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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 11, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 11, 2010New ProjectsArkzia: This Silverlight game.CodePlex Wiki Editor: CodePlex Wiki Editor makes it easier for CodePlex users to create their wiki documentations. This project offer a rich interface for the edition...Evaluate: Evaluate & Comet DWR like .NET library with powerfull Evaluate and Ajax Comet support. Also, you may use Evaluate library in your own .Net applicat...FamAccountor: 家庭记账薄Horadric: This is common tools freamwork!K8061.Managed: This is a solution to use the Velleman Extended K8061 USB Interface board with .net and to have a nice wrapper handling most of the overhead for us...Latent semantic analysis: all you need is to use!: Baggr is feed aggregator with web interface, user rating and LSA filter. Enjoy it!LIF7 ==> RISK : TOWER DEFENSE: Université Lyon 1, L2 MATH-INFO 2009-2010 Semestre de printemps Projet RISK : TOWER DEFENSE Membres : Jessica El Melhem, Vincent Sébille, et Jonat...Managed ESL Suite: Managed ESL Suite using C# for FreeSWITCH Omni-Tool - A program version concept of the tool used in Mass Effect.: A program version concept of the tool used in Mass Effect. It will support little apps (plugins) that run inside the UI. Its talor mainly at develo...PdxCodeCamp: Web application for Portland Code CampProjeto Vírus: Desenvolvimento do Jogo Virus em XNAsilverlight control - stars with rounded corners: Draw stars and cogs including rounded cornersSilverlight MathParser: Implementation of mathematical expressions parser to compute and functions.turing machine simulator: Project for JCE in course SW engeenering. Turing Machine simulator with GUI.WpD - Wallpapers Downloader: You can easy download wallpapers to your computer without any advertising or registration. On 5 minutes you can download so many wallpapers!New ReleasesAJAX Control Framework: v1.0.0.0: New AJAX project that helps you create AJAX enabled controls. Make use of control level AJAX methods, a Script Manager that works like you'd expect...AutoFixture: Version 1.1: This is version 1.1 of AutoFixture. This release contains no known bugs. Compared to Release Candidate 1 for version 1.1, there are no changes. Ho...AutoPoco: AutoPoco 0.3: Method Invocation in configuration Custom type providers during configuration Method invocation for generationBacicworx (Basic Services Framework): 3.0.10.410 (Beta): Major update, winnowing, and recode of the library. Removed redundant classses and methods which have similar functionality to those available in ...Bluetooth Radar: Version 1.5: Mostly UI and Animation Changes.BUtil: BUtil 4.9: 1. Icons of kneo are almost removed 2. Deployment was moved to codeplex.com 3. Adding of storages was unavailable when any of storages are used FIXEDcrudwork library: crudwork 2.2.0.3: few bug fixes new object viewer - allow the user to view and change an object through the property grid and/or the simple XML editor pivot table ...EnhSim: Release v1.9.8.5: Release v1.9.8.5Removed the debugging output from the Armor Penetration change.EnhSim: Release v1.9.8.6: Release v1.9.8.6Updated release to include the correct version of EnhSimGUIEvaluate: Evaluate Library: This file contains Evaluate library source code under Visual Studio project. Also, there is a sample project to see the use.ExcelDna: ExcelDna Version 0.25: This is an important bugfix release, with the following changes: Fix case where unpacked .config temp file might not be deleted. Fix compiler pro...FamAccountor: 家庭账薄 预览版v0.0.1: 家庭账薄 预览版v0.0.1 该版本提供基本功能,还有待扩展! Feature: 实现基本添加、编辑、删除功能。FamAccountor: 家庭账薄 预览版v0.0.2: 家庭账薄 预览版v0.0.2 该版本提供基本功能,还有待扩展! Feature: 添加账户管理功能。Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.4.2: This is the latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.4.2), with general improvements. It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My...GKO Libraries: GKO Libraries 0.3 Beta: Added Silverlight support for Gko.Utils Added ExtensionsHash Calculator: HashCalculator 1.2: HashCalculator 1.2HD-Trailers.NET Downloader: Version: TrailersOnly if set to 'true' only titles with 'trailer' in the title will be download MinTrailerSize Added a minimum trailer size, this avoids t...Home Access Plus+: v3.2.6.0: v3.2.5.1 Release Change Log: Add lesson naming Fixed a bug in the help desk which was rendering the wrong URL for tickets Planning has started ...HTML Ruby: 6.20.0: All new concept, all new code. Because this release does not support complex ruby annotations, "Furigana Injector" is not supported by this release...HTML Ruby: 6.20.1: Fixed problem where ruby with closed tags but no rb tag will result in empty page Added support for complex ruby annotation (limited single ruby)...K8061.Managed: K8061.Managed: This is a pre-compilled K8061.Managed.DLL file release 1.0.Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 2.1.0.0: Users of Kooboo CMS 2.0, please use the "Check updates" feature under System to upgrade New featuresWebDav support You can now use tools like w...Kooboo forum: Kooboo Forum Module for 2.1.0.0: Compatible with Kooboo cms 2.1.0.0 Upgrade to MVC 2Kooboo GoogleAnalytics: Kooboo GoogleAnalytics Module for 2.1.0.0: Compatible with Kooboo cms 2.1.0.0 Upgrade to MVC 2Kooboo wiki: Kooboo CMS Wiki module for 2.1.0.0: Compatible with Kooboo cms 2.1.0.0 Upgrade to MVC 2Mavention: Mavention Simple SiteMapPath: Mavention Simple SiteMapPath is a custom control that renders breadcrumbs as an unordered list what makes it a perfect solution for breadcrumbs on ...MetaSharp: MetaSharp v0.3: MetaSharp v0.3 Roadmap: Oslo Independence Custom Grammar library Improved build environment dogfooding Project structure simplificationsRoTwee: RoTwee (10.0.0.7): New feature of this version is support for mouse wheel. You can rotate tweets rotating mouse wheel.silverlight control - stars with rounded corners: first step: These are the first examples.Silverlight MathParser: Silverlight MathParser 1.0: Implementation of mathematical expressions parser to compute and functions.SimpleGeo.NET: SimpleGeo.NET example website project: ConfigurationYou must change these three configuration values in AppSettings.config: Google Maps API key: for the maps on the test site. Get one he...StickyTweets: 0.6.0: Version 0.6.0 Code - PERFORMANCE Hook into Async WinInet to perform async requests without adding an additional thread Code - Verify that async r...System.Html: Version 1.3; fixed bugs and improved performance: This release incorporates bug fixes, a new normalize method proposed by RudolfHenning of Codeplex.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30410.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVFPX: FoxTabs 0.9.2: The following issues were addressed: 26744 24954 24767Visual Studio DSite: Advanced Guessing Number Game (Visual C++ 2008): A guessing number game made in visual c 2008.WpD - Wallpapers Downloader: WpD v0.1: My first release, I hope you enjoyMost Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesFacebook Developer ToolkitMost Active ProjectsRawrnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.AutoPocopatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryShweet: SharePoint 2010 Team Messaging built with PexFarseer Physics EngineNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterBlogEngine.NETBeanProxy

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  • What does it mean when a User-Agent has another User-Agent inside it?

    - by Erx_VB.NExT.Coder
    Basically, sometimes the user-agent will have its normal user-agent displayed, then at the end it will have teh "User-Agent: " tag displayed, and right after it another user-agent is shown. Sometimes, the second user-agent is just appended to the first one without the "User-Agent: " tag. Here are some samples I've seen: The first few contain the "User-Agent: " tag in the middle somewhere, and I've changed its font to make it easier to to see. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; GTB6; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1); SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; GTB6; MRA 5.10 (build 5339); User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1); .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1); .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1); .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152) Here are some without the "User-Agent: " tag in the middle, but just two user agents that seem stiched together. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1); .NET CLR 3.5.30729) Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; GTB6; IPMS/6568080A-04A5AD839A9; TCO_20090713170733; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1); InfoPath.2) Now, just to add a few notes to this. I understand that the "User-Agent: " tag is normally a header, and what follows a typical "User-Agent: " string sequence is the actual user agent that is sent to servers etc, but normally the "User-Agent: " string should not be part of the actual user agent, that is more like the pre-fix or a tag indicating that what follows will be the actual user agent. Additionally, I may have thought, hey, these are just two user agents pasted together, but on closer inspection, you realize that they are not. On all of these dual user agent listings, if you look at the opening bracket "(" just before the "compatible" keyword, you realize the pair to that bracket ")" is actually at the very end, the end of the second user agent. So, the first user agents closing bracket ")" never occurs before the second user agent begins, it's always right at the end, and therefore, the second user agent is more like one of the features of the first user agent, like: "Trident/4.0" or "GTB6" etc etc... The other thing to note that the second user agent is always MSIE 6.0 (Internet Explorer 6.0), interesting. What I had initially thought was it's some sort of Virtual Machine displaying the browser in use & the browser that is installed, but then I thought, what'd be the point in that? Finally, right now, I am thinking, it's probably soem sort of "Compatibility View" type thing, where even if MSIE 7.0 or 8.0 is installed, when my hypothetical the "Display In Internet Explorer 6.0" mode is turned on, the user agent changes to something like this. That being, IE 8.0 is installed, but is rendering everything as IE 6.0 would. Is there or was there such a feature in Internet Explorer? Am I on to something here? What are your thoughts on this? If you have any other ideas, please feel free to let us know. At the moment, I'm just trying to understand if these are valid User Agents, or if they are invalid. In a list of about 44,000 User Agents, I've seen this type of Dual User Agent about 400 times. I've closely inspected 40 of them, and every single one had MSIE 6.0 as the "second" user agent (and the first user agent a higher version of MSIE, such as 7 or 8). This was true for all except one, where both user agents were MSIE 8.0, here it is: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Win32; GMX); GTB0.0) This occured once in my 40 "close" inspections. I've estimated the 400 in 44,000 by taking a sample of the first 4,400 user agents, and finding 40 of these in the MSIE/Windows user agents, and extrapolated that to estimate 40. There were also similar things occuring for non MSIE user agents where there were two Mozilla's in one user agent, the non MSIE ones would probably add another 30% on top of the ones I've noted. I can show you samples of them if anyone would like. There we have it, this is where I'm at, what do you guys think?

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  • ODI 12c - Parallel Table Load

    - by David Allan
    In this post we will look at the ODI 12c capability of parallel table load from the aspect of the mapping developer and the knowledge module developer - two quite different viewpoints. This is about parallel table loading which isn't to be confused with loading multiple targets per se. It supports the ability for ODI mappings to be executed concurrently especially if there is an overlap of the datastores that they access, so any temporary resources created may be uniquely constructed by ODI. Temporary objects can be anything basically - common examples are staging tables, indexes, views, directories - anything in the ETL to help the data integration flow do its job. In ODI 11g users found a few workarounds (such as changing the technology prefixes - see here) to build unique temporary names but it was more of a challenge in error cases. ODI 12c mappings by default operate exactly as they did in ODI 11g with respect to these temporary names (this is also true for upgraded interfaces and scenarios) but can be configured to support the uniqueness capabilities. We will look at this feature from two aspects; that of a mapping developer and that of a developer (of procedures or KMs). 1. Firstly as a Mapping Developer..... 1.1 Control when uniqueness is enabled A new property is available to set unique name generation on/off. When unique names have been enabled for a mapping, all temporary names used by the collection and integration objects will be generated using unique names. This property is presented as a check-box in the Property Inspector for a deployment specification. 1.2 Handle cleanup after successful execution Provided that all temporary objects that are created have a corresponding drop statement then all of the temporary objects should be removed during a successful execution. This should be the case with the KMs developed by Oracle. 1.3 Handle cleanup after unsuccessful execution If an execution failed in ODI 11g then temporary tables would have been left around and cleaned up in the subsequent run. In ODI 12c, KM tasks can now have a cleanup-type task which is executed even after a failure in the main tasks. These cleanup tasks will be executed even on failure if the property 'Remove Temporary Objects on Error' is set. If the agent was to crash and not be able to execute this task, then there is an ODI tool (OdiRemoveTemporaryObjects here) you can invoke to cleanup the tables - it supports date ranges and the like. That's all there is to it from the aspect of the mapping developer it's much, much simpler and straightforward. You can now execute the same mapping concurrently or execute many mappings using the same resource concurrently without worrying about conflict.  2. Secondly as a Procedure or KM Developer..... In the ODI Operator the executed code shows the actual name that is generated - you can also see the runtime code prior to execution (introduced in 11.1.1.7), for example below in the code type I selected 'Pre-executed Code' this lets you see the code about to be processed and you can also see the executed code (which is the default view). References to the collection (C$) and integration (I$) names will be automatically made unique by using the odiRef APIs - these objects will have unique names whenever concurrency has been enabled for a particular mapping deployment specification. It's also possible to use name uniqueness functions in procedures and your own KMs. 2.1 New uniqueness tags  You can also make your own temporary objects have unique names by explicitly including either %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG in the name passed to calls to the odiRef APIs. Such names would always include the unique tag regardless of the concurrency setting. To illustrate, let's look at the getObjectName() method. At <% expansion time, this API will append %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG to the object name for collection and integration tables. The name parameter passed to this API may contain  %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG. This API always generates to the <? version of getObjectName() At execution time this API will replace the unique tag macros with a string that is unique to the current execution scope. The returned name will conform to the name-length restriction for the target technology, and its pattern for the unique tag. Any necessary truncation will be performed against the initial name for the object and any other fixed text that may have been specified. Examples are:- <?=odiRef.getObjectName("L", "%COL_PRFEMP%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG", "D")?> SCOTT.C$_EABH7QI1BR1EQI3M76PG9SIMBQQ <?=odiRef.getObjectName("L", "EMP%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "D")?> SCOTT.EMPAO96Q2JEKO0FTHQP77TMSAIOSR_ Methods which have this kind of support include getFrom, getTableName, getTable, getObjectShortName and getTemporaryIndex. There are APIs for retrieving this tag info also, the getInfo API has been extended with the following properties (the UNIQUE* properties can also be used in ODI procedures); UNIQUE_STEP_TAG - Returns the unique value for the current step scope, e.g. 5rvmd8hOIy7OU2o1FhsF61 Note that this will be a different value for each loop-iteration when the step is in a loop. UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG - Returns the unique value for the current session scope, e.g. 6N38vXLrgjwUwT5MseHHY9 IS_CONCURRENT - Returns info about the current mapping, will return 0 or 1 (only in % phase) GUID_SRC_SET - Returns the UUID for the current source set/execution unit (only in % phase) The getPop API has been extended with the IS_CONCURRENT property which returns info about an mapping, will return 0 or 1.  2.2 Additional APIs Some new APIs are provided including getFormattedName which will allow KM developers to construct a name from fixed-text or ODI symbols that can be optionally truncate to a max length and use a specific encoding for the unique tag. It has syntax getFormattedName(String pName[, String pTechnologyCode]) This API is available at both the % and the ? phase.  The format string can contain the ODI prefixes that are available for getObjectName(), e.g. %INT_PRF, %COL_PRF, %ERR_PRF, %IDX_PRF alongwith %UNIQUE_STEP_TAG or %UNIQUE_SESSION_TAG. The latter tags will be expanded into a unique string according to the specified technology. Calls to this API within the same execution context are guaranteed to return the same unique name provided that the same parameters are passed to the call. e.g. <%=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "ORACLE")%> <?=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG_AE", "ORACLE")?> C$_MY_TAB7wDiBe80vBog1auacS1xB_AE <?=odiRef.getFormattedName("%COL_PRFMY_TABLE%UNIQUE_STEP_TAG.log", "FILE")?> C2_MY_TAB7wDiBe80vBog1auacS1xB.log 2.3 Name length generation  As part of name generation, the length of the generated name will be compared with the maximum length for the target technology and truncation may need to be applied. When a unique tag is included in the generated string it is important that uniqueness is not compromised by truncation of the unique tag. When a unique tag is NOT part of the generated name, the name will be truncated by removing characters from the end - this is the existing 11g algorithm. When a unique tag is included, the algorithm will first truncate the <postfix> and if necessary  the <prefix>. It is recommended that users will ensure there is sufficient uniqueness in the <prefix> section to ensure uniqueness of the final resultant name. SUMMARY To summarize, ODI 12c make it much simpler to utilize mappings in concurrent cases and provides APIs for helping developing any procedures or custom knowledge modules in such a way they can be used in highly concurrent, parallel scenarios. 

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  • Queued Loadtest to remove Concurrency issues using Shared Data Service in OpenScript

