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• Mixed-mode C++/CLI crashing: heap corruption in atexit (static destructor registration)

  - by thaimin

  I am working on deploying a program and the codebase is a mixture of C++/CLI and C#. The C++/CLI comes in all flavors: native, mixed (/clr), and safe (/clr:safe). In my development environment I create a DLL of all the C++/CLI code and reference that from the C# code (EXE). This method works flawlessly. For my releases that I want to release a single executable (simply stating that "why not just have a DLL and EXE separate?" is not acceptable). So far I have succeeded in compiling the EXE with all the different sources. However, when I run it I get the "XXXX has stopped working" dialog with options to Check online, Close and Debug. The problem details are as follows: Problem Event Name: APPCRASH Fault Module Name: StackHash_8d25 Fault Module Version: 6.1.7600.16559 Fault Module Timestamp: 4ba9b29c Exception Code: c0000374 Exception Offset: 000cdc9b OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.48 Locale ID: 1033 Additional Information 1: 8d25 Additional Information 2: 8d25552d834e8c143c43cf1d7f83abb8 Additional Information 3: 7450 Additional Information 4: 74509ce510cd821216ce477edd86119c If I debug and send it to Visual Studio, it reports: Unhandled exception at 0x77d2dc9b in XXX.exe: A heap has been corrupted Choosing break results in it stopping at ntdll.dll!77d2dc9b() with no additional information. If I tell Visual Studio to continue, the program starts up fine and seems to work without incident, probably since a debugger is now attached. What do you make of this? How do I avoid this heap corruption? The program seems to work fine except for this. My abridged compilation script is as follows (I have omitted my error checking for brevity): @set TARGET=x86 @set TARGETX=x86 @set OUT=%TARGETX% @call "%VS90COMNTOOLS%\..\..\VC\vcvarsall.bat" %TARGET% @set WIMGAPI=C:\Program Files\Windows AIK\SDKs\WIMGAPI\%TARGET% set CL=/Zi /nologo /W4 /O2 /GS /EHa /MD /MP /D NDEBUG /D _UNICODE /D UNICODE /D INTEGRATED /Fd%OUT%\ /Fo%OUT%\ set INCLUDE=%WIMGAPI%;%INCLUDE% set LINK=/nologo /LTCG /CLRIMAGETYPE:IJW /MANIFEST:NO /MACHINE:%TARGETX% /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS,6.0 /OPT:REF /OPT:ICF /DEFAULTLIB:msvcmrt.lib set LIB=%WIMGAPI%;%LIB% set CSC=/nologo /w:4 /d:INTEGRATED /o+ /target:module :: Compiling resources omitted @set CL_NATIVE=/c /FI"stdafx-native.h" @set CL_MIXED=/c /clr /LN /FI"stdafx-mixed.h" @set CL_PURE=/c /clr:safe /LN /GL /FI"stdafx-pure.h" @set NATIVE=... @set MIXED=... @set PURE=... cl %CL_NATIVE% %NATIVE% cl %CL_MIXED% %MIXED% cl %CL_PURE% %PURE% link /LTCG /NOASSEMBLY /DLL /OUT:%OUT%\core.netmodule %OUT%\*.obj csc %CSC% /addmodule:%OUT%\core.netmodule /out:%OUT%\GUI.netmodule /recurse:*.cs link /FIXED /ENTRY:GUI.Program.Main /OUT:%OUT%\XXX.exe ^ /ASSEMBLYRESOURCE:%OUT%\core.resources,XXX.resources,PRIVATE /ASSEMBLYRESOURCE:%OUT%\GUI.resources,GUI.resources,PRIVATE ^ /ASSEMBLYMODULE:%OUT%\core.netmodule %OUT%\gui.res %OUT%\*.obj %OUT%\GUI.netmodule Update 1 Upon compiling this with debug symbols and trying again, I do in fact get more information. The call stack is: msvcr90d.dll!_msize_dbg(void * pUserData, int nBlockUse) Line 1511 + 0x30 bytes msvcr90d.dll!_dllonexit_nolock(int (void)* func, void (void)* * * pbegin, void (void)* * * pend) Line 295 + 0xd bytes msvcr90d.dll!__dllonexit(int (void)* func, void (void)* * * pbegin, void (void)* * * pend) Line 273 + 0x11 bytes XXX.exe!_onexit(int (void)* func) Line 110 + 0x1b bytes XXX.exe!atexit(void (void)* func) Line 127 + 0x9 bytes XXX.exe!`dynamic initializer for 'Bytes::Null''() Line 7 + 0xa bytes mscorwks.dll!6cbd1b5c() [Frames below may be incorrect and/or missing, no symbols loaded for mscorwks.dll] ... The line of my code that 'causes' this (dynamic initializer for Bytes::Null) is: Bytes Bytes::Null; In the header that is declared as: class Bytes { public: static Bytes Null; } I also tried doing a global extern in the header like so: extern Bytes Null; // header Bytes Null; // cpp file Which failed in the same way. It seems that the CRT atexit function is responsible, being inadvertently required due to the static initializer. Fix As Ben Voigt pointed out the use of any CRT functions (including native static initializers) requires proper initialization of the CRT (which happens in mainCRTStartup, WinMainCRTStartup, or _DllMainCRTStartup). I have added a mixed C++/CLI file that has a C++ main or WinMain: using namespace System; [STAThread] // required if using an STA COM objects (such as drag-n-drop or file dialogs) int main() { // or "int __stdcall WinMain(void*, void*, wchar_t**, int)" for GUI applications array<String^> ^args_orig = Environment::GetCommandLineArgs(); int l = args_orig->Length - 1; // required to remove first argument (program name) array<String^> ^args = gcnew array<String^>(l); if (l > 0) Array::Copy(args_orig, 1, args, 0, l); return XXX::CUI::Program::Main(args); // return XXX::GUI::Program::Main(args); } After doing this, the program now gets a little further, but still has issues (which will be addressed elsewhere): When the program is solely in C# it works fine, along with whenever it is just calling C++/CLI methods, getting C++/CLI properties, and creating managed C++/CLI objects Events added by C# into the C++/CLI code never fire (even though they should) One other weird error is that an exception happens is a InvalidCastException saying can't cast from X to X (where X is the same as X...) However since the heap corruption is fixed (by getting the CRT initialized) the question is done.

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• PeopleSoft Upgrades, Fusion, & BI for Leading European PeopleSoft Applications Customers

  - by Mark Rosenberg

  With so many industry-leading services firms around the globe managing their businesses with PeopleSoft, it’s always an adventure setting up times and meetings for us to keep in touch with them, especially those outside of North America who often do not get to join us at Oracle OpenWorld. Fortunately, during the first two weeks of May, Nigel Woodland (Oracle’s Service Industries Director for the EMEA region) and I successfully blocked off our calendars to visit seven different customers spanning four countries in Western Europe. We met executives and leaders at four Staffing industry firms, two Professional Services firms that engage in consulting and auditing, and a Financial Services firm. As we shared the latest information regarding product capabilities and plans, we also gained valuable insight into the hot technology topics facing these businesses. What we heard was both informative and inspiring, and I suspect other Oracle PeopleSoft applications customers can benefit from one or more of the following observations from our trip. Great IT Plans Get Executed When You Respect the Users Each of our visits followed roughly the same pattern. After introductions, Nigel outlined Oracle’s product and technology strategy, including a discussion of how we at Oracle invest in each layer of the “technology stack” to provide customers with unprecedented business management capabilities and choice. Then, I provided the specifics of the PeopleSoft product line’s investment strategy, detailing the dramatic number of rich usability and functionality enhancements added to release 9.1 since its general availability in 2009 and the game-changing capabilities slated for 9.2. What was most exciting about each of these discussions was that shortly after my talking about what customers can do with release 9.1 right now to drive up user productivity and satisfaction, I saw the wheels turning in the minds of our audiences. Business analyst and end user-configurable tools and technologies, such as WorkCenters and the Related Action Framework, that provide the ability to tailor a “central command center” to the exact needs of each recruiter, biller, and every other role in the organization were exactly what each of our customers had been looking for. Every one of our audiences agreed that these tools which demonstrate a respect for the user would finally help IT pole vault over the wall of resistance that users had often raised in the past. With these new user-focused capabilities, IT is positioned to definitively partner with the business, instead of drag the business along, to unlock the value of their investment in PeopleSoft. This topic of respecting the user emerged during our very first visit, which was at Vital Services Group at their Head Office “The Mill” in Manchester, England. (If you are a student of architecture and are ever in Manchester, you should stop in to see this amazingly renovated old mill building.) I had just finished explaining our PeopleSoft 9.2 roadmap, and Mike Code, PeopleSoft Systems Manager for this innovative staffing company, said, “Mark, the new features you’ve shown us in 9.1/9.2 are very relevant to our business. As we forge ahead with the 9.1 upgrade, the ability to configure a targeted user interface with WorkCenters, Related Actions, Pivot Grids, and Alerts will enable us to satisfy the business that this upgrade is for them and will deliver tangible benefits. In fact, you’ve highlighted that we need to start talking to the business to keep up the momentum to start reviewing the 9.2 upgrade after we get to 9.1, because as much as 9.1 and PeopleTools 8.52 offers, what you’ve shown us for 9.2 is what we’ve envisioned was ultimately possible with our investment in PeopleSoft applications.” We also received valuable feedback about our investment for the Staffing industry when we visited with Hans Wanders, CIO of Randstad (the second largest Staffing company in the world) in the Netherlands. After our visit, Hans noted, “It was very interesting to see how the PeopleSoft applications have developed. I was truly impressed by many of the new developments.” Hans and Mike, sincere thanks for the validation that our team’s hard work and dedication to “respecting the users” is worth the effort! Co-existence of PeopleSoft and Fusion Applications Just Makes Sense As a “product person,” one of the most rewarding things about visiting customers is that they actually want to talk to me. Sometimes, they want to discuss a product area that we need to enhance; other times, they are interested in learning how to extract more value from their applications; and still others, they want to tell me how they are using the applications to drive real value for the business. During this trip, I was very pleased to hear that several of our customers not only thought the co-existence of Fusion applications alongside PeopleSoft applications made sense in theory, but also that they were aggressively looking at how to deploy one or more Fusion applications alongside their PeopleSoft HCM and FSCM applications. The most common deployment plan in the works by three of the organizations is to upgrade to PeopleSoft 9.1 or 9.2, and then adopt one of the new Fusion HCM applications, such as Fusion Performance Management or the full suite of  Fusion Talent Management. For example, during an applications upgrade planning discussion with the staffing company Hays plc., Mark Thomas, who is Hays’ UK IT Director, commented, “We are very excited about where we can go with the latest versions of the PeopleSoft applications in conjunction with Fusion Talent Management.” Needless to say, this news was very encouraging, because it reiterated that our applications investment strategy makes good business sense for our customers. Next Generation Business Intelligence Is the Key to the Future The third, and perhaps most exciting, lesson I learned during this journey is that our audiences already know that the latest generation of Business Intelligence technologies will be the “secret sauce” for organizations to transform business in radical ways. While a number of the organizations we visited on the trip have deployed or are deploying Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and the associated analytics applications to provide dashboards of easy-to-understand, user-configurable metrics that help optimize business performance according to current operating procedures, what’s most exciting to them is being able to use Business Intelligence to change the way an organization does business, grows revenue, and makes a profit. In particular, several executives we met asked whether we can help them minimize the need to have perfectly structured data and at the same time generate analytics that improve order fulfillment decision-making. To them, the path to future growth lies in having the ability to analyze unstructured data rapidly and intuitively and leveraging technology’s ability to detect patterns that a human cannot reasonably be expected to see. For illustrative purposes, here is a good example of a business problem where analyzing a combination of structured and unstructured data can produce better results. If you have a resource manager trying to decide which person would be the best fit for an assignment in terms of ensuring (a) client satisfaction, (b) the individual’s satisfaction with the work, (c) least travel distance, and (d) highest margin, you traditionally compare resource qualifications to assignment needs, calculate margins on past work with the client, and measure distances. To perform these comparisons, you are likely to need the organization to have profiles setup, people ranked against profiles, margin targets setup, margins measured, distances setup, distances measured, and more. As you can imagine, this requires organizations to plan and implement data setup, capture, and quality management initiatives to ensure that dependable information is available to support resourcing analysis and decisions. In the fast-paced, tight-budget world in which most organizations operate today, the effort and discipline required to maintain high-quality, structured data like those described in the above example are certainly not desirable and in some cases are not feasible. You can imagine how intrigued our audiences were when I informed them that we are ready to help them analyze volumes of unstructured data, detect trends, and produce recommendations. Our discussions delved into examples of how the firms could leverage Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search and Endeca technologies to keyword search against, compare, and learn from unstructured resource and assignment data. We also considered examples of how they could employ Oracle Real-Time Decisions to generate statistically significant recommendations based on similar resourcing scenarios that have produced the desired satisfaction and profit margin results. --- Although I had almost no time for sight-seeing during this trip to Europe, I have to say that it may have been one of the most energizing and engaging trips of my career. Showing these dedicated customers how they can give every user a uniquely tailored set of tools and address business problems in ways that have to date been impossible made the journey across the Atlantic more than worth it. If any of these three topics intrigue you, I’d recommend you contact your Oracle applications representative to arrange for more detailed discussions with the appropriate members of our organization.

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• New Validation Attributes in ASP.NET MVC 3 Future

  - by imran_ku07

       Introduction:             Validating user inputs is an very important step in collecting information from users because it helps you to prevent errors during processing data. Incomplete or improperly formatted user inputs will create lot of problems for your application. Fortunately, ASP.NET MVC 3 makes it very easy to validate most common input validations. ASP.NET MVC 3 includes Required, StringLength, Range, RegularExpression, Compare and Remote validation attributes for common input validation scenarios. These validation attributes validates most of your user inputs but still validation for Email, File Extension, Credit Card, URL, etc are missing. Fortunately, some of these validation attributes are available in ASP.NET MVC 3 Future. In this article, I will show you how to leverage Email, Url, CreditCard and FileExtensions validation attributes(which are available in ASP.NET MVC 3 Future) in ASP.NET MVC 3 application.       Description:             First of all you need to download ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM Source Code from here. Then extract all files in a folder. Then open MvcFutures project from mvc3-rtm-sources\mvc3\src\MvcFutures folder. Build the project. In case, if you get compile time error(s) then simply remove the reference of System.Web.WebPages and System.Web.Mvc assemblies and add the reference of System.Web.WebPages and System.Web.Mvc 3 assemblies again but from the .NET tab and then build the project again, it will create a Microsoft.Web.Mvc assembly inside mvc3-rtm-sources\mvc3\src\MvcFutures\obj\Debug folder. Now we can use Microsoft.Web.Mvc assembly inside our application.             Create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 application. For demonstration purpose, I will create a dummy model UserInformation. So create a new class file UserInformation.cs inside Model folder and add the following code,   public class UserInformation { [Required] public string Name { get; set; } [Required] [EmailAddress] public string Email { get; set; } [Required] [Url] public string Website { get; set; } [Required] [CreditCard] public string CreditCard { get; set; } [Required] [FileExtensions(Extensions = "jpg,jpeg")] public string Image { get; set; } }             Inside UserInformation class, I am using Email, Url, CreditCard and FileExtensions validation attributes which are defined in Microsoft.Web.Mvc assembly. By default FileExtensionsAttribute allows png, jpg, jpeg and gif extensions. You can override this by using Extensions property of FileExtensionsAttribute class.             Then just open(or create) HomeController.cs file and add the following code,   public class HomeController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Index(UserInformation u) { return View(); } }             Next just open(or create) Index view for Home controller and add the following code,  @model NewValidationAttributesinASPNETMVC3Future.Model.UserInformation @{ ViewBag.Title = "Index"; Layout = "~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml"; } <h2>Index</h2> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> @using (Html.BeginForm()) { @Html.ValidationSummary(true) <fieldset> <legend>UserInformation</legend> <div class="editor-label"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Name) </div> <div class="editor-field"> @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Name) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Name) </div> <div class="editor-label"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Email) </div> <div class="editor-field"> @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Email) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Email) </div> <div class="editor-label"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Website) </div> <div class="editor-field"> @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Website) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Website) </div> <div class="editor-label"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.CreditCard) </div> <div class="editor-field"> @Html.EditorFor(model => model.CreditCard) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.CreditCard) </div> <div class="editor-label"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Image) </div> <div class="editor-field"> @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Image) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Image) </div> <p> <input type="submit" value="Save" /> </p> </fieldset> } <div> @Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index") </div>             Now just run your application. You will find that both client side and server side validation for the above validation attributes works smoothly.                      Summary:             Email, URL, Credit Card and File Extension input validations are very common. In this article, I showed you how you can validate these input validations into your application. I explained this with an example. I am also attaching a sample application which also includes Microsoft.Web.Mvc.dll. So you can add a reference of Microsoft.Web.Mvc assembly directly instead of doing any manual work. Hope you will enjoy this article too.   SyntaxHighlighter.all()

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• Design for Vacation Tracking System

  - by Aaronaught

  I have been tasked with developing a system for tracking our company's paid time-off (vacation, sick days, etc.) At the moment we are using an Excel spreadsheet on a shared network drive, and it works pretty well, but we are concerned that we won't be able to "trust" employees forever and sometimes we run into locking issues when two people try to open the spreadsheet at once. So we are trying to build something a little more robust. I would like some input on this design in terms of maintainability, scalability, extensibility, etc. It's a pretty simple workflow we need to represent right now: I started with a basic MS Access schema like this: Employees (EmpID int, EmpName varchar(50), AllowedDays int) Vacations (VacationID int, EmpID int, BeginDate datetime, EndDate datetime) But we don't want to spend a lot of time building a schema and database like this and have to change it later, so I think I am going to go with something that will be easier to expand through configuration. Right now the vacation table has this schema: Vacations (VacationID int, PropName varchar(50), PropValue varchar(50)) And the table will be populated with data like this: VacationID | PropName | PropValue -----------+--------------+------------------ 1 | EmpID | 4 1 | EmpName | James Jones 1 | Reason | Vacation 1 | BeginDate | 2/24/2010 1 | EndDate | 2/30/2010 1 | Destination | Spectate Swamp 2 | ... | ... I think this is a pretty good, extensible design, we can easily add new properties to the vacation like the destination or maybe approval status, etc. I wasn't too sure how to go about managing the database of valid properties, I thought of putting them in a separate PropNames table but it gets complicated to manage all the different data types and people say that you shouldn't put CLR type names into a SQL database, so I decided to use XML instead, here is the schema: <VacationProperties> <PropertyNames>EmpID,EmpName,Reason,BeginDate,EndDate,Destination</PropertyNames> <PropertyTypes>System.Int32,System.String,System.String,System.DateTime,System.DateTime,System.String</PropertyTypes> <PropertiesRequired>true,true,false,true,true,false</PropertiesRequired> </VacationProperties> I might need more fields than that, I'm not completely sure. I'm parsing the XML like this (would like some feedback on the parsing code): string xml = File.ReadAllText("properties.xml"); Match m = Regex.Match(xml, "<(PropertyNames)>(.*?)</PropertyNames>"; string[] pn = m.Value.Split(','); // do the same for PropertyTypes, PropertiesRequired Then I use the following code to persist configuration changes to the database: string sql = "DROP TABLE VacationProperties"; sql = sql + " CREATE TABLE VacationProperties "; sql = sql + "(PropertyName varchar(100), PropertyType varchar(100) "; sql = sql + "IsRequired varchar(100))"; for (int i = 0; i < pn.Length; i++) { sql = sql + " INSERT VacationProperties VALUES (" + pn[i] + "," + pt[i] + "," + pv[i] + ")"; } // GlobalConnection is a singleton new SqlCommand(sql, GlobalConnection.Instance).ExecuteReader(); So far so good, but after a few days of this I then realized that a lot of this was just a more specific kind of a generic workflow which could be further abstracted, and instead of writing all of this boilerplate plumbing code I could just come up with a workflow and plug it into a workflow engine like Windows Workflow Foundation and have the users configure it: In order to support routing these configurations throw the workflow system, it seemed natural to implement generic XML Web Services for this instead of just using an XML file as above. I've used this code to implement the Web Services: public class VacationConfigurationService : WebService { [WebMethod] public void UpdateConfiguration(string xml) { // Above code goes here } } Which was pretty easy, although I'm still working on a way to validate that XML against some kind of schema as there's no error-checking yet. I also created a few different services for other operations like VacationSubmissionService, VacationReportService, VacationDataService, VacationAuthenticationService, etc. The whole Service Oriented Architecture looks like this: And because the workflow itself might change, I have been working on a way to integrate the WF workflow system with MS Visio, which everybody at the office already knows how to use so they could make changes pretty easily. We have a diagram that looks like the following (it's kind of hard to read but the main items are Activities, Authenticators, Validators, Transformers, Processors, and Data Connections, they're all analogous to the services in the SOA diagram above). The requirements for this system are: (Note - I don't control these, they were given to me by management) Main workflow must interface with Excel spreadsheet, probably through VBA macros (to ease the transition to the new system) Alerts should integrate with MS Outlook, Lotus Notes, and SMS (text messages). We also want to interface it with the company Voice Mail system but that is not a "hard" requirement. Performance requirements: Must handle 250,000 Transactions Per Second Should be able to handle up to 20,000 employees (right now we have 3) 99.99% uptime ("four nines") expected Must be secure against outside hacking, but users cannot be required to enter a username/password. Platforms: Must support Windows XP/Vista/7, Linux, iPhone, Blackberry, DOS 2.0, VAX, IRIX, PDP-11, Apple IIc. Time to complete: 6 to 8 weeks. My questions are: Is this a good design for the system so far? Am I using all of the recommended best practices for these technologies? How do I integrate the Visio diagram above with the Windows Workflow Foundation to call the ConfigurationService and persist workflow changes? Am I missing any important components? Will this be extensible enough to support any scenario via end-user configuration? Will the system scale to the above performance requirements? Will we need any expensive hardware to run it? Are there any "gotchas" I should know about with respect to cross-platform compatibility? For example would it be difficult to convert this to an iPhone app? How long would you expect this to take? (We've dedicated 1 week for testing so I'm thinking maybe 5 weeks?)

