 0 ); m_d3dDeviceContext-PSSetShader( pixelShader.Get(), nullptr, 0 ); // Draw the cube. m_d3dDeviceContext-Draw(3,0); // Present the rendered image to the window. Because the maximum frame latency is set to 1, // the render loop will generally be throttled to the screen refresh rate, typically around // 60Hz, by sleeping the application on Present until the screen is refreshed. DX::ThrowIfFailed( m_swapChain-Present(1, 0) ); } } // This method is called before the application exits. void Uninitialize() { } private: // This method is called whenever the application window size changes. void OnWindowSizeChanged( _In_ CoreWindow^ sender, _In_ WindowSizeChangedEventArgs^ args ) { m_renderTargetView = nullptr; CreateWindowSizeDependentResources(); } // This method creates all application resources that depend on // the application window size. It is called at app initialization, // and whenever the application window size changes. void CreateWindowSizeDependentResources() { if (m_swapChain != nullptr) { // If the swap chain already exists, resize it. DX::ThrowIfFailed( m_swapChain-ResizeBuffers( 2, 0, 0, DXGI_FORMAT_R8G8B8A8_UNORM, 0 ) ); } else { // If the swap chain does not exist, create it. DXGI_SWAP_CHAIN_DESC1 swapChainDesc = {0}; swapChainDesc.Stereo = false; swapChainDesc.BufferUsage = DXGI_USAGE_RENDER_TARGET_OUTPUT; swapChainDesc.Scaling = DXGI_SCALING_NONE; swapChainDesc.Flags = 0; // Use automatic sizing. swapChainDesc.Width = 0; swapChainDesc.Height = 0; // This is the most common swap chain format. swapChainDesc.Format = DXGI_FORMAT_R8G8B8A8_UNORM; // Don't use multi-sampling. swapChainDesc.SampleDesc.Count = 1; swapChainDesc.SampleDesc.Quality = 0; // Use two buffers to enable flip effect. swapChainDesc.BufferCount = 2; // We recommend using this swap effect for all applications. swapChainDesc.SwapEffect = DXGI_SWAP_EFFECT_FLIP_SEQUENTIAL; // Once the swap chain description is configured, it must be // created on the same adapter as the existing D3D Device. // First, retrieve the underlying DXGI Device from the D3D Device. ComPtr dxgiDevice; DX::ThrowIfFailed( m_d3dDevice.As(&dxgiDevice) ); // Ensure that DXGI does not queue more than one frame at a time. This both reduces // latency and ensures that the application will only render after each VSync, minimizing // power consumption. DX::ThrowIfFailed( dxgiDevice-SetMaximumFrameLatency(1) ); // Next, get the parent factory from the DXGI Device. ComPtr dxgiAdapter; DX::ThrowIfFailed( dxgiDevice-GetAdapter(&dxgiAdapter) ); ComPtr dxgiFactory; DX::ThrowIfFailed( dxgiAdapter-GetParent( __uuidof(IDXGIFactory2), &dxgiFactory ) ); // Finally, create the swap chain. DX::ThrowIfFailed( dxgiFactory-CreateSwapChainForImmersiveWindow( m_d3dDevice.Get(), DX::GetIUnknown(m_window), &swapChainDesc, nullptr, // allow on all displays &m_swapChain ) ); } // Once the swap chain is created, create a render target view. This will // allow Direct3D to render graphics to the window. ComPtr backBuffer; DX::ThrowIfFailed( m_swapChain-GetBuffer( 0, __uuidof(ID3D11Texture2D), &backBuffer ) ); DX::ThrowIfFailed( m_d3dDevice-CreateRenderTargetView( backBuffer.Get(), nullptr, &m_renderTargetView ) ); // After the render target view is created, specify that the viewport, // which describes what portion of the window to draw to, should cover // the entire window. D3D11_TEXTURE2D_DESC backBufferDesc = {0}; backBuffer-GetDesc(&backBufferDesc); D3D11_VIEWPORT viewport; viewport.TopLeftX = 0.0f; viewport.TopLeftY = 0.0f; viewport.Width = static_cast(backBufferDesc.Width); viewport.Height = static_cast(backBufferDesc.Height); viewport.MinDepth = D3D11_MIN_DEPTH; viewport.MaxDepth = D3D11_MAX_DEPTH; m_d3dDeviceContext-RSSetViewports(1, &viewport); } }; // This class defines how to create the custom View Provider defined above. ref class Direct3DTutorialViewProviderFactory : IViewProviderFactory { public: IViewProvider^ CreateViewProvider() { return ref new Direct3DTutorialViewProvider(); } }; [Platform::MTAThread] int main(array^) { auto viewProviderFactory = ref new Direct3DTutorialViewProviderFactory(); Windows::ApplicationModel::Core::CoreApplication::Run(viewProviderFactory); return 0; }

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• Firefox 18 Metro Preview Release now Available for Download

  - by Asian Angel

  With Windows 8 general release fast approaching Mozilla has delivered a new nightly build of Firefox for the operating system. This new build delivers awesome browser goodness for both the Modern UI (Metro) and Desktop modes. Image shown above courtesy of Mozilla Blog. This is what the Modern UI Tile will look like on the Start Screen. Image shown below courtesy of Brian R. Bondy. 7 Ways To Free Up Hard Disk Space On Windows HTG Explains: How System Restore Works in Windows HTG Explains: How Antivirus Software Works

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

  - by Reed

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

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• jQuery Templates and Data Linking (and Microsoft contributing to jQuery)

  The jQuery library has a passionate community of developers, and it is now the most widely used JavaScript library on the web today. Two years ago I announced that Microsoft would begin offering product support for jQuery, and that wed be including it in new versions of Visual Studio going forward. By default, when you create new ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC projects with VS 2010 youll find jQuery automatically added to your project. A few weeks ago during my second keynote at the MIX...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Silverlight TV 15: Announcing Silverlight 4 RC at MIX 10

   John and Adam discuss Silverlight 4 RC, following up the MIX10 keynote announcement of Silverlight 4 RC by discussing what is new and what materials have been released on the Channel 9 learning center website. They cover their picks for some of the most impactful features in Silverlight 4 RC and review the concept behind the new two-day Building Business Applications course (check out the course via this link). You can also check out the 60+ page whitepaper that covers the full feature...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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