    - by stefan.thieme(at)oracle.com
    Queued Processing to remove Concurrency issues in Loadtest ScriptsSome scripts act on information returned by the server, e.g. act on first item in the returned list of pending tasks/actions. This may lead to concurrency issues if the virtual users simulated in a load test scenario are not synchronized in some way.As the load test cases should be carried out in a comparable and straight forward manner simply cancel a transaction in case a collision occurs is clearly not an option. In case you increase the number of virtual users this approach would lead to a high number of requests for the early steps in your transaction (e.g. login, retrieve list of action points, assign an action point to the virtual user) but later steps would be rarely visited successfully or at all, depending on the application logic.A way to tackle this problem is to enqueue the virtual users in a Shared Data Service queue. Only the first virtual user in this queue will be allowed to carry out the critical steps (retrieve list of action points, assign an action point to the virtual user) in your transaction at any one time.Once a virtual user has passed the critical path it will dequeue himself from the head of the queue and continue with his actions. This does theoretically allow virtual users to run in parallel all steps of the transaction which are not part of the critical path.In practice it has been seen this is rarely the case, though it does not allow adding more than N users to perform a transaction without causing delays due to virtual users waiting in the queue. N being the time of the total transaction divided by the sum of the time of all critical steps in this transaction.While this problem can be circumvented by allowing multiple queues to act on individual segments of the list of actions, e.g. per country filter, ends with 0..9 filter, etc.This would require additional handling of these additional queues of slots for the virtual users at the head of the queue in order to maintain the mutually exclusive access to the first element in the list returned by the server at any one time of the load test. Such an improved handling of multiple queues and/or multiple slots is above the subject of this paper.Shared Data Services Pre-RequisitesStart WebLogic Server to host Shared Data ServicesYou will have to make sure that your WebLogic server is installed and started. Shared Data Services may not work if you installed only the minimal installation package for OpenScript. If however you installed the default package including OLT and OTM, you may follow the instructions below to start and verify WebLogic installation.To start the WebLogic Server deployed underneath of Oracle Load Testing and/or Oracle Test Manager you can go to your Start menu, Oracle Application Testing Suite and select the Restart Oracle Application Testing Suite Application Service entry from the Tools submenu.To verify the service has been started you can run the Microsoft Management Console for Services by Selecting Run from the Start Menu and entering services.msc. Look for the entry that reads Oracle Application Testing Suite Application Service, once it has changed it status from Starting to Started you can proceed to verify the login. Please note that this may take several minutes, I would say up to 10 minutes depending on the strength of your CPU horse-power.Verify WebLogic Server user credentialsYou will have to make sure that your WebLogic Server is installed and started. Next open the Oracle WebLogic Server Adminstration Console on http://localhost:8088/console.It may take a while until the application is deployed and started. It may display the following until the Administration Console has been deployed on the fly.Afterwards you can login using the username oats and the password that you selected during install time for your Application Testing Suite administrative purposes.This will bring up the Home page of you WebLogic Server. You have actually verified that you are able to login with these credentials already. However if you want to check the details, navigate to Security Realms, myrealm, Users and Groups tab.Here you could add users to your WebLogic Server which could be used in the later steps. Details on the Groups required for such a custom user to work are exceeding this quick overview and have to be selected with the WebLogic Server Adminstration Guide in mind.Shared Data Services pre-requisites for Load testingOpenScript Preferences have to be set to enable Encryption and provide a default Shared Data Service Connection for Playback.These are pre-requisites you want to use for load testing with Shared Data Services.Please note that the usage of the Connection Parameters (individual directive in the script) for Shared Data Services did not playback reliably in the current version 9.20.0370 of Oracle Load Testing (OLT) and encryption of credentials still seemed to be mandatory as well.General Encryption settingsSelect OpenScript Preferences from the View menu and navigate to the General, Encryption entry in the tree on the left. Select the Encrypt script data option from the list and enter the same password that you used for securing your WebLogic Server Administration Console.Enable global shared data access credentialsSelect OpenScript Preferences from the View menu and navigate to the Playback, Shared Data entry in the tree on the left. Enable the global shared data access credentials and enter the Address, User name and Password determined for your WebLogic Server to host Shared Data Services.Please note, that you may want to replace the localhost in Address with the hosts realname in case you plan to run load tests with Loadtest Agents running on remote systems.Queued Processing of TransactionsEnable Shared Data Services Module in Script PropertiesThe Shared Data Services Module has to be enabled for each Script that wants to employ the Shared Data Service Queue functionality in OpenScript. It can be enabled under the Script menu selecting Script Properties. On the Script Properties Dialog select the Modules section and check Shared Data to enable Shared Data Service Module for your script. Checking the Shared Data Services option will effectively add a line to your script code that adds the sharedData ScriptService to your script class of IteratingVUserScript.@ScriptService oracle.oats.scripting.modules.sharedData.api.SharedDataService sharedData;Record your scriptRecord your script as usual and then add the following things for Queue handling in the Initialize code block, before the first step and after the last step of your critical path and in the Finalize code block.The java code to be added at individual locations is explained in the following sections in full detail.Create a Shared Data Queue in InitializeTo create a Shared Data Queue go to the Java view of your script and enter the following statements to the initialize() code block.info("Create queueA with life time of 120 minutes");sharedData.createQueue("queueA", 120);This will create an instantiation of the Shared Data Queue object named queueA which is maintained for upto 120 minutes.If you want to use the code for multiple scripts, make sure to use a different queue name for each one here and in the subsequent steps. You may even consider to use a dynamic queueName based on filters of your result list being concurrently accessed.Prepare a unique id for each IterationIn order to keep track of individual virtual users in our queue we need to create a unique identifier from the virtual user id and the used username right after retrieving the next record from our databank file.getDatabank("Usernames").getNextDatabankRecord();getVariables().set("usernameValue1","VU_{{@vuid}}_{{@iterationnum}}_{{db.Usernames.Username}}_{{@timestamp}}_{{@random(10000)}}");String usernameValue = getVariables().get("usernameValue1");info("Now running virtual user " + usernameValue);As you can see from the above code block, we have set the OpenScript variable usernameValue1 to VU_{{@vuid}}_{{@iterationnum}}_{{db.Usernames.Username}}_{{@timestamp}}_{{@random(10000)}} which is a concatenation of the virtual user id and the iterationnumber for general uniqueness; as well as the username from our databank, the timestamp and a random number for making it further unique and ease spotting of errors.Not all of these fields are actually required to make it really unique, but adding the queue name may also be considered to help troubleshoot multiple queues.The value is then retrieved with the getVariables.get() method call and assigned to the usernameValue String used throughout the script.Please note that moving the getDatabank("Usernames").getNextDatabankRecord(); call to the initialize block was later considered to remove concurrency of multiple virtual users running with the same userid and therefor accessing the same "My Inbox" in step 6. This will effectively give each virtual user a userid from the databank file. Make sure you have enough userids to remove this second hurdle.Enqueue and attend Queue before Critical PathTo maintain the right order of virtual users being allowed into the critical path of the transaction the following pseudo step has to be added in front of the first critical step. In the case of this example this is right in front of the step where we retrieve the list of actions from which we select the first to be assigned to us.beginStep("[0] Waiting in the Queue", 0);{info("Enqueued virtual user " + usernameValue + " at the end of queueA");sharedData.offerLast("queueA", usernameValue);info("Wait until the user is the first in queueA");String queueValue1 = null;do {// we wait for at least 0.7 seconds before we check the head of the// queue. This is the time it takes one user to move through the// critical path, i.e. pass steps [5] Enter country and [6] Assign// to meThread.sleep(700);queueValue1 = (String) sharedData.peekFirst("queueA");info("The first user in queueA is currently: '" + queueValue1 + "' " + queueValue1.getClass() + " length " + queueValue1.length() );info("The current user is '"+ usernameValue + "' " + usernameValue.getClass() + " length " + usernameValue.length() + ": indexOf " + usernameValue.indexOf(queueValue1) + " equals " + usernameValue.equals(queueValue1) );} while ( queueValue1.indexOf(usernameValue) < 0 );info("Now the user is the first in queueA");}endStep();This will enqueue the username to the tail of our Queue. It will will wait for at least 700 milliseconds, the time it takes for one user to exit the critical path and then compare the head of our queue with it's username. This last step will be repeated while the two are not equal (indexOf less than zero). If they are equal the indexOf will yield a value of zero or larger and we will perform the critical steps.Dequeue after Critical PathAfter the virtual user has left the critical path and complete its last step the following code block needs to dequeue the virtual user. In the case of our example this is right after the action has been actually assigned to the virtual user. This will allow the next virtual user to retrieve the list of actions still available and in turn let him make his selection/assignment.info("Get and remove the current user from the head of queueA");String pollValue1 = (String) sharedData.pollFirst("queueA");The current user is removed from the head of the queue. The next one will now be able to match his username against the head of the queue.Clear and Destroy Queue for FinishWhen the script has completed, it should clear and destroy the queue. This code block can be put in the finish block of your script and/or in a separate script in order to clear and remove the queue in case you have spotted an error or want to reset the queue for some reason.info("Clear queueA");sharedData.clearQueue("queueA");info("Destroy queueA");sharedData.destroyQueue("queueA");The users waiting in queueA are cleared and the queue is destroyed. If you have scripts still executing they will be caught in a loop.I found it better to maintain a separate Reset Queue script which contained only the following code in the initialize() block. I use to call this script to make sure the queue is cleared in between multiple Loadtest runs. This script could also even be added as the first in a larger scenario, which would execute it only once at very start of the Loadtest and make sure the queues do not contain any stale entries.info("Create queueA with life time of 120 minutes");sharedData.createQueue("queueA", 120);info("Clear queueA");sharedData.clearQueue("queueA");This will create a Shared Data Queue instance of queueA and clear all entries from this queue.Monitoring QueueWhile creating the scripts it was useful to monitor the contents, i.e. the current first user in the Queue. The following code block will make sure the Shared Data Queue is accessible in the initialize() block.info("Create queueA with life time of 120 minutes");sharedData.createQueue("queueA", 120);In the run() block the following code will continuously monitor the first element of the Queue and write an informational message with the current username Value to the Result window.info("Monitor the first users in queueA");String queueValue1 = null;do {queueValue1 = (String) sharedData.peekFirst("queueA");if (queueValue1 != null)info("The first user in queueA is currently: '" + queueValue1 + "' " + queueValue1.getClass() + " length " + queueValue1.length() );} while ( true );This script can be run from OpenScript parallel to a loadtest performed by the Oracle Load Test.However it is not recommend to run this in a production loadtest as the performance impact is unknown. Accessing the Queue's head with the peekFirst() method has been reported with about 2 seconds response time by both OpenScript and OTL. It is advised to log a Service Request to see if this could be lowered in future releases of Application Testing Suite, as the pollFirst() and even offerLast() writing to the tail of the Queue usually returned after an average 0.1 seconds.Debugging QueueWhile debugging the scripts the following was useful to remove single entries from its head, i.e. the current first user in the Queue. The following code block will make sure the Shared Data Queue is accessible in the initialize() block.info("Create queueA with life time of 120 minutes");sharedData.createQueue("queueA", 120);In the run() block the following code will remove the first element of the Queue and write an informational message with the current username Value to the Result window.info("Get and remove the current user from the head of queueA");String pollValue1 = (String) sharedData.pollFirst("queueA");info("The first user in queueA was currently: '" + pollValue1 + "' " + pollValue1.getClass() + " length " + pollValue1.length() );ReferencesOracle Functional Testing OpenScript User's Guide Version 9.20 [E15488-05]Chapter 17 Using the Shared Data Modulehttp://download.oracle.com/otn/nt/apptesting/oats-docs-9.21.0030.zipOracle Fusion Middleware Oracle WebLogic Server Administration Console Online Help 11g Release 1 (10.3.4) [E13952-04]Administration Console Online Help - Manage users and groupshttp://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17904_01/apirefs.1111/e13952/taskhelp/security/ManageUsersAndGroups.htm

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  • ASP.NET Controls – CommunityServer Captcha ControlAdapter, a practical case

    - by nmgomes
    The ControlAdapter is available since .NET framework version 2.0 and his main goal is to adapt and customize a control render in order to achieve a specific behavior or layout. This customization is done without changing the base control. A ControlAdapter is commonly used to custom render for specific platforms like Mobile. In this particular case the ControlAdapter was used to add a specific behavior to a Control. In this  post I will use one adapter to add a Captcha to all WeblogPostCommentForm controls within pontonetpt.com CommunityServer instance. The Challenge The ControlAdapter complexity is usually associated with the complexity/structure of is base control. This case is precisely one of those since base control dynamically load his content (controls) thru several ITemplate. Those of you who already played with ITemplate knows that while it is an excellent option for control composition it also brings to the table a big issue: “Controls defined within a template are not available for manipulation until they are instantiated inside another control.” While analyzing the WeblogPostCommentForm control I found that he uses the ITemplate technique to compose it’s layout and unfortunately I also found that the template content vary from theme to theme. This could have been a problem but luckily WeblogPostCommentForm control template content always contains a submit button with a well known ID (at least I can assume that there are a well known set of IDs). Using this submit button as anchor it’s possible to add the Captcha controls in the correct place. Another important finding was that WeblogPostCommentForm control inherits from the WrappedFormBase control which is the base control for all CommunityServer input forms. Knowing this inheritance link the main goal has changed to became the creation of a base ControlAdapter that  could be extended and customized to allow adding Captcha to: post comments form contact form user creation form. And, with this mind set, I decided to used the following ControlAdapter base class signature :public abstract class WrappedFormBaseCaptchaAdapter<T> : ControlAdapter where T : WrappedFormBase { }Great, but there are still many to do … Captcha The Captcha will be assembled with: A dynamically generated image with a set of random numbers A TextBox control where the image number will be inserted A Validator control to validate whether TextBox numbers match the image numbers This is a common Captcha implementation, is not rocket science and don’t bring any additional problem. The main problem, as told before, is to find the correct anchor control to ensure a correct Captcha control injection. The anchor control can vary by: target control  theme Implementation To support this dynamic scenario I choose to use the following implementation:private List<string> _validAnchorIds = null; protected virtual List<string> ValidAnchorIds { get { if (this._validAnchorIds == null) { this._validAnchorIds = new List<string>(); this._validAnchorIds.Add("btnSubmit"); } return this._validAnchorIds; } } private Control GetAnchorControl(T wrapper) { if (this.ValidAnchorIds == null || this.ValidAnchorIds.Count == 0) { throw new ArgumentException("Cannot be null or empty", "validAnchorNames"); } var q = from anchorId in this.ValidAnchorIds let anchorControl = CSControlUtility.Instance().FindControl(wrapper, anchorId) where anchorControl != null select anchorControl; return q.FirstOrDefault(); } I can now, using the ValidAnchorIds property, configure a set of valid anchor control  Ids. The GetAnchorControl method searches for a valid anchor control within the set of valid control Ids. Here, some of you may question why to use a LINQ To Objects expression, but the important here is to notice the usage of CSControlUtility.Instance().FindControl CommunityServer method. I want to build on top of CommunityServer not to reinvent the wheel. Assuming that an anchor control was found, it’s now possible to inject the Captcha at the correct place. This not something new, we do this all the time when creating server controls or adding dynamic controls:protected sealed override void CreateChildControls() { base.CreateChildControls(); if (this.IsCaptchaRequired) { T wrapper = base.Control as T; if (wrapper != null) { Control anchorControl = GetAnchorControl(wrapper); if (anchorControl != null) { Panel phCaptcha = new Panel {CssClass = "CommonFormField", ID = "Captcha"}; int index = anchorControl.Parent.Controls.IndexOf(anchorControl); anchorControl.Parent.Controls.AddAt(index, phCaptcha); CaptchaConfiguration.DefaultProvider.AddCaptchaControls( phCaptcha, GetValidationGroup(wrapper, anchorControl)); } } } } Here you can see a new entity in action: a provider. This is a CaptchaProvider class instance and is only goal is to create the Captcha itself and do everything else is needed to ensure is correct operation.public abstract class CaptchaProvider : ProviderBase { public abstract void AddCaptchaControls(Panel captchaPanel, string validationGroup); } You can create your own specific CaptchaProvider class to use different Captcha strategies including the use of existing Captcha services  like ReCaptcha. Once the generic ControlAdapter was created became extremely easy to created a specific one. Here is the specific ControlAdapter for the WeblogPostCommentForm control:public class WeblogPostCommentFormCaptchaAdapter : WrappedFormBaseCaptchaAdapter<WrappedFormBase> { #region Overriden Methods protected override List<string> ValidAnchorIds { get { List<string> validAnchorNames = base.ValidAnchorIds; validAnchorNames.Add("CommentSubmit"); return validAnchorNames; } } protected override string DefaultValidationGroup { get { return "CreateCommentForm"; } } #endregion Overriden Methods } Configuration This is the magic step. Without changing the original pages and keeping the application original assemblies untouched we are going to add a new behavior to the CommunityServer application. To glue everything together you must follow this steps: Add the following configuration to default.browser file:<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?> <browsers> <browser refID="Default"> <controlAdapters> <!-- Adapter for the WeblogPostCommentForm control in order to add the Captcha and prevent SPAM comments --> <adapter controlType="CommunityServer.Blogs.Controls.WeblogPostCommentForm" adapterType="NunoGomes.CommunityServer.Components.WeblogPostCommentFormCaptchaAdapter, NunoGomes.CommunityServer" /> </controlAdapters> </browser> </browsers> Add the following configuration to web.config file:<configuration> <configSections> <!-- New section for Captcha providers configuration --> <section name="communityServer.Captcha" type="NunoGomes.CommunityServer.Captcha.Configuration.CaptchaSection" /> </configSections> <!-- Configuring a simple Captcha provider --> <communityServer.Captcha defaultProvider="simpleCaptcha"> <providers> <add name="simpleCaptcha" type="NunoGomes.CommunityServer.Captcha.Providers.SimpleCaptchaProvider, NunoGomes.CommunityServer" imageUrl="~/captcha.ashx" enabled="true" passPhrase="_YourPassPhrase_" saltValue="_YourSaltValue_" hashAlgorithm="SHA1" passwordIterations="3" keySize="256" initVector="_YourInitVectorWithExactly_16_Bytes_" /> </providers> </communityServer.Captcha> <system.web> <httpHandlers> <!-- The Captcha Image handler used by the simple Captcha provider --> <add verb="GET" path="captcha.ashx" type="NunoGomes.CommunityServer.Captcha.Providers.SimpleCaptchaProviderImageHandler, NunoGomes.CommunityServer" /> </httpHandlers> </system.web> <system.webServer> <handlers accessPolicy="Read, Write, Script, Execute"> <!-- The Captcha Image handler used by the simple Captcha provider --> <add verb="GET" name="captcha" path="captcha.ashx" type="NunoGomes.CommunityServer.Captcha.Providers.SimpleCaptchaProviderImageHandler, NunoGomes.CommunityServer" /> </handlers> </system.webServer> </configuration> Conclusion Building a ControlAdapter can be complex but the reward is his ability to allows us, thru configuration changes, to modify an application render and/or behavior. You can see this ControlAdapter in action here and here (anonymous required). A complete solution is available in “CommunityServer Extensions” Codeplex project.

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  • WebSocket and Java EE 7 - Getting Ready for JSR 356 (TOTD #181)

    - by arungupta
    WebSocket is developed as part of HTML 5 specification and provides a bi-directional, full-duplex communication channel over a single TCP socket. It provides dramatic improvement over the traditional approaches of Polling, Long-Polling, and Streaming for two-way communication. There is no latency from establishing new TCP connections for each HTTP message. There is a WebSocket API and the WebSocket Protocol. The Protocol defines "handshake" and "framing". The handshake defines how a normal HTTP connection can be upgraded to a WebSocket connection. The framing defines wire format of the message. The design philosophy is to keep the framing minimum to avoid the overhead. Both text and binary data can be sent using the API. WebSocket may look like a competing technology to Server-Sent Events (SSE), but they are not. Here are the key differences: WebSocket can send and receive data from a client. A typical example of WebSocket is a two-player game or a chat application. Server-Sent Events can only push data data to the client. A typical example of SSE is stock ticker or news feed. With SSE, XMLHttpRequest can be used to send data to the server. For server-only updates, WebSockets has an extra overhead and programming can be unecessarily complex. SSE provides a simple and easy-to-use model that is much better suited. SSEs are sent over traditional HTTP and so no modification is required on the server-side. WebSocket require servers that understand the protocol. SSE have several features that are missing from WebSocket such as automatic reconnection, event IDs, and the ability to send arbitrary events. The client automatically tries to reconnect if the connection is closed. The default wait before trying to reconnect is 3 seconds and can be configured by including "retry: XXXX\n" header where XXXX is the milliseconds to wait before trying to reconnect. Event stream can include a unique event identifier. This allows the server to determine which events need to be fired to each client in case the connection is dropped in between. The data can span multiple lines and can be of any text format as long as EventSource message handler can process it. WebSockets provide true real-time updates, SSE can be configured to provide close to real-time by setting appropriate timeouts. OK, so all excited about WebSocket ? Want to convert your POJOs into WebSockets endpoint ? websocket-sdk and GlassFish 4.0 is here to help! The complete source code shown in this project can be downloaded here. On the server-side, the WebSocket SDK converts a POJO into a WebSocket endpoint using simple annotations. Here is how a WebSocket endpoint will look like: @WebSocket(path="/echo")public class EchoBean { @WebSocketMessage public String echo(String message) { return message + " (from your server)"; }} In this code "@WebSocket" is a class-level annotation that declares a POJO to accept WebSocket messages. The path at which the messages are accepted is specified in this annotation. "@WebSocketMessage" indicates the Java method that is invoked when the endpoint receives a message. This method implementation echoes the received message concatenated with an additional string. The client-side HTML page looks like <div style="text-align: center;"> <form action=""> <input onclick="send_echo()" value="Press me" type="button"> <input id="textID" name="message" value="Hello WebSocket!" type="text"><br> </form></div><div id="output"></div> WebSocket allows a full-duplex communication. So the client, a browser in this case, can send a message to a server, a WebSocket endpoint in this case. And the server can send a message to the client at the same time. This is unlike HTTP which follows a "request" followed by a "response". In this code, the "send_echo" method in the JavaScript is invoked on the button click. There is also a <div> placeholder to display the response from the WebSocket endpoint. The JavaScript looks like: <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> var wsUri = "ws://localhost:8080/websockets/echo"; var websocket = new WebSocket(wsUri); websocket.onopen = function(evt) { onOpen(evt) }; websocket.onmessage = function(evt) { onMessage(evt) }; websocket.onerror = function(evt) { onError(evt) }; function init() { output = document.getElementById("output"); } function send_echo() { websocket.send(textID.value); writeToScreen("SENT: " + textID.value); } function onOpen(evt) { writeToScreen("CONNECTED"); } function onMessage(evt) { writeToScreen("RECEIVED: " + evt.data); } function onError(evt) { writeToScreen('<span style="color: red;">ERROR:</span> ' + evt.data); } function writeToScreen(message) { var pre = document.createElement("p"); pre.style.wordWrap = "break-word"; pre.innerHTML = message; output.appendChild(pre); } window.addEventListener("load", init, false);</script> In this code The URI to connect to on the server side is of the format ws://<HOST>:<PORT>/websockets/<PATH> "ws" is a new URI scheme introduced by the WebSocket protocol. <PATH> is the path on the endpoint where the WebSocket messages are accepted. In our case, it is ws://localhost:8080/websockets/echo WEBSOCKET_SDK-1 will ensure that context root is included in the URI as well. WebSocket is created as a global object so that the connection is created only once. This object establishes a connection with the given host, port and the path at which the endpoint is listening. The WebSocket API defines several callbacks that can be registered on specific events. The "onopen", "onmessage", and "onerror" callbacks are registered in this case. The callbacks print a message on the browser indicating which one is called and additionally also prints the data sent/received. On the button click, the WebSocket object is used to transmit text data to the endpoint. Binary data can be sent as one blob or using buffering. The HTTP request headers sent for the WebSocket call are: GET ws://localhost:8080/websockets/echo HTTP/1.1Origin: http://localhost:8080Connection: UpgradeSec-WebSocket-Extensions: x-webkit-deflate-frameHost: localhost:8080Sec-WebSocket-Key: mDbnYkAUi0b5Rnal9/cMvQ==Upgrade: websocketSec-WebSocket-Version: 13 And the response headers received are Connection:UpgradeSec-WebSocket-Accept:q4nmgFl/lEtU2ocyKZ64dtQvx10=Upgrade:websocket(Challenge Response):00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00 The headers are shown in Chrome as shown below: The complete source code shown in this project can be downloaded here. The builds from websocket-sdk are integrated in GlassFish 4.0 builds. Would you like to live on the bleeding edge ? Then follow the instructions below to check out the workspace and install the latest SDK: Check out the source code svn checkout https://svn.java.net/svn/websocket-sdk~source-code-repository Build and install the trunk in your local repository as: mvn install Copy "./bundles/websocket-osgi/target/websocket-osgi-0.3-SNAPSHOT.jar" to "glassfish3/glassfish/modules/websocket-osgi.jar" in your GlassFish 4 latest promoted build. Notice, you need to overwrite the JAR file. Anybody interested in building a cool application using WebSocket and get it running on GlassFish ? :-) This work will also feed into JSR 356 - Java API for WebSocket. On a lighter side, there seems to be less agreement on the name. Here are some of the options that are prevalent: WebSocket (W3C API, the URL is www.w3.org/TR/websockets though) Web Socket (HTML5 Demos - html5demos.com/web-socket) Websocket (Jenkins Plugin - wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Websocket%2BPlugin) WebSockets (Used by Mozilla - developer.mozilla.org/en/WebSockets, but use WebSocket as well) Web sockets (HTML5 Working Group - www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/network.html) Web Sockets (Chrome Blog - blog.chromium.org/2009/12/web-sockets-now-available-in-google.html) I prefer "WebSocket" as that seems to be most common usage and used by the W3C API as well. What do you use ?