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• Creating and maintaining Orchard translations

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  Many volunteers have already stepped up to provide translations for Orchard. There are many challenges to overcome with translating such a project. Orchard is a very modular CMS, so the translation mechanism needs to account for the core as well as first and third party modules and themes. Another issue is that every new version of Orchard or of a module changes some localizable strings and adds new ones as others enter obsolescence. In order to address those problems, I've built a small Orchard module that automates some of the most complex tasks that maintaining a translation implies. In this post, I'll walk you through the operations I had to do to update the French translation for Orchard 1.0. In order to make sure you translate all the first party modules, I would recommend that you start from a full source code enlistment. The reason is that I'll show how you can extract the default en-US translation from any source code enlistment. That enables you to create a translation that is even more up-to-date than what is currently on the site. Alternatively, you could start by downloading the current en-US translation. If you decide to do so, just skip the relevant paragraphs. First, let's install the Orchard Translation Manager. I'm starting from a vanilla clone of the latest in the code repository. After you've setup the site, go into the dashboard and click on Gallery. Locate the Orchard Translation Manager in the list of modules and click "Install". Once the module is installed, you need to enable its one feature by going into Configuration/Features and clicking "Enable" next to Vandelay.TranslationManager. We're done with the setup that we need in order to start our translation work. We'll now switch to the command-line and to our favorite text editor. Open a command-line on the Orchard web site folder. I found the easiest way to do this is to do a SHIFT+right-click on the Orchard.Web folder in Windows Explorer and to click "Open command window here". Type bin\orchard to enter the Orchard command-line environment. If you do a "help commands" you should see four commands in the list that came from the module we just installed: extract default translation, install translation, package translation and sync translation. First, we're going to generate the default translation. Note that it is possible to generate that default translation for a specific list of modules and themes by using the /Extensions: switch, which should facilitate the translation of third party extensions, but in this tutorial we're going to generate it for the whole of the Orchard source code. extract default translation /Output:\temp .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; } This should have created an Orchard.en-us.po.zip file in the temp directory. Extract that archive into an orchard.po folder under \temp. The next step depends on whether you have an existing translation that you want to update or not. If you do have an existing translation, just extract it into the same \temp\orchard.po directory. That should result in a file structure where you have the default en-US translation alongside your own. If you don't have an existing translation, just continue, the commands will be the same. We are now going to synchronize those translations (or generate the stub for a new one if you didn't start from an existing translation). sync translation /Input:\temp\orchard.po /Culture:fr-FR After this command (where you should of course substitute fr-FR with the culture you're working on), we now have updated files that contain a few useful flags. Open each of the .po files under the culture you are working on (there should be around 36) with your favorite text editor. For all the strings that are still valid in the latest version, nothing changes and you don't need to do anything. For all the strings that disappeared from the default culture, the old translation will still be there but they will be prefixed with the following comment: # Obsolete translation Conveniently, all the obsolete strings will be grouped at the end of the file. You can select all those and delete them. For all the new strings, you will see the following comment: # Untranslated string This is where the hard work begins. You'll need to translate each of those new strings by entering the translation between the quotes in: msgstr "" Don't introduce hard carriage returns in the strings, just stay on one line (your text editor should do some reasonable wrapping so this shouldn't be a big deal). Once you're done with a file, save it. Make sure, and this is very important, that your text editor is saving using the UTF-8 encoding. In Notepad, that setting can be found in the file saving dialog by doing a "Save As" rather than a plain "Save": When all the po files have been edited, you are ready to package the translation for submission (a.k.a. sending e-mail to the localization mailing list). package translation /Culture:fr-FR /Input:\temp\orchard.po /Output:\temp You should now see a Orchard.fr-FR.po.zip file in temp that is ready to be submitted. That is, once you've tested it, which can be done by deploying it into the site: install translation \temp\orchard.fr-fr.po.zip Once this is done you can go into the dashboard under Configuration/Settings and click on "Add or remove supported cultures for the site". Choose your culture and click "Add". You can go back to settings and set the default culture. Save. You may now take a tour of the application and verify that everything works as expected: And that's it really. Creating a translation for Orchard is a matter of a few hours. If you don't see a translation for your culture, please consider creating it.

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• Finding a person in the forest

  - by PointsToShare

  © 2011 By: Dov Trietsch. All rights reserved finding a person in the forest or Limiting the AD result in SharePoint People Picker There are times when we need to limit the SharePoint audience of certain farms or servers or site collections to a particular audience. One of my experiences involved limiting access to US citizens, another to a particular location. Now, most of us – your humble servant included – are not Active Directory experts – but we must be able to handle the “audience restrictions” as required. So here is how it’s done in a nutshell. Important note. Not all could be done in PowerShell (at least not yet)! There are no Windows PowerShell commands to configure People Picker. The stsadm command is: stsadm -o setproperty -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomquery -pv ADQuery –url http://somethingOrOther Note the long-hyphenated property name. Now to filling the ADQuery.   LDAP Query in a nutshell Syntax LDAP is no older than SQL and an LDAP query is actually a query against the LDAP Database. LDAP attributes are the equivalent of Database columns, so why do we have to learn a new query language? Beats me! But we must, so here it is. The syntax of an LDAP query string is made of individual statements with relational operators including: = Equal <= Lower than or equal >= Greater than or equal… and memberOf – a group membership. ! Not * Wildcard Equal and memberOf are the most commonly used. Checking for absence uses the ! – not and the * - wildcard Example: (SN=Grant) All whose last name – SurName – is Grant Example: (!(SN=Grant)) All except Grant Example: (!(SN=*)) all where there is no SurName i.e SurName is absent (probably Rappers). Example: (CN=MyGroup) Common Name is MyGroup.  Example: (GN=J*) all the Given Names that start with J (JJ, Jane, Jon, John, etc.) The cryptic SN, CN, GN, etc. are attributes and more about them later All the queries are enclosed in parentheses (Query). Complex queries are comprised of sets that are in AND or OR conditions. AND is denoted by the ampersand (&) and the OR is denoted by the vertical pipe (|). The general syntax is that of the Prefix polish notation where the operand precedes the variables. E.g +ab is the sum of a and b. In an LDAP query (&(A)(B)) will garner the objects for which both A and B are true. In an LDAP query (&(A)(B)(C)) will garner the objects for which A, B and C are true. There’s no limit to the number of conditions. In an LDAP query (|(A)(B)) will garner the objects for which either A or B are true. In an LDAP query (|(A)(B)(C)) will garner the objects for which at least one of A, B and C is true. There’s no limit to the number of conditions. More complex queries have both types of conditions and the parentheses determine the order of operations. Attributes Now let’s get into the SN, CN, GN, and other attributes of the query SN – is the SurName (last name) GN – is the Given Name (first name) CN – is the Common Name, usually GN followed by SN OU – is an Organization Unit such as division, department etc. DC – is a Domain Content in the AD forest l – lower case ‘L’ stands for location. Jerusalem anybody? Or Katmandu. UPN – User Principal Name, is usually the first part of an email address. By nature it is unique in the forest. Most systems set the UPN to be the first initial followed by the SN of the person involved. Some limit the total to 8 characters. If we have many ‘jsmith’ we have to somehow distinguish them from each other. DN – is the distinguished name – a name unique to AD forest in which it lives. Usually it’s a CN with some domain or group distinguishers. DN is important in conjunction with the memberOf relation. Groups have stricter requirement. Each group has to have a unique name - its CN and it has to be unique regardless of its place. See more below. All of the attributes are case insensitive. CN, cn, Cn, and cN are identical. objectCategory is an element that requires special consideration. AD contains many different object like computers, printers, and of course people and groups. In the queries below, we’re limiting our search to people (person). Putting it altogether Let’s get a list of all the Johns in the SPAdmin group of the Jerusalem that local domain. (&(objectCategory=person)(memberOf=cn=SPAdmin,ou=Jerusalem,dc=local)) The memberOf=cn=SPAdmin uses the cn (Common Name) of the SPAdmin group. This is how the memberOf relation is used. ‘SPAdmin’ is actually the DN of the group. Also the memberOf relation does not allow wild cards (*) in the group name. Also, you are limited to at most one ‘OU’ entry. Let’s add Marvin Minsky to the search above. |(&(objectCategory=person)(memberOf=cn=SPAdmin,ou=Jerusalem,dc=local))(CN=Marvin Minsky) Here I added the or pipeline at the beginning of the query and put the CN requirement for Minsky at the end. Note that if Marvin was already in the prior result, he’s not going to be listed twice. One last note: You may see a dryer but more complete list of attributes rules and examples in: http://www.tek-tips.com/faqs.cfm?fid=5667 And finally (thus negating the claim that my previous note was last), to the best of my knowledge there are 3 more ways to limit the audience. One is to use the peoplepicker-searchadcustomfilter property using the same ADQuery. This works only in SP1 and above. The second is to limit the search to users within this particular site collection – the property name is peoplepicker-onlysearchwithinsitecollection and the value is yes (-pv yes) And the third is –pn peoplepicker-serviceaccountdirectorypaths –pv “OU=ou1,DC=dc1…..” Again you are limited to at most one ‘OU’ phrase – no OU=ou1,OU=ou2… And now the real end. The main property discussed in this sprawling and seemingly endless monogram – peoplepicker-searchadcustomquery - is the most general way of getting the job done. Here are a few examples of command lines that worked and some that didn’t. Can you see why? C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (Title=David) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (!Title=David) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (OU=OURealName,OU=OUMid,OU=OUTop,DC=TopDC,DC=MidDC,DC=BottomDC) Command line error. Too many OUs C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (OU=OURealName) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (DC=TopDC,DC=MidDC,DC=BottomDC) Operation completed successfully. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa dm -o setproperty -url http://somethingOrOther -pn peoplepicker-searchadcustomfi lter -pv (OU=OURealName,DC=TopDC,DC=MidDC,DC=BottomDC) Operation completed successfully.   That’s all folks!

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• 24+ Coda Alternatives for Windows and Linux

  - by Matt

  Coda plays an important role in designing layout on Mac. There are numerous coda alternatives for windows and Linux too. It is not possible to describe each and everyone so some of the coda alternatives, which work on both windows and Linux platforms, are discussed below. EditPlus $35.00 Good thing about EditPlus is that it highlights URLs and email addresses, activating them when you ‘crtl + double-click’. It also has a built in browser for previewing HTML, and FTP and SFTP support. Also supports Macros and RegEx find and replace. UltraEdit $49.99 It is another good coda alternative for windows and Linux. It is the best suited editor for text, HTML and HEX. It also plays an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. It supports disk-based 64-bit or standard file handling on 32-bit Windows platforms or window 2000 and later versions. HippoEdit $39.95 HippoEDIT has the best autocomplete it gives pop a ‘tooltip’ above your cursor as you type, suggesting words you’ve already typed. It does syntax highlighting for over 2 dozen language. Sublime Text $59.00 Sublime Text awesome ‘zoomed out’ view of the file lets you focus on the area you want. It lets you open a local file when you right-click on its link, and there are a few automation features, so this would make a solid choice of a text editor. Textpad $24.70 TextPad is simple editor with nifty features such as column select, drag-and-drop text between files, and hyperlink support. It also supports large files. Aptana Free Aptana Studio is one of the best editors working on both windows and Linux. It is a complete web development setting that has a nice blend of powerful authoring tools with a collection of online hosting and collaboration services. It is quite helpful as it support for PHP, CSS, FTP, and more. SciTE Free It is a SCIntilla based Text Editor. It has gradually developed as a generally useful editor. It provides for building and running programs. It is best to be used for jobs with simple configurations. SciTE is currently available for Intel Win32 and Linux compatible operating systems with GTK+. It has been run on Windows XP and on Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10 with GTK+ 2.12 E Text Editor $34.96 E Text Editor is a new text editor for Windows, which also works on Linux as well. It has powerful editing features and also some unique abilities. It makes text manipulation quite fast and easy, and makes user focus on his writing as it automatically does all the manual work. It can be extend it in any language. It supports Text Mate bundles, thus allows the user to tap into a huge and active community. Editra Free Editra is an upcoming editor, with some fantastic features such as user profiles, auto-completion, session saving, and syntax highlighing for 60+ languages. Plugins can extend the feature set, offering an integrated python console, FTP client, file browser, and calculator, among others. PSPad Free PSPad is a good Template for writing CSS, as it an internal web browser, and a macro recorder to the table. It also supports hex editing, and some degree of code compiling. JEdit Free It is a mature programmer’s text editor and has taken a good deal of time to be developed as it is today. It is better than many costlier development tools due to its features and simplicity of use. It has been released as free software with full source code, provided under the terms of the GPL 2.0. Which also adds to its attractiveness. NEdit Free It is a multi-purpose text editor for the X Window System, which also works on Linux. It combines a standard, easy to use, graphical user interface with the full functionality and stability required by users who edit text for long period a day. It also provides for thorough support for development in various languages. It also facilitates the use of text processors, and other tools at the same time. It can be used productively by anyone who needs to edit text. It is quite a user-friendly tool. Its salient features include syntax highlighting with built in pattern, auto indent, tab emulation, block indentation adjustment etc. As of version 5.1, NEdit may be freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. MadEdit Free Mad Edit is an Open-Source and Cross-Platform Text/Hex Editor. It is written in C++ and wxWidgets. MadEdit can edit files in Text/Column/Hex modes. It also supports many useful functions, such as Syntax Highlighting, Word Wrap, Encoding for UTF8/16/32,and others. It also supports word count, which makes it quite a useful text editor for both windows and Linux. It has been recently modified on 10/09/2010. KompoZer Free Kompozer is a complete web authoring system that has a combination of web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing. KompoZer has been designed to be completely and extensively easy to use. It is thus an ideal tool for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without knowing HTML or web coding. It is based on the NVU source code. Vim Free Vim or “Vi IMproved” is an advanced text editor. Its salient features are syntax highlighting, word completion and it also has a huge amount of contributed content. Vim has several “modes” on offer for editing, which adds to the efficiency in editing. Thus it becomes a non-user-friendly application but it is also strength for its users. The normal mode binds alphanumeric keys to task-oriented commands. The visual mode highlights text. More tools for search & replace, defining functions, etc. are offered through command line mode. Vim comes with complete help. NotePad ++ Free One of the the best free text editor for Windows out there; with support for simple things—like syntax highlighting and folding—all the way up to FTP, Notepad++ should tick most of the boxes Notepad2 Free Notepad2 is also based on the Scintilla editing engine, but it’s much simpler than Notepad++. It bills itself as being fast, light-weight, and Notepad-like. Crimson Editor Free Crimson Editor has the ability to edit remote files, using a built-in FTP client; there’s also a spell checker. TotalEdit Free TotalEdit allows file comparison, RegEx search and replace, and has multiple options for file backup / versioning. For cleanup, it offers (X)HTML and XML customizable formatting, and a spell checker. In-Type Free ConTEXT Free SourceEdit Free SourceEdit includes features such as clipboard history, syntax highlighting and autocompletion for a decent set of languages. A hex editor and FTP client. RJ TextED Free RJ TextED supports integration with TopStyle Lite. Provides HTML validation and formatting. It includes an FTP client, a file browser, and a code browser, as well as a character map and support for email. GEDIT Free It is one of the best coda alternatives for windows and Linux. It has syntax highlighting and is best suitable for programming. It has many attractive features such as full support for UTF-8, undo/redo, and clipboard support, search and replace, configurable syntax highlighting for various languages and many more supportive features. It is extensible with plug ins. Other important coda alternatives for windows and Linux are Redcar, Bluefish Editor, NVU, Ruby Mine, Slick Edit, Geany, Editra, txt2html and CSSED. There are many more. Its up to user to decide which one suits best to his requirements. Related posts:10 Useful Text Editor For Developer Applications to Install & Run Windows on Linux Open Source WYSIWYG Text Editors

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• How to manage maintenance/bug-fix branches in Subversion when setup projects need to be built?

  - by Mike Spross

  We have a suite of related products written in VB6, with some C# and VB.NET projects, and all the source is kept in a single Subversion repository. We haven't been using branches in Subversion (although we do tag releases now), and simply do all development in trunk, creating new releases when the trunk is stable enough. This causes no end of grief when we release a new version, issues are found with it, and we have already begun working on new features or major changes to the trunk. In the past, we would address this in one of two ways, depending on the severity of the issues and how stable we thought the trunk was: Hurry to stabilize the trunk, fix the issues, and then release a maintenance update based on the HEAD revision, but this had the side effect of releases that fixed the bugs but introduced new issues because of half-finished features or bugfixes that were in trunk. Make customers wait until the next official release, which is usually a few months. We want to change our policies to better deal with this situation. I was considering creating a "maintenance branch" in Subversion whenever I tag an official release. Then, new development would continue in trunk, and I can periodically merge specific fixes from trunk into the maintenance branch, and create a maintenance release when enough fixes are accumulated, while we continue to work on the next major update in parallel. I know we could also have a more stable trunk and create a branch for new updates instead, but keeping current development in trunk seems simpler to me. The major problem is that while we can easily branch the source code from a release tag and recompile it to get the binaries for that release, I'm not sure how to handle the setup and installer projects. We use QSetup to create all of our setup programs, and right now when we need to modify a setup project, we just edit the project file in-place (all the setup projects and any dependencies that we don't compile ourselves are stored on a separate server, and we make sure to always compile the setup projects on that machine only). However, since we may add or remove files to the setup as our code changes, there is no guarantee that today's setup projects will work with yesterday's source code. I was going to put all the QSetup projects in Subversion to deal with this, but I see some problems with this approach. I want the creation of setup programs to be as automated as possible, and at the very least, I want a separate build machine where I can build the release that I want (grabbing the code from Subversion first), grab the setup project for that release from Subversion, recompile the setup, and then copy the setup to another place on the network for QA testing and eventual release to customers. However, when someone needs to change a setup project (to add a new dependency that trunk now requires or to make other changes), there is a problem. If they treat it like a source file and check it out on their own machine to edit it, they won't be able to add files to the project unless they first copy the files they need to add to the build machine (so they are available to other developers), then copy all the other dependencies from the build machine to their machine, making sure to match the folder structure exactly. The issue here is that QSetup uses absolute paths for any files added to a setup project. However, this means installing a bunch of setup dependencies onto development machines, which seems messy (and which could destabilize the development environment if someone accidentally runs the setup project on their machine). Also, how do we manage third-party dependencies? For example, if the current maintenance branch used MSXML 3.0 and the trunk now requires MSXML 4.0, we can't go back and create a maintenance release if we have already replaced the MSXML library on the build machine with the latest version (assuming both versions have the same filename). The only solution I can think is to either put all the third-party dependencies in Subversion along with the source code, or to make sure we put different library versions in separate folders (i.e. C:\Setup\Dependencies\MSXML\v3.0 and C:\Setup\Dependencies\MSXML\v4.0). Is one way "better" or more common than the other? Are there any best practices for dealing with this situation? Basically, if we release v2.0 of our software, we want to be able to release v2.0.1, v2.0.2, and v.2.0.3 while we work on v2.1, but the whole setup/installation project and setup dependency issue is making this more complicated than the typical "just create a branch in Subversion and recompile as needed" answer.