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  • Translating with Google Translate without API and C# Code

    - by Rick Strahl
    Some time back I created a data base driven ASP.NET Resource Provider along with some tools that make it easy to edit ASP.NET resources interactively in a Web application. One of the small helper features of the interactive resource admin tool is the ability to do simple translations using both Google Translate and Babelfish. Here's what this looks like in the resource administration form: When a resource is displayed, the user can click a Translate button and it will show the current resource text and then lets you set the source and target languages to translate. The Go button fires the translation for both Google and Babelfish and displays them - pressing use then changes the language of the resource to the target language and sets the resource value to the newly translated value. It's a nice and quick way to get a quick translation going. Ch… Ch… Changes Originally, both implementations basically did some screen scraping of the interactive Web sites and retrieved translated text out of result HTML. Screen scraping is always kind of an iffy proposition as content can be changed easily, but surprisingly that code worked for many years without fail. Recently however, Google at least changed their input pages to use AJAX callbacks and the page updates no longer worked the same way. End result: The Google translate code was broken. Now, Google does have an official API that you can access, but the API is being deprecated and you actually need to have an API key. Since I have public samples that people can download the API key is an issue if I want people to have the samples work out of the box - the only way I could even do this is by sharing my API key (not allowed).   However, after a bit of spelunking and playing around with the public site however I found that Google's interactive translate page actually makes callbacks using plain public access without an API key. By intercepting some of those AJAX calls and calling them directly from code I was able to get translation back up and working with minimal fuss, by parsing out the JSON these AJAX calls return. I don't think this particular Warning: This is hacky code, but after a fair bit of testing I found this to work very well with all sorts of languages and accented and escaped text etc. as long as you stick to small blocks of translated text. I thought I'd share it in case anybody else had been relying on a screen scraping mechanism like I did and needed a non-API based replacement. Here's the code: /// <summary> /// Translates a string into another language using Google's translate API JSON calls. /// <seealso>Class TranslationServices</seealso> /// </summary> /// <param name="Text">Text to translate. Should be a single word or sentence.</param> /// <param name="FromCulture"> /// Two letter culture (en of en-us, fr of fr-ca, de of de-ch) /// </param> /// <param name="ToCulture"> /// Two letter culture (as for FromCulture) /// </param> public string TranslateGoogle(string text, string fromCulture, string toCulture) { fromCulture = fromCulture.ToLower(); toCulture = toCulture.ToLower(); // normalize the culture in case something like en-us was passed // retrieve only en since Google doesn't support sub-locales string[] tokens = fromCulture.Split('-'); if (tokens.Length > 1) fromCulture = tokens[0]; // normalize ToCulture tokens = toCulture.Split('-'); if (tokens.Length > 1) toCulture = tokens[0]; string url = string.Format(@"http://translate.google.com/translate_a/t?client=j&text={0}&hl=en&sl={1}&tl={2}", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(text),fromCulture,toCulture); // Retrieve Translation with HTTP GET call string html = null; try { WebClient web = new WebClient(); // MUST add a known browser user agent or else response encoding doen't return UTF-8 (WTF Google?) web.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.UserAgent, "Mozilla/5.0"); web.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.AcceptCharset, "UTF-8"); // Make sure we have response encoding to UTF-8 web.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8; html = web.DownloadString(url); } catch (Exception ex) { this.ErrorMessage = Westwind.Globalization.Resources.Resources.ConnectionFailed + ": " + ex.GetBaseException().Message; return null; } // Extract out trans":"...[Extracted]...","from the JSON string string result = Regex.Match(html, "trans\":(\".*?\"),\"", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase).Groups[1].Value; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(result)) { this.ErrorMessage = Westwind.Globalization.Resources.Resources.InvalidSearchResult; return null; } //return WebUtils.DecodeJsString(result); // Result is a JavaScript string so we need to deserialize it properly JavaScriptSerializer ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); return ser.Deserialize(result, typeof(string)) as string; } To use the code is straightforward enough - simply provide a string to translate and a pair of two letter source and target languages: string result = service.TranslateGoogle("Life is great and one is spoiled when it goes on and on and on", "en", "de"); TestContext.WriteLine(result); How it works The code to translate is fairly straightforward. It basically uses the URL I snagged from the Google Translate Web Page slightly changed to return a JSON result (&client=j) instead of the funky nested PHP style JSON array that the default returns. The JSON result returned looks like this: {"sentences":[{"trans":"Das Leben ist großartig und man wird verwöhnt, wenn es weiter und weiter und weiter geht","orig":"Life is great and one is spoiled when it goes on and on and on","translit":"","src_translit":""}],"src":"en","server_time":24} I use WebClient to make an HTTP GET call to retrieve the JSON data and strip out part of the full JSON response that contains the actual translated text. Since this is a JSON response I need to deserialize the JSON string in case it's encoded (for upper/lower ASCII chars or quotes etc.). Couple of odd things to note in this code: First note that a valid user agent string must be passed (or at least one starting with a common browser identification - I use Mozilla/5.0). Without this Google doesn't encode the result with UTF-8, but instead uses a ISO encoding that .NET can't easily decode. Google seems to ignore the character set header and use the user agent instead which is - odd to say the least. The other is that the code returns a full JSON response. Rather than use the full response and decode it into a custom type that matches Google's result object, I just strip out the translated text. Yeah I know that's hacky but avoids an extra type and firing up the JavaScript deserializer. My internal version uses a small DecodeJsString() method to decode Javascript without the overhead of a full JSON parser. It's obviously not rocket science but as mentioned above what's nice about it is that it works without an Google API key. I can't vouch on how many translates you can do before there are cut offs but in my limited testing running a few stress tests on a Web server under load I didn't run into any problems. Limitations There are some restrictions with this: It only works on single words or single sentences - multiple sentences (delimited by .) are cut off at the ".". There is also a length limitation which appears to happen at around 220 characters or so. While that may not sound  like much for typical word or phrase translations this this is plenty of length. Use with a grain of salt - Google seems to be trying to limit their exposure to usage of the Translate APIs so this code might break in the future, but for now at least it works. FWIW, I also found that Google's translation is not as good as Babelfish, especially for contextual content like sentences. Google is faster, but Babelfish tends to give better translations. This is why in my translation tool I show both Google and Babelfish values retrieved. You can check out the code for this in the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit's TranslationService.cs file which contains both the Google and Babelfish translation code pieces. Ironically the Babelfish code has been working forever using screen scraping and continues to work just fine today. I think it's a good idea to have multiple translation providers in case one is down or changes its format, hence the dual display in my translation form above. I hope this has been helpful to some of you - I've actually had many small uses for this code in a number of applications and it's sweet to have a simple routine that performs these operations for me easily. Resources Live Localization Sample Localization Resource Provider Administration form that includes options to translate text using Google and Babelfish interactively. TranslationService.cs The full source code in the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit's Globalization library that contains the translation code. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in CSharp  HTTP   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • Monitor your Hard Drive’s Health with Acronis Drive Monitor

    - by Matthew Guay
    Are you worried that your computer’s hard drive could die without any warning?  Here’s how you can keep tabs on it and get the first warning signs of potential problems before you actually lose your critical data. Hard drive failures are one of the most common ways people lose important data from their computers.  As more of our memories and important documents are stored digitally, a hard drive failure can mean the loss of years of work.  Acronis Drive Monitor helps you avert these disasters by warning you at the first signs your hard drive may be having trouble.  It monitors many indicators, including heat, read/write errors, total lifespan, and more. It then notifies you via a taskbar popup or email that problems have been detected.  This early warning lets you know ahead of time that you may need to purchase a new hard drive and migrate your data before it’s too late. Getting Started Head over to the Acronis site to download Drive Monitor (link below).  You’ll need to enter your name and email, and then you can download this free tool. Also, note that the download page may ask if you want to include a trial of their for-pay backup program.  If you wish to simply install the Drive Monitor utility, click Continue without adding. Run the installer when the download is finished.  Follow the prompts and install as normal. Once it’s installed, you can quickly get an overview of your hard drives’ health.  Note that it shows 3 categories: Disk problems, Acronis backup, and Critical Events.  On our computer, we had Seagate DiskWizard, an image backup utility based on Acronis Backup, installed, and Acronis detected it. Drive Monitor stays running in your tray even when the application window is closed.  It will keep monitoring your hard drives, and will alert you if there’s a problem. Find Detailed Information About Your Hard Drives Acronis’ simple interface lets you quickly see an overview of how the drives on your computer are performing.  If you’d like more information, click the link under the description.  Here we see that one of our drives have overheated, so click Show disks to get more information. Now you can select each of your drives and see more information about them.  From the Disk overview tab that opens by default, we see that our drive is being monitored, has been running for a total of 368 days, and that it’s health is good.  However, it is running at 113F, which is over the recommended max of 107F.   The S.M.A.R.T. parameters tab gives us more detailed information about our drive.  Most users wouldn’t know what an accepted value would be, so it also shows the status.  If the value is within the accepted parameters, it will report OK; otherwise, it will show that has a problem in this area. One very interesting piece of information we can see is the total number of Power-On Hours, Start/Stop Count, and Power Cycle Count.  These could be useful indicators to check if you’re considering purchasing a second hand computer.  Simply load this program, and you’ll get a better view of how long it’s been in use. Finally, the Events tab shows each time the program gave a warning.  We can see that our drive, which had been acting flaky already, is routinely overheating even when our other hard drive was running in normal temperature ranges. Monitor Acronis Backups And Critical Errors In addition to monitoring critical stats of your hard drives, Acronis Drive Monitor also keeps up with the status of your backup software and critical events reported by Windows.  You can access these from the front page, or via the links on the left hand sidebar.  If you have any edition of any Acronis Backup product installed, it will show that it was detected.  Note that it can only monitor the backup status of the newest versions of Acronis Backup and True Image. If no Acronis backup software was installed, it will show a warning that the drive may be unprotected and will give you a link to download Acronis backup software.   If you have another backup utility installed that you wish to monitor yourself, click Configure backup monitoring, and then disable monitoring on the drives you’re monitoring yourself. Finally, you can view any detected Critical events from the Critical events tab on the left. Get Emailed When There’s a Problem One of Drive Monitor’s best features is the ability to send you an email whenever there’s a problem.  Since this program can run on any version of Windows, including the Server and Home Server editions, you can use this feature to stay on top of your hard drives’ health even when you’re not nearby.  To set this up, click Options in the top left corner. Select Alerts on the left, and then click the Change settings link to setup your email account. Enter the email address which you wish to receive alerts, and a name for the program.  Then, enter the outgoing mail server settings for your email.  If you have a Gmail account, enter the following information: Outgoing mail server (SMTP): smtp.gmail.com Port: 587 Username and Password: Your gmail address and password Check the Use encryption box, and then select TLS from the encryption options.   It will now send a test message to your email account, so check and make sure it sent ok. Now you can choose to have the program automatically email you when warnings and critical alerts appear, and also to have it send regular disk status reports.   Conclusion Whether you’ve got a brand new hard drive or one that’s seen better days, knowing the real health of your it is one of the best ways to be prepared before disaster strikes.  It’s no substitute for regular backups, but can help you avert problems.  Acronis Drive Monitor is a nice tool for this, and although we wish it wasn’t so centered around their backup offerings, we still found it a nice tool. Link Download Acronis Drive Monitor (registration required) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Change Monitor Timeout From Command LineAnalyze and Manage Hard Drive Space with WinDirStatMonitor CPU, Memory, and Disk IO In Windows 7 with Taskbar MetersDefrag Multiple Hard Drives At Once In WindowsFind Your Missing USB Drive on Windows XP TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Windows 7’s WordPad is Actually Good Greate Image Viewing and Management with Zoner Photo Studio Free Windows Media Player Plus! – Cool WMP Enhancer Get Your Team’s World Cup Schedule In Google Calendar Backup Drivers With Driver Magician TubeSort: YouTube Playlist Organizer

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  • Adding Volcanos and Options - Earthquake Locator, part 2

    - by Bobby Diaz
    Since volcanos are often associated with earthquakes, and vice versa, I decided to show recent volcanic activity on the Earthquake Locator map.  I am pulling the data from a website created for a joint project between the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program and the US Geological Survey's Volcano Hazards Program, found here.  They provide a Weekly Volcanic Activity Report as an RSS feed.   I started implementing this new functionality by creating a new Volcano entity in the domain model and adding the following to the EarthquakeService class (I also factored out the common reading/parsing helper methods to a separate FeedReader class that can be used by multiple domain service classes):           private static readonly string VolcanoFeedUrl =             ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["VolcanoFeedUrl"];           /// <summary>         /// Gets the volcano data for the previous week.         /// </summary>         /// <returns>A queryable collection of <see cref="Volcano"/> objects.</returns>         public IQueryable<Volcano> GetVolcanos()         {             var feed = FeedReader.Load(VolcanoFeedUrl);             var list = new List<Volcano>();               if ( feed != null )             {                 foreach ( var item in feed.Items )                 {                     var quake = CreateVolcano(item);                     if ( quake != null )                     {                         list.Add(quake);                     }                 }             }               return list.AsQueryable();         }           /// <summary>         /// Creates a <see cref="Volcano"/> object for each item in the RSS feed.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="item">The RSS item.</param>         /// <returns></returns>         private Volcano CreateVolcano(SyndicationItem item)         {             Volcano volcano = null;             string title = item.Title.Text;             string desc = item.Summary.Text;             double? latitude = null;             double? longitude = null;               FeedReader.GetGeoRssPoint(item, out latitude, out longitude);               if ( !String.IsNullOrEmpty(title) )             {                 title = title.Substring(0, title.IndexOf('-'));             }             if ( !String.IsNullOrEmpty(desc) )             {                 desc = String.Join("\n\n", desc                         .Replace("<p>", "")                         .Split(                             new string[] { "</p>" },                             StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)                         .Select(s => s.Trim())                         .ToArray())                         .Trim();             }               if ( latitude != null && longitude != null )             {                 volcano = new Volcano()                 {                     Id = item.Id,                     Title = title,                     Description = desc,                     Url = item.Links.Select(l => l.Uri.OriginalString).FirstOrDefault(),                     Latitude = latitude.GetValueOrDefault(),                     Longitude = longitude.GetValueOrDefault()                 };             }               return volcano;         } I then added the corresponding LoadVolcanos() method and Volcanos collection to the EarthquakeViewModel class in much the same way I did with the Earthquakes in my previous article in this series. Now that I am starting to add more information to the map, I wanted to give the user some options as to what is displayed and allowing them to choose what gets turned off.  I have updated the MainPage.xaml to look like this:   <UserControl x:Class="EarthquakeLocator.MainPage"     xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"     xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"     xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"     xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"     xmlns:basic="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls;assembly=System.Windows.Controls"     xmlns:bing="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Maps.MapControl;assembly=Microsoft.Maps.MapControl"     xmlns:vm="clr-namespace:EarthquakeLocator.ViewModel"     mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="640" d:DesignHeight="480" >     <UserControl.Resources>         <DataTemplate x:Key="EarthquakeTemplate">             <Ellipse Fill="Red" Stroke="Black" StrokeThickness="1"                      Width="{Binding Size}" Height="{Binding Size}"                      bing:MapLayer.Position="{Binding Location}"                      bing:MapLayer.PositionOrigin="Center">                 <ToolTipService.ToolTip>                     <StackPanel>                         <TextBlock Text="{Binding Title}" FontSize="14" FontWeight="Bold" />                         <TextBlock Text="{Binding UtcTime}" />                         <TextBlock Text="{Binding LocalTime}" />                         <TextBlock Text="{Binding DepthDesc}" />                     </StackPanel>                 </ToolTipService.ToolTip>             </Ellipse>         </DataTemplate>           <DataTemplate x:Key="VolcanoTemplate">             <Polygon Fill="Gold" Stroke="Black" StrokeThickness="1" Points="0,10 5,0 10,10"                      bing:MapLayer.Position="{Binding Location}"                      bing:MapLayer.PositionOrigin="Center"                      MouseLeftButtonUp="Volcano_MouseLeftButtonUp">                 <ToolTipService.ToolTip>                     <StackPanel>                         <TextBlock Text="{Binding Title}" FontSize="14" FontWeight="Bold" />                         <TextBlock Text="Click icon for more information..." />                     </StackPanel>                 </ToolTipService.ToolTip>             </Polygon>         </DataTemplate>     </UserControl.Resources>       <UserControl.DataContext>         <vm:EarthquakeViewModel AutoLoadData="True" />     </UserControl.DataContext>       <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">           <bing:Map x:Name="map" CredentialsProvider="--Your-Bing-Maps-Key--"                   Center="{Binding MapCenter, Mode=TwoWay}"                   ZoomLevel="{Binding ZoomLevel, Mode=TwoWay}">               <bing:MapItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Earthquakes}"                                   ItemTemplate="{StaticResource EarthquakeTemplate}" />               <bing:MapItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Volcanos}"                                   ItemTemplate="{StaticResource VolcanoTemplate}" />         </bing:Map>           <basic:TabControl x:Name="tabs" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" MaxHeight="25" Opacity="0.7">             <basic:TabItem Margin="90,0,-90,0" MouseLeftButtonUp="TabItem_MouseLeftButtonUp">                 <basic:TabItem.Header>                     <TextBlock x:Name="txtHeader" Text="Options"                                FontSize="13" FontWeight="Bold" />                 </basic:TabItem.Header>                   <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">                     <TextBlock Text="Earthquakes:" FontWeight="Bold" Margin="3" />                     <StackPanel Margin="3">                         <CheckBox Content=" &lt; 4.0"                                   IsChecked="{Binding ShowLt4, Mode=TwoWay}" />                         <CheckBox Content="4.0 - 4.9"                                   IsChecked="{Binding Show4s, Mode=TwoWay}" />                         <CheckBox Content="5.0 - 5.9"                                   IsChecked="{Binding Show5s, Mode=TwoWay}" />                     </StackPanel>                       <StackPanel Margin="10,3,3,3">                         <CheckBox Content="6.0 - 6.9"                                   IsChecked="{Binding Show6s, Mode=TwoWay}" />                         <CheckBox Content="7.0 - 7.9"                                   IsChecked="{Binding Show7s, Mode=TwoWay}" />                         <CheckBox Content="8.0 +"                                   IsChecked="{Binding ShowGe8, Mode=TwoWay}" />                     </StackPanel>                       <TextBlock Text="Other:" FontWeight="Bold" Margin="50,3,3,3" />                     <StackPanel Margin="3">                         <CheckBox Content="Volcanos"                                   IsChecked="{Binding ShowVolcanos, Mode=TwoWay}" />                     </StackPanel>                 </StackPanel>               </basic:TabItem>         </basic:TabControl>       </Grid> </UserControl> Notice that I added a VolcanoTemplate that uses a triangle-shaped Polygon to represent the Volcano locations, and I also added a second <bing:MapItemsControl /> tag to the map to bind to the Volcanos collection.  The TabControl found below the map houses the options panel that will present the user with several checkboxes so they can filter the different points based on type and other properties (i.e. Magnitude).  Initially, the TabItem is collapsed to reduce it's footprint, but the screen shot below shows the options panel expanded to reveal the available settings:     I have updated the Source Code and Live Demo to include these new features.   Happy Mapping!

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  • FAQ: GridView Calculation with JavaScript

    - by Vincent Maverick Durano
    In my previous post I wrote a simple demo on how to Calculate Totals in GridView and Display it in the Footer. Basically what it does is it calculates the total amount by typing into the TextBox and display the grand total in the footer of the GridView and basically it was a server side implemenation.  Many users in the forums are asking how to do the same thing without postbacks and how to calculate both amount and total amount together. In this post I will demonstrate how to do this using JavaScript. To get started let's go ahead and set up the form. Just for the simplicity of this demo I just set up the form like this:   <asp:gridview ID="GridView1" runat="server" ShowFooter="true" AutoGenerateColumns="false"> <Columns> <asp:BoundField DataField="RowNumber" HeaderText="Row Number" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Description" HeaderText="Item Description" /> <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Item Price"> <ItemTemplate> <asp:Label ID="LBLPrice" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("Price") %>'></asp:Label> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Quantity"> <ItemTemplate> <asp:TextBox ID="TXTQty" runat="server"></asp:TextBox> </ItemTemplate> <FooterTemplate> <b>Total Amount:</b> </FooterTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Sub-Total"> <ItemTemplate> <asp:Label ID="LBLSubTotal" runat="server"></asp:Label> </ItemTemplate> <FooterTemplate> <asp:Label ID="LBLTotal" runat="server" ForeColor="Green"></asp:Label> </FooterTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> </Columns> </asp:gridview>   As you can see there's no fancy about the mark up above. It just a standard GridView with BoundFields and TemplateFields on it. Now just for the purpose of this demo I just use a dummy data for populating the GridView. Here's the code below:   public partial class GridCalculation : System.Web.UI.Page { private void BindDummyDataToGrid() { DataTable dt = new DataTable(); DataRow dr = null; dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("RowNumber", typeof(string))); dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Description", typeof(string))); dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Price", typeof(string))); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 1; dr["Description"] = "Nike"; dr["Price"] = "1000"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 2; dr["Description"] = "Converse"; dr["Price"] = "800"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 3; dr["Description"] = "Adidas"; dr["Price"] = "500"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 4; dr["Description"] = "Reebok"; dr["Price"] = "750"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 5; dr["Description"] = "Vans"; dr["Price"] = "1100"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); dr = dt.NewRow(); dr["RowNumber"] = 6; dr["Description"] = "Fila"; dr["Price"] = "200"; dt.Rows.Add(dr); //Bind the Gridview GridView1.DataSource = dt; GridView1.DataBind(); } protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!IsPostBack) { BindDummyDataToGrid(); } } }   Now try to run the page. The output should look something like below: The Client-Side Calculation Here's the code for the GridView calculation:   <script type="text/javascript"> function CalculateTotals() { var gv = document.getElementById("<%= GridView1.ClientID %>"); var tb = gv.getElementsByTagName("input"); var lb = gv.getElementsByTagName("span"); var sub = 0; var total = 0; var indexQ = 1; var indexP = 0; for (var i = 0; i < tb.length; i++) { if (tb[i].type == "text") { sub = parseFloat(lb[indexP].innerHTML) * parseFloat(tb[i].value); if (isNaN(sub)) { lb[i + indexQ].innerHTML = ""; sub = 0; } else { lb[i + indexQ].innerHTML = sub; } indexQ++; indexP = indexP + 2; total += parseFloat(sub); } } lb[lb.length -1].innerHTML = total; } </script>   The code above calculates the sub-total by multiplying the price and the quantity and at the same time calculates the total amount  by adding the sub-total values. Now you can simply call the JavaScript function above like this:   <ItemTemplate> <asp:TextBox ID="TXTQty" runat="server" onkeyup="CalculateTotals();"></asp:TextBox> </ItemTemplate>   Running the code above will display something like below: That's it! I hope someone find this post useful! Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,JavaScript,GridView,TipsTricks

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  • Creating a multi-column rollover image gallery with HTML 5

    - by nikolaosk
    I know it has been a while since I blogged about HTML 5. I have two posts in this blog about HTML 5. You can find them here and here.I am creating a small content website (only text,images and a contact form) for a friend of mine.He wanted to create a rollover gallery.The whole concept is that we have some small thumbnails on a page, the user hovers over them and they appear enlarged on a designated container/placeholder on a page. I am trying not to use Javascript scripts when I am using effects on a web page and this is what I will be doing in this post.  Well some people will say that HTML 5 is not supported in all browsers. That is true but most of the modern browsers support most of its recommendations. For people who still use IE6 some hacks must be devised.Well to be totally honest I cannot understand why anyone at this day and time is using IE 6.0.That really is beyond me.Well, the point of having a web browser is to be able to ENJOY the great experience that the WE? offers today.  Two very nice sites that show you what features and specifications are implemented by various browsers and their versions are http://caniuse.com/ and http://html5test.com/. At this times Chrome seems to support most of HTML 5 specifications.Another excellent way to find out if the browser supports HTML 5 and CSS 3 features is to use the Javascript lightweight library Modernizr.In this hands-on example I will be using Expression Web 4.0.This application is not a free application. You can use any HTML editor you like.You can use Visual Studio 2012 Express edition. You can download it here. In order to be absolutely clear this is not (and could not be ) a detailed tutorial on HTML 5. There are other great resources for that.Navigate to the excellent interactive tutorials of W3School.Another excellent resource is HTML 5 Doctor.For the people who are not convinced yet that they should invest time and resources on becoming experts on HTML 5 I should point out that HTML 5 websites will be ranked higher than others. Search engines will be able to locate better the content of our site and its relevance/importance since it is using semantic tags. Let's move now to the actual hands-on example. In this case (since I am mad Liverpool supporter) I will create a rollover image gallery of Liverpool F.C legends. I create a folder in my desktop. I name it Liverpool Gallery.Then I create two subfolders in it, large-images (I place the large images in there) and thumbs (I place the small images in there).Then I create an empty .html file called LiverpoolLegends.html and an empty .css file called style.css.Please have a look at the HTML Markup that I typed in my fancy editor package below<!doctype html><html lang="en"><head><title>Liverpool Legends Gallery</title><meta charset="utf-8"><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css"></head><body><header><h1>A page dedicated to Liverpool Legends</h1><h2>Do hover over the images with the mouse to see the full picture</h2></header><ul id="column1"><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/john-barnes.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/john-barnes-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/ian-rush.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/ian-rush-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/graeme-souness.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/graeme-souness-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li></ul><ul id="column2"><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/steven-gerrard.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/steven-gerrard-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/kenny-dalglish.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/kenny-dalglish-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/robbie-fowler.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/robbie-fowler-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li></ul><ul id="column3"><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/alan-hansen.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/alan-hansen-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li><li><a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx?SelectedNavItem=Posts§ionid=1153&postid=8927200#"><img src="thumbs/michael-owen.jpg" alt=""><img class="large" src="large-images/michael-owen-large.jpg" alt=""></a></li></ul></body></html> It is very easy to follow the markup. Please have a look at the new doctype and the new semantic tag <header>. I have 3 columns and I place my images in there.There is a class called "large".I will use this class in my CSS code to hide the large image when the mouse is not on (hover) an image Make sure you validate your HTML 5 page in the validator found hereHave a look at the CSS code below that makes it all happen.img { border:none;}#column1 { position: absolute; top: 30; left: 100; }li { margin: 15px; list-style-type:none;}#column1 a img.large {  position: absolute; top: 0; left:700px; visibility: hidden;}#column1 a:hover { background: white;}#column1 a:hover img.large { visibility:visible;}#column2 { position: absolute; top: 30; left: 195px; }li { margin: 5px; list-style-type:none;}#column2 a img.large { position: absolute; top: 0; left:510px; margin-left:0; visibility: hidden;}#column2 a:hover { background: white;}#column2 a:hover img.large { visibility:visible;}#column3 { position: absolute; top: 30; left: 400px; width:108px;}li { margin: 5px; list-style-type:none;}#column3 a img.large { width: 260px; height:260px; position: absolute; top: 0; left:315px; margin-left:0; visibility: hidden;}#column3 a:hover { background: white;}#column3 a:hover img.large { visibility:visible;}?n the first line of the CSS code I set the images to have no border.Then I place the first column in the page and then remove the bullets from the list elements.Then I use the large CSS class to create a position for the large image and hide it.Finally when the hover event takes place I make the image visible.I repeat the process for the next two columns. I have tested the page with IE 10 and the latest versions of Opera,Chrome and Firefox.Feel free to style your HTML 5 gallery any way you want through the magic of CSS.I did not bother adding background colors and borders because that was beyond the scope of this post. Hope it helps!!!!

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  • Interview with Lenz Grimmer about MySQL Connect

    - by Keith Larson
    Keith Larson: Thank you for allowing me to do this interview with you.  I have been talking with a few different Oracle ACEs   about the MySQL Connect Conference. I figured the MySQL community might be missing you as well. You have been very busy with Oracle Linux but I know you still have an eye on the MySQL Community. How have things been?Lenz Grimmer: Thanks for including me in this series of interviews, I feel honored! I've read the other interviews, and really liked them. I still try to follow what's going on over in the MySQL community and it's good to see that many of the familiar faces are still around. Over the course of the 9 years that I was involved with MySQL, many colleagues and contacts turned into good friends and we still maintain close relationships.It's been almost 1.5 years ago that I moved into my new role here in the Linux team at Oracle, and I really enjoy working on a Linux distribution again (I worked for SUSE before I joined MySQL AB in 2002). I'm still learning a lot - Linux in the data center has greatly evolved in so many ways and there are a lot of new and exciting technologies to explore. Keith Larson: What were your thoughts when you heard that Oracle was going to deliver the MySQL Connect conference to the MySQL Community?Lenz Grimmer: I think it's testament to the fact that Oracle deeply cares about MySQL, despite what many skeptics may say. What started as "MySQL Sunday" two years ago has now evolved into a full-blown sub-conference, with 80 sessions at one of the largest corporate IT events in the world. I find this quite telling, not many products at Oracle enjoy this level of exposure! So it certainly makes me feel proud to see how far MySQL has come. Keith Larson: Have you had a chance to look over the sessions? What are your thoughts on them?Lenz Grimmer: I did indeed look at the final schedule.The content committee did a great job with selecting these sessions. I'm glad to see that the content selection was influenced by involving well-known and respected members of the MySQL community. The sessions cover a broad range of topics and technologies, both covering established topics as well as recent developments. Keith Larson: When you get a chance, what sessions do you plan on attending?Lenz Grimmer: I will actually be manning the Oracle booth in the exhibition area on one of these days, so I'm not sure if I'll have a lot of time attending sessions. But if I do, I'd love to see the keynotes and catch some of the sessions that talk about recent developments and new features in MySQL, High Availability and Clustering . Quite a lot has happened and it's hard to keep up with this constant flow of new MySQL releases.In particular, the following sessions caught my attention: MySQL Connect Keynote: The State of the Dolphin Evaluating MySQL High-Availability Alternatives CERN’s MySQL “as a Service” Deployment with Oracle VM: Empowering Users MySQL 5.6 Replication: Taking Scalability and High Availability to the Next Level What’s New in MySQL Server 5.6? MySQL Security: Past and Present MySQL at Twitter: Development and Deployment MySQL Community BOF MySQL Connect Keynote: MySQL Perspectives Keith Larson: So I will ask you just like I have asked the others I have interviewed, any tips that you would give to people for handling the long hours at conferences?Lenz Grimmer: Wear comfortable shoes and make sure to drink a lot! Also prepare a plan of the sessions you would like to attend beforehand and familiarize yourself with the venue, so you can get to the next talk in time without scrambling to find the location. The good thing about piggybacking on such a large conference like Oracle OpenWorld is that you benefit from the whole infrastructure. For example, there is a nice schedule builder that helps you to keep track of your sessions of interest. Other than that, bring enough business cards and talk to people, build up your network among your peers and other MySQL professionals! Keith Larson: What features of the MySQL 5.6 release do you look forward to the most ?Lenz Grimmer: There has been solid progress in so many areas like the InnoDB Storage Engine, the Optimizer, Replication or Performance Schema, it's hard for me to really highlight anything in particular. All in all, MySQL 5.6 sounds like a very promising release. I'm confident it will follow the tradition that Oracle already established with MySQL 5.5, which received a lot of praise even from very critical members of the MySQL community. If I had to name a single feature, I'm particularly and personally happy that the precise GIS functions have finally made it into a GA release - that was long overdue. Keith Larson:  In your opinion what is the best reason for someone to attend this event?Lenz Grimmer: This conference is an excellent opportunity to get in touch with the key people in the MySQL community and ecosystem and to get facts and information from the domain experts and developers that work on MySQL. The broad range of topics should attract people from a variety of roles and relations to MySQL, beginning with Developers and DBAs, to CIOs considering MySQL as a viable solution for their requirements. Keith Larson: You will be attending MySQL Connect and have some Oracle Linux Demos, do you see a growing demand for MySQL on Oracle Linux ?Lenz Grimmer: Yes! Oracle Linux is our recommended Linux distribution and we have a good relationship to the MySQL engineering group. They use Oracle Linux as a base Linux platform for development and QA, so we make sure that MySQL and Oracle Linux are well tested together. Setting up a MySQL server on Oracle Linux can be done very quickly, and many customers recognize the benefits of using them both in combination.Because Oracle Linux is available for free (including free bug fixes and errata), it's an ideal choice for running MySQL in your data center. You can run the same Linux distribution on both your development/staging systems as well as on the production machines, you decide which of these should be covered by a support subscription and at which level of support. This gives you flexibility and provides some really attractive cost-saving opportunities. Keith Larson: Since I am a Linux user and fan, what is on the horizon for  Oracle Linux?Lenz Grimmer: We're working hard on broadening the ecosystem around Oracle Linux, building up partnerships with ISVs and IHVs to certify Oracle Linux as a fully supported platform for their products. We also continue to collaborate closely with the Linux kernel community on various projects, to make sure that Linux scales and performs well on large systems and meets the demands of today's data centers. These improvements and enhancements will then rolled into the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, which is the key ingredient that sets Oracle Linux apart from other distributions. We also have a number of ongoing projects which are making good progress, and I'm sure you'll hear more about this at the upcoming OpenWorld conference :) Keith Larson: What is something that more people should be aware of when it comes to Oracle Linux and MySQL ?Lenz Grimmer: Many people assume that Oracle Linux is just tuned for Oracle products, such as the Oracle Database or our Engineered Systems. While it's of course true that we do a lot of testing and optimization for these workloads, Oracle Linux is and will remain a general-purpose Linux distribution that is a very good foundation for setting up a LAMP-Stack, for example. We also provide MySQL RPM packages for Oracle Linux, so you can easily stay up to date if you need something newer than what's included in the stock distribution.One more thing that is really unique to Oracle Linux is Ksplice, which allows you to apply security patches to the running Linux kernel, without having to reboot. This ensures that your MySQL database server keeps up and running and is not affected by any downtime. Keith Larson: What else would you like to add ?Lenz Grimmer: Thanks again for getting in touch with me, I appreciated the opportunity. I'm looking forward to MySQL Connect and Oracle OpenWorld and to meet you and many other people from the MySQL community that I haven't seen for quite some time! Keith Larson:  Thank you Lenz!