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• Crash when trying to get NSManagedObject from NSFetchedResultsController after 25 objects?

  - by Jeremy

  Hey everyone, I'm relatively new to Core Data on iOS, but I think I've been getting better with it. I've been experiencing a bizarre crash, however, in one of my applications and have not been able to figure it out. I have approximately 40 objects in Core Data, presented in a UITableView. When tapping on a cell, a UIActionSheet appears, presenting the user with a UIActionSheet with options related to the cell that was selected. So that I can reference the selected object, I declare an NSIndexPath in my header called "lastSelection" and do the following when the UIActionSheet is presented: // Each cell has a tag based on its row number (i.e. first row has tag 0) lastSelection = [NSIndexPath indexPathForRow:[sender tag] inSection:0]; NSManagedObject *managedObject = [self.fetchedResultsController objectAtIndexPath:lastSelection]; BOOL onDuty = [[managedObject valueForKey:@"onDuty"] boolValue]; UIActionSheet *actionSheet = [[UIActionSheet alloc] initWithTitle:@"Status" delegate:self cancelButtonTitle:nil destructiveButtonTitle:nil otherButtonTitles:nil]; if(onDuty) { [actionSheet addButtonWithTitle:@"Off Duty"]; } else { [actionSheet addButtonWithTitle:@"On Duty"]; } actionSheet.actionSheetStyle = UIActionSheetStyleBlackOpaque; // Override the typical UIActionSheet behavior by presenting it overlapping the sender's frame. This makes it more clear which cell is selected. CGRect senderFrame = [sender frame]; CGPoint point = CGPointMake(senderFrame.origin.x + (senderFrame.size.width / 2), senderFrame.origin.y + (senderFrame.size.height / 2)); CGRect popoverRect = CGRectMake(point.x, point.y, 1, 1); [actionSheet showFromRect:popoverRect inView:[sender superview] animated:NO]; [actionSheet release]; When the UIActionSheet is dismissed with a button, the following code is called: - (void)actionSheet:(UIActionSheet *)actionSheet willDismissWithButtonIndex:(NSInteger)buttonIndex { // Set status based on UIActionSheet button pressed if(buttonIndex == -1) { return; } NSManagedObject *managedObject = [self.fetchedResultsController objectAtIndexPath:lastSelection]; if([actionSheet.title isEqualToString:@"Status"]) { if([[actionSheet buttonTitleAtIndex:buttonIndex] isEqualToString:@"On Duty"]) { [managedObject setValue:[NSNumber numberWithBool:YES] forKey:@"onDuty"]; [managedObject setValue:@"onDuty" forKey:@"status"]; } else { [managedObject setValue:[NSNumber numberWithBool:NO] forKey:@"onDuty"]; [managedObject setValue:@"offDuty" forKey:@"status"]; } } NSError *error; [self.managedObjectContext save:&error]; [tableView reloadData]; } This might not be the most efficient code (sorry, I'm new!), but it does work. That is, for the first 25 items in the list. Selecting the 26th item or beyond, the UIActionSheet will appear, but if it is dismissed with a button, I get a variety of errors, including any one of the following: [__NSCFArray section]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x4c6bf90 Program received signal: “EXC_BAD_ACCESS” [_NSObjectID_48_0 section]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x4c54710 [__NSArrayM section]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x4c619a0 [NSComparisonPredicate section]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x6088790 [NSKeyPathExpression section]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x4c18950 If I comment out NSManagedObject *managedObject = [self.fetchedResultsController objectAtIndexPath:lastSelection]; it doesn't crash anymore, so I believe it has something do do with that. Can anyone offer any insight? Please let me know if I need to include any other information. Thanks! EDIT: Interestingly, my fetchedResultsController code returns a different object every time. Is this expected, or could this be a cause of my issue? The code looks like this: - (NSFetchedResultsController *)fetchedResultsController { /* Set up the fetched results controller. */ // Create the fetch request for the entity. NSFetchRequest *fetchRequest = [[NSFetchRequest alloc] init]; // Edit the entity name as appropriate. NSEntityDescription *entity = [NSEntityDescription entityForName:@"Employee" inManagedObjectContext:self.managedObjectContext]; [fetchRequest setEntity:entity]; // Set the batch size to a suitable number. [fetchRequest setFetchBatchSize:80]; // Edit the sort key as appropriate. NSString *sortKey; BOOL ascending; if(sortControl.selectedSegmentIndex == 0) { sortKey = @"startTime"; ascending = YES; } else if(sortControl.selectedSegmentIndex == 1) { sortKey = @"name"; ascending = YES; } else { sortKey = @"onDuty"; ascending = NO; } NSSortDescriptor *sortDescriptor = [[NSSortDescriptor alloc] initWithKey:sortKey ascending:ascending]; NSArray *sortDescriptors = [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects:sortDescriptor, nil]; [fetchRequest setSortDescriptors:sortDescriptors]; // Edit the section name key path and cache name if appropriate. NSFetchedResultsController *aFetchedResultsController = [[NSFetchedResultsController alloc] initWithFetchRequest:fetchRequest managedObjectContext:self.managedObjectContext sectionNameKeyPath:nil cacheName:@"Root"]; aFetchedResultsController.delegate = self; self.fetchedResultsController = aFetchedResultsController; [aFetchedResultsController release]; [fetchRequest release]; [sortDescriptor release]; [sortDescriptors release]; NSError *error = nil; if (![fetchedResultsController_ performFetch:&error]) { /* Replace this implementation with code to handle the error appropriately. abort() causes the application to generate a crash log and terminate. You should not use this function in a shipping application, although it may be useful during development. If it is not possible to recover from the error, display an alert panel that instructs the user to quit the application by pressing the Home button. */ //NSLog(@"Unresolved error %@, %@", error, [error userInfo]); abort(); } return fetchedResultsController_; } This happens when I set a breakpoint: (gdb) po [self fetchedResultsController] <NSFetchedResultsController: 0x61567c0> (gdb) po [self fetchedResultsController] <NSFetchedResultsController: 0x4c83630>

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• Portal And Content - Content Integration - Best Practices

  - by Stefan Krantz

  Lately we have seen an increase in projects that have failed to either get user friendly content integration or non satisfactory performance. Our intention is to mitigate any knowledge gap that our previous post might have left you with, therefore this post will repeat some recommendation or reference back to old useful post. Moreover this post will help you understand ground up how to design, architect and implement business enabled, responsive and performing portals with complex requirements on business centric information publishing. Design the Information Model The key to successful portal deployments is Information modeling, it's a key task to understand the use case you designing for, therefore I have designed a set of question you need to ask yourself or your customer: Question: Who will own the content, IT or Business? Answer: BusinessQuestion: Who will publish the content, IT or Business? Answer: BusinessQuestion: Will there be multiple publishers? Answer: YesQuestion: Are the publishers computer scientist?Answer: NoQuestion: How often do the information changes, daily, weekly, monthly?Answer: Daily, weekly If your answers to the questions matches at least 2, we strongly recommend you design your content with following principles: Divide your pages in to logical sections, where each section is marked with its purpose Assign capabilities to each section, does it contain text, images, formatting and/or is it static and is populated through other contextual information Select editor/design element type WYSIWYG - Rich Text Plain Text - non-format text Image - Image object Static List - static list of formatted informationDynamic Data List - assembled information from multiple data files through CMIS query The result of such design map could look like following below examples: Based on the outcome of the required elements in the design column 3 from the left you will now simply design a data model in WebCenter Content - Site Studio by creating a Region Definition structure matching your design requirements.For more information on how to create a Region definition see following post: Region Definition Post - note see instruction 7 for details. Each region definition can now be used to instantiate data files, a data file will hold the actual data for each element in the region definition. Another way you can see this is to compare the region definition as an extension to the metadata model in WebCenter Content for each data file item. Design content templates With a solid dependable information model we can now proceed to template creation and page design, in this phase focuses on how to place the content sections from the region definition on the page via a Content Presenter template. Remember by creating content presenter templates you will leverage the latest and most integrated technology WebCenter has to offer. This phase is much easier since the you already have the information model and design wire-frames to base the logic on, however there is still few considerations to pay attention to: Base the template on ADF and make only necessary exceptions to markup when required Leverage ADF design components for Tabs, Accordions and other similar components, this way the design in the content published areas will comply with other design areas based on custom ADF taskflows There is no performance impact when using meta data or region definition based data All data access regardless of type, metadata or xml data it can be accessed via the Content Presenter - Node. See below for applied examples on how to access data Access metadata property from Document - #{node.propertyMap['myProp'].value}myProp in this example can be for instance (dDocName, dDocTitle, xComments or any other available metadata) Access element data from data file xml - #{node.propertyMap['[Region Definition Name]:[Element name]'].asTextHtml}Region Definition Name is the expect region definition that the current data file is instantiatingElement name is the element value you like to grab from the data file I recommend you read following  useful post on content template topic:CMIS queries and template creation - note see instruction 9 for detailsStatic List template rendering For more information on templates:Single Item Content TemplateMulti Item Content TemplateExpression Language Internationalization Considerations When integrating content assets via content presenter you by now probably understand that the content item/data file is wired to the page, what is also pretty common at this stage is that the content item/data file only support one language since its not practical or business friendly to mix that into a complex structure. Therefore you will be left with a very common dilemma that you will have to either build a complete new portal for each locale, which is not an good option! However with little bit of information modeling and clear naming convention this can be addressed. Basically you can simply make sure that all content item/data file are named with a predictable naming convention like "Content1_EN" for the English rendition and "Content1_ES" for the Spanish rendition. This way through simple none complex customizations you will be able to dynamically switch the actual content item/data file just before rendering. By following proposed approach above you not only enable a simple mechanism for internationalized content you also preserve the functionality in the content presenter to support business accessible run-time publishing of information on existing and new pages. I recommend you read following useful post on Internationalization topics:Internationalize with Content Presenter Integrate with Review & Approval processes Today the Review and approval functionality and configuration is based out of WebCenter Content - Criteria Workflows. Criteria Workflows uses the metadata of the checked in document to evaluate if the document is under any review/approval process. So for instance if a Criteria Workflow is configured to force any documents with Version = "2" or "higher" and Content Type is "Instructions", any matching content item version on check in will now enter the workflow before getting released for general access. Few things to consider when configuring Criteria Workflows: Make sure to not trigger on version one for Content Items that are Data Files - if you trigger on version 1 you will not only approve an empty document you will also have a content presenter pointing to a none existing document - since the document will only be available after successful completion of the workflow Approval workflows sometimes requires more complex criteria, the recommendation if that is the case is that the meta data triggering such criteria is automatically populated, this can be achieved through many approaches including Content Profiles Criteria workflows are configured and managed in WebCenter Content Administration Applets where you can configure one or more workflows. When you configured Criteria workflows the Content Presenter will support the editors with the approval process directly inline in the "Contribution mode" of the portal. In addition to approve/reject and details of the task, the content presenter natively support the user to view the current and future version of the change he/she is approving. See below for example: Architectural recommendation To support review&approval processes - minimize the amount of data files per page Each CMIS query can consume significant time depending on the complexity of the query - minimize the amount of CMIS queries per page Use Content Presenter Templates based on ADF - this way you minimize the design considerations and optimize the usage of caching Implement the page in as few Data files as possible - simplifies publishing process, increases performance and simplifies release process Named data file (node) or list of named nodes when integrating to pages increases performance vs. querying for data Named data file (node) or list of named nodes when integrating to pages enables business centric page creation and publishing and reduces the need for IT department interaction Summary Just because one architectural decision solves a business problem it doesn't mean its the right one, when designing portals all architecture has to be in harmony and not impacting each other. For instance the most technical complex solution is not always the best since it will most likely defeat the business accessibility, performance or both, therefore the best approach is to first design for simplicity that even a non-technical user can operate, after that consider the performance impact and final look at the technology challenges these brings and workaround them first with out-of-the-box features, after that design and develop functions to complement the short comings.

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• SQL Server &ndash; Undelete a Table and Restore a Single Table from Backup