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  • Windows Azure AppFabric: ServiceBus Queue WPF Sample

    - by xamlnotes
    The latest version of the AppFabric ServiceBus now has support for queues and topics. Today I will show you a bit about using queues and also talk about some of the best practices in using them. If you are just getting started, you can check out this site for more info on Windows Azure. One of the 1st things I thought if when Azure was announced back when was how we handle fault tolerance. Web sites hosted in Azure are no much of an issue unless they are using SQL Azure and then you must account for potential fault or latency issues. Today I want to talk a bit about ServiceBus and how to handle fault tolerance.  And theres stuff like connecting to the servicebus and so on you have to take care of. To demonstrate some of the things you can do, let me walk through this sample WPF app that I am posting for you to download. To start off, the application is going to need things like the servicenamespace, issuer details and so forth to make everything work.  To facilitate this I created settings in the wpf app for all of these items. Then I mapped a static class to them and set the values when the program loads like so: StaticElements.ServiceNamespace = Convert.ToString(Properties.Settings.Default["ServiceNamespace"]); StaticElements.IssuerName = Convert.ToString(Properties.Settings.Default["IssuerName"]); StaticElements.IssuerKey = Convert.ToString(Properties.Settings.Default["IssuerKey"]); StaticElements.QueueName = Convert.ToString(Properties.Settings.Default["QueueName"]);   Now I can get to each of these elements plus some other common values or instances directly from the StaticElements class. Now, lets look at the application.  The application looks like this when it starts:   The blue graphic represents the queue we are going to use.  The next figure shows the form after items were added and the queue stats were updated . You can see how the queue has grown: To add an item to the queue, click the Add Order button which displays the following dialog: After you fill in the form and press OK, the order is published to the ServiceBus queue and the form closes. The application also allows you to read the queued items by clicking the Process Orders button. As you can see below, the form shows the queued items in a list and the  queue has disappeared as its now empty. In real practice we normally would use a Windows Service or some other automated process to subscribe to the queue and pull items from it. I created a class named ServiceBusQueueHelper that has the core queue features we need. There are three public methods: * GetOrCreateQueue – Gets an instance of the queue description if the queue exists. if not, it creates the queue and returns a description instance. * SendMessageToQueue = This method takes an order instance and sends it to the queue. The call to the queue is wrapped in the ExecuteAction method from the Transient Fault Tolerance Framework and handles all the retry logic for the queue send process. * GetOrderFromQueue – Grabs an order from the queue and returns a typed order from the queue. It also marks the message complete so the queue can remove it.   Now lets turn to the WPF window code (MainWindow.xaml.cs). The constructor contains the 4 lines shown about to setup the static variables and to perform other initialization tasks. The next few lines setup certain features we need for the ServiceBus: TokenProvider credentials = TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider(StaticElements.IssuerName, StaticElements.IssuerKey); Uri serviceUri = ServiceBusEnvironment.CreateServiceUri("sb", StaticElements.ServiceNamespace, string.Empty); StaticElements.CurrentNamespaceManager = new NamespaceManager(serviceUri, credentials); StaticElements.CurrentMessagingFactory = MessagingFactory.Create(serviceUri, credentials); The next two lines update the queue name label and also set the timer to 20 seconds.             QueueNameLabel.Content = StaticElements.QueueName;             _timer.Interval = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(20);             Next I call the UpdateQueueStats to initialize the UI for the queue:             UpdateQueueStats();             _timer.Tick += new EventHandler(delegate(object s, EventArgs a)                         {                      UpdateQueueStats();                  });             _timer.Start();         } The UpdateQueueStats method shown below. You can see that it uses the GetOrCreateQueue method mentioned earlier to grab the queue description, then it can get the MessageCount property.         private void UpdateQueueStats()         {             _queueDescription = _serviceBusQueueHelper.GetOrCreateQueue();             QueueCountLabel.Content = "(" + _queueDescription.MessageCount + ")";             long count = _queueDescription.MessageCount;             long queueWidth = count * 20;             QueueRectangle.Width = queueWidth;             QueueTickCount += 1;             TickCountlabel.Content = QueueTickCount.ToString();         }   The ReadQueueItemsButton_Click event handler calls the GetOrderFromQueue method and adds the order to the listbox. If you look at the SendQueueMessageController, you can see the SendMessage method that sends an order to the queue. Its pretty simple as it just creates a new CustomerOrderEntity instance,fills it and then passes it to the SendMessageToQueue. As you can see, all of our interaction with the queue is done through the helper class (ServiceBusQueueHelper). Now lets dig into the helper class. First, before you create anything like this, download the Transient Fault Handling Framework. Microsoft provides this free and they also provide the C# source. Theres a great article that shows how to use this framework with ServiceBus. I included the entire ServiceBusQueueHelper class in List 1. Notice the using statements for TransientFaultHandling: using Microsoft.AzureCAT.Samples.TransientFaultHandling; using Microsoft.AzureCAT.Samples.TransientFaultHandling.ServiceBus; The SendMessageToQueue in Listing 1 shows how to use the async send features of ServiceBus with them wrapped in the Transient Fault Handling Framework.  It is not much different than plain old ServiceBus calls but it sure makes it easy to have the fault tolerance added almost for free. The GetOrderFromQueue uses the standard synchronous methods to access the queue. The best practices article walks through using the async approach for a receive operation also.  Notice that this method makes a call to Receive to get the message then makes a call to GetBody to get a new strongly typed instance of CustomerOrderEntity to return. Listing 1 using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.AzureCAT.Samples.TransientFaultHandling; using Microsoft.AzureCAT.Samples.TransientFaultHandling.ServiceBus; using Microsoft.ServiceBus; using Microsoft.ServiceBus.Messaging; using System.Xml.Serialization; using System.Diagnostics; namespace WPFServicebusPublishSubscribeSample {     class ServiceBusQueueHelper     {         RetryPolicy currentPolicy = new RetryPolicy<ServiceBusTransientErrorDetectionStrategy>(RetryPolicy.DefaultClientRetryCount);         QueueClient currentQueueClient;         public QueueDescription GetOrCreateQueue()         {                        QueueDescription queue = null;             bool createNew = false;             try             {                 // First, let's see if a queue with the specified name already exists.                 queue = currentPolicy.ExecuteAction<QueueDescription>(() => { return StaticElements.CurrentNamespaceManager.GetQueue(StaticElements.QueueName); });                 createNew = (queue == null);             }             catch (MessagingEntityNotFoundException)             {                 // Looks like the queue does not exist. We should create a new one.                 createNew = true;             }             // If a queue with the specified name doesn't exist, it will be auto-created.             if (createNew)             {                 try                 {                     var newqueue = new QueueDescription(StaticElements.QueueName);                     queue = currentPolicy.ExecuteAction<QueueDescription>(() => { return StaticElements.CurrentNamespaceManager.CreateQueue(newqueue); });                 }                 catch (MessagingEntityAlreadyExistsException)                 {                     // A queue under the same name was already created by someone else,                     // perhaps by another instance. Let's just use it.                     queue = currentPolicy.ExecuteAction<QueueDescription>(() => { return StaticElements.CurrentNamespaceManager.GetQueue(StaticElements.QueueName); });                 }             }             currentQueueClient = StaticElements.CurrentMessagingFactory.CreateQueueClient(StaticElements.QueueName);             return queue;         }         public void SendMessageToQueue(CustomerOrderEntity Order)         {             BrokeredMessage msg = null;             GetOrCreateQueue();             // Use a retry policy to execute the Send action in an asynchronous and reliable fashion.             currentPolicy.ExecuteAction             (                 (cb) =>                 {                     // A new BrokeredMessage instance must be created each time we send it. Reusing the original BrokeredMessage instance may not                     // work as the state of its BodyStream cannot be guaranteed to be readable from the beginning.                     msg = new BrokeredMessage(Order);                     // Send the event asynchronously.                     currentQueueClient.BeginSend(msg, cb, null);                 },                 (ar) =>                 {                     try                     {                         // Complete the asynchronous operation.                         // This may throw an exception that will be handled internally by the retry policy.                         currentQueueClient.EndSend(ar);                     }                     finally                     {                         // Ensure that any resources allocated by a BrokeredMessage instance are released.                         if (msg != null)                         {                             msg.Dispose();                             msg = null;                         }                     }                 },                 (ex) =>                 {                     // Always dispose the BrokeredMessage instance even if the send                     // operation has completed unsuccessfully.                     if (msg != null)                     {                         msg.Dispose();                         msg = null;                     }                     // Always log exceptions.                     Trace.TraceError(ex.Message);                 }             );         }                 public CustomerOrderEntity GetOrderFromQueue()         {             CustomerOrderEntity Order = new CustomerOrderEntity();             QueueClient myQueueClient = StaticElements.CurrentMessagingFactory.CreateQueueClient(StaticElements.QueueName, ReceiveMode.PeekLock);             BrokeredMessage message;             ServiceBusQueueHelper serviceBusQueueHelper = new ServiceBusQueueHelper();             QueueDescription queueDescription;             queueDescription = serviceBusQueueHelper.GetOrCreateQueue();             if (queueDescription.MessageCount > 0)             {                 message = myQueueClient.Receive(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(90));                 if (message != null)                 {                     try                     {                         Order = message.GetBody<CustomerOrderEntity>();                         message.Complete();                     }                     catch (Exception ex)                     {                         throw ex;                     }                 }                 else                 {                     throw new Exception("Did not receive the messages");                 }             }             return Order;         }     } } I will post a link to the download demo in a separate post soon.

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  • MVC 3 AdditionalMetadata Attribute with ViewBag to Render Dynamic UI

    - by Steve Michelotti
    A few months ago I blogged about using Model metadata to render a dynamic UI in MVC 2. The scenario in the post was that we might have a view model where the questions are conditionally displayed and therefore a dynamic UI is needed. To recap the previous post, the solution was to use a custom attribute called [QuestionId] in conjunction with an “ApplicableQuestions” collection to identify whether each question should be displayed. This allowed me to have a view model that looked like this: 1: [UIHint("ScalarQuestion")] 2: [DisplayName("First Name")] 3: [QuestionId("NB0021")] 4: public string FirstName { get; set; } 5: 6: [UIHint("ScalarQuestion")] 7: [DisplayName("Last Name")] 8: [QuestionId("NB0022")] 9: public string LastName { get; set; } 10: 11: [UIHint("ScalarQuestion")] 12: [QuestionId("NB0023")] 13: public int Age { get; set; } 14: 15: public IEnumerable<string> ApplicableQuestions { get; set; } At the same time, I was able to avoid repetitive IF statements for every single question in my view: 1: <%: Html.EditorFor(m => m.FirstName, new { applicableQuestions = Model.ApplicableQuestions })%> 2: <%: Html.EditorFor(m => m.LastName, new { applicableQuestions = Model.ApplicableQuestions })%> 3: <%: Html.EditorFor(m => m.Age, new { applicableQuestions = Model.ApplicableQuestions })%> by creating an Editor Template called “ScalarQuestion” that encapsulated the IF statement: 1: <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl" %> 2: <%@ Import Namespace="DynamicQuestions.Models" %> 3: <%@ Import Namespace="System.Linq" %> 4: <% 5: var applicableQuestions = this.ViewData["applicableQuestions"] as IEnumerable<string>; 6: var questionAttr = this.ViewData.ModelMetadata.ContainerType.GetProperty(this.ViewData.ModelMetadata.PropertyName).GetCustomAttributes(typeof(QuestionIdAttribute), true) as QuestionIdAttribute[]; 7: string questionId = null; 8: if (questionAttr.Length > 0) 9: { 10: questionId = questionAttr[0].Id; 11: } 12: if (questionId != null && applicableQuestions.Contains(questionId)) { %> 13: <div> 14: <%: Html.Label("") %> 15: <%: Html.TextBox("", this.Model)%> 16: </div> 17: <% } %> You might want to go back and read the full post in order to get the full context. MVC 3 offers a couple of new features that make this scenario more elegant to implement. The first step is to use the new [AdditionalMetadata] attribute which, so far, appears to be an under appreciated new feature of MVC 3. With this attribute, I don’t need my custom [QuestionId] attribute anymore - now I can just write my view model like this: 1: [UIHint("ScalarQuestion")] 2: [DisplayName("First Name")] 3: [AdditionalMetadata("QuestionId", "NB0021")] 4: public string FirstName { get; set; } 5:   6: [UIHint("ScalarQuestion")] 7: [DisplayName("Last Name")] 8: [AdditionalMetadata("QuestionId", "NB0022")] 9: public string LastName { get; set; } 10:   11: [UIHint("ScalarQuestion")] 12: [AdditionalMetadata("QuestionId", "NB0023")] 13: public int Age { get; set; } Thus far, the documentation seems to be pretty sparse on the AdditionalMetadata attribute. It’s buried in the Other New Features section of the MVC 3 home page and, after showing the attribute on a view model property, it just says, “This metadata is made available to any display or editor template when a product view model is rendered. It is up to you to interpret the metadata information.” But what exactly does it look like for me to “interpret the metadata information”? Well, it turns out it makes the view much easier to work with. Here is the re-implemented ScalarQuestion template updated for MVC 3 and Razor: 1: @{ 2: object questionId; 3: ViewData.ModelMetadata.AdditionalValues.TryGetValue("QuestionId", out questionId); 4: if (ViewBag.applicableQuestions.Contains((string)questionId)) { 5: <div> 6: @Html.LabelFor(m => m) 7: @Html.TextBoxFor(m => m) 8: </div> 9: } 10: } So we’ve gone from 17 lines of code (in the MVC 2 version) to about 7-8 lines of code here. The first thing to notice is that in MVC 3 we now have a property called “AdditionalValues” that hangs off of the ModelMetadata property. This is automatically populated by any [AdditionalMetadata] attributes on the property. There is no more need for me to explicitly write Reflection code to GetCustomAttributes() and then check to see if those attributes were present. I can just call TryGetValue() on the dictionary to see if they were present. Secondly, the “applicableQuestions” anonymous type that I passed in from the calling view – in MVC 3 I now have a dynamic ViewBag property where I can just “dot into” the applicableQuestions with a nicer syntax than dictionary square bracket syntax. And there’s no problems calling the Contains() method on this dynamic object because at runtime the DLR has resolved that it is a generic List<string>. At this point you might be saying that, yes the view got much nicer than the MVC 2 version, but my view model got slightly worse.  In the previous version I had a nice [QuestionId] attribute but now, with the [AdditionalMetadata] attribute, I have to type the string “QuestionId” for every single property and hope that I don’t make a typo. Well, the good news is that it’s easy to create your own attributes that can participate in the metadata’s additional values. The key is that the attribute must implement that IMetadataAware interface and populate the AdditionalValues dictionary in the OnMetadataCreated() method: 1: public class QuestionIdAttribute : Attribute, IMetadataAware 2: { 3: public string Id { get; set; } 4:   5: public QuestionIdAttribute(string id) 6: { 7: this.Id = id; 8: } 9:   10: public void OnMetadataCreated(ModelMetadata metadata) 11: { 12: metadata.AdditionalValues["QuestionId"] = this.Id; 13: } 14: } This now allows me to encapuslate my “QuestionId” string in just one place and get back to my original attribute which can be used like this: [QuestionId(“NB0021”)]. The [AdditionalMetadata] attribute is a powerful and under-appreciated new feature of MVC 3. Combined with the dynamic ViewBag property, you can do some really interesting things with your applications with less code and ceremony.

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  • NINE Questions with Michelle Juett

    - by NINEQuestions
    Michelle Juett is one of the more interesting people I know, even though we’ve never met face to face. She’s part artist, part techie and all cool. We “met” via my good buddy George Clingerman and have plotting to take over the world, errr… I mean “collaborating” ever since. If you happen to live in the Seattle area, you can catch her and her work at Sakura Con on April 2-4, 2010 and various other gamer and art cons throughout the year. You can also find her on Twitter as @Shelldragon. Now that you know a little bit, I’ll let her tell you the rest of the story in these NINE Questions: 1. Where are you from? I was born in Clearwater, Florida. I like to tell people I'm from the Bermuda Triangle, it just makes explaining myself so much easier. My family moved to Washington when I was 5 and I've been in the Pacific Northwest ever since. We like to QQ about the rain but we really love the green trees and clean water. 2. What do you do? I fight evil by moonlight and win love by daylight.. or something like that.  I’ve been in quality assurance for games during the day since January 2008 and an artist for life. I currently work in QA for a really awesome game company in Bellevue.  At home, I work on personal digital art, making game assets as well as other random freelance projects as they pop up. 3. How did you get to where you are now? I'm still not where I want to be but I'm getting closer. The biggest piece of advice I can give is to work hard and never settle for the minimum required. I tend to overwork myself but I've never regretted it. You can want something really bad but if you aren't willing to work for it, then you can't expect it to just happen. I've always drawn and had an unhealthy love for video games that I was told I’d grow out of.  I knew I would not ‘grow out’ of games and that real adults make them and I could too. After I graduated, in searching for jobs, I discovered game testing. I figured this would be a good way to get my foot in the door and start networking. I’ve worked with consoles, websites and now, PC games.  I stuck with my journey, although it has been a rocky one, daylighting as a tester and moonlighting as an artist. I'm still on that journey but I wouldn't have it any other way. Test has given me a perspective that is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain any other way. It gives an unconditional respect for other hard working testers and an insight into creative problem solving. 4. So video game testing probably sounds WAY cooler than the reality. What's it like? What's a given day for you? Game testers don't get a lot of respect because of their stigmas and the fact most people don't actually know what we do.  People hear about the opening and closing disc trays all day. Many places do treat their testers like numbers. It all depends on where you work and how awesome your company is. I've had to deal with a lot of bad work situations to get to a really good one. QA exists to ensure the game is as flawless and enjoyable as it can be by the time it has to leave the nest and go out into the world. This includes everything obvious: “can I beat the level and save the princess?” to the more obscure: ‘What happens when I lose internet connection while trying to save right before falling into a pit to my death while holding the jump key then my cat pulls out my memory card and hides it in her litter box?” On the dev side, for developers, testers can be very scary people. Especially when the test team is not in house and you can’t see each other’s faces.  I've seen both sides. We don't mean to hurt your feelings. We really DO love you and want your game to be the best it can be! It can be some serious tough love. 5. You are also an accomplished artist. Got any major projects right now you'd like to talk about? LOL, I don't know if I’d say I'm an accomplished artist just yet. I’m still a long way from where I want to be. I figure that’s what makes you grow though: the desire to never stop improving. I like QA but I want to be a full time artist. I was lucky enough to register for a table at Sakura Con in the 11 second window that the tables sold out. As such, I’ll be selling my wares in the Artist Alley April 2-4th. Part of preparing for this is actually making the art to be sold there. Anime is a fun pass time but I don’t draw a whole lot of it so I’m making up for lost time. As I seem to enjoy burying myself in work, I’m an art lead for a secret project that’s so secret I might be killed tonight for even mentioning it. I also take on various freelance projects and do what I can to help out indie games. I discovered the XNA community a year and a half ago and developed a love for Indies when I was writing a weekly newsletter on XBLA news. I’m a little late to the party but I find myself in a unique position where I am an artist and also have technical skills in games. While not programmer myself, I have a lot of game sense and experience. I hope to make some awesome happen. Lastly, I have an ongoing web comic Shell’s Angels) that tends to get neglected when I get busy. I still love drawing comics and keep a little book with me to sketch down ideas as they pop into my head. I may pick it back up again as a larger project sometime in the future. 6. Can you talk about any of the other freelance projects you're doing or are you sworn to secrecy on those too? We wouldn't want a team of game developer ninjas to take you out or anything. All my projects are currently 2d. I have personal projects such as the ongoing comic as well as a graphic novel I've been picking at here and there. My main focus until April is Sakura Con, Sakura Con, Sakura Con.  I see it as a great way to get exposure and convention experience. I found out I love conventions a couple years ago and I want to get more involved in them. 7. As an artist, what is your weapon of choice? What do you use to get most of your stuff done? I am a Photoshop Hero and I have the hoodie to prove it. (http://www.pennyarcademerch.com/pah090011.html) I've dabbled in other paint programs but I always gravitate back to Photoshop. She is my one true love. I'd like to learn programs like Flash or Anime Studio when I get a bit more time because of their animation abilities. I've worked on frame by frame animation forever but I would love to learn 2d rigging. Still, nothing can compare to a simple sketchpad and a pencil. I always have one on me in case I come across or think of something interesting and can't get to a computer. If the Courier ever comes to exist it will be an ideal weapon for me. 8. You did some videos too, depicting the art creation process. What was the motivation behind those? The creative process is just as important as the final product, if not more so.  I've always loved watching speed paint videos and wanted to try it out myself. Turns out it's a lot of work and time but it's definitely fun to go back and rewatch them. Art isn't always the end result and is more often the process itself. 9. Got any interesting tattoos? Designed any for yourself or other people? Not yet, but not for lack of desire. I've toiled over what and where for years. Last year, I finally decided the back of my shoulders would be the place. Like anything permanent, I want it to have meaning. I thought of somehow incorporating games but I couldn't find something I felt would stand the test of time even with all the classic sprite games. I'm very picky so we'll see if I can get something solid decided. Come see me at Sakura Con April 2 -4!!!

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  • Launching a WPF Window in a Separate Thread, Part 1

    - by Reed
    Typically, I strongly recommend keeping the user interface within an application’s main thread, and using multiple threads to move the actual “work” into background threads.  However, there are rare times when creating a separate, dedicated thread for a Window can be beneficial.  This is even acknowledged in the MSDN samples, such as the Multiple Windows, Multiple Threads sample.  However, doing this correctly is difficult.  Even the referenced MSDN sample has major flaws, and will fail horribly in certain scenarios.  To ease this, I wrote a small class that alleviates some of the difficulties involved. The MSDN Multiple Windows, Multiple Threads Sample shows how to launch a new thread with a WPF Window, and will work in most cases.  The sample code (commented and slightly modified) works out to the following: // Create a thread Thread newWindowThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart( () => { // Create and show the Window Window1 tempWindow = new Window1(); tempWindow.Show(); // Start the Dispatcher Processing System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run(); })); // Set the apartment state newWindowThread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); // Make the thread a background thread newWindowThread.IsBackground = true; // Start the thread newWindowThread.Start(); .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 sample creates a thread, marks it as single threaded apartment state, and starts the Dispatcher on that thread. That is the minimum requirements to get a Window displaying and handling messages correctly, but, unfortunately, has some serious flaws. The first issue – the created thread will run continuously until the application shuts down, given the code in the sample.  The problem is that the ThreadStart delegate used ends with running the Dispatcher.  However, nothing ever stops the Dispatcher processing.  The thread was created as a Background thread, which prevents it from keeping the application alive, but the Dispatcher will continue to pump dispatcher frames until the application shuts down. In order to fix this, we need to call Dispatcher.InvokeShutdown after the Window is closed.  This would require modifying the above sample to subscribe to the Window’s Closed event, and, at that point, shutdown the Dispatcher: // Create a thread Thread newWindowThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart( () => { Window1 tempWindow = new Window1(); // When the window closes, shut down the dispatcher tempWindow.Closed += (s,e) => Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher.BeginInvokeShutdown(DispatcherPriority.Background); tempWindow.Show(); // Start the Dispatcher Processing System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run(); })); // Setup and start thread as before This eliminates the first issue.  Now, when the Window is closed, the new thread’s Dispatcher will shut itself down, which in turn will cause the thread to complete. The above code will work correctly for most situations.  However, there is still a potential problem which could arise depending on the content of the Window1 class.  This is particularly nasty, as the code could easily work for most windows, but fail on others. The problem is, at the point where the Window is constructed, there is no active SynchronizationContext.  This is unlikely to be a problem in most cases, but is an absolute requirement if there is code within the constructor of Window1 which relies on a context being in place. While this sounds like an edge case, it’s fairly common.  For example, if a BackgroundWorker is started within the constructor, or a TaskScheduler is built using TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext() with the expectation of synchronizing work to the UI thread, an exception will be raised at some point.  Both of these classes rely on the existence of a proper context being installed to SynchronizationContext.Current, which happens automatically, but not until Dispatcher.Run is called.  In the above case, SynchronizationContext.Current will return null during the Window’s construction, which can cause exceptions to occur or unexpected behavior. Luckily, this is fairly easy to correct.  We need to do three things, in order, prior to creating our Window: Create and initialize the Dispatcher for the new thread manually Create a synchronization context for the thread which uses the Dispatcher Install the synchronization context Creating the Dispatcher is quite simple – The Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher property gets the current thread’s Dispatcher and “creates a new Dispatcher if one is not already associated with the thread.”  Once we have the correct Dispatcher, we can create a SynchronizationContext which uses the dispatcher by creating a DispatcherSynchronizationContext.  Finally, this synchronization context can be installed as the current thread’s context via SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext.  These three steps can easily be added to the above via a single line of code: // Create a thread Thread newWindowThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart( () => { // Create our context, and install it: SynchronizationContext.SetSynchronizationContext( new DispatcherSynchronizationContext( Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher)); Window1 tempWindow = new Window1(); // When the window closes, shut down the dispatcher tempWindow.Closed += (s,e) => Dispatcher.CurrentDispatcher.BeginInvokeShutdown(DispatcherPriority.Background); tempWindow.Show(); // Start the Dispatcher Processing System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run(); })); // Setup and start thread as before This now forces the synchronization context to be in place before the Window is created and correctly shuts down the Dispatcher when the window closes. However, there are quite a few steps.  In my next post, I’ll show how to make this operation more reusable by creating a class with a far simpler API…

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  • Metro: Query Selectors

    - by Stephen.Walther
    The goal of this blog entry is to explain how to perform queries using selectors when using the WinJS library. In particular, you learn how to use the WinJS.Utilities.query() method and the QueryCollection class to retrieve and modify the elements of an HTML document. Introduction to Selectors When you are building a Web application, you need some way of easily retrieving elements from an HTML document. For example, you might want to retrieve all of the input elements which have a certain class. Or, you might want to retrieve the one and only element with an id of favoriteColor. The standard way of retrieving elements from an HTML document is by using a selector. Anyone who has ever created a Cascading Style Sheet has already used selectors. You use selectors in Cascading Style Sheets to apply formatting rules to elements in a document. For example, the following Cascading Style Sheet rule changes the background color of every INPUT element with a class of .required in a document to the color red: input.red { background-color: red } The “input.red” part is the selector which matches all INPUT elements with a class of red. The W3C standard for selectors (technically, their recommendation) is entitled “Selectors Level 3” and the standard is located here: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-selectors/ Selectors are not only useful for adding formatting to the elements of a document. Selectors are also useful when you need to apply behavior to the elements of a document. For example, you might want to select a particular BUTTON element with a selector and add a click handler to the element so that something happens whenever you click the button. Selectors are not specific to Cascading Style Sheets. You can use selectors in your JavaScript code to retrieve elements from an HTML document. jQuery is famous for its support for selectors. Using jQuery, you can use a selector to retrieve matching elements from a document and modify the elements. The WinJS library enables you to perform the same types of queries as jQuery using the W3C selector syntax. Performing Queries with the WinJS.Utilities.query() Method When using the WinJS library, you perform a query using a selector by using the WinJS.Utilities.query() method.  The following HTML document contains a BUTTON and a DIV element: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Application1</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> <!-- Application1 references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet"> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> </head> <body> <button>Click Me!</button> <div style="display:none"> <h1>Secret Message</h1> </div> </body> </html> The document contains a reference to the following JavaScript file named \js\default.js: (function () { "use strict"; var app = WinJS.Application; app.onactivated = function (eventObject) { if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) { WinJS.Utilities.query("button").listen("click", function () { WinJS.Utilities.query("div").clearStyle("display"); }); } }; app.start(); })(); The default.js script uses the WinJS.Utilities.query() method to retrieve all of the BUTTON elements in the page. The listen() method is used to wire an event handler to the BUTTON click event. When you click the BUTTON, the secret message contained in the hidden DIV element is displayed. The clearStyle() method is used to remove the display:none style attribute from the DIV element. Under the covers, the WinJS.Utilities.query() method uses the standard querySelectorAll() method. This means that you can use any selector which is compatible with the querySelectorAll() method when using the WinJS.Utilities.query() method. The querySelectorAll() method is defined in the W3C Selectors API Level 1 standard located here: http://www.w3.org/TR/selectors-api/ Unlike the querySelectorAll() method, the WinJS.Utilities.query() method returns a QueryCollection. We talk about the methods of the QueryCollection class below. Retrieving a Single Element with the WinJS.Utilities.id() Method If you want to retrieve a single element from a document, instead of matching a set of elements, then you can use the WinJS.Utilities.id() method. For example, the following line of code changes the background color of an element to the color red: WinJS.Utilities.id("message").setStyle("background-color", "red"); The statement above matches the one and only element with an Id of message. For example, the statement matches the following DIV element: <div id="message">Hello!</div> Notice that you do not use a hash when matching a single element with the WinJS.Utilities.id() method. You would need to use a hash when using the WinJS.Utilities.query() method to do the same thing like this: WinJS.Utilities.query("#message").setStyle("background-color", "red"); Under the covers, the WinJS.Utilities.id() method calls the standard document.getElementById() method. The WinJS.Utilities.id() method returns the result as a QueryCollection. If no element matches the identifier passed to WinJS.Utilities.id() then you do not get an error. Instead, you get a QueryCollection with no elements (length=0). Using the WinJS.Utilities.children() method The WinJS.Utilities.children() method enables you to retrieve a QueryCollection which contains all of the children of a DOM element. For example, imagine that you have a DIV element which contains children DIV elements like this: <div id="discussContainer"> <div>Message 1</div> <div>Message 2</div> <div>Message 3</div> </div> You can use the following code to add borders around all of the child DIV element and not the container DIV element: var discussContainer = WinJS.Utilities.id("discussContainer").get(0); WinJS.Utilities.children(discussContainer).setStyle("border", "2px dashed red");   It is important to understand that the WinJS.Utilities.children() method only works with a DOM element and not a QueryCollection. Notice that the get() method is used to retrieve the DOM element which represents the discussContainer. Working with the QueryCollection Class Both the WinJS.Utilities.query() method and the WinJS.Utilities.id() method return an instance of the QueryCollection class. The QueryCollection class derives from the base JavaScript Array class and adds several useful methods for working with HTML elements: addClass(name) – Adds a class to every element in the QueryCollection. clearStyle(name) – Removes a style from every element in the QueryCollection. conrols(ctor, options) – Enables you to create controls. get(index) – Retrieves the element from the QueryCollection at the specified index. getAttribute(name) – Retrieves the value of an attribute for the first element in the QueryCollection. hasClass(name) – Returns true if the first element in the QueryCollection has a certain class. include(items) – Includes a collection of items in the QueryCollection. listen(eventType, listener, capture) – Adds an event listener to every element in the QueryCollection. query(query) – Performs an additional query on the QueryCollection and returns a new QueryCollection. removeClass(name) – Removes a class from the every element in the QueryCollection. removeEventListener(eventType, listener, capture) – Removes an event listener from every element in the QueryCollection. setAttribute(name, value) – Adds an attribute to every element in the QueryCollection. setStyle(name, value) – Adds a style attribute to every element in the QueryCollection. template(templateElement, data, renderDonePromiseContract) – Renders a template using the supplied data.  toggleClass(name) – Toggles the specified class for every element in the QueryCollection. Because the QueryCollection class derives from the base Array class, it also contains all of the standard Array methods like forEach() and slice(). Summary In this blog post, I’ve described how you can perform queries using selectors within a Windows Metro Style application written with JavaScript. You learned how to return an instance of the QueryCollection class by using the WinJS.Utilities.query(), WinJS.Utilities.id(), and WinJS.Utilities.children() methods. You also learned about the methods of the QueryCollection class.

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  • SQL SERVER – 5 Tips for Improving Your Data with expressor Studio

    - by pinaldave
    It’s no secret that bad data leads to bad decisions and poor results.  However, how do you prevent dirty data from taking up residency in your data store?  Some might argue that it’s the responsibility of the person sending you the data.  While that may be true, in practice that will rarely hold up.  It doesn’t matter how many times you ask, you will get the data however they decide to provide it. So now you have bad data.  What constitutes bad data?  There are quite a few valid answers, for example: Invalid date values Inappropriate characters Wrong data Values that exceed a pre-set threshold While it is certainly possible to write your own scripts and custom SQL to identify and deal with these data anomalies, that effort often takes too long and becomes difficult to maintain.  Instead, leveraging an ETL tool like expressor Studio makes the data cleansing process much easier and faster.  Below are some tips for leveraging expressor to get your data into tip-top shape. Tip 1:     Build reusable data objects with embedded cleansing rules One of the new features in expressor Studio 3.2 is the ability to define constraints at the metadata level.  Using expressor’s concept of Semantic Types, you can define reusable data objects that have embedded logic such as constraints for dealing with dirty data.  Once defined, they can be saved as a shared atomic type and then re-applied to other data attributes in other schemas. As you can see in the figure above, I’ve defined a constraint on zip code.  I can then save the constraint rules I defined for zip code as a shared atomic type called zip_type for example.   The next time I get a different data source with a schema that also contains a zip code field, I can simply apply the shared atomic type (shown below) and the previously defined constraints will be automatically applied. Tip 2:     Unlock the power of regular expressions in Semantic Types Another powerful feature introduced in expressor Studio 3.2 is the option to use regular expressions as a constraint.   A regular expression is used to identify patterns within data.   The patterns could be something as simple as a date format or something much more complex such as a street address.  For example, I could define that a valid IP address should be made up of 4 numbers, each 0 to 255, and separated by a period.  So 192.168.23.123 might be a valid IP address whereas 888.777.0.123 would not be.   How can I account for this using regular expressions? A very simple regular expression that would look for any 4 sets of 3 digits separated by a period would be:  ^[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}$ Alternatively, the following would be the exact check for truly valid IP addresses as we had defined above:  ^(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])$ .  In expressor, we would enter this regular expression as a constraint like this: Here we select the corrective action to be ‘Escalate’, meaning that the expressor Dataflow operator will decide what to do.  Some of the options include rejecting the offending record, skipping it, or aborting the dataflow. Tip 3:     Email pattern expressions that might come in handy In the example schema that I am using, there’s a field for email.  Email addresses are often entered incorrectly because people are trying to avoid spam.  While there are a lot of different ways to define what constitutes a valid email address, a quick search online yields a couple of really useful regular expressions for validating email addresses: This one is short and sweet:  \b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b (Source: http://www.regular-expressions.info/) This one is more specific about which characters are allowed:  ^([a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.]+)@((\[[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.)|(([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+\.)+))([a-zA-Z]{2,4}|[0-9]{1,3})(\]?)$ (Source: http://regexlib.com/REDetails.aspx?regexp_id=26 ) Tip 4:     Reject “dirty data” for analysis or further processing Yet another feature introduced in expressor Studio 3.2 is the ability to reject records based on constraint violations.  To capture reject records on input, simply specify Reject Record in the Error Handling setting for the Read File operator.  Then attach a Write File operator to the reject port of the Read File operator as such: Next, in the Write File operator, you can configure the expressor operator in a similar way to the Read File.  The key difference would be that the schema needs to be derived from the upstream operator as shown below: Once configured, expressor will output rejected records to the file you specified.  In addition to the rejected records, expressor also captures some diagnostic information that will be helpful towards identifying why the record was rejected.  This makes diagnosing errors much easier! Tip 5:    Use a Filter or Transform after the initial cleansing to finish the job Sometimes you may want to predicate the data cleansing on a more complex set of conditions.  For example, I may only be interested in processing data containing males over the age of 25 in certain zip codes.  Using an expressor Filter operator, you can define the conditional logic which isolates the records of importance away from the others. Alternatively, the expressor Transform operator can be used to alter the input value via a user defined algorithm or transformation.  It also supports the use of conditional logic and data can be rejected based on constraint violations. However, the best tip I can leave you with is to not constrain your solution design approach – expressor operators can be combined in many different ways to achieve the desired results.  For example, in the expressor Dataflow below, I can post-process the reject data from the Filter which did not meet my pre-defined criteria and, if successful, Funnel it back into the flow so that it gets written to the target table. I continue to be impressed that expressor offers all this functionality as part of their FREE expressor Studio desktop ETL tool, which you can download from here.  Their Studio ETL tool is absolutely free and they are very open about saying that if you want to deploy their software on a dedicated Windows Server, you need to purchase their server software, whose pricing is posted on their website. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Integrating Flickr with ASP.Net application

    - by sreejukg
    Flickr is the popular photo management and sharing application offered by yahoo. The services from flicker allow you to store and share photos and videos online. Flicker offers strong API support for almost all services they provide. Using this API, developers can integrate photos to their public website. Since 2005, developers have collaborated on top of Flickr's APIs to build fun, creative, and gorgeous experiences around photos that extend beyond Flickr. In this article I am going to demonstrate how easily you can bring the photos stored on flicker to your website. Let me explain the scenario this article is trying to address. I have a flicker account where I upload photos and share in many ways offered by Flickr. Now I have a public website, instead of re-upload the photos again to public website, I want to show this from Flickr. Also I need complete control over what photo to display. So I went and referred the Flickr documentation and there is API support ready to address my scenario (and more… ). FlickerAPI for ASP.Net To Integrate Flicker with ASP.Net applications, there is a library available in CodePlex. You can find it here http://flickrnet.codeplex.com/ Visit the URL and download the latest version. The download includes a Zip file, when you unzip you will get a number of dlls. Since I am going to use ASP.Net application, I need FlickrNet.dll. See the screenshot of all the dlls, and there is a help file available in the download (.chm) for your reference. Once you have the dll, you need to use Flickr API from your website. I assume you have a flicker account and you are familiar with Flicker services. Arrange your photos using Sets in Flickr In flicker, you can define sets and add your uploaded photos to sets. You can compare set to photo album. A set is a logical collection of photos, which is an excellent option for you to categorize your photos. Typically you will have a number of sets each set having few photos. You can write application that brings photos from sets to your website. For the purpose of this article I already created a set Flickr and added some photos to it. Once you logged in to Flickr, you can see the Sets under the Menu. In the Sets page, you will see all the sets you have created. As you notice, you can see certain sample images I have uploaded just to test the functionality. Though I wish I couldn’t create good photos so please bear with me. I have created 2 photo sets named Blue Album and Red Album. Click on the image for the set, will take you to the corresponding set page. In the set “Red Album” there are 4 photos and the set has a unique ID (highlighted in the URL). You can simply retrieve the photos with the set id from your application. In this article I am going to retrieve the images from Red album in my ASP.Net page. For that First I need to setup FlickrAPI for my usage. Configure Flickr API Key As I mentioned, we are going to use Flickr API to retrieve the photos stored in Flickr. In order to get access to Flickr API, you need an API key. To create an API key, navigate to the URL http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/create/ Click on Request an API key link, now you need to tell Flickr whether your application in commercial or non-commercial. I have selected a non-commercial key. Now you need to enter certain information about your application. Once you enter the details, Click on the submit button. Now Flickr will create the API key for your application. Generating non-commercial API key is very easy, in couple of steps the key will be generated and you can use the key in your application immediately. ASP.Net application for retrieving photos Now we need write an ASP.Net application that display pictures from Flickr. Create an empty web application (I named this as FlickerIntegration) and add a reference to FlickerNet.dll. Add a web form page to the application where you will retrieve and display photos(I have named this as Gallery.aspx). After doing all these, the solution explorer will look similar to following. I have used the below code in the Gallery.aspx page. The output for the above code is as follows. I am going to explain the code line by line here. First it is adding a reference to the FlickrNet namespace. using FlickrNet; Then create a Flickr object by using your API key. Flickr f = new Flickr("<yourAPIKey>"); Now when you retrieve photos, you can decide what all fields you need to retrieve from Flickr. Every photo in Flickr contains lots of information. Retrieving all will affect the performance. For the demonstration purpose, I have retrieved all the available fields as follows. PhotoSearchExtras.All But if you want to specify the fields you can use logical OR operator(|). For e.g. the following statement will retrieve owner name and date taken. PhotoSearchExtras extraInfo = PhotoSearchExtras.OwnerName | PhotoSearchExtras.DateTaken; Then retrieve all the photos from a photo set using PhotoSetsGetPhotos method. I have passed the PhotoSearchExtras object created earlier. PhotosetPhotoCollection photos = f.PhotosetsGetPhotos("72157629872940852", extraInfo); The PhotoSetsGetPhotos method will return a collection of Photo objects. You can just navigate through the collection using a foreach statement. foreach (Photo p in photos) {     //access each photo properties } Photo class have lot of properties that map with the properties from Flickr. The chm documentation comes along with the CodePlex download is a great asset for you to understand the fields. In the above code I just used the following p.LargeUrl – retrieves the large image url for the photo. p.ThumbnailUrl – retrieves the thumbnail url for the photo p.Title – retrieves the Title of the photo p.DateUploaded – retrieves the date of upload Visual Studio intellisense will give you all properties, so it is easy, you can just try with Visual Studio intellisense to find the right properties you are looking for. Most of hem are self-explanatory. So you can try retrieving the required properties. In the above code, I just pushed the photos to the page. In real time you can use the retrieved photos along with JQuery libraries to create animated photo galleries, slideshows etc. Configuration and Troubleshooting If you get access denied error while executing the code, you need to disable the caching in Flickr API. FlickrNet cache the photos to your local disk when retrieved. You can specify a cache folder where the application need write permission. You can specify the Cache folder in the code as follows. Flickr.CacheLocation = Server.MapPath("./FlickerCache/"); If the application doesn’t have have write permission to the cache folder, the application will throw access denied error. If you cannot give write permission to the cache folder, then you must disable the caching. You can do this from code as follows. Flickr.CacheDisabled = true; Disabling cache will have an impact on the performance. Take care! Also you can define the Flickr settings in web.config file.You can find the documentation here. http://flickrnet.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=ExampleConfigFile&ProjectName=flickrnet Flickr is a great place for storing and sharing photos. The API access allows developers to do seamless integration with the photos uploaded on Flickr.