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  This post is part of the monthly community event called T-SQL Tuesday started by Adam Machanic (blog|twitter) and hosted by someone else each month. This month the host is Sankar Reddy (blog|twitter) and the topic is Misconceptions in SQL Server. You can follow posts for this theme on Twitter by looking at #TSQL2sDay hashtag. Let me start by saying: This code is a crazy hack that is to never be used unless you really, really have to. Really! And I don’t think there’s a time when you would really have to use it for real. Because it’s a hack there are number of things that can go wrong so play with it knowing that. I’ve managed to totally corrupt one database. :) Oh… and for those saying: yeah yeah.. you have a single table in a file group and you’re restoring that, I say “nay nay” to you. As we all know SQL Server can’t do single table restores from backup. This is kind of a obvious thing due to different relational integrity (RI) concerns. Since we have to maintain that we have to restore all tables represented in a RI graph. For this exercise i say BAH! to those concerns. Note that this method “works” only for simple tables that don’t have LOB and off rows data. The code can be expanded to include those but I’ve tried to leave things “simple”. Note that for this to work our table needs to be relatively static data-wise. This doesn’t work for OLTP table. Products are a perfect example of static data. They don’t change much between backups, pretty much everything depends on them and their table is one of those tables that are relatively easy to accidentally delete everything from. This only works if the database is in Full or Bulk-Logged recovery mode for tables where the contents have been deleted or truncated but NOT when a table was dropped. Everything we’ll talk about has to be done before the data pages are reused for other purposes. After deletion or truncation the pages are marked as reusable so you have to act fast. The best thing probably is to put the database into single user mode ASAP while you’re performing this procedure and return it to multi user after you’re done. How do we do it? We will be using an undocumented but known DBCC commands: DBCC PAGE, an undocumented function sys.fn_dblog and a little known DATABASE RESTORE PAGE option. All tests will be on a copy of Production.Product table in AdventureWorks database called Production.Product1 because the original table has FK constraints that prevent us from truncating it for testing. -- create a duplicate table. This doesn't preserve indexes!SELECT *INTO AdventureWorks.Production.Product1FROM AdventureWorks.Production.Product   After we run this code take a full back to perform further testing.   First let’s see what the difference between DELETE and TRUNCATE is when it comes to logging. With DELETE every row deletion is logged in the transaction log. With TRUNCATE only whole data page deallocations are logged in the transaction log. Getting deleted data pages is simple. All we have to look for is row delete entry in the sys.fn_dblog output. But getting data pages that were truncated from the transaction log presents a bit of an interesting problem. I will not go into depths of IAM(Index Allocation Map) and PFS (Page Free Space) pages but suffice to say that every IAM page has intervals that tell us which data pages are allocated for a table and which aren’t. If we deep dive into the sys.fn_dblog output we can see that once you truncate a table all the pages in all the intervals are deallocated and this is shown in the PFS page transaction log entry as deallocation of pages. For every 8 pages in the same extent there is one PFS page row in the transaction log. This row holds information about all 8 pages in CSV format which means we can get to this data with some parsing. A great help for parsing this stuff is Peter Debetta’s handy function dbo.HexStrToVarBin that converts hexadecimal string into a varbinary value that can be easily converted to integer tus giving us a readable page number. The shortened (columns removed) sys.fn_dblog output for a PFS page with CSV data for 1 extent (8 data pages) looks like this: -- [Page ID] is displayed in hex format. -- To convert it to readable int we'll use dbo.HexStrToVarBin function found at -- http://sqlblog.com/blogs/peter_debetta/archive/2007/03/09/t-sql-convert-hex-string-to-varbinary.aspx -- This function must be installed in the master databaseSELECT Context, AllocUnitName, [Page ID], DescriptionFROM sys.fn_dblog(NULL, NULL)WHERE [Current LSN] = '00000031:00000a46:007d' The pages at the end marked with 0x00—> are pages that are allocated in the extent but are not part of a table. We can inspect the raw content of each data page with a DBCC PAGE command: -- we need this trace flag to redirect output to the query window.DBCC TRACEON (3604); -- WITH TABLERESULTS gives us data in table format instead of message format-- we use format option 3 because it's the easiest to read and manipulate further onDBCC PAGE (AdventureWorks, 1, 613, 3) WITH TABLERESULTS   Since the DBACC PAGE output can be quite extensive I won’t put it here. You can see an example of it in the link at the beginning of this section. Getting deleted data back When we run a delete statement every row to be deleted is marked as a ghost record. A background process periodically cleans up those rows. A huge misconception is that the data is actually removed. It’s not. Only the pointers to the rows are removed while the data itself is still on the data page. We just can’t access it with normal means. To get those pointers back we need to restore every deleted page using the RESTORE PAGE option mentioned above. This restore must be done from a full backup, followed by any differential and log backups that you may have. This is necessary to bring the pages up to the same point in time as the rest of the data.  However the restore doesn’t magically connect the restored page back to the original table. It simply replaces the current page with the one from the backup. After the restore we use the DBCC PAGE to read data directly from all data pages and insert that data into a temporary table. To finish the RESTORE PAGE  procedure we finally have to take a tail log backup (simple backup of the transaction log) and restore it back. We can now insert data from the temporary table to our original table by hand. Getting truncated data back When we run a truncate the truncated data pages aren’t touched at all. Even the pointers to rows stay unchanged. Because of this getting data back from truncated table is simple. we just have to find out which pages belonged to our table and use DBCC PAGE to read data off of them. No restore is necessary. Turns out that the problems we had with finding the data pages is alleviated by not having to do a RESTORE PAGE procedure. Stop stalling… show me The Code! This is the code for getting back deleted and truncated data back. It’s commented in all the right places so don’t be afraid to take a closer look. Make sure you have a full backup before trying this out. Also I suggest that the last step of backing and restoring the tail log is performed by hand. USE masterGOIF OBJECT_ID('dbo.HexStrToVarBin') IS NULL RAISERROR ('No dbo.HexStrToVarBin installed. Go to http://sqlblog.com/blogs/peter_debetta/archive/2007/03/09/t-sql-convert-hex-string-to-varbinary.aspx and install it in master database' , 18, 1) SET NOCOUNT ONBEGIN TRY DECLARE @dbName VARCHAR(1000), @schemaName VARCHAR(1000), @tableName VARCHAR(1000), @fullBackupName VARCHAR(1000), @undeletedTableName VARCHAR(1000), @sql VARCHAR(MAX), @tableWasTruncated bit; /* THE FIRST LINE ARE OUR INPUT PARAMETERS In this case we're trying to recover Production.Product1 table in AdventureWorks database. My full backup of AdventureWorks database is at e:\AW.bak */ SELECT @dbName = 'AdventureWorks', @schemaName = 'Production', @tableName = 'Product1', @fullBackupName = 'e:\AW.bak', @undeletedTableName = '##' + @tableName + '_Undeleted', @tableWasTruncated = 0, -- copy the structure from original table to a temp table that we'll fill with restored data @sql = 'IF OBJECT_ID(''tempdb..' + @undeletedTableName + ''') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE ' + @undeletedTableName + ' SELECT *' + ' INTO ' + @undeletedTableName + ' FROM [' + @dbName + '].[' + @schemaName + '].[' + @tableName + ']' + ' WHERE 1 = 0' EXEC (@sql) IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#PagesToRestore') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #PagesToRestore /* FIND DATA PAGES WE NEED TO RESTORE*/ CREATE TABLE #PagesToRestore ([ID] INT IDENTITY(1,1), [FileID] INT, [PageID] INT, [SQLtoExec] VARCHAR(1000)) -- DBCC PACE statement to run later RAISERROR ('Looking for deleted pages...', 10, 1) -- use T-LOG direct read to get deleted data pages INSERT INTO #PagesToRestore([FileID], [PageID], [SQLtoExec]) EXEC('USE [' + @dbName + '];SELECT FileID, PageID, ''DBCC TRACEON (3604); DBCC PAGE ([' + @dbName + '], '' + FileID + '', '' + PageID + '', 3) WITH TABLERESULTS'' as SQLToExecFROM (SELECT DISTINCT LEFT([Page ID], 4) AS FileID, CONVERT(VARCHAR(100), ' + 'CONVERT(INT, master.dbo.HexStrToVarBin(SUBSTRING([Page ID], 6, 20)))) AS PageIDFROM sys.fn_dblog(NULL, NULL)WHERE AllocUnitName LIKE ''%' + @schemaName + '.' + @tableName + '%'' ' + 'AND Context IN (''LCX_MARK_AS_GHOST'', ''LCX_HEAP'') AND Operation in (''LOP_DELETE_ROWS''))t');SELECT *FROM #PagesToRestore -- if upper EXEC returns 0 rows it means the table was truncated so find truncated pages IF (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM #PagesToRestore) = 0 BEGIN RAISERROR ('No deleted pages found. Looking for truncated pages...', 10, 1) -- use T-LOG read to get truncated data pages INSERT INTO #PagesToRestore([FileID], [PageID], [SQLtoExec]) -- dark magic happens here -- because truncation simply deallocates pages we have to find out which pages were deallocated. -- we can find this out by looking at the PFS page row's Description column. -- for every deallocated extent the Description has a CSV of 8 pages in that extent. -- then it's just a matter of parsing it. -- we also remove the pages in the extent that weren't allocated to the table itself -- marked with '0x00-->00' EXEC ('USE [' + @dbName + '];DECLARE @truncatedPages TABLE(DeallocatedPages VARCHAR(8000), IsMultipleDeallocs BIT);INSERT INTO @truncatedPagesSELECT REPLACE(REPLACE(Description, ''Deallocated '', ''Y''), ''0x00-->00 '', ''N'') + '';'' AS DeallocatedPages, CHARINDEX('';'', Description) AS IsMultipleDeallocsFROM (SELECT DISTINCT LEFT([Page ID], 4) AS FileID, CONVERT(VARCHAR(100), CONVERT(INT, master.dbo.HexStrToVarBin(SUBSTRING([Page ID], 6, 20)))) AS PageID, DescriptionFROM sys.fn_dblog(NULL, NULL)WHERE Context IN (''LCX_PFS'') AND Description LIKE ''Deallocated%'' AND AllocUnitName LIKE ''%' + @schemaName + '.' + @tableName + '%'') t;SELECT FileID, PageID , ''DBCC TRACEON (3604); DBCC PAGE ([' + @dbName + '], '' + FileID + '', '' + PageID + '', 3) WITH TABLERESULTS'' as SQLToExecFROM (SELECT LEFT(PageAndFile, 1) as WasPageAllocatedToTable , SUBSTRING(PageAndFile, 2, CHARINDEX('':'', PageAndFile) - 2 ) as FileID , CONVERT(VARCHAR(100), CONVERT(INT, master.dbo.HexStrToVarBin(SUBSTRING(PageAndFile, CHARINDEX('':'', PageAndFile) + 1, LEN(PageAndFile))))) as PageIDFROM ( SELECT SUBSTRING(DeallocatedPages, delimPosStart, delimPosEnd - delimPosStart) as PageAndFile, IsMultipleDeallocs FROM ( SELECT *, CHARINDEX('';'', DeallocatedPages)*(N-1) + 1 AS delimPosStart, CHARINDEX('';'', DeallocatedPages)*N AS delimPosEnd FROM @truncatedPages t1 CROSS APPLY (SELECT TOP (case when t1.IsMultipleDeallocs = 1 then 8 else 1 end) ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY number) as N FROM master..spt_values) t2 )t)t)tWHERE WasPageAllocatedToTable = ''Y''') SELECT @tableWasTruncated = 1 END DECLARE @lastID INT, @pagesCount INT SELECT @lastID = 1, @pagesCount = COUNT(*) FROM #PagesToRestore SELECT @sql = 'Number of pages to restore: ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), @pagesCount) IF @pagesCount = 0 RAISERROR ('No data pages to restore.', 18, 1) ELSE RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) -- If the table was truncated we'll read the data directly from data pages without restoring from backup IF @tableWasTruncated = 0 BEGIN -- RESTORE DATA PAGES FROM FULL BACKUP IN BATCHES OF 200 WHILE @lastID <= @pagesCount BEGIN -- create CSV string of pages to restore SELECT @sql = STUFF((SELECT ',' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(100), FileID) + ':' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(100), PageID) FROM #PagesToRestore WHERE ID BETWEEN @lastID AND @lastID + 200 ORDER BY ID FOR XML PATH('')), 1, 1, '') SELECT @sql = 'RESTORE DATABASE [' + @dbName + '] PAGE = ''' + @sql + ''' FROM DISK = ''' + @fullBackupName + '''' RAISERROR ('Starting RESTORE command:' , 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; RAISERROR (@sql , 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; EXEC(@sql); RAISERROR ('Restore DONE' , 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; SELECT @lastID = @lastID + 200 END /* If you have any differential or transaction log backups you should restore them here to bring the previously restored data pages up to date */ END DECLARE @dbccSinglePage TABLE ( [ParentObject] NVARCHAR(500), [Object] NVARCHAR(500), [Field] NVARCHAR(500), [VALUE] NVARCHAR(MAX) ) DECLARE @cols NVARCHAR(MAX), @paramDefinition NVARCHAR(500), @SQLtoExec VARCHAR(1000), @FileID VARCHAR(100), @PageID VARCHAR(100), @i INT = 1 -- Get deleted table columns from information_schema view -- Need sp_executeSQL because database name can't be passed in as variable SELECT @cols = 'select @cols = STUFF((SELECT '', ['' + COLUMN_NAME + '']''FROM ' + @dbName + '.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNSWHERE TABLE_NAME = ''' + @tableName + ''' AND TABLE_SCHEMA = ''' + @schemaName + '''ORDER BY ORDINAL_POSITIONFOR XML PATH('''')), 1, 2, '''')', @paramDefinition = N'@cols nvarchar(max) OUTPUT' EXECUTE sp_executesql @cols, @paramDefinition, @cols = @cols OUTPUT -- Loop through all the restored data pages, -- read data from them and insert them into temp table -- which you can then insert into the orignial deleted table DECLARE dbccPageCursor CURSOR GLOBAL FORWARD_ONLY FOR SELECT [FileID], [PageID], [SQLtoExec] FROM #PagesToRestore ORDER BY [FileID], [PageID] OPEN dbccPageCursor; FETCH NEXT FROM dbccPageCursor INTO @FileID, @PageID, @SQLtoExec; WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0 BEGIN RAISERROR ('---------------------------------------------', 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; SELECT @sql = 'Loop iteration: ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), @i); RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; SELECT @sql = 'Running: ' + @SQLtoExec RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; -- if something goes wrong with DBCC execution or data gathering, skip it but print error BEGIN TRY INSERT INTO @dbccSinglePage EXEC (@SQLtoExec) -- make the data insert magic happen here IF (SELECT CONVERT(BIGINT, [VALUE]) FROM @dbccSinglePage WHERE [Field] LIKE '%Metadata: ObjectId%') = OBJECT_ID('['+@dbName+'].['+@schemaName +'].['+@tableName+']') BEGIN DELETE @dbccSinglePage WHERE NOT ([ParentObject] LIKE 'Slot % Offset %' AND [Object] LIKE 'Slot % Column %') SELECT @sql = 'USE tempdb; ' + 'IF (OBJECTPROPERTY(object_id(''' + @undeletedTableName + '''), ''TableHasIdentity'') = 1) ' + 'SET IDENTITY_INSERT ' + @undeletedTableName + ' ON; ' + 'INSERT INTO ' + @undeletedTableName + '(' + @cols + ') ' + STUFF((SELECT ' UNION ALL SELECT ' + STUFF((SELECT ', ' + CASE WHEN VALUE = '[NULL]' THEN 'NULL' ELSE '''' + [VALUE] + '''' END FROM ( -- the unicorn help here to correctly set ordinal numbers of columns in a data page -- it's turning STRING order into INT order (1,10,11,2,21 into 1,2,..10,11...21) SELECT [ParentObject], [Object], Field, VALUE, RIGHT('00000' + O1, 6) AS ParentObjectOrder, RIGHT('00000' + REVERSE(LEFT(O2, CHARINDEX(' ', O2)-1)), 6) AS ObjectOrder FROM ( SELECT [ParentObject], [Object], Field, VALUE, REPLACE(LEFT([ParentObject], CHARINDEX('Offset', [ParentObject])-1), 'Slot ', '') AS O1, REVERSE(LEFT([Object], CHARINDEX('Offset ', [Object])-2)) AS O2 FROM @dbccSinglePage WHERE t.ParentObject = ParentObject )t)t ORDER BY ParentObjectOrder, ObjectOrder FOR XML PATH('')), 1, 2, '') FROM @dbccSinglePage t GROUP BY ParentObject FOR XML PATH('') ), 1, 11, '') + ';' RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; EXEC (@sql) END END TRY BEGIN CATCH SELECT @sql = 'ERROR!!!' + CHAR(10) + CHAR(13) + 'ErrorNumber: ' + ERROR_NUMBER() + '; ErrorMessage' + ERROR_MESSAGE() + CHAR(10) + CHAR(13) + 'FileID: ' + @FileID + '; PageID: ' + @PageID RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; END CATCH DELETE @dbccSinglePage SELECT @sql = 'Pages left to process: ' + CONVERT(VARCHAR(10), @pagesCount - @i) + CHAR(10) + CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) + CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) + CHAR(13), @i = @i+1 RAISERROR (@sql, 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; FETCH NEXT FROM dbccPageCursor INTO @FileID, @PageID, @SQLtoExec; END CLOSE dbccPageCursor; DEALLOCATE dbccPageCursor; EXEC ('SELECT ''' + @undeletedTableName + ''' as TableName; SELECT * FROM ' + @undeletedTableName)END TRYBEGIN CATCH SELECT ERROR_NUMBER() AS ErrorNumber, ERROR_MESSAGE() AS ErrorMessage IF CURSOR_STATUS ('global', 'dbccPageCursor') >= 0 BEGIN CLOSE dbccPageCursor; DEALLOCATE dbccPageCursor; ENDEND CATCH-- if the table was deleted we need to finish the restore page sequenceIF @tableWasTruncated = 0BEGIN -- take a log tail backup and then restore it to complete page restore process DECLARE @currentDate VARCHAR(30) SELECT @currentDate = CONVERT(VARCHAR(30), GETDATE(), 112) RAISERROR ('Starting Log Tail backup to c:\Temp ...', 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; PRINT ('BACKUP LOG [' + @dbName + '] TO DISK = ''c:\Temp\' + @dbName + '_TailLogBackup_' + @currentDate + '.trn''') EXEC ('BACKUP LOG [' + @dbName + '] TO DISK = ''c:\Temp\' + @dbName + '_TailLogBackup_' + @currentDate + '.trn''') RAISERROR ('Log Tail backup done.', 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; RAISERROR ('Starting Log Tail restore from c:\Temp ...', 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT; PRINT ('RESTORE LOG [' + @dbName + '] FROM DISK = ''c:\Temp\' + @dbName + '_TailLogBackup_' + @currentDate + '.trn''') EXEC ('RESTORE LOG [' + @dbName + '] FROM DISK = ''c:\Temp\' + @dbName + '_TailLogBackup_' + @currentDate + '.trn''') RAISERROR ('Log Tail restore done.', 10, 1) WITH NOWAIT;END-- The last step is manual. Insert data from our temporary table to the original deleted table The misconception here is that you can do a single table restore properly in SQL Server. You can't. But with little experimentation you can get pretty close to it. One way to possible remove a dependency on a backup to retrieve deleted pages is to quickly run a similar script to the upper one that gets data directly from data pages while the rows are still marked as ghost records. It could be done if we could beat the ghost record cleanup task.

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• Windows Azure: Announcing release of Windows Azure SDK 2.2 (with lots of goodies)

  - by ScottGu

  Earlier today I blogged about a big update we made today to Windows Azure, and some of the great new features it provides. Today I’m also excited to also announce the release of the Windows Azure SDK 2.2. Today’s SDK release adds even more great features including: Visual Studio 2013 Support Integrated Windows Azure Sign-In support within Visual Studio Remote Debugging Cloud Services with Visual Studio Firewall Management support within Visual Studio for SQL Databases Visual Studio 2013 RTM VM Images for MSDN Subscribers Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET Updated Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets and ScriptCenter The below post has more details on what’s available in today’s Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release.  Also head over to Channel 9 to see the new episode of the Visual Studio Toolbox show that will be available shortly, and which highlights these features in a video demonstration. Visual Studio 2013 Support Version 2.2 of the Window Azure SDK is the first official version of the SDK to support the final RTM release of Visual Studio 2013. If you installed the 2.1 SDK with the Preview of Visual Studio 2013 we recommend that you upgrade your projects to SDK 2.2.  SDK 2.2 also works side by side with the SDK 2.0 and SDK 2.1 releases on Visual Studio 2012: Integrated Windows Azure Sign In within Visual Studio Integrated Windows Azure Sign-In support within Visual Studio is one of the big improvements added with this Windows Azure SDK release.  Integrated sign-in support enables developers to develop/test/manage Windows Azure resources within Visual Studio without having to download or use management certificates.  You can now just right-click on the “Windows Azure” icon within the Server Explorer inside Visual Studio and choose the “Connect to Windows Azure” context menu option to connect to Windows Azure: Doing this will prompt you to enter the email address of the account you wish to sign-in with: You can use either a Microsoft Account (e.g. Windows Live ID) or an Organizational account (e.g. Active Directory) as the email.  The dialog will update with an appropriate login prompt depending on which type of email address you enter: Once you sign-in you’ll see the Windows Azure resources that you have permissions to manage show up automatically within the Visual Studio Server Explorer (and you can start using them): With this new integrated sign in experience you are now able to publish web apps, deploy VMs and cloud services, use Windows Azure diagnostics, and fully interact with your Windows Azure services within Visual Studio without the need for a management certificate.  All of the authentication is handled using the Windows Azure Active Directory associated with your Windows Azure account (details on this can be found in my earlier blog post). Integrating authentication this way end-to-end across the Service Management APIs + Dev Tools + Management Portal + PowerShell automation scripts enables a much more secure and flexible security model within Windows Azure, and makes it much more convenient to securely manage multiple developers + administrators working on a project.  It also allows organizations and enterprises to use the same authentication model that they use for their developers on-premises in the cloud.  It also ensures that employees who leave an organization immediately lose access to their company’s cloud based resources once their Active Directory account is suspended. Filtering/Subscription Management Once you login within Visual Studio, you can filter which Windows Azure subscriptions/regions are visible within the Server Explorer by right-clicking the “Filter Services” context menu within the Server Explorer.  You can also use the “Manage Subscriptions” context menu to mange your Windows Azure Subscriptions: Bringing up the “Manage Subscriptions” dialog allows you to see which accounts you are currently using, as well as which subscriptions are within them: The “Certificates” tab allows you to continue to import and use management certificates to manage Windows Azure resources as well.  We have not removed any functionality with today’s update – all of the existing scenarios that previously supported management certificates within Visual Studio continue to work just fine.  The new integrated sign-in support provided with today’s release is purely additive. Note: the SQL Database node and the Mobile Service node in Server Explorer do not support integrated sign-in at this time. Therefore, you will only see databases and mobile services under those nodes if you have a management certificate to authorize access to them.  We will enable them with integrated sign-in in a future update. Remote Debugging Cloud Resources within Visual Studio Today’s Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release adds support for remote debugging many types of Windows Azure resources. With live, remote debugging support from within Visual Studio, you are now able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure.  Let’s walkthrough how to enable remote debugging for a Cloud Service: Remote Debugging of Cloud Services To enable remote debugging for your cloud service, select Debug as the Build Configuration on the Common Settings tab of your Cloud Service’s publish dialog wizard: Then click the Advanced Settings tab and check the Enable Remote Debugging for all roles checkbox: Once your cloud service is published and running live in the cloud, simply set a breakpoint in your local source code: Then use Visual Studio’s Server Explorer to select the Cloud Service instance deployed in the cloud, and then use the Attach Debugger context menu on the role or to a specific VM instance of it: Once the debugger attaches to the Cloud Service, and a breakpoint is hit, you’ll be able to use the rich debugging capabilities of Visual Studio to debug the cloud instance remotely, in real-time, and see exactly how your app is running in the cloud. Today’s remote debugging support is super powerful, and makes it much easier to develop and test applications for the cloud.  Support for remote debugging Cloud Services is available as of today, and we’ll also enable support for remote debugging Web Sites shortly. Firewall Management Support with SQL Databases By default we enable a security firewall around SQL Databases hosted within Windows Azure.  This ensures that only your application (or IP addresses you approve) can connect to them and helps make your infrastructure secure by default.  This is great for protection at runtime, but can sometimes be a pain at development time (since by default you can’t connect/manage the database remotely within Visual Studio if the security firewall blocks your instance of VS from connecting to it). One of the cool features we’ve added with today’s release is support that makes it easy to enable and configure the security firewall directly within Visual Studio.  Now with the SDK 2.2 release, when you try and connect to a SQL Database using the Visual Studio Server Explorer, and a firewall rule prevents access to the database from your machine, you will be prompted to add a firewall rule to enable access from your local IP address: You can simply click Add Firewall Rule and a new rule will be automatically added for you. In some cases, the logic to detect your local IP may not be sufficient (for example: you are behind a corporate firewall that uses a range of IP addresses) and you may need to set up a firewall rule for a range of IP addresses in order to gain access. The new Add Firewall Rule dialog also makes this easy to do.  Once connected you’ll be able to manage your SQL Database directly within the Visual Studio Server Explorer: This makes it much easier to work with databases in the cloud. Visual Studio 2013 RTM Virtual Machine Images Available for MSDN Subscribers Last week we released the General Availability Release of Visual Studio 2013 to the web.  This is an awesome release with a ton of new features. With today’s Windows Azure update we now have a set of pre-configured VM images of VS 2013 available within the Windows Azure Management Portal for use by MSDN customers.  This enables you to create a VM in the cloud with VS 2013 pre-installed on it in with only a few clicks: Windows Azure now provides the fastest and easiest way to get started doing development with Visual Studio 2013. Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET (Preview) Having the ability to automate the creation, deployment, and tear down of resources is a key requirement for applications running in the cloud.  It also helps immensely when running dev/test scenarios and coded UI tests against pre-production environments. Today we are releasing a preview of a new set of Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET.  These new libraries make it easy to automate tasks using any .NET language (e.g. C#, VB, F#, etc).  Previously this automation capability was only available through the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets or to developers who were willing to write their own wrappers for the Windows Azure Service Management REST API. Modern .NET Developer Experience We’ve worked to design easy-to-understand .NET APIs that still map well to the underlying REST endpoints, making sure to use and expose the modern .NET functionality that developers expect today: Portable Class Library (PCL) support targeting applications built for any .NET Platform (no platform restriction) Shipped as a set of focused NuGet packages with minimal dependencies to simplify versioning Support async/await task based asynchrony (with easy sync overloads) Shared infrastructure for common error handling, tracing, configuration, HTTP pipeline manipulation, etc. Factored for easy testability and mocking Built on top of popular libraries like HttpClient and Json.NET Below is a list of a few of the management client classes that are shipping with today’s initial preview release: .NET Class Name Supports Operations for these Assets (and potentially more) ManagementClient Locations Credentials Subscriptions Certificates ComputeManagementClient Hosted Services Deployments Virtual Machines Virtual Machine Images & Disks StorageManagementClient Storage Accounts WebSiteManagementClient Web Sites Web Site Publish Profiles Usage Metrics Repositories VirtualNetworkManagementClient Networks Gateways Automating Creating a Virtual Machine using .NET Let’s walkthrough an example of how we can use the new Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET to fully automate creating a Virtual Machine. I’m deliberately showing a scenario with a lot of custom options configured – including VHD image gallery enumeration, attaching data drives, network endpoints + firewall rules setup - to show off the full power and richness of what the new library provides. We’ll begin with some code that demonstrates how to enumerate through the built-in Windows images within the standard Windows Azure VM Gallery.  We’ll search for the first VM image that has the word “Windows” in it and use that as our base image to build the VM from.  We’ll then create a cloud service container in the West US region to host it within: We can then customize some options on it such as setting up a computer name, admin username/password, and hostname.  We’ll also open up a remote desktop (RDP) endpoint through its security firewall: We’ll then specify the VHD host and data drives that we want to mount on the Virtual Machine, and specify the size of the VM we want to run it in: Once everything has been set up the call to create the virtual machine is executed asynchronously In a few minutes we’ll then have a completely deployed VM running on Windows Azure with all of the settings (hard drives, VM size, machine name, username/password, network endpoints + firewall settings) fully configured and ready for us to use: Preview Availability via NuGet The Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET are now available via NuGet. Because they are still in preview form, you’ll need to add the –IncludePrerelease switch when you go to retrieve the packages. The Package Manager Console screen shot below demonstrates how to get the entire set of libraries to manage your Windows Azure assets: You can also install them within your .NET projects by right clicking on the VS Solution Explorer and using the Manage NuGet Packages context menu command.  Make sure to select the “Include Prerelease” drop-down for them to show up, and then you can install the specific management libraries you need for your particular scenarios: Open Source License The new Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET make it super easy to automate management operations within Windows Azure – whether they are for Virtual Machines, Cloud Services, Storage Accounts, Web Sites, and more.  Like the rest of the Windows Azure SDK, we are releasing the source code under an open source (Apache 2) license and it is hosted at https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-for-net/tree/master/libraries if you wish to contribute. PowerShell Enhancements and our New Script Center Today, we are also shipping Windows Azure PowerShell 0.7.0 (which is a separate download). You can find the full change log here. Here are some of the improvements provided with it: Windows Azure Active Directory authentication support Script Center providing many sample scripts to automate common tasks on Windows Azure New cmdlets for Media Services and SQL Database Script Center Windows Azure enables you to script and automate a lot of tasks using PowerShell.  People often ask for more pre-built samples of common scenarios so that they can use them to learn and tweak/customize. With this in mind, we are excited to introduce a new Script Center that we are launching for Windows Azure. You can learn about how to scripting with Windows Azure with a get started article. You can then find many sample scripts across different solutions, including infrastructure, data management, web, and more: All of the sample scripts are hosted on TechNet with links from the Windows Azure Script Center. Each script is complete with good code comments, detailed descriptions, and examples of usage. Summary Visual Studio 2013 and the Windows Azure SDK 2.2 make it easier than ever to get started developing rich cloud applications. Along with the Windows Azure Developer Center’s growing set of .NET developer resources to guide your development efforts, today’s Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release should make your development experience more enjoyable and efficient. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• How to count each digit in a range of integers?

  - by Carlos Gutiérrez

  Imagine you sell those metallic digits used to number houses, locker doors, hotel rooms, etc. You need to find how many of each digit to ship when your customer needs to number doors/houses: 1 to 100 51 to 300 1 to 2,000 with zeros to the left The obvious solution is to do a loop from the first to the last number, convert the counter to a string with or without zeros to the left, extract each digit and use it as an index to increment an array of 10 integers. I wonder if there is a better way to solve this, without having to loop through the entire integers range. Solutions in any language or pseudocode are welcome. Edit: Answers review John at CashCommons and Wayne Conrad comment that my current approach is good and fast enough. Let me use a silly analogy: If you were given the task of counting the squares in a chess board in less than 1 minute, you could finish the task by counting the squares one by one, but a better solution is to count the sides and do a multiplication, because you later may be asked to count the tiles in a building. Alex Reisner points to a very interesting mathematical law that, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be relevant to this problem. Andres suggests the same algorithm I’m using, but extracting digits with %10 operations instead of substrings. John at CashCommons and phord propose pre-calculating the digits required and storing them in a lookup table or, for raw speed, an array. This could be a good solution if we had an absolute, unmovable, set in stone, maximum integer value. I’ve never seen one of those. High-Performance Mark and strainer computed the needed digits for various ranges. The result for one millon seems to indicate there is a proportion, but the results for other number show different proportions. strainer found some formulas that may be used to count digit for number which are a power of ten. Robert Harvey had a very interesting experience posting the question at MathOverflow. One of the math guys wrote a solution using mathematical notation. Aaronaught developed and tested a solution using mathematics. After posting it he reviewed the formulas originated from Math Overflow and found a flaw in it (point to Stackoverflow :). noahlavine developed an algorithm and presented it in pseudocode. A new solution After reading all the answers, and doing some experiments, I found that for a range of integer from 1 to 10n-1: For digits 1 to 9, n*10(n-1) pieces are needed For digit 0, if not using leading zeros, n*10n-1 - ((10n-1) / 9) are needed For digit 0, if using leading zeros, n*10n-1 - n are needed The first formula was found by strainer (and probably by others), and I found the other two by trial and error (but they may be included in other answers). For example, if n = 6, range is 1 to 999,999: For digits 1 to 9 we need 6*105 = 600,000 of each one For digit 0, without leading zeros, we need 6*105 – (106-1)/9 = 600,000 - 111,111 = 488,889 For digit 0, with leading zeros, we need 6*105 – 6 = 599,994 These numbers can be checked using High-Performance Mark results. Using these formulas, I improved the original algorithm. It still loops from the first to the last number in the range of integers, but, if it finds a number which is a power of ten, it uses the formulas to add to the digits count the quantity for a full range of 1 to 9 or 1 to 99 or 1 to 999 etc. Here's the algorithm in pseudocode: integer First,Last //First and last number in the range integer Number //Current number in the loop integer Power //Power is the n in 10^n in the formulas integer Nines //Nines is the resut of 10^n - 1, 10^5 - 1 = 99999 integer Prefix //First digits in a number. For 14,200, prefix is 142 array 0..9 Digits //Will hold the count for all the digits FOR Number = First TO Last CALL TallyDigitsForOneNumber WITH Number,1 //Tally the count of each digit //in the number, increment by 1 //Start of optimization. Comments are for Number = 1,000 and Last = 8,000. Power = Zeros at the end of number //For 1,000, Power = 3 IF Power 0 //The number ends in 0 00 000 etc Nines = 10^Power-1 //Nines = 10^3 - 1 = 1000 - 1 = 999 IF Number+Nines <= Last //If 1,000+999 < 8,000, add a full set Digits[0-9] += Power*10^(Power-1) //Add 3*10^(3-1) = 300 to digits 0 to 9 Digits[0] -= -Power //Adjust digit 0 (leading zeros formula) Prefix = First digits of Number //For 1000, prefix is 1 CALL TallyDigitsForOneNumber WITH Prefix,Nines //Tally the count of each //digit in prefix, //increment by 999 Number += Nines //Increment the loop counter 999 cycles ENDIF ENDIF //End of optimization ENDFOR SUBROUTINE TallyDigitsForOneNumber PARAMS Number,Count REPEAT Digits [ Number % 10 ] += Count Number = Number / 10 UNTIL Number = 0 For example, for range 786 to 3,021, the counter will be incremented: By 1 from 786 to 790 (5 cycles) By 9 from 790 to 799 (1 cycle) By 1 from 799 to 800 By 99 from 800 to 899 By 1 from 899 to 900 By 99 from 900 to 999 By 1 from 999 to 1000 By 999 from 1000 to 1999 By 1 from 1999 to 2000 By 999 from 2000 to 2999 By 1 from 2999 to 3000 By 1 from 3000 to 3010 (10 cycles) By 9 from 3010 to 3019 (1 cycle) By 1 from 3019 to 3021 (2 cycles) Total: 28 cycles Without optimization: 2,235 cycles Note that this algorithm solves the problem without leading zeros. To use it with leading zeros, I used a hack: If range 700 to 1,000 with leading zeros is needed, use the algorithm for 10,700 to 11,000 and then substract 1,000 - 700 = 300 from the count of digit 1. Benchmark and Source code I tested the original approach, the same approach using %10 and the new solution for some large ranges, with these results: Original 104.78 seconds With %10 83.66 With Powers of Ten 0.07 A screenshot of the benchmark application: If you would like to see the full source code or run the benchmark, use these links: Complete Source code (in Clarion): http://sca.mx/ftp/countdigits.txt Compilable project and win32 exe: http://sca.mx/ftp/countdigits.zip Accepted answer noahlavine solution may be correct, but l just couldn’t follow the pseudo code, I think there are some details missing or not completely explained. Aaronaught solution seems to be correct, but the code is just too complex for my taste. I accepted strainer’s answer, because his line of thought guided me to develop this new solution.

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• Authenticating clients in the new WCF Http stack

  - by cibrax

  About this time last year, I wrote a couple of posts about how to use the “Interceptors” from the REST starker kit for implementing several authentication mechanisms like “SAML”, “Basic Authentication” or “OAuth” in the WCF Web programming model. The things have changed a lot since then, and Glenn finally put on our hands a new version of the Web programming model that deserves some attention and I believe will help us a lot to build more Http oriented services in the .NET stack. What you can get today from wcf.codeplex.com is a preview with some cool features like Http Processors (which I already discussed here), a new and improved version of the HttpClient library, Dependency injection and better TDD support among others. However, the framework still does not support an standard way of doing client authentication on the services (This is something planned for the upcoming releases I believe). For that reason, moving the existing authentication interceptors to this new programming model was one of the things I did in the last few days. In order to make authentication simple and easy to extend,  I first came up with a model based on what I called “Authentication Interceptors”. An authentication interceptor maps to an existing Http authentication mechanism and implements the following interface, public interface IAuthenticationInterceptor{ string Scheme { get; } bool DoAuthentication(HttpRequestMessage request, HttpResponseMessage response, out IPrincipal principal);} An authentication interceptors basically needs to returns the http authentication schema that implements in the property “Scheme”, and implements the authentication mechanism in the method “DoAuthentication”. As you can see, this last method “DoAuthentication” only relies on the HttpRequestMessage and HttpResponseMessage classes, making the testing of this interceptor very simple (There is no need to do some black magic with the WCF context or messages). After this, I implemented a couple of interceptors for supporting basic authentication and brokered authentication with SAML (using WIF) in my services. The following code illustrates how the basic authentication interceptors looks like. public class BasicAuthenticationInterceptor : IAuthenticationInterceptor{ Func<UsernameAndPassword, bool> userValidation; string realm;  public BasicAuthenticationInterceptor(Func<UsernameAndPassword, bool> userValidation, string realm) { if (userValidation == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("userValidation");  if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(realm)) throw new ArgumentNullException("realm");  this.userValidation = userValidation; this.realm = realm; }  public string Scheme { get { return "Basic"; } }  public bool DoAuthentication(HttpRequestMessage request, HttpResponseMessage response, out IPrincipal principal) { string[] credentials = ExtractCredentials(request); if (credentials.Length == 0 || !AuthenticateUser(credentials[0], credentials[1])) { response.StatusCode = HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized; response.Content = new StringContent("Access denied"); response.Headers.WwwAuthenticate.Add(new AuthenticationHeaderValue("Basic", "realm=" + this.realm));  principal = null;  return false; } else { principal = new GenericPrincipal(new GenericIdentity(credentials[0]), new string[] {});  return true; } }  private string[] ExtractCredentials(HttpRequestMessage request) { if (request.Headers.Authorization != null && request.Headers.Authorization.Scheme.StartsWith("Basic")) { string encodedUserPass = request.Headers.Authorization.Parameter.Trim();  Encoding encoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1"); string userPass = encoding.GetString(Convert.FromBase64String(encodedUserPass)); int separator = userPass.IndexOf(':');  string[] credentials = new string[2]; credentials[0] = userPass.Substring(0, separator); credentials[1] = userPass.Substring(separator + 1);  return credentials; }  return new string[] { }; }  private bool AuthenticateUser(string username, string password) { var usernameAndPassword = new UsernameAndPassword { Username = username, Password = password };  if (this.userValidation(usernameAndPassword)) { return true; }  return false; }} This interceptor receives in the constructor a callback in the form of a Func delegate for authenticating the user and the “realm”, which is required as part of the implementation. The rest is a general implementation of the basic authentication mechanism using standard http request and response messages. I also implemented another interceptor for authenticating a SAML token with WIF. public class SamlAuthenticationInterceptor : IAuthenticationInterceptor{ SecurityTokenHandlerCollection handlers = null;  public SamlAuthenticationInterceptor(SecurityTokenHandlerCollection handlers) { if (handlers == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("handlers");  this.handlers = handlers; }  public string Scheme { get { return "saml"; } }  public bool DoAuthentication(HttpRequestMessage request, HttpResponseMessage response, out IPrincipal principal) { SecurityToken token = ExtractCredentials(request);  if (token != null) { ClaimsIdentityCollection claims = handlers.ValidateToken(token);  principal = new ClaimsPrincipal(claims);  return true; } else { response.StatusCode = HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized; response.Content = new StringContent("Access denied");  principal = null;  return false; } }  private SecurityToken ExtractCredentials(HttpRequestMessage request) { if (request.Headers.Authorization != null && request.Headers.Authorization.Scheme == "saml") { XmlTextReader xmlReader = new XmlTextReader(new StringReader(request.Headers.Authorization.Parameter));  var col = SecurityTokenHandlerCollection.CreateDefaultSecurityTokenHandlerCollection(); SecurityToken token = col.ReadToken(xmlReader);  return token; }  return null; }}This implementation receives a “SecurityTokenHandlerCollection” instance as part of the constructor. This class is part of WIF, and basically represents a collection of token managers to know how to handle specific xml authentication tokens (SAML is one of them). I also created a set of extension methods for injecting these interceptors as part of a service route when the service is initialized. var basicAuthentication = new BasicAuthenticationInterceptor((u) => true, "ContactManager");var samlAuthentication = new SamlAuthenticationInterceptor(serviceConfiguration.SecurityTokenHandlers); // use MEF for providing instancesvar catalog = new AssemblyCatalog(typeof(Global).Assembly);var container = new CompositionContainer(catalog);var configuration = new ContactManagerConfiguration(container); RouteTable.Routes.AddServiceRoute<ContactResource>("contact", configuration, basicAuthentication, samlAuthentication);RouteTable.Routes.AddServiceRoute<ContactsResource>("contacts", configuration, basicAuthentication, samlAuthentication); In the code above, I am injecting the basic authentication and saml authentication interceptors in the “contact” and “contacts” resource implementations that come as samples in the code preview. I will use another post to discuss more in detail how the brokered authentication with SAML model works with this new WCF Http bits. The code is available to download in this location.

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• Azure, don't give me multiple VMs, give me one elastic VM

  - by FransBouma

  Yesterday, Microsoft revealed new major features for Windows Azure (see ScottGu's post). It all looks shiny and great, but after reading most of the material describing the new features, I still find the overall idea behind all of it flawed: why should I care on how much VMs my web app runs? Isn't that a problem to solve for the Windows Azure engineers / software? And what if I need the file system, why can't I simply get a virtual filesystem ? To illustrate my point, let's use a real example: a product website with a customer system/database and next to it a support site with accompanying database. Both are written in .NET, using ASP.NET and use a SQL Server database each. The product website offers files to download by customers, very simple. You have a couple of options to host these websites: Buy a server, place it in a rack at an ISP and run the sites on that server Use 'shared hosting' with an ISP, which means your sites' appdomains are running on the same machine, as well as the files stored, and the databases are hosted in the same server as the other shared databases. Hire a VM, install your OS of choice at an ISP, and host the sites on that VM, basically the same as the first option, except you don't have a physical server At some cloud-vendor, either host the sites 'shared' or in a VM. See above. With all of those options, scalability is a problem, even the cloud-based ones, though not due to the same reasons: The physical server solution has the obvious problem that if you need more power, you need to buy a bigger server or more servers which requires you to add replication and other overhead Shared hosting solutions are almost always capped on memory usage / traffic and database size: if your sites get too big, you have to move out of the shared hosting environment and start over with one of the other solutions The VM solution, be it a VM at an ISP or 'in the cloud' at e.g. Windows Azure or Amazon, in theory allows scaling out by simply instantiating more VMs, however that too introduces the same overhead problems as with the physical servers: suddenly more than 1 instance runs your sites. If a cloud vendor offers its services in the form of VMs, you won't gain much over having a VM at some ISP: the main problems you have to work around are still there: when you spin up more than one VM, your application must be completely stateless at any moment, including the DB sub system, because what's in memory in instance 1 might not be in memory in instance 2. This might sounds trivial but it's not. A lot of the websites out there started rather small: they were perfectly runnable on a single machine with normal memory and CPU power. After all, you don't need a big machine to run a website with even thousands of users a day. Moving these sites to a multi-VM environment will cause a problem: all the in-memory state they use, all the multi-page transitions they use while keeping state across the transition, they can't do that anymore like they did that on a single machine: state is something of the past, you have to store every byte of state in either a DB or in a viewstate or in a cookie somewhere so with the next request, all state information is available through the request, as nothing is kept in-memory. Our example uses a bunch of files in a file system. Using multiple VMs will require that these files move to a cloud storage system which is mounted in each VM so we don't have to store the files on each VM. This might require different file paths, but this change should be minor. What's perhaps less minor is the maintenance procedure in place on the new type of cloud storage used: instead of ftp-ing into a VM, you might have to update the files using different ways / tools. All in all this makes moving an existing website which was written for an environment that's based around a VM (namely .NET with its CLR) overly cumbersome and problematic: it forces you to refactor your website system to be able to be used 'in the cloud', which is caused by the limited way how e.g. Windows Azure offers its cloud services: in blocks of VMs. Offer a scalable, flexible VM which extends with my needs Instead, cloud vendors should offer simply one VM to me. On that VM I run the websites, store my DB and my files. As it's a virtual machine, how this machine is actually ran on physical hardware (e.g. partitioned), I don't care, as that's the problem for the cloud vendor to solve. If I need more resources, e.g. I have more traffic to my server, way more visitors per day, the VM stretches, like I bought a bigger box. This frees me from the problem which comes with multiple VMs: I don't have any refactoring to do at all: I can simply build my website as if it runs on my local hardware server, upload it to the VM offered by the cloud vendor, install it on the VM and I'm done. "But that might require changes to windows!" Yes, but Microsoft is Windows. Windows Azure is their service, they can make whatever change to what they offer to make it look like it's windows. Yet, they're stuck, like Amazon, in thinking in VMs, which forces developers to 'think ahead' and gamble whether they would need to migrate to a cloud with multiple VMs in the future or not. Which comes down to: gamble whether they should invest time in code / architecture which they might never need. (YAGNI anyone?) So the VM we're talking about, is that a low-level VM which runs a guest OS, or is that VM a different kind of VM? The flexible VM: .NET's CLR ? My example websites are ASP.NET based, which means they run inside a .NET appdomain, on the .NET CLR, which is a VM. The only physical OS resource the sites need is the file system, however this too is accessed through .NET. In short: all the websites see is what .NET allows the websites to see, the world as the websites know it is what .NET shows them and lets them access. How the .NET appdomain is run physically, that's the concern of .NET, not mine. This begs the question why Windows Azure doesn't offer virtual appdomains? Or better: .NET environments which look like one machine but could be physically multiple machines. In such an environment, no change has to be made to the websites to migrate them from a local machine or own server to the cloud to get proper scaling: the .NET VM will simply scale with the need: more memory needed, more CPU power needed, it stretches. What it offers to the application running inside the appdomain is simply increasing, but not fragmented: all resources are available to the application: this means that the problem of how to scale is back to where it should be: with the cloud vendor. "Yeah, great, but what about the databases?" The .NET application communicates with the database server through a .NET ADO.NET provider. Where the database is located is not a problem of the appdomain: the ADO.NET provider has to solve that. I.o.w.: we can host the databases in an environment which offers itself as a single resource and is accessible through one connection string without replication overhead on the outside, and use that environment inside the .NET VM as if it was a single DB. But what about memory replication and other problems? This environment isn't simple, at least not for the cloud vendor. But it is simple for the customer who wants to run his sites in that cloud: no work needed. No refactoring needed of existing code. Upload it, run it. Perhaps I'm dreaming and what I described above isn't possible. Yet, I think if cloud vendors don't move into that direction, what they're offering isn't interesting: it doesn't solve a problem at all, it simply offers a way to instantiate more VMs with the guest OS of choice at the cost of me needing to refactor my website code so it can run in the straight jacket form factor dictated by the cloud vendor. Let's not kid ourselves here: most of us developers will never build a website which needs a truck load of VMs to run it: almost all websites created by developers can run on just a few VMs at most. Yet, the most expensive change is right at the start: moving from one to two VMs. As soon as you have refactored your website code to run across multiple VMs, adding another one is just as easy as clicking a mouse button. But that first step, that's the problem here and as it's right there at the beginning of scaling the website, it's particularly strange that cloud vendors refuse to solve that problem and leave it to the developers to solve that. Which makes migrating 'to the cloud' particularly expensive.