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  • Company Review: Google Products

    Google, Inc offers an array of products and services to all of its end-users. However their search capabilities are the foundation for Google’s current success and their primary business focus. Currently, Google offers over twenty different search applications that allow users to search the internet for books, maps, videos, images, products and much more. Their product decisions have allowed users demands to be met while focusing on the free based model. This allows users to access Google data free of charge and indirectly gives Google a strong competitive advantage of other competitors along with the accuracy of the search results. According to Google, Inc, they offer the following types of searching capabilities: Alerts Get email updates on the topics of your choice Blog Search Find blogs on your favorite topics  Books Search the full text of books  Custom Search Create a customized search experience for your community  Desktop Search and personalize your computer  Dictionary Search for definitions of words and phrases Directory Search the web, organized by topic or category Earth Explore the world from your computer Finance Business info, news and interactive charts GOOG-411 Find and connect for free with businesses from your phone  Images Search for images on the web Maps View maps and directions News Search thousands of news stories Patent Search Search the full text of US Patents Product Search Search for stuff to buy Scholar Search scholarly papers Toolbar Add a search box to your browser Trends Explore past and present search trends Videos Search for videos on the web Web Search Search billions of web pages Web Search Features Find movies, music, stocks, books and more mapping Google’s free based business model is only one way it differentiates itself from its competition. There is also a strong focus on the accuracy of search results and the speed in which they are returned to the end-user. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a structured method used to help connect user needs to the design features of a project proposed to address those needs. This method is particularly useful in accounting for needs that are not easily articulated or precisely defined according to the U. S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration. Due to the fact that QFD is so customer driven Google is always in a constant state of change in attempt to reengineer its search algorithms, and other dependant systems so that end-users requirements are constantly being met. Value engineering is a key example of this, Google is constantly trying to improve all aspects of its products, improve system maintainability, and system interoperability. Bridgefield Group defines value engineering as an organized methodology that identifies and selects the lowest lifecycle cost options in design, materials and processes that achieves the desired level of performance, reliability and customer satisfaction. In addition, it seeks to remove unnecessary costs in the above areas and is often a joint effort with cross-functional internal teams and relevant suppliers. Common issues that appear when developing large scale systems like Google’s search applications include modular design of a product and/or service and providing accurate value analysis. A design approach that adheres to four fundamental tenets of cohesiveness, encapsulation, self-containment, and high binding to design a system component as an independently operable unit subject to change is how the Open System Joint Task Force defines modular design. More specifically M. S. Schmaltz defines modular software design as having a large collection of statements strung together in one partition of in-line code; we segment or divide the statements into logical groups called modules. Each module performs one or two tasks, and then passes control to another module. By breaking up the code into "bite-sized chunks", so to speak, we are able to better control the flow of data and control. This is especially true in large software systems. Value analysis is a process to evaluate products and services based on effectiveness, safety, and cost. Value analysis involves assessing the quality as well as the cost of a product or service as defined by the Healthcare Financial Management Association.  “Operations Management deals with the design and management of products, processes, services and supply chains. It considers the acquisition, development, and utilization of resources that firms need to deliver the goods and services their clients want.” (MIT,2010) Google, Inc encourages an open environment between all employees, also known as Googlers. This is reinforced by a cross-section team or cross-functional teams comprised from multiple departments assigned to every project so that every department like marketing, finance, and quality assurance has input on every project. In addition, Google is known for their openness to new ideas regardless of the status or seniority of an employee. In fact, Google allows for 20% of an employee’s time can be devoted to developing new ideas and/or pet projects. HumTech.com defines a cross-functional team as a collection of people with varied levels of skills and experience brought together to accomplish a task. As the name implies, Cross-Functional Team members come from different organizational units. Cross-Functional Teams may be permanent or ad hoc. Google’s search application product strategy primarily focuses on mass customization. This is allows Google to create a base search application and allows results to be returned to the end-users quickly based on specific parameters and search settings. In addition, they also store the data that is returned in case other desire the same results based on other end-users supplying the same customized settings. This allows Google to appear to render search results in virtually real-time to the user while allowing for complete customization of the searching criteria. Greg Vogl, a professor at Uganda Martyrs University, defines mass customization as when a business gives its customers the opportunity to tailor its products or services to the customer's specifications. The IT staff at Google play a key role in ensuring that the search application’s product strategy is maintained simply because the IT staff designs, develops, and maintains all of their proprietary applications. In fact, they also maintain all network infrastructure to ensure that it is available to all end-users. References: http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/ http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/publications/ftat_user_guide/sec5.htm http://www.bridgefieldgroup.com/bridgefieldgroup/glos9.htm#V http://www.acq.osd.mil/osjtf/termsdef.html http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~mssz/Pascal-CGS2462/prog-dsn.html http://www.hfma.org/publications/business_caring_newsletter/exclusives/Supply+and+Inventory+Terms+Defined.htm http://mitsloan.mit.edu/omg/om-definition.php http://www.humtech.com/opm/grtl/ols/ols3.cfm http://www.gregvogl.net/courses/mis1/glossary.htm

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  • Lightning talk: Coderetreat

    - by Michael Williamson
    In the spirit of trying to encourage more deliberate practice amongst coders in Red Gate, Lauri Pesonen had the idea of running a coderetreat in Red Gate. Lauri and I ran the first one a few weeks ago: given that neither of us hadn’t even been to a coderetreat before, let alone run one, I think it turned out quite well. The participants gave positive feedback, saying that they enjoyed the day, wrote some thought-provoking code and would do it again. Sam Blackburn was one of the attendees, and gave a lightning talk to the other developers in one of our regular lightning talk sessions: In case you can’t watch the video, I’ve transcribed the talk below, although I’d recommend watching the video if you can — I didn’t have much time to do the transcribing! So, what is a coderetreat? So it’s not just something in Red Gate, there’s a website and everything, although it’s not a very big website. It calls itself a community network. The basic ideas behind coderetreat are: you’ve got one day, and you split it into one hour sections. You spend three quarters of that coding, and do a little retrospective at the end. You’re supposed to start fresh each, we were told to delete our code after every session. We were in pairs, swapping after each session, and we did the same task every time. In fact, Conway’s Game of Life is the only task mentioned anywhere that I find for coderetreat. So I don’t know what we’ll do next time, or if we’re meant to do the same thing again. There are some guiding principles which felt to us like restrictions, that you have to code in crazy ways to encourage better code. Final thing is that it’s supposed to be free for outsiders to join. It’s meant to be a kind of networking thing, where you link up with people from other companies. We had a pilot day with Michael and Lauri. Since it was basically the first time any of us had done anything like this, everybody was from Red Gate. We didn’t chat to anybody else for the initial one. The task was Conway’s Game of Life, which most of you have probably heard of it, all but one of us knew about it when did the coderetreat. I won’t got into the details of what it is, but it felt like the right size of task, basically one or two groups actually produced something working by the end of the day, and of course that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a day’s work to produce that because we were starting again every hour. The task really drives you more than trying to create good code, I found. It was really tempting to try and get it working rather than stick to the rules. But it’s really good to stop and try again because there are so many what-ifs when you’ve finished writing something, “what if I’d done it this way?”. You can answer all those questions at a coderetreat because it’s not about getting a product out the door, it’s about learning and playing with ideas. So we had all these different practices we were trying. I’ll try and go through most of these. Single responsibility is this idea that everything should do just one thing. It was the very first session, we were still trying to figure out how do you go about the Game of Life? So by the end of forty-five minutes hadn’t produced very much for that first session. We were still thinking, “Do we start with a board, how do we represent all these squares? It can be infinitely big, help, this is getting really difficult!”. So, most of us didn’t really get anywhere on the first one. Although it was interesting that some people started with the board, one group started with the FateDecider class that decides whether things live or die. A sort of god class, but in a good way. They managed to implement all of the rules without even defining how the squares were arranged or anything like that. Another thing we tried was TDD (test-driven development). I’m sure most of you know what TDD is: Watch a test, watch it fail for the right reason Write code to pass the test, watch it pass Refactor, check the test still passes Repeat! It basically worked, we were able to produce code, but we often found the tests defined the direction that code went, which is obviously the idea of TDD. But you tend to find that by the time you’ve even written your first assertion, which is supposed to be the very first thing you write, because you write your tests backwards from the assertions back to the initial conditions, you’ve already constrained the logic of the code in some way by the time you’ve done that. You then get to this situation of, “Well, we actually want to go in a slightly different direction. Can we do this?”. Can we write tests that don’t constrain the architecture? Wrapping up all primitives: it’s kind of turtles all the way down. We had a Size, which has a Width and Height, which both derive from Dimension. You’ve got pages of code before you’ve even done anything. No getters and setters (use tell don’t ask instead): mocks and stubs for tests are required if you want to assert that your results are what you think they should be. You can’t just check the internal state of the code. And people found that really challenging and it made them think in a different way which I think is really good. Not having mutable state: that was kind of confusing because we weren’t quite sure what fitted within that rule and what didn’t, and I think we were trying too hard to follow the rule rather than the guideline. No if-statements: supposed to use polymorphism instead, but polymorphism still requires a factory with conditional behaviour. We did something really crazy to get around this: public T If(bool condition, Func<T> left, Func<T> right) { var dict = new Dictionary<bool, Func<T>> {{true, left}, {false, right}}; return dict[condition].Invoke(); } That is not really polymorphism, is it? For-loops: you can always replace a for-loop with recursion, but it doesn’t tend to make it any more readable unless it’s the kind of task that really lends itself to that. So it was interesting, it was good practice, but it wouldn’t make it easier it’s the kind of tree-structure algorithm where that would help. Having a limit on the number of levels of indentation: again, I think it does produce very nice, clean code, but it wasn’t actually a challenge because you just extract methods. That’s quite a useful thing because you can apply that to real code and say, “Okay, should this method really be going crazy like this?” No talking: we hated that. It’s like there’s two of you at a computer, and one of you is doing the typing, what does the other guy do if they’re not allowed to talk. The answer is TDD ping-pong – one person writes the tests, and then the other person writes the code to pass the test. And that creates communication without actually having to have discussion about things which is kind of cool. No code comments: just makes no difference to anything. It’s a forty-five minute exercise, so what are you going to put comments in code for? Finally, this is my fault. I discovered an entertaining way of doing the calculation that was kind of cool (using convolutions over the state of the board). Unfortunately, it turns out to be really hard to implement in C#, so didn’t even manage to work out how to do that convolution in C#. It’s trivial in some high-level languages, but you need something matrix-orientated for it to really work. That’s most of it, really. The thoughts that people went away with: we put down our answers to questions like “What have you learnt?” and “What surprised you?”, “How are you going to do things differently?”, and most people said redoing the problem is really, really good for understanding it properly. People hate having a massive legacy codebase that they can’t change, so being able to attack something three different ways in an environment where the end-product isn’t important: that’s something people really enjoyed. Pair-programming: also people said that they wanted to do more of that, especially with TDD ping-pong, where you write the test and somebody else writes the code. Various people thought different things about immutables, but most people thought they were good, they promote functional programming. And TDD people found really hard. “Tell, don’t ask” people found really, really hard and really, really, really hard to do well. And the recursion just made things trickier to debug. But most people agreed that coderetreats are really cool, and we should do more of them.

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  • Globally Handling Request Validation In ASP.NET MVC

    - by imran_ku07
       Introduction:           Cross Site Scripting(XSS) and Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks are one of dangerous attacks on web.  They are among the most famous security issues affecting web applications. OWASP regards XSS is the number one security issue on the Web. Both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC paid very much attention to make applications build with ASP.NET as secure as possible. So by default they will throw an exception 'A potentially dangerous XXX value was detected from the client', when they see, < followed by an exclamation(like <!) or < followed by the letters a through z(like <s) or & followed by a pound sign(like &#123) as a part of querystring, posted form and cookie collection. This is good for lot of applications. But this is not always the case. Many applications need to allow users to enter html tags, for example applications which uses  Rich Text Editor. You can allow user to enter these tags by just setting validateRequest="false" in your Web.config application configuration file inside <pages> element if you are using Web Form. This will globally disable request validation. But in ASP.NET MVC request handling is different than ASP.NET Web Form. Therefore for disabling request validation globally in ASP.NET MVC you have to put ValidateInputAttribute in your every controller. This become pain full for you if you have hundred of controllers. Therefore in this article i will present a very simple way to handle request validation globally through web.config.   Description:           Before starting how to do this it is worth to see why validateRequest in Page directive and web.config not work in ASP.NET MVC. Actually request handling in ASP.NET Web Form and ASP.NET MVC is different. In Web Form mostly the HttpHandler is the page handler which checks the posted form, query string and cookie collection during the Page ProcessRequest method, while in MVC request validation occur when ActionInvoker calling the action. Just see the stack trace of both framework.   ASP.NET MVC Stack Trace:     System.Web.HttpRequest.ValidateString(String s, String valueName, String collectionName) +8723114   System.Web.HttpRequest.ValidateNameValueCollection(NameValueCollection nvc, String collectionName) +111   System.Web.HttpRequest.get_Form() +129   System.Web.HttpRequestWrapper.get_Form() +11   System.Web.Mvc.ValueProviderDictionary.PopulateDictionary() +145   System.Web.Mvc.ValueProviderDictionary..ctor(ControllerContext controllerContext) +74   System.Web.Mvc.ControllerBase.get_ValueProvider() +31   System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.GetParameterValue(ControllerContext controllerContext, ParameterDescriptor parameterDescriptor) +53   System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.GetParameterValues(ControllerContext controllerContext, ActionDescriptor actionDescriptor) +109   System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeAction(ControllerContext controllerContext, String actionName) +399   System.Web.Mvc.Controller.ExecuteCore() +126   System.Web.Mvc.ControllerBase.Execute(RequestContext requestContext) +27   ASP.NET Web Form Stack Trace:    System.Web.HttpRequest.ValidateString(String s, String valueName, String collectionName) +3213202   System.Web.HttpRequest.ValidateNameValueCollection(NameValueCollection nvc, String collectionName) +108   System.Web.HttpRequest.get_QueryString() +119   System.Web.UI.Page.GetCollectionBasedOnMethod(Boolean dontReturnNull) +2022776   System.Web.UI.Page.DeterminePostBackMode() +60   System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +6953   System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequest(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +154   System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequest() +86                        Since the first responder of request in ASP.NET MVC is the controller action therefore it will check the posted values during calling the action. That's why web.config's requestValidate not work in ASP.NET MVC.            So let's see how to handle this globally in ASP.NET MVC. First of all you need to add an appSettings in web.config. <appSettings>    <add key="validateRequest" value="true"/>  </appSettings>              I am using the same key used in disable request validation in Web Form. Next just create a new ControllerFactory by derving the class from DefaultControllerFactory.     public class MyAppControllerFactory : DefaultControllerFactory    {        protected override IController GetControllerInstance(Type controllerType)        {            var controller = base.GetControllerInstance(controllerType);            string validateRequest=System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["validateRequest"];            bool b;            if (validateRequest != null && bool.TryParse(validateRequest,out b))                ((ControllerBase)controller).ValidateRequest = bool.Parse(validateRequest);            return controller;        }    }                         Next just register your controller factory in global.asax.        protected void Application_Start()        {            //............................................................................................            ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(new MyAppControllerFactory());        }              This will prevent the above exception to occur in the context of ASP.NET MVC. But if you are using the Default WebFormViewEngine then you need also to set validateRequest="false" in your web.config file inside <pages> element            Now when you run your application you see the effect of validateRequest appsetting. One thing also note that the ValidateInputAttribute placed inside action or controller will always override this setting.    Summary:          Request validation is great security feature in ASP.NET but some times there is a need to disable this entirely. So in this article i just showed you how to disable this globally in ASP.NET MVC. I also explained the difference between request validation in Web Form and ASP.NET MVC. Hopefully you will enjoy this.

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  • Running a simple integration scenario using the Oracle Big Data Connectors on Hadoop/HDFS cluster