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• Using JDialog with Tabbed Pane to draw different pictures [migrated]

  - by Bryam Ulloa

  I am using NetBeans, and I have a class that extends to JDialog, inside that Dialog box I have created a Tabbed Pane. The Tabbed Pane contains 6 different tabs, with 6 different panels of course. What I want to do is when I click on the different tabs, a diagram is supposed to be drawn with the paint method. My question is how can I draw on the different panels with just one paint method in another class being called from the Dialog class? Here is my code for the Dialog class: package GUI; public class NewJDialog extends javax.swing.JDialog{ /** * Creates new form NewJDialog */ public NewJDialog(java.awt.Frame parent, boolean modal) { super(parent, modal); initComponents(); } /** * This method is called from within the constructor to initialize the form. * WARNING: Do NOT modify this code. The content of this method is always * regenerated by the Form Editor. */ @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") // <editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc="Generated Code"> private void initComponents() { jTabbedPane1 = new javax.swing.JTabbedPane(); jPanel1 = new javax.swing.JPanel(); jPanel2 = new javax.swing.JPanel(); jPanel3 = new javax.swing.JPanel(); jPanel4 = new javax.swing.JPanel(); jPanel5 = new javax.swing.JPanel(); jPanel6 = new javax.swing.JPanel(); jPanel7 = new javax.swing.JPanel(); jLabel1 = new javax.swing.JLabel(); jLabel2 = new javax.swing.JLabel(); setDefaultCloseOperation(javax.swing.WindowConstants.DISPOSE_ON_CLOSE); javax.swing.GroupLayout jPanel1Layout = new javax.swing.GroupLayout(jPanel1); jPanel1.setLayout(jPanel1Layout); jPanel1Layout.setHorizontalGroup( jPanel1Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGap(0, 466, Short.MAX_VALUE) ); jPanel1Layout.setVerticalGroup( jPanel1Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGap(0, 242, Short.MAX_VALUE) ); jTabbedPane1.addTab("FCFS", jPanel1); javax.swing.GroupLayout jPanel2Layout = new javax.swing.GroupLayout(jPanel2); jPanel2.setLayout(jPanel2Layout); jPanel2Layout.setHorizontalGroup( jPanel2Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGap(0, 466, Short.MAX_VALUE) ); jPanel2Layout.setVerticalGroup( jPanel2Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGap(0, 242, Short.MAX_VALUE) ); jTabbedPane1.addTab("SSTF", jPanel2); javax.swing.GroupLayout jPanel3Layout = new javax.swing.GroupLayout(jPanel3); jPanel3.setLayout(jPanel3Layout); jPanel3Layout.setHorizontalGroup( jPanel3Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGap(0, 466, Short.MAX_VALUE) ); jPanel3Layout.setVerticalGroup( jPanel3Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGap(0, 242, Short.MAX_VALUE) ); jTabbedPane1.addTab("LOOK", jPanel3); javax.swing.GroupLayout jPanel4Layout = new javax.swing.GroupLayout(jPanel4); jPanel4.setLayout(jPanel4Layout); jPanel4Layout.setHorizontalGroup( jPanel4Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGap(0, 466, Short.MAX_VALUE) ); jPanel4Layout.setVerticalGroup( jPanel4Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGap(0, 242, Short.MAX_VALUE) ); jTabbedPane1.addTab("LOOK C", jPanel4); javax.swing.GroupLayout jPanel5Layout = new javax.swing.GroupLayout(jPanel5); jPanel5.setLayout(jPanel5Layout); jPanel5Layout.setHorizontalGroup( jPanel5Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGap(0, 466, Short.MAX_VALUE) ); jPanel5Layout.setVerticalGroup( jPanel5Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGap(0, 242, Short.MAX_VALUE) ); jTabbedPane1.addTab("SCAN", jPanel5); javax.swing.GroupLayout jPanel6Layout = new javax.swing.GroupLayout(jPanel6); jPanel6.setLayout(jPanel6Layout); jPanel6Layout.setHorizontalGroup( jPanel6Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGap(0, 466, Short.MAX_VALUE) ); jPanel6Layout.setVerticalGroup( jPanel6Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGap(0, 242, Short.MAX_VALUE) ); jTabbedPane1.addTab("SCAN C", jPanel6); getContentPane().add(jTabbedPane1, java.awt.BorderLayout.CENTER); jLabel1.setText("Distancia:"); jLabel2.setText("___________"); javax.swing.GroupLayout jPanel7Layout = new javax.swing.GroupLayout(jPanel7); jPanel7.setLayout(jPanel7Layout); jPanel7Layout.setHorizontalGroup( jPanel7Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGroup(jPanel7Layout.createSequentialGroup() .addGap(21, 21, 21) .addComponent(jLabel1) .addPreferredGap(javax.swing.LayoutStyle.ComponentPlacement.RELATED) .addComponent(jLabel2) .addContainerGap(331, Short.MAX_VALUE)) ); jPanel7Layout.setVerticalGroup( jPanel7Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.LEADING) .addGroup(jPanel7Layout.createSequentialGroup() .addContainerGap() .addGroup(jPanel7Layout.createParallelGroup(javax.swing.GroupLayout.Alignment.BASELINE) .addComponent(jLabel1) .addComponent(jLabel2)) .addContainerGap(15, Short.MAX_VALUE)) ); getContentPane().add(jPanel7, java.awt.BorderLayout.PAGE_START); pack(); }// </editor-fold> /** * @param args the command line arguments */ public static void main(String args[]) { /* Set the Nimbus look and feel */ //<editor-fold defaultstate="collapsed" desc=" Look and feel setting code (optional) "> /* If Nimbus (introduced in Java SE 6) is not available, stay with the default look and feel. * For details see http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/lookandfeel/plaf.html */ try { for (javax.swing.UIManager.LookAndFeelInfo info : javax.swing.UIManager.getInstalledLookAndFeels()) { if ("Nimbus".equals(info.getName())) { javax.swing.UIManager.setLookAndFeel(info.getClassName()); break; } } } catch (ClassNotFoundException ex) { java.util.logging.Logger.getLogger(NewJDialog.class.getName()).log(java.util.logging.Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } catch (InstantiationException ex) { java.util.logging.Logger.getLogger(NewJDialog.class.getName()).log(java.util.logging.Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } catch (IllegalAccessException ex) { java.util.logging.Logger.getLogger(NewJDialog.class.getName()).log(java.util.logging.Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } catch (javax.swing.UnsupportedLookAndFeelException ex) { java.util.logging.Logger.getLogger(NewJDialog.class.getName()).log(java.util.logging.Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } //</editor-fold> /* Create and display the dialog */ java.awt.EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() { public void run() { NewJDialog dialog = new NewJDialog(new javax.swing.JFrame(), true); dialog.addWindowListener(new java.awt.event.WindowAdapter() { @Override public void windowClosing(java.awt.event.WindowEvent e) { System.exit(0); } }); dialog.setVisible(true); } }); } // Variables declaration - do not modify private javax.swing.JLabel jLabel1; private javax.swing.JLabel jLabel2; private javax.swing.JPanel jPanel1; private javax.swing.JPanel jPanel2; private javax.swing.JPanel jPanel3; private javax.swing.JPanel jPanel4; private javax.swing.JPanel jPanel5; private javax.swing.JPanel jPanel6; private javax.swing.JPanel jPanel7; private javax.swing.JTabbedPane jTabbedPane1; // End of variables declaration } This is another class that I have created for the paint method: package GUI; import java.awt.Graphics; import javax.swing.JPanel; /** * * @author TOSHIBA */ public class Lienzo { private int width = 5; private int height = 5; private int y = 5; private int x = 0; private int x1 = 0; public Graphics Draw(Graphics g, int[] pistas) { //Im not sure if this is the correct way to do it //The diagram gets drawn according to values from an array //The array is not always the same thats why I used the different Panels for (int i = 0; i < pistas.length; i++) { x = pistas[i]; x1 = pistas[i + 1]; g.drawOval(x, y, width, height); g.drawString(Integer.toString(x), x, y); g.drawLine(x, y, x1, y); } return g; } } I hope you guys understand what I am trying to do with my program.

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• CI Deployment Of Azure Web Roles Using TeamCity

  - by srkirkland

  After recently migrating an important new website to use Windows Azure “Web Roles” I wanted an easier way to deploy new versions to the Azure Staging environment as well as a reliable process to rollback deployments to a certain “known good” source control commit checkpoint.  By configuring our JetBrains’ TeamCity CI server to utilize Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets to create new automated deployments, I’ll show you how to take control of your Azure publish process. Step 0: Configuring your Azure Project in Visual Studio Before we can start looking at automating the deployment, we should make sure manual deployments from Visual Studio are working properly.  Detailed information for setting up deployments can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ff683672.aspx#PublishAzure or by doing some quick Googling, but the basics are as follows: Install the prerequisite Windows Azure SDK Create an Azure project by right-clicking on your web project and choosing “Add Windows Azure Cloud Service Project” (or by manually adding that project type) Configure your Role and Service Configuration/Definition as desired Right-click on your azure project and choose “Publish,” create a publish profile, and push to your web role You don’t actually have to do step #4 and create a publish profile, but it’s a good exercise to make sure everything is working properly.  Once your Windows Azure project is setup correctly, we are ready to move on to understanding the Azure Publish process. Understanding the Azure Publish Process The actual Windows Azure project is fairly simple at its core—it builds your dependent roles (in our case, a web role) against a specific service and build configuration, and outputs two files: ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg: This is just the file containing your package configuration info, for example Instance Count, OsFamily, ConnectionString and other Setting information. ProjectName.Azure.cspkg: This is the package file that contains the guts of your deployment, including all deployable files. When you package your Azure project, these two files will be created within the directory ./[ProjectName].Azure/bin/[ConfigName]/app.publish/.  If you want to build your Azure Project from the command line, it’s as simple as calling MSBuild on the “Publish” target: msbuild.exe /target:Publish Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets The last pieces of the puzzle that make CI automation possible are the Azure PowerShell Cmdlets (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156055.aspx).  These cmdlets are what will let us create deployments without Visual Studio or other user intervention. Preparing TeamCity for Azure Deployments Now we are ready to get our TeamCity server setup so it can build and deploy Windows Azure projects, which we now know requires the Azure SDK and the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets. Installing the Azure SDK is easy enough, just go to https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/ and click “Install” Once this SDK is installed, I recommend running a test build to make sure your project is building correctly.  You’ll want to setup your build step using MSBuild with the “Publish” target against your solution file.  Mine looks like this: Assuming the build was successful, you will now have the two *.cspkg and *cscfg files within your build directory.  If the build was red (failed), take a look at the build logs and keep an eye out for “unsupported project type” or other build errors, which will need to be addressed before the CI deployment can be completed. With a successful build we are now ready to install and configure the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets: Follow the instructions at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj554332 to install the Cmdlets and configure PowerShell After installing the Cmdlets, you’ll need to get your Azure Subscription Info using the Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile command. Store the resulting *.publishsettings file somewhere you can get to easily, like C:\TeamCity, because you will need to reference it later from your deploy script. Scripting the CI Deploy Process Now that the cmdlets are installed on our TeamCity server, we are ready to script the actual deployment using a TeamCity “PowerShell” build runner.  Before we look at any code, here’s a breakdown of our deployment algorithm: Setup your variables, including the location of the *.cspkg and *cscfg files produced in the earlier MSBuild step (remember, the folder is something like [ProjectName].Azure/bin/[ConfigName]/app.publish/ Import the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets Import and set your Azure Subscription information (this is basically your authentication/authorization step, so protect your settings file Now look for a current deployment, and if you find one Upgrade it, else Create a new deployment Pretty simple and straightforward.  Now let’s look at the code (also available as a gist here: https://gist.github.com/3694398): $subscription = "[Your Subscription Name]" $service = "[Your Azure Service Name]" $slot = "staging" #staging or production $package = "[ProjectName]\bin\[BuildConfigName]\app.publish\[ProjectName].cspkg" $configuration = "[ProjectName]\bin\[BuildConfigName]\app.publish\ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg" $timeStampFormat = "g" $deploymentLabel = "ContinuousDeploy to $service v%build.number%"   Write-Output "Running Azure Imports" Import-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\PowerShell\Azure\*.psd1" Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile "C:\TeamCity\[PSFileName].publishsettings" Set-AzureSubscription -CurrentStorageAccount $service -SubscriptionName $subscription   function Publish(){ $deployment = Get-AzureDeployment -ServiceName $service -Slot $slot -ErrorVariable a -ErrorAction silentlycontinue   if ($a[0] -ne $null) { Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - No deployment is detected. Creating a new deployment. " } if ($deployment.Name -ne $null) { #Update deployment inplace (usually faster, cheaper, won't destroy VIP) Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Deployment exists in $servicename. Upgrading deployment." UpgradeDeployment } else { CreateNewDeployment } }   function CreateNewDeployment() { write-progress -id 3 -activity "Creating New Deployment" -Status "In progress" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Creating New Deployment: In progress"   $opstat = New-AzureDeployment -Slot $slot -Package $package -Configuration $configuration -label $deploymentLabel -ServiceName $service   $completeDeployment = Get-AzureDeployment -ServiceName $service -Slot $slot $completeDeploymentID = $completeDeployment.deploymentid   write-progress -id 3 -activity "Creating New Deployment" -completed -Status "Complete" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Creating New Deployment: Complete, Deployment ID: $completeDeploymentID" }   function UpgradeDeployment() { write-progress -id 3 -activity "Upgrading Deployment" -Status "In progress" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Upgrading Deployment: In progress"   # perform Update-Deployment $setdeployment = Set-AzureDeployment -Upgrade -Slot $slot -Package $package -Configuration $configuration -label $deploymentLabel -ServiceName $service -Force   $completeDeployment = Get-AzureDeployment -ServiceName $service -Slot $slot $completeDeploymentID = $completeDeployment.deploymentid   write-progress -id 3 -activity "Upgrading Deployment" -completed -Status "Complete" Write-Output "$(Get-Date -f $timeStampFormat) - Upgrading Deployment: Complete, Deployment ID: $completeDeploymentID" }   Write-Output "Create Azure Deployment" Publish   Creating the TeamCity Build Step The only thing left is to create a second build step, after your MSBuild “Publish” step, with the build runner type “PowerShell”.  Then set your script to “Source Code,” the script execution mode to “Put script into PowerShell stdin with “-Command” arguments” and then copy/paste in the above script (replacing the placeholder sections with your values).  This should look like the following:   Wrap Up After combining the MSBuild /target:Publish step (which creates the necessary Windows Azure *.cspkg and *.cscfg files) and a PowerShell script step which utilizes the Azure PowerShell Cmdlets, we have a fully deployable build configuration in TeamCity.  You can configure this step to run whenever you’d like using build triggers – for example, you could even deploy whenever a new master branch deploy comes in and passes all required tests. In the script I’ve hardcoded that every deployment goes to the Staging environment on Azure, but you could deploy straight to Production if you want to, or even setup a deployment configuration variable and set it as desired. After your TeamCity Build Configuration is complete, you’ll see something that looks like this: Whenever you click the “Run” button, all of your code will be compiled, published, and deployed to Windows Azure! One additional enormous benefit of automating the process this way is that you can easily deploy any specific source control changeset by clicking the little ellipsis button next to "Run.”  This will bring up a dialog like the one below, where you can select the last change to use for your deployment.  Since Azure Web Role deployments don’t have any rollback functionality, this is a critical feature.   Enjoy!

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• MediaRecorder prepare() causes segfault

  - by dwilde1

  Folks, I have a situation where my MediaRecorder instance causes a segfault. I'm working with a HTC Hero, Android 1.5+APIs. I've tried all variations, including 3gpp and H.263 and reducing the video resolution to 320x240. What am I missing? The state machine causes 4 MediaPlayer beeps and then turns on the video camera. Here's the pertinent source: UPDATE: ADDING SURFACE CREATE INFO I have rebooted the device based on previous answer to similar question. UPDATE 2: I seem to be following the MediaRecorder state machine perfectly, and if I trap out the MR code, the blank surface displays perfectly and everything else functions perfectly. I can record videos manually and play back via MediaPlayer in my code, so there should be nothing wrong with the underlying code. I've copied sample code on the surface and surfaceHolder code. I've looked at the MR instance in the Debug perspective in Eclipse and see that all (known) variables seem to be instantiated correctly. The setter calls are all now implemented in the exaxct order specced in the state diagram. UPDATE 3: I've tried all permission combinations: CAMERA + RECORD_AUDIO+RECORD_VIDEO, CAMERA only, RECORD_AUDIO+RECORD_VIDEO This is driving me bats! :))) // in activity class definition protected MediaPlayer mPlayer; protected MediaRecorder mRecorder; protected boolean inCapture = false; protected int phaseCapture = 0; protected int durCapturePhase = INF; protected SurfaceView surface; protected SurfaceHolder surfaceHolder; // in onCreate() // panelPreview is an empty LinearLayout surface = new SurfaceView(getApplicationContext()); surfaceHolder = surface.getHolder(); surfaceHolder.setType(SurfaceHolder.SURFACE_TYPE_PUSH_BUFFERS); panelPreview.addView(surface); // in timer handler runnable if (mRecorder == null) mRecorder = new MediaRecorder(); mRecorder.setAudioSource(MediaRecorder.AudioSource.MIC); mRecorder.setVideoSource(MediaRecorder.VideoSource.CAMERA); mRecorder.setOutputFormat(MediaRecorder.OutputFormat.THREE_GPP); mRecorder.setAudioEncoder(MediaRecorder.AudioEncoder.AMR_NB); mRecorder.setOutputFile(path + "/" + vlip); mRecorder.setVideoSize(320, 240); mRecorder.setVideoFrameRate(15); mRecorder.setPreviewDisplay(surfaceHolder.getSurface()); panelPreview.setVisibility(LinearLayout.VISIBLE); mRecorder.prepare(); mRecorder.start(); Here is a complete log trace for the process run and crash: I/ActivityManager( 80): Start proc com.ejf.convince.jenplus for activity com.ejf.convince.jenplus/.JenPLUS: pid=17738 uid=10075 gids={1006, 3003} I/jdwp (17738): received file descriptor 10 from ADB W/System.err(17738): Can't dispatch DDM chunk 46454154: no handler defined W/System.err(17738): Can't dispatch DDM chunk 4d505251: no handler defined I/WindowManager( 80): Screen status=true, current orientation=-1, SensorEnabled=false I/WindowManager( 80): needSensorRunningLp, mCurrentAppOrientation =-1 I/WindowManager( 80): Enabling listeners W/ActivityThread(17738): Application com.ejf.convince.jenplus is waiting for the debugger on port 8100... I/System.out(17738): Sending WAIT chunk I/dalvikvm(17738): Debugger is active I/AlertDialog( 80): [onCreate] auto launch SIP. I/WindowManager( 80): onOrientationChanged, rotation changed to 0 I/System.out(17738): Debugger has connected I/System.out(17738): waiting for debugger to settle... I/System.out(17738): waiting for debugger to settle... I/System.out(17738): waiting for debugger to settle... I/System.out(17738): waiting for debugger to settle... I/System.out(17738): waiting for debugger to settle... I/System.out(17738): waiting for debugger to settle... I/System.out(17738): waiting for debugger to settle... I/System.out(17738): waiting for debugger to settle... I/System.out(17738): waiting for debugger to settle... I/System.out(17738): waiting for debugger to settle... I/System.out(17738): waiting for debugger to settle... I/System.out(17738): waiting for debugger to settle... I/System.out(17738): debugger has settled (1370) I/ActivityManager( 80): Displayed activity com.ejf.convince.jenplus/.JenPLUS: 5186 ms I/OpenCore( 2696): [Hank debug] LN 289 FN CreateNode I/AudioHardwareMSM72XX( 2696): AUDIO_START: start kernel pcm_out driver. W/AudioFlinger( 2696): write blocked for 96 msecs I/PlayerDriver( 2696): CIQ 1625 sendEvent state=5 I/OpenCore( 2696): [Hank debug] LN 289 FN CreateNode I/PlayerDriver( 2696): CIQ 1625 sendEvent state=5 I/OpenCore( 2696): [Hank debug] LN 289 FN CreateNode I/PlayerDriver( 2696): CIQ 1625 sendEvent state=5 I/OpenCore( 2696): [Hank debug] LN 289 FN CreateNode I/PlayerDriver( 2696): CIQ 1625 sendEvent state=5 W/AuthorDriver( 2696): Intended width(640) exceeds the max allowed width(352). Max width is used instead. W/AuthorDriver( 2696): Intended height(480) exceeds the max allowed height(288). Max height is used instead. I/AudioHardwareMSM72XX( 2696): AudioHardware pcm playback is going to standby. I/DEBUG (16094): *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** I/DEBUG (16094): Build fingerprint: 'sprint/htc_heroc/heroc/heroc: 1.5/CUPCAKE/85027:user/release-keys' I/DEBUG (16094): pid: 17738, tid: 17738 com.ejf.convince.jenplus Thanks in advance! -- Don Wilde http://www.ConvinceProject.com

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• Reference a GNU C (POSIX) DLL built in GCC against Cygwin, from C#/NET

  - by Dale Halliwell

  Here is what I want: I have a huge legacy C/C++ codebase written for POSIX, including some very POSIX specific stuff like pthreads. This can be compiled on Cygwin/GCC and run as an executable under Windows with the Cygwin DLL. What I would like to do is build the codebase itself into a Windows DLL that I can then reference from C# and write a wrapper around it to access some parts of it programatically. I have tried this approach with the very simple "hello world" example at http://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/dll.html and it doesn't seem to work. #include <stdio.h> extern "C" __declspec(dllexport) int hello(); int hello() { printf ("Hello World!\n"); return 42; } I believe I should be able to reference a DLL built with the above code in C# using something like: [DllImport("kernel32.dll")] public static extern IntPtr LoadLibrary(string dllToLoad); [DllImport("kernel32.dll")] public static extern IntPtr GetProcAddress(IntPtr hModule, string procedureName); [DllImport("kernel32.dll")] public static extern bool FreeLibrary(IntPtr hModule); [UnmanagedFunctionPointer(CallingConvention.Cdecl)] private delegate int hello(); static void Main(string[] args) { var path = Path.Combine(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "helloworld.dll"); IntPtr pDll = LoadLibrary(path); IntPtr pAddressOfFunctionToCall = GetProcAddress(pDll, "hello"); hello hello = (hello)Marshal.GetDelegateForFunctionPointer( pAddressOfFunctionToCall, typeof(hello)); int theResult = hello(); Console.WriteLine(theResult.ToString()); bool result = FreeLibrary(pDll); Console.ReadKey(); } But this approach doesn't seem to work. LoadLibrary returns null. It can find the DLL (helloworld.dll), it is just like it can't load it or find the exported function. I am sure that if I get this basic case working I can reference the rest of my codebase in this way. Any suggestions or pointers, or does anyone know if what I want is even possible? Thanks. Edit: Examined my DLL with Dependency Walker (great tool, thanks) and it seems to export the function correctly. Question: should I be referencing it as the function name Dependency Walker seems to find (_Z5hellov)? Edit2: Just to show you I have tried it, linking directly to the dll at relative or absolute path (i.e. not using LoadLibrary): [DllImport(@"C:\.....\helloworld.dll")] public static extern int hello(); static void Main(string[] args) { int theResult = hello(); Console.WriteLine(theResult.ToString()); Console.ReadKey(); } This fails with: "Unable to load DLL 'C:.....\helloworld.dll': Invalid access to memory location. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800703E6) *Edit 3: * Oleg has suggested running dumpbin.exe on my dll, this is the output: Dump of file helloworld.dll File Type: DLL Section contains the following exports for helloworld.dll 00000000 characteristics 4BD5037F time date stamp Mon Apr 26 15:07:43 2010 0.00 version 1 ordinal base 1 number of functions 1 number of names ordinal hint RVA name 1 0 000010F0 hello Summary 1000 .bss 1000 .data 1000 .debug_abbrev 1000 .debug_info 1000 .debug_line 1000 .debug_pubnames 1000 .edata 1000 .eh_frame 1000 .idata 1000 .reloc 1000 .text Edit 4 Thanks everyone for the help, I managed to get it working. Oleg's answer gave me the information I needed to find out what I was doing wrong. There are 2 ways to do this. One is to build with the gcc -mno-cygwin compiler flag, which builds the dll without the cygwin dll, basically as if you had built it in MingW. Building it this way got my hello world example working! However, MingW doesn't have all the libraries that cygwin has in the installer, so if your POSIX code has dependencies on these libraries (mine had heaps) you can't do this way. And if your POSIX code didn't have those dependencies, why not just build for Win32 from the beginning. So that's not much help unless you want to spend time setting up MingW properly. The other option is to build with the Cygwin DLL. The Cygwin DLL needs an initialization function init() to be called before it can be used. This is why my code wasn't working before. The code below loads and runs my hello world example. //[DllImport(@"hello.dll", EntryPoint = "#1",SetLastError = true)] //static extern int helloworld(); //don't do this! cygwin needs to be init first [DllImport("kernel32", CharSet = CharSet.Ansi, ExactSpelling = true, SetLastError = true)] static extern IntPtr GetProcAddress(IntPtr hModule, string procName); [DllImport("kernel32", SetLastError = true)] static extern IntPtr LoadLibrary(string lpFileName); public delegate int MyFunction(); static void Main(string[] args) { //load cygwin dll IntPtr pcygwin = LoadLibrary("cygwin1.dll"); IntPtr pcyginit = GetProcAddress(pcygwin, "cygwin_dll_init"); Action init = (Action)Marshal.GetDelegateForFunctionPointer(pcyginit, typeof(Action)); init(); IntPtr phello = LoadLibrary("hello.dll"); IntPtr pfn = GetProcAddress(phello, "helloworld"); MyFunction helloworld = (MyFunction)Marshal.GetDelegateForFunctionPointer(pfn, typeof(MyFunction)); Console.WriteLine(helloworld()); Console.ReadKey(); } Thanks to everyone that answered~~

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• Conversion of BizTalk Projects to Use the New WCF-SAP Adaptor

  - by Geordie

  We are in the process of upgrading our BizTalk Environment from BizTalk 2006 R2 to BizTalk 2010. The SAP adaptor in BizTalk 2010 is an all new and more powerful WCF-SAP adaptor. When my colleagues tested out the new adaptor they discovered that the format of the data extracted from SAP was not identical to the old adaptor. This is not a big deal if the structure of the messages from SAP is simple. In this case we were receiving the delivery and invoice iDocs. Both these structures are complex especially the delivery document. Over the past few years I have tweaked the delivery mapping to remove bugs from original mapping. The idea of redoing these maps did not appeal and due to the current work load was not even an option. I opted for a rather crude alternative of pulling in the iDoc in the new typed format and then adding a static map at the start of the orchestration to convert the data to the old schema.  Note WCF-SAP data formats (on the binding tab of the configuration dialog box is the ‘RecieiveIdocFormat’ field): Typed:  Returns a XML document with the hierarchy represented in XML and all fields being represented by XML tags. RFC: Returns an XML document with the hierarchy represented in XML but the iDoc lines in flat file format. String: This returns the iDoc in a format that is closest to the original flat file format but is still wrapped with some top level XML tags. The files also contained some strange characters at the end of each line. I started with the invoice document and it was quite straight forward to add the mapping but this is where my problems started. The orchestrations for these documents are dynamic and so require the identity of the partner to be able to correctly configure the orchestration. The partner identity is in the EDI_DC40 segment of the iDoc. In the old project the RECPRN node of the segment was promoted. The code to set a variable to the partner ID was now failing. After lot of head scratching I discovered the problem was due to the addition of Namespaces to the fields in the EDI_DC40 segment. To overcome this I needed to use an xPath query with a Namespace Manager. This had to be done in custom code. I now tried to repeat the process with the delivery document. Unfortunately when we tried to get sample typed data from SAP an exception was thrown. The adapter "WCF-SAP" raised an error message. Details "Microsoft.ServiceModel.Channels.Common.XmlReaderGenerationException: The segment or group definition E2EDKA1001 was not found in the IDoc metadata. The UniqueId of the IDoc type is: IDOCTYP/3/DESADV01/ZASNEXT1/640. For Receive operations, the SAP adapter does not support unreleased segments.   Our guess is that when the WCF-SAP adaptor tries to down load the data it retrieves a data schema from SAP. For some reason the schema does not match the data. This may be due to the version of SAP we are running or due to a customization. Either way resolving this problem did not look easy. When doing some research on this problem I found an article showing me how to get the data from SAP using the WCF-SAP adaptor without any XML tags. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adapters/archive/2007/10/05/receiving-idocs-getting-the-raw-idoc-data.aspx Reproduction of Mustansir blog: Since the WCF based SAP Adapter is ... well, WCF based, all data flowing in and out of the adapter is encapsulated within a SOAP message. Which means there are those pesky xml tags all over the place. If you want to receive an Idoc from SAP, you can receive it in "Typed" format (in which case each column in each segment of the idoc appears within its own xml tag), or you can receive it in "String" format (in which case there are just 2 xml tags at the top, the raw xml data in string/flat file format, and the 2 closing xml tags). In "String" format, an incoming idoc (for ORDERS05, containing 5 data records) would look like: <ReceiveIdoc ><idocData>EDI_DC40 8000000000001064985620 E2EDK01005 800000000000106498500000100000001 E2EDK14 8000000000001064985000002000000020111000 E2EDK14 8000000000001064985000003000000020081000 E2EDK14 80000000000010649850000040000000200710 E2EDK14 80000000000010649850000050000000200600</idocData></ReceiveIdoc> (I have trimmed part of the control record so that it fits cleanly here on one line). Now, you're only interested in the IDOC data, and don't care much for the XML tags. It isn't that difficult to write your own pipeline component, or even some logic in the orchestration to remove the tags, right? Well, you don't need to write any extra code at all - the WCF Adapter can help you here! During the configuration of your one-way Receive Location using WCF-Custom, navigate to the Messages tab. Under the section "Inbound BizTalk Messge Body", select the "Path" radio button, and: (a) Enter the body path expression as: /*[local-name()='ReceiveIdoc']/*[local-name()='idocData'] (b) Choose "String" for the Node Encoding. What we've done is, used an XPATH to pull out the value of the "idocData" node from the XML. Your Receive Location will now emit text containing only the idoc data. You can at this point, for example, put the Flat File Pipeline component to convert the flat text into a different xml format based on some other schema you already have, and receive your version of the xml formatted message in your orchestration.   This was potentially a much easier solution than adding the static maps to the orchestrations and overcame the issue with ‘Typed’ delivery documents. Not quite so fast… Note: When I followed Mustansir’s blog the characters at the end of each line disappeared. After configuring the adaptor and passing the iDoc data into the original flat file receive pipelines I was receiving exceptions. There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: "PAPINETPipelines.DeliveryFlatFileReceive, CustomerIntegration2.PAPINET.Pipelines, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=4ca3635fbf092bbb" Source: "Pipeline " Receive Port: "recSAP_Delivery" URI: "D:\CustomerIntegration2\SAP\Delivery\*.xml" Reason: An error occurred when parsing the incoming document: "Unexpected data found while looking for: 'Z2EDPZ7' The current definition being parsed is E2EDP07GRP. The stream offset where the error occured is 8859. The line number where the error occured is 23. The column where the error occured is 0.". Although the new flat file looked the same as the old one there was a differences. In the original file all lines in the document were exactly 1064 character long. In the new file all lines were truncated to the last alphanumeric character. The final piece of the puzzle was to add a custom pipeline component to pad all the lines to 1064 characters. This component was added to the decode node of the custom delivery and invoice flat file disassembler pipelines. Execute method of the custom pipeline component: public IBaseMessage Execute(IPipelineContext pc, IBaseMessage inmsg) { //Convert Stream to a string Stream s = null; IBaseMessagePart bodyPart = inmsg.BodyPart;   // NOTE inmsg.BodyPart.Data is implemented only as a setter in the http adapter API and a //getter and setter for the file adapter. Use GetOriginalDataStream to get data instead. if (bodyPart != null) s = bodyPart.GetOriginalDataStream();   string newMsg = string.Empty; string strLine; try { StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(s); strLine = sr.ReadLine(); while (strLine != null) { //Execute padding code if (strLine != null) strLine = strLine.PadRight(1064, ' ') + "\r\n"; newMsg += strLine; strLine = sr.ReadLine(); } sr.Close(); } catch (IOException ex) { throw new Exception("Error occured trying to pad the message to 1064 charactors"); }   //Convert back to stream and set to Data property inmsg.BodyPart.Data = new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(newMsg)); ; //reset the position of the stream to zero inmsg.BodyPart.Data.Position = 0; return inmsg; }

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• Metro: Grouping Items in a ListView Control

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The purpose of this blog entry is to explain how you can group list items when displaying the items in a WinJS ListView control. In particular, you learn how to group a list of products by product category. Displaying a grouped list of items in a ListView control requires completing the following steps: Create a Grouped data source from a List data source Create a Grouped Header Template Declare the ListView control so it groups the list items Creating the Grouped Data Source Normally, you bind a ListView control to a WinJS.Binding.List object. If you want to render list items in groups, then you need to bind the ListView to a grouped data source instead. The following code – contained in a file named products.js — illustrates how you can create a standard WinJS.Binding.List object from a JavaScript array and then return a grouped data source from the WinJS.Binding.List object by calling its createGrouped() method: (function () { "use strict"; // Create List data source var products = new WinJS.Binding.List([ { name: "Milk", price: 2.44, category: "Beverages" }, { name: "Oranges", price: 1.99, category: "Fruit" }, { name: "Wine", price: 8.55, category: "Beverages" }, { name: "Apples", price: 2.44, category: "Fruit" }, { name: "Steak", price: 1.99, category: "Other" }, { name: "Eggs", price: 2.44, category: "Other" }, { name: "Mushrooms", price: 1.99, category: "Other" }, { name: "Yogurt", price: 2.44, category: "Other" }, { name: "Soup", price: 1.99, category: "Other" }, { name: "Cereal", price: 2.44, category: "Other" }, { name: "Pepsi", price: 1.99, category: "Beverages" } ]); // Create grouped data source var groupedProducts = products.createGrouped( function (dataItem) { return dataItem.category; }, function (dataItem) { return { title: dataItem.category }; }, function (group1, group2) { return group1.charCodeAt(0) - group2.charCodeAt(0); } ); // Expose the grouped data source WinJS.Namespace.define("ListViewDemos", { products: groupedProducts }); })(); Notice that the createGrouped() method requires three functions as arguments: groupKey – This function associates each list item with a group. The function accepts a data item and returns a key which represents a group. In the code above, we return the value of the category property for each product. groupData – This function returns the data item displayed by the group header template. For example, in the code above, the function returns a title for the group which is displayed in the group header template. groupSorter – This function determines the order in which the groups are displayed. The code above displays the groups in alphabetical order: Beverages, Fruit, Other. Creating the Group Header Template Whenever you create a ListView control, you need to create an item template which you use to control how each list item is rendered. When grouping items in a ListView control, you also need to create a group header template. The group header template is used to render the header for each group of list items. Here’s the markup for both the item template and the group header template: <div id="productTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="product"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> <div id="productGroupHeaderTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="productGroupHeader"> <h1 data-win-bind="innerText: title"></h1> </div> </div> You should declare the two templates in the same file as you declare the ListView control – for example, the default.html file. Declaring the ListView Control The final step is to declare the ListView control. Here’s the required markup: <div data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.dataSource, itemTemplate:select('#productTemplate'), groupDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.groups.dataSource, groupHeaderTemplate:select('#productGroupHeaderTemplate'), layout: {type: WinJS.UI.GridLayout} }"> </div> In the markup above, six properties of the ListView control are set when the control is declared. First the itemDataSource and itemTemplate are specified. Nothing new here. Next, the group data source and group header template are specified. Notice that the group data source is represented by the ListViewDemos.products.groups.dataSource property of the grouped data source. Finally, notice that the layout of the ListView is changed to Grid Layout. You are required to use Grid Layout (instead of the default List Layout) when displaying grouped items in a ListView. Here’s the entire contents of the default.html page: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>ListViewDemos</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- ListViewDemos references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> <script src="/js/products.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <style type="text/css"> .product { width: 200px; height: 100px; border: white solid 1px; font-size: x-large; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="productTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="product"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> <div id="productGroupHeaderTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="productGroupHeader"> <h1 data-win-bind="innerText: title"></h1> </div> </div> <div data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.dataSource, itemTemplate:select('#productTemplate'), groupDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.groups.dataSource, groupHeaderTemplate:select('#productGroupHeaderTemplate'), layout: {type: WinJS.UI.GridLayout} }"> </div> </body> </html> Notice that the default.html page includes a reference to the products.js file: <script src=”/js/products.js” type=”text/javascript”></script> The default.html page also contains the declarations of the item template, group header template, and ListView control. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to explain how you can group items in a ListView control. You learned how to create a grouped data source, a group header template, and declare a ListView so that it groups its list items.