    - by hamsun
    Between the elephant ( the tradional image of the Hadoop framework) and the Oracle Iron Man (Big Data..) an english setter could be seen as the link to the right data Data, Data, Data, we are living in a world where data technology based on popular applications , search engines, Webservers, rich sms messages, email clients, weather forecasts and so on, have a predominant role in our life. More and more technologies are used to analyze/track our behavior, try to detect patterns, to propose us "the best/right user experience" from the Google Ad services, to Telco companies or large consumer sites (like Amazon:) ). The more we use all these technologies, the more we generate data, and thus there is a need of huge data marts and specific hardware/software servers (as the Exadata servers) in order to treat/analyze/understand the trends and offer new services to the users. Some of these "data feeds" are raw, unstructured data, and cannot be processed effectively by normal SQL queries. Large scale distributed processing was an emerging infrastructure need and the solution seemed to be the "collocation of compute nodes with the data", which in turn leaded to MapReduce parallel patterns and the development of the Hadoop framework, which is based on MapReduce and a distributed file system (HDFS) that runs on larger clusters of rather inexpensive servers. Several Oracle products are using the distributed / aggregation pattern for data calculation ( Coherence, NoSql, times ten ) so once that you are familiar with one of these technologies, lets says with coherence aggregators, you will find the whole Hadoop, MapReduce concept very similar. Oracle Big Data Appliance is based on the Cloudera Distribution (CDH), and the Oracle Big Data Connectors can be plugged on a Hadoop cluster running the CDH distribution or equivalent Hadoop clusters. In this paper, a "lab like" implementation of this concept is done on a single Linux X64 server, running an Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.4.0, and a single node Apache hadoop-1.2.1 HDFS cluster, using the SQL connector for HDFS. The whole setup is fairly simple: Install on a Linux x64 server ( or virtual box appliance) an Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.4.0 server Get the Apache Hadoop distribution from: http://mir2.ovh.net/ftp.apache.org/dist/hadoop/common/hadoop-1.2.1. Get the Oracle Big Data Connectors from: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/bdc/big-data-connectors/downloads/index.html?ssSourceSiteId=ocomen. Check the java version of your Linux server with the command: java -version java version "1.7.0_40" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_40-b43) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.0-b56, mixed mode) Decompress the hadoop hadoop-1.2.1.tar.gz file to /u01/hadoop-1.2.1 Modify your .bash_profile export HADOOP_HOME=/u01/hadoop-1.2.1 export PATH=$PATH:$HADOOP_HOME/bin export HIVE_HOME=/u01/hive-0.11.0 export PATH=$PATH:$HADOOP_HOME/bin:$HIVE_HOME/bin (also see my sample .bash_profile) Set up ssh trust for Hadoop process, this is a mandatory step, in our case we have to establish a "local trust" as will are using a single node configuration copy the new public keys to the list of authorized keys connect and test the ssh setup to your localhost: We will run a "pseudo-Hadoop cluster", in what is called "local standalone mode", all the Hadoop java components are running in one Java process, this is enough for our demo purposes. We need to "fine tune" some Hadoop configuration files, we have to go at our $HADOOP_HOME/conf, and modify the files: core-site.xml hdfs-site.xml mapred-site.xml check that the hadoop binaries are referenced correctly from the command line by executing: hadoop -version As Hadoop is managing our "clustered HDFS" file system we have to create "the mount point" and format it , the mount point will be declared to core-site.xml as: The layout under the /u01/hadoop-1.2.1/data will be created and used by other hadoop components (MapReduce = /mapred/...) HDFS is using the /dfs/... layout structure format the HDFS hadoop file system: Start the java components for the HDFS system As an additional check, you can use the GUI Hadoop browsers to check the content of your HDFS configurations: Once our HDFS Hadoop setup is done you can use the HDFS file system to store data ( big data : )), and plug them back and forth to Oracle Databases by the means of the Big Data Connectors ( which is the next configuration step). You can create / use a Hive db, but in our case we will make a simple integration of "raw data" , through the creation of an External Table to a local Oracle instance ( on the same Linux box, we run the Hadoop HDFS one node cluster and one Oracle DB). Download some public "big data", I use the site: http://france.meteofrance.com/france/observations, from where I can get *.csv files for my big data simulations :). Here is the data layout of my example file: Download the Big Data Connector from the OTN (oraosch-2.2.0.zip), unzip it to your local file system (see picture below) Modify your environment in order to access the connector libraries , and make the following test: [oracle@dg1 bin]$./hdfs_stream Usage: hdfs_stream locationFile [oracle@dg1 bin]$ Load the data to the Hadoop hdfs file system: hadoop fs -mkdir bgtest_data hadoop fs -put obsFrance.txt bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt hadoop fs -ls /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt [oracle@dg1 bg-data-raw]$ hadoop fs -ls /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Found 1 items -rw-r--r-- 1 oracle supergroup 54103 2013-10-22 06:10 /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt [oracle@dg1 bg-data-raw]$hadoop fs -ls hdfs:///user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Found 1 items -rw-r--r-- 1 oracle supergroup 54103 2013-10-22 06:10 /user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Check the content of the HDFS with the browser UI: Start the Oracle database, and run the following script in order to create the Oracle database user, the Oracle directories for the Oracle Big Data Connector (dg1 it’s my own db id replace accordingly yours): #!/bin/bash export ORAENV_ASK=NO export ORACLE_SID=dg1 . oraenv sqlplus /nolog <<EOF CONNECT / AS sysdba; CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY osch_bin_path AS '/u01/orahdfs-2.2.0/bin'; CREATE USER BGUSER IDENTIFIED BY oracle; GRANT CREATE SESSION, CREATE TABLE TO BGUSER; GRANT EXECUTE ON sys.utl_file TO BGUSER; GRANT READ, EXECUTE ON DIRECTORY osch_bin_path TO BGUSER; CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY BGT_LOG_DIR as '/u01/BG_TEST/logs'; GRANT READ, WRITE ON DIRECTORY BGT_LOG_DIR to BGUSER; CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY BGT_DATA_DIR as '/u01/BG_TEST/data'; GRANT READ, WRITE ON DIRECTORY BGT_DATA_DIR to BGUSER; EOF Put the following in a file named t3.sh and make it executable, hadoop jar $OSCH_HOME/jlib/orahdfs.jar \ oracle.hadoop.exttab.ExternalTable \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.tableName=BGTEST_DP_XTAB \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.defaultDirectory=BGT_DATA_DIR \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.dataPaths="hdfs:///user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt" \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.columnCount=7 \ -D oracle.hadoop.connection.url=jdbc:oracle:thin:@//localhost:1521/dg1 \ -D oracle.hadoop.connection.user=BGUSER \ -D oracle.hadoop.exttab.printStackTrace=true \ -createTable --noexecute then test the creation fo the external table with it: [oracle@dg1 samples]$ ./t3.sh ./t3.sh: line 2: /u01/orahdfs-2.2.0: Is a directory Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS Release 2.2.0 - Production Copyright (c) 2011, 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Enter Database Password:] The create table command was not executed. The following table would be created. CREATE TABLE "BGUSER"."BGTEST_DP_XTAB" ( "C1" VARCHAR2(4000), "C2" VARCHAR2(4000), "C3" VARCHAR2(4000), "C4" VARCHAR2(4000), "C5" VARCHAR2(4000), "C6" VARCHAR2(4000), "C7" VARCHAR2(4000) ) ORGANIZATION EXTERNAL ( TYPE ORACLE_LOADER DEFAULT DIRECTORY "BGT_DATA_DIR" ACCESS PARAMETERS ( RECORDS DELIMITED BY 0X'0A' CHARACTERSET AL32UTF8 STRING SIZES ARE IN CHARACTERS PREPROCESSOR "OSCH_BIN_PATH":'hdfs_stream' FIELDS TERMINATED BY 0X'2C' MISSING FIELD VALUES ARE NULL ( "C1" CHAR(4000), "C2" CHAR(4000), "C3" CHAR(4000), "C4" CHAR(4000), "C5" CHAR(4000), "C6" CHAR(4000), "C7" CHAR(4000) ) ) LOCATION ( 'osch-20131022081035-74-1' ) ) PARALLEL REJECT LIMIT UNLIMITED; The following location files would be created. osch-20131022081035-74-1 contains 1 URI, 54103 bytes 54103 hdfs://localhost:19000/user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt Then remove the --noexecute flag and create the external Oracle table for the Hadoop data. Check the results: The create table command succeeded. CREATE TABLE "BGUSER"."BGTEST_DP_XTAB" ( "C1" VARCHAR2(4000), "C2" VARCHAR2(4000), "C3" VARCHAR2(4000), "C4" VARCHAR2(4000), "C5" VARCHAR2(4000), "C6" VARCHAR2(4000), "C7" VARCHAR2(4000) ) ORGANIZATION EXTERNAL ( TYPE ORACLE_LOADER DEFAULT DIRECTORY "BGT_DATA_DIR" ACCESS PARAMETERS ( RECORDS DELIMITED BY 0X'0A' CHARACTERSET AL32UTF8 STRING SIZES ARE IN CHARACTERS PREPROCESSOR "OSCH_BIN_PATH":'hdfs_stream' FIELDS TERMINATED BY 0X'2C' MISSING FIELD VALUES ARE NULL ( "C1" CHAR(4000), "C2" CHAR(4000), "C3" CHAR(4000), "C4" CHAR(4000), "C5" CHAR(4000), "C6" CHAR(4000), "C7" CHAR(4000) ) ) LOCATION ( 'osch-20131022081719-3239-1' ) ) PARALLEL REJECT LIMIT UNLIMITED; The following location files were created. osch-20131022081719-3239-1 contains 1 URI, 54103 bytes 54103 hdfs://localhost:19000/user/oracle/bgtest_data/obsFrance.txt This is the view from the SQL Developer: and finally the number of lines in the oracle table, imported from our Hadoop HDFS cluster SQL select count(*) from "BGUSER"."BGTEST_DP_XTAB"; COUNT(*) ---------- 1151 In a next post we will integrate data from a Hive database, and try some ODI integrations with the ODI Big Data connector. Our simplistic approach is just a step to show you how these unstructured data world can be integrated to Oracle infrastructure. Hadoop, BigData, NoSql are great technologies, they are widely used and Oracle is offering a large integration infrastructure based on these services. Oracle University presents a complete curriculum on all the Oracle related technologies: NoSQL: Introduction to Oracle NoSQL Database Using Oracle NoSQL Database Big Data: Introduction to Big Data Oracle Big Data Essentials Oracle Big Data Overview Oracle Data Integrator: Oracle Data Integrator 12c: New Features Oracle Data Integrator 11g: Integration and Administration Oracle Data Integrator: Administration and Development Oracle Data Integrator 11g: Advanced Integration and Development Oracle Coherence 12c: Oracle Coherence 12c: New Features Oracle Coherence 12c: Share and Manage Data in Clusters Oracle Coherence 12c: Oracle GoldenGate 11g: Fundamentals for Oracle Oracle GoldenGate 11g: Fundamentals for SQL Server Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for Oracle Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for DB2 Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for Teradata Oracle GoldenGate 11g Fundamentals for HP NonStop Oracle GoldenGate 11g Management Pack: Overview Oracle GoldenGate 11g Troubleshooting and Tuning Oracle GoldenGate 11g: Advanced Configuration for Oracle Other Resources: Apache Hadoop : http://hadoop.apache.org/ is the homepage for these technologies. "Hadoop Definitive Guide 3rdEdition" by Tom White is a classical lecture for people who want to know more about Hadoop , and some active "googling " will also give you some more references. About the author: Eugene Simos is based in France and joined Oracle through the BEA-Weblogic Acquisition, where he worked for the Professional Service, Support, end Education for major accounts across the EMEA Region. He worked in the banking sector, ATT, Telco companies giving him extensive experience on production environments. Eugen currently specializes in Oracle Fusion Middleware teaching an array of courses on Weblogic/Webcenter, Content,BPM /SOA/Identity-Security/GoldenGate/Virtualisation/Unified Comm Suite) throughout the EMEA region.

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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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  • Understanding LINQ to SQL (11) Performance

    - by Dixin
    [LINQ via C# series] LINQ to SQL has a lot of great features like strong typing query compilation deferred execution declarative paradigm etc., which are very productive. Of course, these cannot be free, and one price is the performance. O/R mapping overhead Because LINQ to SQL is based on O/R mapping, one obvious overhead is, data changing usually requires data retrieving:private static void UpdateProductUnitPrice(int id, decimal unitPrice) { using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { Product product = database.Products.Single(item => item.ProductID == id); // SELECT... product.UnitPrice = unitPrice; // UPDATE... database.SubmitChanges(); } } Before updating an entity, that entity has to be retrieved by an extra SELECT query. This is slower than direct data update via ADO.NET:private static void UpdateProductUnitPrice(int id, decimal unitPrice) { using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection( "Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=Northwind;Integrated Security=True")) using (SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand( @"UPDATE [dbo].[Products] SET [UnitPrice] = @UnitPrice WHERE [ProductID] = @ProductID", connection)) { command.Parameters.Add("@ProductID", SqlDbType.Int).Value = id; command.Parameters.Add("@UnitPrice", SqlDbType.Money).Value = unitPrice; connection.Open(); command.Transaction = connection.BeginTransaction(); command.ExecuteNonQuery(); // UPDATE... command.Transaction.Commit(); } } The above imperative code specifies the “how to do” details with better performance. For the same reason, some articles from Internet insist that, when updating data via LINQ to SQL, the above declarative code should be replaced by:private static void UpdateProductUnitPrice(int id, decimal unitPrice) { using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { database.ExecuteCommand( "UPDATE [dbo].[Products] SET [UnitPrice] = {0} WHERE [ProductID] = {1}", id, unitPrice); } } Or just create a stored procedure:CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[UpdateProductUnitPrice] ( @ProductID INT, @UnitPrice MONEY ) AS BEGIN BEGIN TRANSACTION UPDATE [dbo].[Products] SET [UnitPrice] = @UnitPrice WHERE [ProductID] = @ProductID COMMIT TRANSACTION END and map it as a method of NorthwindDataContext (explained in this post):private static void UpdateProductUnitPrice(int id, decimal unitPrice) { using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { database.UpdateProductUnitPrice(id, unitPrice); } } As a normal trade off for O/R mapping, a decision has to be made between performance overhead and programming productivity according to the case. In a developer’s perspective, if O/R mapping is chosen, I consistently choose the declarative LINQ code, unless this kind of overhead is unacceptable. Data retrieving overhead After talking about the O/R mapping specific issue. Now look into the LINQ to SQL specific issues, for example, performance in the data retrieving process. The previous post has explained that the SQL translating and executing is complex. Actually, the LINQ to SQL pipeline is similar to the compiler pipeline. It consists of about 15 steps to translate an C# expression tree to SQL statement, which can be categorized as: Convert: Invoke SqlProvider.BuildQuery() to convert the tree of Expression nodes into a tree of SqlNode nodes; Bind: Used visitor pattern to figure out the meanings of names according to the mapping info, like a property for a column, etc.; Flatten: Figure out the hierarchy of the query; Rewrite: for SQL Server 2000, if needed Reduce: Remove the unnecessary information from the tree. Parameterize Format: Generate the SQL statement string; Parameterize: Figure out the parameters, for example, a reference to a local variable should be a parameter in SQL; Materialize: Executes the reader and convert the result back into typed objects. So for each data retrieving, even for data retrieving which looks simple: private static Product[] RetrieveProducts(int productId) { using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { return database.Products.Where(product => product.ProductID == productId) .ToArray(); } } LINQ to SQL goes through above steps to translate and execute the query. Fortunately, there is a built-in way to cache the translated query. Compiled query When such a LINQ to SQL query is executed repeatedly, The CompiledQuery can be used to translate query for one time, and execute for multiple times:internal static class CompiledQueries { private static readonly Func<NorthwindDataContext, int, Product[]> _retrieveProducts = CompiledQuery.Compile((NorthwindDataContext database, int productId) => database.Products.Where(product => product.ProductID == productId).ToArray()); internal static Product[] RetrieveProducts( this NorthwindDataContext database, int productId) { return _retrieveProducts(database, productId); } } The new version of RetrieveProducts() gets better performance, because only when _retrieveProducts is first time invoked, it internally invokes SqlProvider.Compile() to translate the query expression. And it also uses lock to make sure translating once in multi-threading scenarios. Static SQL / stored procedures without translating Another way to avoid the translating overhead is to use static SQL or stored procedures, just as the above examples. Because this is a functional programming series, this article not dive into. For the details, Scott Guthrie already has some excellent articles: LINQ to SQL (Part 6: Retrieving Data Using Stored Procedures) LINQ to SQL (Part 7: Updating our Database using Stored Procedures) LINQ to SQL (Part 8: Executing Custom SQL Expressions) Data changing overhead By looking into the data updating process, it also needs a lot of work: Begins transaction Processes the changes (ChangeProcessor) Walks through the objects to identify the changes Determines the order of the changes Executes the changings LINQ queries may be needed to execute the changings, like the first example in this article, an object needs to be retrieved before changed, then the above whole process of data retrieving will be went through If there is user customization, it will be executed, for example, a table’s INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE can be customized in the O/R designer It is important to keep these overhead in mind. Bulk deleting / updating Another thing to be aware is the bulk deleting:private static void DeleteProducts(int categoryId) { using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { database.Products.DeleteAllOnSubmit( database.Products.Where(product => product.CategoryID == categoryId)); database.SubmitChanges(); } } The expected SQL should be like:BEGIN TRANSACTION exec sp_executesql N'DELETE FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[CategoryID] = @p0',N'@p0 int',@p0=9 COMMIT TRANSACTION Hoverer, as fore mentioned, the actual SQL is to retrieving the entities, and then delete them one by one:-- Retrieves the entities to be deleted: exec sp_executesql N'SELECT [t0].[ProductID], [t0].[ProductName], [t0].[SupplierID], [t0].[CategoryID], [t0].[QuantityPerUnit], [t0].[UnitPrice], [t0].[UnitsInStock], [t0].[UnitsOnOrder], [t0].[ReorderLevel], [t0].[Discontinued] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[CategoryID] = @p0',N'@p0 int',@p0=9 -- Deletes the retrieved entities one by one: BEGIN TRANSACTION exec sp_executesql N'DELETE FROM [dbo].[Products] WHERE ([ProductID] = @p0) AND ([ProductName] = @p1) AND ([SupplierID] IS NULL) AND ([CategoryID] = @p2) AND ([QuantityPerUnit] IS NULL) AND ([UnitPrice] = @p3) AND ([UnitsInStock] = @p4) AND ([UnitsOnOrder] = @p5) AND ([ReorderLevel] = @p6) AND (NOT ([Discontinued] = 1))',N'@p0 int,@p1 nvarchar(4000),@p2 int,@p3 money,@p4 smallint,@p5 smallint,@p6 smallint',@p0=78,@p1=N'Optimus Prime',@p2=9,@p3=$0.0000,@p4=0,@p5=0,@p6=0 exec sp_executesql N'DELETE FROM [dbo].[Products] WHERE ([ProductID] = @p0) AND ([ProductName] = @p1) AND ([SupplierID] IS NULL) AND ([CategoryID] = @p2) AND ([QuantityPerUnit] IS NULL) AND ([UnitPrice] = @p3) AND ([UnitsInStock] = @p4) AND ([UnitsOnOrder] = @p5) AND ([ReorderLevel] = @p6) AND (NOT ([Discontinued] = 1))',N'@p0 int,@p1 nvarchar(4000),@p2 int,@p3 money,@p4 smallint,@p5 smallint,@p6 smallint',@p0=79,@p1=N'Bumble Bee',@p2=9,@p3=$0.0000,@p4=0,@p5=0,@p6=0 -- ... COMMIT TRANSACTION And the same to the bulk updating. This is really not effective and need to be aware. Here is already some solutions from the Internet, like this one. The idea is wrap the above SELECT statement into a INNER JOIN:exec sp_executesql N'DELETE [dbo].[Products] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [j0] INNER JOIN ( SELECT [t0].[ProductID], [t0].[ProductName], [t0].[SupplierID], [t0].[CategoryID], [t0].[QuantityPerUnit], [t0].[UnitPrice], [t0].[UnitsInStock], [t0].[UnitsOnOrder], [t0].[ReorderLevel], [t0].[Discontinued] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[CategoryID] = @p0) AS [j1] ON ([j0].[ProductID] = [j1].[[Products])', -- The Primary Key N'@p0 int',@p0=9 Query plan overhead The last thing is about the SQL Server query plan. Before .NET 4.0, LINQ to SQL has an issue (not sure if it is a bug). LINQ to SQL internally uses ADO.NET, but it does not set the SqlParameter.Size for a variable-length argument, like argument of NVARCHAR type, etc. So for two queries with the same SQL but different argument length:using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { database.Products.Where(product => product.ProductName == "A") .Select(product => product.ProductID).ToArray(); // The same SQL and argument type, different argument length. database.Products.Where(product => product.ProductName == "AA") .Select(product => product.ProductID).ToArray(); } Pay attention to the argument length in the translated SQL:exec sp_executesql N'SELECT [t0].[ProductID] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ProductName] = @p0',N'@p0 nvarchar(1)',@p0=N'A' exec sp_executesql N'SELECT [t0].[ProductID] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ProductName] = @p0',N'@p0 nvarchar(2)',@p0=N'AA' Here is the overhead: The first query’s query plan cache is not reused by the second one:SELECT sys.syscacheobjects.cacheobjtype, sys.dm_exec_cached_plans.usecounts, sys.syscacheobjects.[sql] FROM sys.syscacheobjects INNER JOIN sys.dm_exec_cached_plans ON sys.syscacheobjects.bucketid = sys.dm_exec_cached_plans.bucketid; They actually use different query plans. Again, pay attention to the argument length in the [sql] column (@p0 nvarchar(2) / @p0 nvarchar(1)). Fortunately, in .NET 4.0 this is fixed:internal static class SqlTypeSystem { private abstract class ProviderBase : TypeSystemProvider { protected int? GetLargestDeclarableSize(SqlType declaredType) { SqlDbType sqlDbType = declaredType.SqlDbType; if (sqlDbType <= SqlDbType.Image) { switch (sqlDbType) { case SqlDbType.Binary: case SqlDbType.Image: return 8000; } return null; } if (sqlDbType == SqlDbType.NVarChar) { return 4000; // Max length for NVARCHAR. } if (sqlDbType != SqlDbType.VarChar) { return null; } return 8000; } } } In this above example, the translated SQL becomes:exec sp_executesql N'SELECT [t0].[ProductID] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ProductName] = @p0',N'@p0 nvarchar(4000)',@p0=N'A' exec sp_executesql N'SELECT [t0].[ProductID] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ProductName] = @p0',N'@p0 nvarchar(4000)',@p0=N'AA' So that they reuses the same query plan cache: Now the [usecounts] column is 2.

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