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• ASP.NET MVC 2 throws exception for ‘favicon.ico’

  - by nmarun

  I must be on fire or something – third blog in 2 days… awesome! Before I begin, in case you’re wondering, favicon.ico is the small image that appears to the left of your web address, once the page loads. In order to learn more about MVC or any thing for that matter, it’s better to look at the source itself. Since MVC is open source (at least some part of it is), I started looking at the source code that’s available for download. While doing so, I hit Steve Sanderson’s blog site where he explains in great detail the way to debug your app using ASP.NET MVC source code. For those who are not aware, Steve Sanderson’s book - Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework, is one of the best books to learn about MVC. Alrighty, I followed the article and I hit F5 to debug the default / unchanged MVC project. I put a breakpoint in the DefaultControllerFactory.cs, CreateController() method. To know a little more about this class and the method, read this. Sure enough, the control stopped at the breakpoint and I hit F5 again and the page rendered just fine. But then what’s this? The breakpoint was hit again, as if something else was being requested. I now hovered my mouse over the ‘controllerName’ parameter and it says – favicon.ico. This by itself was more than enough for me to raise my eye-brows, but what happened next just took the ground below my feet. Oh, oh, I’m sorry I’m just typing, no code, no image, so here are a couple of screen captures. The first one shows the request for the Home controller; I get ‘Home’ when I hover over the parameter: And here’s the one that shows the same for call for ‘favicon.ico’. So, I step through the code and when the control reaches line 91 – GetControllerInstance() method, I step in. This is when I had the ‘ground-losing’ experience. Wow, an exception is being thrown for this file and that too in RTM. For some reason MVC thinks, this as a controller and tries to run it through the MvcHandler and it hits this snag. So it seems like this will happen for any MVC 2 site and this did not happen for me in the previous version of MVC. Before I get to how to resolve it, here’s another way of reproducing this exception. Revert back all your changes that you did as mentioned in Steve’s blog above. Now, add a class to your MVC project and call it say, MyControllerFactory and let this inherit from DefaultControllerFactory class. (Read this for details on the DefaultControllerFactory class is and how it is used in a different context). Add an override for the CreateController() method and for the sake of this blog, just copy the same content from the DefaultControllerFactory class. The last step is to tell your MVC app to use the MyControllerFactory class instead of the default one. To do this, go to your Global.asax.cs file and add line 6 of the snippet below: 1: protected void Application_Start() 2: { 3: AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas(); 4:   5: RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); 6: ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(new MyControllerFactory()); 7: } .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; } Now, you’re ready to reproduce the issue. Just F5 the project and when you hit the overridden CreateController() method for the second time, this is what it looks like for me: And continuing further gives me the same exception. I believe this is something that MS should fix, as not having ‘favicon.ico’ file will be common for most of the applications. So I think the when you create an MVC project, line 6 should be added by default by Visual Studio itself: 1: public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication 2: { 3: public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) 4: { 5: routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); 6: routes.IgnoreRoute("favicon.ico"); 7:   8: routes.MapRoute( 9: "Default", // Route name 10: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters 11: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults 12: ); 13: } .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; } There it is, that’s the solution to avoid the exception altogether. I tried this both IE8 and Firefox browsers and was able to successfully reproduce the error. Hope someone will look at this issue and find a fix. Just before I finish up, I found another ‘bug’, if you want to call it, with Visual Studio 2008. Remember how you could change what browser you want your application to run in by just right clicking on the .aspx file and choosing ‘Browse with…’? Seems like that’s missing when you’re working with an MVC project. In order to test the above bug in the other browser, I had to load a classic ASP.NET project, change the settings and then run my MVC project. Felt kinda ‘icky’, for lack of a better word.

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• Optimizing AES modes on Solaris for Intel Westmere

  - by danx

  Optimizing AES modes on Solaris for Intel Westmere Review AES is a strong method of symmetric (secret-key) encryption. It is a U.S. FIPS-approved cryptographic algorithm (FIPS 197) that operates on 16-byte blocks. AES has been available since 2001 and is widely used. However, AES by itself has a weakness. AES encryption isn't usually used by itself because identical blocks of plaintext are always encrypted into identical blocks of ciphertext. This encryption can be easily attacked with "dictionaries" of common blocks of text and allows one to more-easily discern the content of the unknown cryptotext. This mode of encryption is called "Electronic Code Book" (ECB), because one in theory can keep a "code book" of all known cryptotext and plaintext results to cipher and decipher AES. In practice, a complete "code book" is not practical, even in electronic form, but large dictionaries of common plaintext blocks is still possible. Here's a diagram of encrypting input data using AES ECB mode: Block 1 Block 2 PlainTextInput PlainTextInput | | | | \/ \/ AESKey-->(AES Encryption) AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | | | | \/ \/ CipherTextOutput CipherTextOutput Block 1 Block 2 What's the solution to the same cleartext input producing the same ciphertext output? The solution is to further process the encrypted or decrypted text in such a way that the same text produces different output. This usually involves an Initialization Vector (IV) and XORing the decrypted or encrypted text. As an example, I'll illustrate CBC mode encryption: Block 1 Block 2 PlainTextInput PlainTextInput | | | | \/ \/ IV >----->(XOR) +------------->(XOR) +---> . . . . | | | | | | | | \/ | \/ | AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | | | | | | | | | \/ | \/ | CipherTextOutput ------+ CipherTextOutput -------+ Block 1 Block 2 The steps for CBC encryption are: Start with a 16-byte Initialization Vector (IV), choosen randomly. XOR the IV with the first block of input plaintext Encrypt the result with AES using a user-provided key. The result is the first 16-bytes of output cryptotext. Use the cryptotext (instead of the IV) of the previous block to XOR with the next input block of plaintext Another mode besides CBC is Counter Mode (CTR). As with CBC mode, it also starts with a 16-byte IV. However, for subsequent blocks, the IV is just incremented by one. Also, the IV ix XORed with the AES encryption result (not the plain text input). Here's an illustration: Block 1 Block 2 PlainTextInput PlainTextInput | | | | \/ \/ AESKey-->(AES Encryption) AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | | | | \/ \/ IV >----->(XOR) IV + 1 >---->(XOR) IV + 2 ---> . . . . | | | | \/ \/ CipherTextOutput CipherTextOutput Block 1 Block 2 Optimization Which of these modes can be parallelized? ECB encryption/decryption can be parallelized because it does more than plain AES encryption and decryption, as mentioned above. CBC encryption can't be parallelized because it depends on the output of the previous block. However, CBC decryption can be parallelized because all the encrypted blocks are known at the beginning. CTR encryption and decryption can be parallelized because the input to each block is known--it's just the IV incremented by one for each subsequent block. So, in summary, for ECB, CBC, and CTR modes, encryption and decryption can be parallelized with the exception of CBC encryption. How do we parallelize encryption? By interleaving. Usually when reading and writing data there are pipeline "stalls" (idle processor cycles) that result from waiting for memory to be loaded or stored to or from CPU registers. Since the software is written to encrypt/decrypt the next data block where pipeline stalls usually occurs, we can avoid stalls and crypt with fewer cycles. This software processes 4 blocks at a time, which ensures virtually no waiting ("stalling") for reading or writing data in memory. Other Optimizations Besides interleaving, other optimizations performed are Loading the entire key schedule into the 128-bit %xmm registers. This is done once for per 4-block of data (since 4 blocks of data is processed, when present). The following is loaded: the entire "key schedule" (user input key preprocessed for encryption and decryption). This takes 11, 13, or 15 registers, for AES-128, AES-192, and AES-256, respectively The input data is loaded into another %xmm register The same register contains the output result after encrypting/decrypting Using SSSE 4 instructions (AESNI). Besides the aesenc, aesenclast, aesdec, aesdeclast, aeskeygenassist, and aesimc AESNI instructions, Intel has several other instructions that operate on the 128-bit %xmm registers. Some common instructions for encryption are: pxor exclusive or (very useful), movdqu load/store a %xmm register from/to memory, pshufb shuffle bytes for byte swapping, pclmulqdq carry-less multiply for GCM mode Combining AES encryption/decryption with CBC or CTR modes processing. Instead of loading input data twice (once for AES encryption/decryption, and again for modes (CTR or CBC, for example) processing, the input data is loaded once as both AES and modes operations occur at in the same function Performance Everyone likes pretty color charts, so here they are. I ran these on Solaris 11 running on a Piketon Platform system with a 4-core Intel Clarkdale processor @3.20GHz. Clarkdale which is part of the Westmere processor architecture family. The "before" case is Solaris 11, unmodified. Keep in mind that the "before" case already has been optimized with hand-coded Intel AESNI assembly. The "after" case has combined AES-NI and mode instructions, interleaved 4 blocks at-a-time. « For the first table, lower is better (milliseconds). The first table shows the performance improvement using the Solaris encrypt(1) and decrypt(1) CLI commands. I encrypted and decrypted a 1/2 GByte file on /tmp (swap tmpfs). Encryption improved by about 40% and decryption improved by about 80%. AES-128 is slighty faster than AES-256, as expected. The second table shows more detail timings for CBC, CTR, and ECB modes for the 3 AES key sizes and different data lengths. » The results shown are the percentage improvement as shown by an internal PKCS#11 microbenchmark. And keep in mind the previous baseline code already had optimized AESNI assembly! The keysize (AES-128, 192, or 256) makes little difference in relative percentage improvement (although, of course, AES-128 is faster than AES-256). Larger data sizes show better improvement than 128-byte data. Availability This software is in Solaris 11 FCS. It is available in the 64-bit libcrypto library and the "aes" Solaris kernel module. You must be running hardware that supports AESNI (for example, Intel Westmere and Sandy Bridge, microprocessor architectures). The easiest way to determine if AES-NI is available is with the isainfo(1) command. For example, $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu 32-bit i386 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov sep cx8 tsc fpu No special configuration or setup is needed to take advantage of this software. Solaris libraries and kernel automatically determine if it's running on AESNI-capable machines and execute the correctly-tuned software for the current microprocessor. Summary Maximum throughput of AES cipher modes can be achieved by combining AES encryption with modes processing, interleaving encryption of 4 blocks at a time, and using Intel's wide 128-bit %xmm registers and instructions. References "Block cipher modes of operation", Wikipedia Good overview of AES modes (ECB, CBC, CTR, etc.) "Advanced Encryption Standard", Wikipedia "Current Modes" describes NIST-approved block cipher modes (ECB,CBC, CFB, OFB, CCM, GCM)

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• Metro: Grouping Items in a ListView Control

  - by Stephen.Walther

  The purpose of this blog entry is to explain how you can group list items when displaying the items in a WinJS ListView control. In particular, you learn how to group a list of products by product category. Displaying a grouped list of items in a ListView control requires completing the following steps: Create a Grouped data source from a List data source Create a Grouped Header Template Declare the ListView control so it groups the list items Creating the Grouped Data Source Normally, you bind a ListView control to a WinJS.Binding.List object. If you want to render list items in groups, then you need to bind the ListView to a grouped data source instead. The following code – contained in a file named products.js — illustrates how you can create a standard WinJS.Binding.List object from a JavaScript array and then return a grouped data source from the WinJS.Binding.List object by calling its createGrouped() method: (function () { "use strict"; // Create List data source var products = new WinJS.Binding.List([ { name: "Milk", price: 2.44, category: "Beverages" }, { name: "Oranges", price: 1.99, category: "Fruit" }, { name: "Wine", price: 8.55, category: "Beverages" }, { name: "Apples", price: 2.44, category: "Fruit" }, { name: "Steak", price: 1.99, category: "Other" }, { name: "Eggs", price: 2.44, category: "Other" }, { name: "Mushrooms", price: 1.99, category: "Other" }, { name: "Yogurt", price: 2.44, category: "Other" }, { name: "Soup", price: 1.99, category: "Other" }, { name: "Cereal", price: 2.44, category: "Other" }, { name: "Pepsi", price: 1.99, category: "Beverages" } ]); // Create grouped data source var groupedProducts = products.createGrouped( function (dataItem) { return dataItem.category; }, function (dataItem) { return { title: dataItem.category }; }, function (group1, group2) { return group1.charCodeAt(0) - group2.charCodeAt(0); } ); // Expose the grouped data source WinJS.Namespace.define("ListViewDemos", { products: groupedProducts }); })(); Notice that the createGrouped() method requires three functions as arguments: groupKey – This function associates each list item with a group. The function accepts a data item and returns a key which represents a group. In the code above, we return the value of the category property for each product. groupData – This function returns the data item displayed by the group header template. For example, in the code above, the function returns a title for the group which is displayed in the group header template. groupSorter – This function determines the order in which the groups are displayed. The code above displays the groups in alphabetical order: Beverages, Fruit, Other. Creating the Group Header Template Whenever you create a ListView control, you need to create an item template which you use to control how each list item is rendered. When grouping items in a ListView control, you also need to create a group header template. The group header template is used to render the header for each group of list items. Here’s the markup for both the item template and the group header template: <div id="productTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="product"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> <div id="productGroupHeaderTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="productGroupHeader"> <h1 data-win-bind="innerText: title"></h1> </div> </div> You should declare the two templates in the same file as you declare the ListView control – for example, the default.html file. Declaring the ListView Control The final step is to declare the ListView control. Here’s the required markup: <div data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.dataSource, itemTemplate:select('#productTemplate'), groupDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.groups.dataSource, groupHeaderTemplate:select('#productGroupHeaderTemplate'), layout: {type: WinJS.UI.GridLayout} }"> </div> In the markup above, six properties of the ListView control are set when the control is declared. First the itemDataSource and itemTemplate are specified. Nothing new here. Next, the group data source and group header template are specified. Notice that the group data source is represented by the ListViewDemos.products.groups.dataSource property of the grouped data source. Finally, notice that the layout of the ListView is changed to Grid Layout. You are required to use Grid Layout (instead of the default List Layout) when displaying grouped items in a ListView. Here’s the entire contents of the default.html page: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>ListViewDemos</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.0.6/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- ListViewDemos references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> <script src="/js/products.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <style type="text/css"> .product { width: 200px; height: 100px; border: white solid 1px; font-size: x-large; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="productTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="product"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:name"></span> <span data-win-bind="innerText:price"></span> </div> </div> <div id="productGroupHeaderTemplate" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="productGroupHeader"> <h1 data-win-bind="innerText: title"></h1> </div> </div> <div data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.dataSource, itemTemplate:select('#productTemplate'), groupDataSource:ListViewDemos.products.groups.dataSource, groupHeaderTemplate:select('#productGroupHeaderTemplate'), layout: {type: WinJS.UI.GridLayout} }"> </div> </body> </html> Notice that the default.html page includes a reference to the products.js file: <script src=”/js/products.js” type=”text/javascript”></script> The default.html page also contains the declarations of the item template, group header template, and ListView control. Summary The goal of this blog entry was to explain how you can group items in a ListView control. You learned how to create a grouped data source, a group header template, and declare a ListView so that it groups its list items.

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• The blocking nature of aggregates

  - by Rob Farley

  I wrote a post recently about how query tuning isn’t just about how quickly the query runs – that if you have something (such as SSIS) that is consuming your data (and probably introducing a bottleneck), then it might be more important to have a query which focuses on getting the first bit of data out. You can read that post here.  In particular, we looked at two operators that could be used to ensure that a query returns only Distinct rows. and The Sort operator pulls in all the data, sorts it (discarding duplicates), and then pushes out the remaining rows. The Hash Match operator performs a Hashing function on each row as it comes in, and then looks to see if it’s created a Hash it’s seen before. If not, it pushes the row out. The Sort method is quicker, but has to wait until it’s gathered all the data before it can do the sort, and therefore blocks the data flow. But that was my last post. This one’s a bit different. This post is going to look at how Aggregate functions work, which ties nicely into this month’s T-SQL Tuesday. I’ve frequently explained about the fact that DISTINCT and GROUP BY are essentially the same function, although DISTINCT is the poorer cousin because you have less control over it, and you can’t apply aggregate functions. Just like the operators used for Distinct, there are different flavours of Aggregate operators – coming in blocking and non-blocking varieties. The example I like to use to explain this is a pile of playing cards. If I’m handed a pile of cards and asked to count how many cards there are in each suit, it’s going to help if the cards are already ordered. Suppose I’m playing a game of Bridge, I can easily glance at my hand and count how many there are in each suit, because I keep the pile of cards in order. Moving from left to right, I could tell you I have four Hearts in my hand, even before I’ve got to the end. By telling you that I have four Hearts as soon as I know, I demonstrate the principle of a non-blocking operation. This is known as a Stream Aggregate operation. It requires input which is sorted by whichever columns the grouping is on, and it will release a row as soon as the group changes – when I encounter a Spade, I know I don’t have any more Hearts in my hand. Alternatively, if the pile of cards are not sorted, I won’t know how many Hearts I have until I’ve looked through all the cards. In fact, to count them, I basically need to put them into little piles, and when I’ve finished making all those piles, I can count how many there are in each. Because I don’t know any of the final numbers until I’ve seen all the cards, this is blocking. This performs the aggregate function using a Hash Match. Observant readers will remember this from my Distinct example. You might remember that my earlier Hash Match operation – used for Distinct Flow – wasn’t blocking. But this one is. They’re essentially doing a similar operation, applying a Hash function to some data and seeing if the set of values have been seen before, but before, it needs more information than the mere existence of a new set of values, it needs to consider how many of them there are. A lot is dependent here on whether the data coming out of the source is sorted or not, and this is largely determined by the indexes that are being used. If you look in the Properties of an Index Scan, you’ll be able to see whether the order of the data is required by the plan. A property called Ordered will demonstrate this. In this particular example, the second plan is significantly faster, but is dependent on having ordered data. In fact, if I force a Stream Aggregate on unordered data (which I’m doing by telling it to use a different index), a Sort operation is needed, which makes my plan a lot slower. This is all very straight-forward stuff, and information that most people are fully aware of. I’m sure you’ve all read my good friend Paul White (@sql_kiwi)’s post on how the Query Optimizer chooses which type of aggregate function to apply. But let’s take a look at SQL Server Integration Services. SSIS gives us a Aggregate transformation for use in Data Flow Tasks, but it’s described as Blocking. The definitive article on Performance Tuning SSIS uses Sort and Aggregate as examples of Blocking Transformations. I’ve just shown you that Aggregate operations used by the Query Optimizer are not always blocking, but that the SSIS Aggregate component is an example of a blocking transformation. But is it always the case? After all, there are plenty of SSIS Performance Tuning talks out there that describe the value of sorted data in Data Flow Tasks, describing the IsSorted property that can be set through the Advanced Editor of your Source component. And so I set about testing the Aggregate transformation in SSIS, to prove for sure whether providing Sorted data would let the Aggregate transform behave like a Stream Aggregate. (Of course, I knew the answer already, but it helps to be able to demonstrate these things). A query that will produce a million rows in order was in order. Let me rephrase. I used a query which produced the numbers from 1 to 1000000, in a single field, ordered. The IsSorted flag was set on the source output, with the only column as SortKey 1. Performing an Aggregate function over this (counting the number of rows per distinct number) should produce an additional column with 1 in it. If this were being done in T-SQL, the ordered data would allow a Stream Aggregate to be used. In fact, if the Query Optimizer saw that the field had a Unique Index on it, it would be able to skip the Aggregate function completely, and just insert the value 1. This is a shortcut I wouldn’t be expecting from SSIS, but certainly the Stream behaviour would be nice. Unfortunately, it’s not the case. As you can see from the screenshots above, the data is pouring into the Aggregate function, and not being released until all million rows have been seen. It’s not doing a Stream Aggregate at all. This is expected behaviour. (I put that in bold, because I want you to realise this.) An SSIS transformation is a piece of code that runs. It’s a physical operation. When you write T-SQL and ask for an aggregation to be done, it’s a logical operation. The physical operation is either a Stream Aggregate or a Hash Match. In SSIS, you’re telling the system that you want a generic Aggregation, that will have to work with whatever data is passed in. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be possible to make a sometimes-blocking aggregation component in SSIS. A Custom Component could be created which could detect whether the SortKeys columns of the input matched the Grouping columns of the Aggregation, and either call the blocking code or the non-blocking code as appropriate. One day I’ll make one of those, and publish it on my blog. I’ve done it before with a Script Component, but as Script components are single-use, I was able to handle the data knowing everything about my data flow already. As per my previous post – there are a lot of aspects in which tuning SSIS and tuning execution plans use similar concepts. In both situations, it really helps to have a feel for what’s going on behind the scenes. Considering whether an operation is blocking or not is extremely relevant to performance, and that it’s not always obvious from the surface. In a future post, I’ll show the impact of blocking v non-blocking and synchronous v asynchronous components in SSIS, using some of LobsterPot’s Script Components and Custom Components as examples. When I get that sorted, I’ll make a Stream Aggregate component available for download.

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